Feast of Fools

My name is Geoffrey Stern and at Madlik we light a spark or shed some light on a Jewish text or tradition. Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz we host Madlik Disruptive Torah on your favorite podcast platform. And now on YouTube, we also publish a source sheet on Sefaria a link is included in the show notes. So, Rabbi, last week you said we should talk about Purim and here we are. So by the time you’re listening to this, you might even have a drink or two. But as I said in the intro, the name of this episode is Feast of Fools and that is the name of a seminal book by Harvey Cox that we are going to jump into. But Feast of Fools itself, if you look it up in Wikipedia, was something that happened in the Middle Ages in southern France where participants would elect either a false bishop, a false archbishop, a false pope, they would have ecclesial ecclesiastical rituals would be parodied and higher and lower clergy would change places. So a real mayhem, if you will. Of course, carnival and Mardi Gras we’re a little bit more familiar with, which again are around this time, as is St Patrick’s Day and other spring spring-like holidays where we all feel like bursting out of the constraints of winter. But they all have, I think, something in common and something that might teach us. I mean, in carnival they have elaborate costumes and masks that should strike a chord with those who celebrate Purim. Participants indulge in excessive consumption of alcohol and other foods. So really these indulgences are. Some are connected to spring and others, Rabbi, are connected to the other more serious holidays that come to follow. We celebrated last week one of the four Shabbatot preceding Passover, if you will. We’re all starting to think even beyond Purim when we do Purim. And one of the reasons they say that people would drink a lot of alcohol before Easter and Lent was. They knew they couldn’t drink during Lent, so they drank it up. We do the same thing for chametz (leaven) drink our liquid acid. assets that is interesting.

Adam Mintz [3:18 – 3:26]: You know, it’s funny because you said spring and I said to myself, hey, you need to mention the fact that it’s before the serious holiday.

Geoffrey Stern [3:26 – 5:02]: Yes. And if that wasn’t enough, I just realized this year that there is an Indian holiday called Holi. I saw an announcement from a Jewish community in Los Gatos, and they are doing a Holi H O L I Purim. And again, what that celebrates, if you look it up in Wikipedia. First of all, the interesting thing, Rabbi, about Holi is it is linked to the full moon, the same full moon that marks the celebration of Purim. And it does have to do with the end of winter and the ideas of colors. They go around spraying each other with colors, and then they go ahead and they have meals. The idea is to reset and renew ruptured relationship, ends, conflicts, get rid of all of the accumulation from staying inside of their houses during the winter. So a lot of things, I would say this is one of the situations where our humanity really impacts on our festivals. And you have to be blind even before you get to that, Rabbi, in Venice, if you don’t say that. There are some commonalities here in terms of how we celebrate the onset of spring and the end of winter, but also what lessons we ought to take from it. And maybe some things have been lost in translation as we moderns have shed a little bit too much of our traditions. So what thinks you, Rabbi, of these spring holidays?

Adam Mintz [5:02 – 5:23]: No, I mean, I love it. I love, you know, just like you talk about the winter holidays that Hanukah goes with Christmas and Kwanzaa, so here too you have the spring holidays and again and Pesach goes with Easter, but here you have the kind of the preliminary spring holidays, which are fantastic. So this is. This is a great topic.

Geoffrey Stern [5:23 – 9:08]: So I wanted a little bit of license, because we are not doing what’s typically done if you look at Purim. Seriously, I’m not even going to go into what Purim Torah. When you look at Purim, not seriously, but a lot of it has to do with looking at the story, the text, the fact that God’s not mentioned. But I have to say, it is not only the last book in the Jewish canon, it is one that was almost on the fence as to whether it was going to be accepted into Tanakh. There are discussions that talk about whether it should be part of the canon. There are discussions that talk about whether, like a Torah scroll, it renders impure or not impure. There’s even a question that normally, I think we read in one way, but we can read in another, the Gemara in Chullin says, from where in the Torah do we know Esther? And of course, we all know the answer, Rabbi. The hastir aster et panai. In Deuteronomy, God talks about hiding his face. So typically they talk about this is how we know everything in the Megillah is hidden. God’s name is not hide behind masks. But in another way, you can almost ask, the rabbi is asking, how do we know it’s part of the canon? How do we know that it’s not simply an allegory? There are those who believe, along with maybe the story of Job, that this is too fanciful, it’s too Hollywood, it’s too entertaining and absolutely immersive. Maybe it’s just a story that we have to take lessons from and didn’t actually happen. But I think, Rabbi, that gives us a great license to say, let’s not talk about the story of Purim. Let’s talk about the way we celebrate it. And it is a unique celebration. So if you look at Esther 9, it says, and so on the 13th day of the 12 month, that is the month of Adar, when the king’s command and decree were to be executed, the very day on which the enemies of the Jews had expected to get them in their power. The opposite happened, and the Jews got their enemies in their power. The word for the opposite happened is vinahapechu. And that is the name of songs that we sing. But what ultimately the takeaway from that is this is a day where we turn everything that we otherwise hold dear on its head. Its opposites. We might dress in women’s clothing, we might drink to excess. Everything is vinnehapechu turned upside down. I think if you had to characterize the way we celebrate the holiday, that clearly would be one token. And the other, of course, is it says that in those days, the Jews were vinnehabich. They were transformed. I like that interpretation. Translation. And they were to observe them as days of feasting and merry making, Mishteh v’simcha and as an occasion for sending gifts to one another and presents to the poor. So clearly, of all of the holidays, this is the one that we are commanded to be a little foolish. Merry making, Mishtev’simcha. I mean, you know, I think simcha is something that we come across more regularly in The Torah. But the Mishta part of it emphasizes that eating to excess and maybe drink. Yeah.

