Purim as a Spatula
One day when I was living in Jerusalem, I felt a little homesick. I decided to make some American comfort food for breakfast, which for me, was pancakes. The only problem was that I didn’t have a spatula, nor any ingredients in my apartment. While I knew how to say “eggs,” beitzim, and “flour,” kemach, I had no idea about the Hebrew word for “spatula.” This was before the days when you could pull out an iPhone and simply look it up, and I didn’t think to grab a Hebrew-English dictionary from my library shelf before I headed to the market to purchase eggs, flour, and a spatula.
On my way over, I used my Hebrew grammar to construct a word that I believed would mean “spatula.” The root הפך, meaning to flip, combined with the grammatical construct for a tool, should yield “spatula.” At the market, I asked someone אני מחפש מהפך, which judging by the person’s perplexed face, I knew did not mean what I thought it meant. I was asking for a מהפך (mahpach), a revolution.
The Hebrew word for “spatula” is actually מריט (marit), which is derived from the Aramaic מר (mar), meaning a garden spade. That day, I learned two new words in Hebrew: 1. מהפך (mahpach), a revolution, and 2. מריט (marit), a spatula. Both words offer us insight into understanding the upcoming holiday of Purim.
When we read from the Megillah, one of the key lines that has stood out for generations reads: “וְנַהֲפ֣וֹךְה֔וּא (nahafuch hu), the opposite happened” of everything that Haman had intended. Haman sought to execute the Jews, whereas he and his family ended up with the fate he decreed for them. Purim has thus become a day of opposites, where, like a pancake, everything gets flipped upside down. Or perhaps, to put it another way, Purim is the ultimate spatula (marit) of Jewish holidays. It flips everything we do upside down. But most importantly, Purim flips us upside down.
One custom on Purim is that Jews are supposed to become intoxicated. The tradition offers that Jews should drink to the point that we don’t know the difference between Haman and Mordechai. In other words, drink so much that we become our upside down selves. And of course, we are supposed to dress up on Purim. But maybe dress “up” is not the right turn of phrase. On Yom Kippur, and at other major life events, we dress “up.” In other words, we dress to be more like ourselves, or better versions of ourselves. The rabbis note that Yom HaKipurim (Yom Kippur) is the nahafuch, the opposite of Purim, because on Yom Kippur we dress up, but on Purim, we dress to be the opposite of ourselves. We aren’t masking ourselves, rather, Purim transforms us into someone we are not. You might simply conclude that we dress up because it’s enjoyable. After all, it’s novel and fun to pretend to be someone that we are not. And, yes, Purim is to a large degree about having fun. But the rabbis again note the similarities not just in name between Purim and Yom HaKipurim. Both holidays, they point out, teach us about who it is that we really are. When things in our lives get turned upside down, we discover a truer sense of what is really right side up.
Ask anyone who has gone through an experience in their lives when the world seemed turned upside down. The story will likely end with a conclusion of self-discovery. The Talmud tells a story that echoes the experiences of many people whose lives get turned upside down through death, illness, injury, or some other catastrophe. Rabbi Yosef becomes critically ill and goes into a coma. Miraculously, he comes to, and makes a full recovery. His father asks him, “What did you see when you were unconscious?” “I saw the world upside down (olam hafuch),” he responds, “what was above was below and what was below was above.” His father said to him, “My son, you have seen an olam barur (a clear world), you have seen the world clearly (Talmud Bavli, Pesachim 50a).”
As we approach Purim, I want to encourage you to use the holiday as a spatula for flipping your life upside down. It’s not supposed to be comfortable, though it may be a little fun. Be someone you are not for the day, or just for the evening. Purim may seem like a kids holiday, but it isn’t. No one is too grown up for Purim. We could all use a little nahafoch hu, life turned topsy turvy at least one day of the year.