Adam Mintz [9:08 – 9:25]: I mean, you have to say that it’s related to the story. The story is around parties. So that’s the way we celebrate around parties, you know? Now you could say they build parties into the story because they want us to celebrate that way. You don’t know which comes first, the chicken or the egg.

Geoffrey Stern [9:25 – 10:39]: Absolutely. But. But here’s where I think they take it to the next level. In the Megillah. In the Talmud Megillah, it says Rava said, a person is obligated to become intoxicated with wine on Purim until he is so intoxicated that he does not know how to distinguish between cursed is Haman and blessed is Mordechai. And I think this is the famous kind of operating motive of the holiday. We’re really pushing the envelope. And I think that, I think is the fuse or the thing that we have to unravel about this holiday. What were they getting at? What was the meaning? I should say that I always thought intoxicated was pretty straightforward. It says in the Hebrew, libsomei, Rashi says, libsome la histakir baYayin, intoxicated with wine. But if you look at Jastrow, he really seems to be more eating in excess, eating in delicate, more in line with what you were talking about of kind of doing. So it’s almost gluttony. It’s almost, again, I would say pushing the outside of the envelope.

Adam Mintz [10:40 – 11:03]: I would just say one interesting thing. Intoxicated with wine. That’s as opposed to Scotch. Now, it might be that Rashi didn’t know about Scotch living in France. But it’s interesting, Rashi also interpolates that he makes that up. The Gemara doesn’t say get intoxicated with wine. That’s Rashi’s interpretation based on where he lived and how he lived.

Geoffrey Stern [11:03 – 11:09]: Okay. And you didn’t hear this from me, but I heard that Rashi had a vineyard and was a winemaker.

Adam Mintz [11:09 – 11:12]: So it was selfserving. Right. Okay. It was a business. Business decision.

Geoffrey Stern [11:12 – 12:09]: You never know. You never know. But anyway, here’s where we get into the issue that I raised earlier. In Deuteronomy, we all know it says in 22, a woman must not put on man’s apparel, nor shall a man wear woman’s clothing. For whoever does this thing is abhorrent to your God. Rabbi. cross-dressing is not allowed. So the truth is that there are many costumes that you will see if you go to the streets in Israel. Of Mea Sha’arim anywhere in Israel, actually, people are dressing up. But there are amazing pictures of Hasidic Jews dressed as Santa Claus. You have them dressed as nuns. There’s all sorts of. But clearly also literal cross-dressing exists. So the first mention of this is a rav Yehuda Mintz. responsa 17. Rabbi, is there any relation? There is none..

Adam Mintz [12:09 – 12:22]: But I’ll tell you a funny story. About 15 years ago, in my shul, someone asked to speak on the Shabbos before Purim. And he studied this responsa in my honor. He thought that that was funny.

Geoffrey Stern [12:23 – 12:26]: But, I mean, you can’t say for sure that there’s no relationship.

Adam Mintz [12:26 – 12:35]: No, you cannot say for sure. I cannot trace my lineage. I can only trace my lineage to Poland 100 years ago. I have no idea what was happening in 1400.

Geoffrey Stern [12:35 – 13:38]: Okay, so we have that. Teshuva says the responsa says there is no prohibition involved in dressing up on Purim, even dressing like a woman, since the reason is for simcha and not for the purpose of immorality to violate Torah law. The Rama quotes the pesak (legal opinion) in the Shulchan Orach. And I went ahead and I looked it up in the Shulchan Orach. And Rabbi, this goes even further. In the Shulchan Orach, it says the custom of wearing masks on Purim and of cross-dressing is totally permitted because of its innocent and joyful purpose, as is the wearing of shantez (forbidden mixture of wool and linen). Now, in the Hebrew, it says shatnez m’derabanan And I don’t know why they didn’t translate that, but these are biggies, Rabbi, while some would prohibit it, our practice is, as I have already said, so those who playfully rob each other do not violate. Thou shalt not steal. We literally had a Maimonides a few weeks ago who said, you can’t rob, even as a jest, as a fun.

Adam Mintz [13:38 – 13:39]: Right.

Geoffrey Stern [13:39 – 13:58]: As a fun thing. Here you can. So this is, I think, rather extreme. When I saw shatnez, that really put this into context, literally, on this one day a year, you can do what we saw in Wikipedia about Feast of Fools. You can pretend you’re the Pope. You can. It’s total.

Adam Mintz [13:59 – 14:00]: There are no rules.

Geoffrey Stern [14:00 – 15:16]: Absolutely. Now, Moritz Steinbecker, who was in the 19th century, he attributes the development of the Minhag to the direct influence of the Roman Carnival. Carnival is a festive season which occurs immediately before the Catholic season of Lent. The Roman carnival includes a public celebration and a parade combined with elements of a circus, the wearing of masks and public street partying. People would dress up in masquerade during these festivals and celebrations. Carnival is a festival traditional held in Roman Catholic and to a lesser extent, Eastern Orthodox societies. It originated in Italy and was held in February. So the source that I found this in was the ou and they said, you should ignore him. This guy was a good rabbi. But he was off here. But what I was fascinated by was he literally said what I said in the beginning, that we took. We took what was common practice. And I believe that is. Is extremely fascinating. Right, so we’re gonna talk about somebody who had a great influence on me. Harvey Cox wrote a book called the Secular City. And as I reread it, we know.

Adam Mintz [15:16 – 15:22]: By the way, we know how old you are, because it’s been a long time since the book has been $1.45.

Geoffrey Stern [15:22 – 16:05]: That’s true, that’s true. Now, he wrote it when he was 37, which is hard to believe. It sold a million copies. But, Rabbi, I think I will put him into the same category as Emil Fakenheim and Yitz Greenberg where it for the Christians. And basically what he said is, God has disappeared and we have to find God and religion has to find a place, a new place in secular society. And he is brilliant, and that’s why he was the most popular professor of religion at Harvard. Interesting thing about him is that he got divorced and he married a professor from a Wellesley college.

Adam Mintz [16:05 – 16:06]: Oh, I didn’t know that.

Geoffrey Stern [16:07 – 18:05]: That’s Nina Termarkin, and she is a devout Jew. And Rabbi, I literally can’t believe you haven’t heard of the book he wrote after this, because I think you should assign it to every one of your converts. They decided to raise their child as a Jew, and he, being a great theologian, says he better learn about Judaism. And he wrote a book called Common Prayers, where literally he goes through every holiday in the Jewish calendar, every ritual, and comments upon it with love and respect. And if you Google Harvey Cox and Purim, you’re going to find a chapter on Purim here, which is not the subject matter of tonight because he deals with it in a different way, but a book that he wrote that, according to Wikipedia, is actually his most favorite book. That if you see him at a cocktail party and ask him which book he thinks is his most important. It is the Feast of Fools, and we are going to spend the balance of tonight talking about how he characterizes the importance, the significance, and the lessons we can learn from humanity’s joint holidays that we’ve kind of been touching upon. He says there is an unnecessary gap in today’s world, between the world changers and the life celebrators, there is no reason why those who celebrate life can not also be committed to fundamental social change. And world changers need not be joyless and ascetic. So that’s almost the blurb. Rabbi. But we are going to look at some of his thought and he’s going to take the subject of the frivolity of what we do on Purim and give it a whole new guise for us. Have you read any of Harvey Cox’s I know you said I’m dated.

Adam Mintz [18:05 – 18:19]: Yeah. The answer is, is that his first book? I have read. But now that I know about the book of the Christian Journey through the Calendar, that’s a real. I actually was just writing an article about that. That’s a great topic. I’m going to read that book.

Geoffrey Stern [18:19 – 19:49]: You have to read the book. It is a beautiful journey through the eyes of a first class theologian into our traditions. So what he starts by saying is not something that should be so surprising to us Jews. And that is not only associated with Purim, it is associated with Judaism in general. We have Simchat Torah, we talk about Oneg Shabbat. We literally love to celebrate time. We love to celebrate history. And he says only man celebrates. Festivity is a human form of play through which man appropriates an extended area of life, including the past, into his own experience. Fantasy is uniquely human. Rabbi. A hungry lion may dream about a zebra dinner, but only man can mentally invent wholly new ways of living his life as an individual and as a species. If festivity enables man to enlarge his experience by reliving events of the past, fantasy is a form of play that extends the frontiers of the future. I mean, if this doesn’t, that’s brilliant. It’s almost in the same category as Heschel’s The Sabbath. It explains the power of what we as Jews do so much when we celebrate our past and when we dream.

Adam Mintz [19:49 – 20:03]: We dream of the future. I mean, fantasy means dreaming for the future. It’s interesting. That’s a human quality. Rabbi Soloveitchik would like that. That empowers the human being. We do something that’s only a human quality.

Geoffrey Stern [20:03 – 21:06]: Absolutely. He gets a little Greek or Latin on us. He says Man is homo festivus and homo fantasia. No other creature we know of relives the legends of his forefathers, blows out candles on a birthday cake or dresses up and pretends he is someone else. He’s not taking this lightly. He’s taking us on a trip Today, where he’s going to analyze this is great. So he talks about the fact that today in our society, and he did write this in the 60s, but I think it is as clear today as it was then that machines, as we know, can be astonishingly efficient. But there are some things they cannot do. Among other things, they cannot really play, pretend or prevaricate. I’m going to look that up after the show. They cannot frolic or fantasize. These activities are somehow uniquely human. And if they vanish, man loses essential reminders of his singularity.

Adam Mintz [21:06 – 21:15]: There’s a lot of ways to do with AI, right? You know, can you. Can AI do these things? Would be an interesting question for him.

Geoffrey Stern [21:15 – 23:22]: I was thinking the same thing. And that makes the celebration of human again, of Purim again, that much more essential. So he says festival occasion has three essential ingredients. Conscious excess, interesting, celebrative affirmation and juxtaposition. By excess, he means that we always overdo it, and we do so on purpose. We live it up. We stay up later, eat and drink more and spend more money than we ordinarily would. Perhaps we laugh or cry or both. In festivity, it is not superficiality. It recognizes tragedy. Rabbi, he looks at South American religions, of Latin Catholicism. He looks at the African American community, and he notices something about the way they celebrate. They celebrate with a lot more intensity than we moderns in his world, than we Protestants do. And what he draws as a conclusion is there is no correlation, or I would say there is an absolute negative correlation between people who are strangers to pain and oppression and their ability to celebrate. We would think, and I have to say we’re here. It’s two years after the October 7th, and last year we struggled with this, and this year we’re struggling with this. How can we celebrate to excess? How can we dress up in costumes and twirl our gragger (noisemaker) when there are hostages, when there’s such pain? And the point that he makes is if you look at cultures, those cultures that are closer to real tragedy, brutality, chaos, failure and death, as well as triumphant compassion, they are the ones whose celebrations are deeper. And I thought that was a fascinating. That’s brilliant.

Adam Mintz [23:22 – 23:33]: I mean, we should think about that for a minute. That’s absolutely brilliant that the ones who. Who experience tragedy, those are the people who know how to celebrate better.

Geoffrey Stern [23:33 – 24:38]: I just was just blown away by the timeliness of his comments. He talks about there’s another kind of frivolous, however. It is the frivolous of taking oneself and one’s effort Too seriously. There are scholars who say frivolity of any person capable of trying to solve problems of local interest without the least sense of absurdity is itself absurd. Rabbi we are living in a time where there are people who are looking at our problems, and they’re too intense, and they’re too. They don’t see the absurdity of us trying to solve other people’s problems, let alone our own. What he says is festivity is the way we cool history without fleeing from it. Sometimes we have to step back, and that is what the festivities of a Purim kind of teach us, that we can’t take ourselves too seriously and we have to learn how to take the situations around us as less serious.

Adam Mintz [24:38 – 24:47]: Well, he’s saying it’s a reaction to know. To knowing tragedy is to know how to celebrate. That’s really fantastic.

Geoffrey Stern [24:47 – 26:25]: Yeah, yeah, yeah. He says a perspective on history without removing him from the terror and responsibility he bears as a history maker. He talks about celebrating history and stepping back from making history. You can’t always try to change the world. Sometimes you have to pull back. And he talks again about a recess from history making. This for us Jews who keep Shabbat. And we always talk about not talking about the weekday on the Shabbat. He says we need a brief recess from history making, a time where we are not working, planning, or recording. Hence the wise custom that outlaws talking politics at business parties. He says it’s when we celebrate a holiday like Purim, which has historical antecedents. It’s both an affirmation of history making and a temporary respite from it. Festivity reminds us of the link between two levels of our being, the instrumental, calculating side and the expressive, playful side. Festivity periodically restores us to our proper relationship between history and history making. It reminds us that we are fully within history, but that history also is within something else. As my granddaughter would say when she watches Frozen, sometimes we have to just let it go. And letting it go almost in excess gives us perspective and makes us more serious. I think about.

Adam Mintz [26:25 – 26:46]: Yeah, I mean, it pays to think about that for a second. Second. Why does celebration make you more serious? Because it gives you a balance. Sometimes we’re too far to the side of tragedy. We can’t appreciate the, you know, we can’t appreciate it kind of from a distance. And celebration restores the balance.

Geoffrey Stern [26:47 – 27:37]: Absolutely. And then he makes it interesting. He. He quotes some people who have done some sociological studies. Of course, these are dated. I would love to see what the uptick is. And he says they found that Anglo Saxons daydream less than Jews and Italians, and that black people daydream more frequently than any other group. If it is true that black people in America seem to have a richer and more extensive fantasy life than other people do, this could mean that there is a positive correlation between fantasy and what sociologists have sometimes called marginality. Maybe groups and individuals who are cut out of the benefits of a given society are the ones who most often dream about another and sometimes act to bring it about. I just think that each one of these insights is amazing.

Adam Mintz [27:37 – 27:38]: It’s brilliant.

Geoffrey Stern [27:40 – 30:49]: So then he gets to this third point about juxtaposition. And this is kind of interesting. He says, most importantly, it cannot try to smooth over the obvious contradictions in these dimensions of faith and experience, nor attempt to reduce or reconcile them to each other. Rabbi, if you recall, we were studying Emil Fackenheim, and he ended up saying that for the secular world, Midrash, Talmudic Midrash is the answer where things are not resolved, where you have conflicting opinions. And what he’s saying is that is part and parcel of celebrating. And I would argue. And by the way, I sent Harvey Cox an email and I said, would you like to. He’s alive. I don’t know what shape he’s in, but I said, would you like to talk about. Would you like to talk about Purim, the Feast of Fools? And I think this is the best explanation of Vinahapechu and drinking until you don’t know the difference between Mordechai and Haman. It is this lesson that we learned from Fackenheim. It’s what we learn from the Midrash every time we study it, that there are no resolutions to the human condition, there are differences, and that we have to learn how to live with those differences. And I’ll kind of end up by saying I was in a car this year, a block and away from the Met, waiting for my wife and brother. And there was the Met Gala going on, and the police sent the demonstrators who were demonstrating for Free Palestine outside of the Met Gala. And literally I was there trying to keep away from it. And next thing I know, my car is in the middle of a Red Sea of people screaming at the top of their lungs. And one thing I saw was such hatred, such anger. It’s not what we saw in the 60s where people. And this Cox talks about is used to imagine what it would be like, that fantasy of the Kumbaya, of being able to sing about the beauty of the future. I didn’t see that. I saw only hatred. And so what I wish upon all of us are those who are of us who have gone through two terrible years, the people of Gaza, the demonstrators. Take a time out. Look in terms of fantasy, look in terms of your past and be able to try to imagine a time where we can not necessarily resolve all the conflicts, but come together and reach out as only Simcha can do for us and Joy can do for us. And be a little humble in terms of that. We can’t solve all the problems, but we have our humanity in question. The winter’s over. Isn’t it time for us to come out and to sing Kumbaya once in a while?

Adam Mintz [30:49 – 31:10]: When you say restore balance, because that’s missing in the world, the idea of balance. Everyone is to one of the extremes. We need to restore balance. This is a great topic. Thank you, Geoffrey. Happy Purim to everybody. Enjoy. Now you have some perspective on why we celebrate so hard. So celebrate hard and enjoy your Purim Purim Sameach.

Geoffrey Stern [31:10 – 31:21]: Happy Purim Purim Sameach. And you have two books that you need to read by Harvey Cox. One is Shared Blessings and the other one is Feast of Fools.

Adam Mintz [31:21 – 31:22]: Amazing.

Geoffrey Stern [31:23 – 31:25]: See you all next week. Bye.