Purim and the art of achieving balance through extremes

Purim and the art of achieving balance through extremes
Jordana Schuster Battis

We live our lives pulled between tensions of sleep and wake, work and play, truth and fiction. We strive for balance but rarely have a sense even of how to go about achieving it.

In my yoga class, my teacher will often tell me to relax my shoulders. Most of the time, I have no idea that I’m even tensing them—much less, how to let them go. The more I think about them, the tenser they get. So, then, she will say, “Tighten your shoulders! Pull them up and in toward your ears!” That, I can do: I tighten. “Now,” she says, “let that go.” And I can and do. The tension disappears; my shoulders, at last, relax.

Sometimes, taking things to the extreme and then letting them go is how we restore ourselves to balance.

This ironic truth—the need for a storm to make clouds go away—is recognized and ritualized in the Jewish calendar. We try throughout the year to maintain balances of joy and solemnity, ancient awe and contemporary skepticism, concentrating on the here and now and thinking about the big picture, but what yardstick do we have to measure against? How do we know whether we are at a point of balance? How do we know if our shoulders are relaxed?

And so, at two times in the Jewish year, we take all of our emotions to one extreme: on Tisha B’av, we take things to an excess of sadness and mourning, and on Purim, we take them to an excess of frivolity. We do this on Purim through our rituals and our attitudes: we wear costumes, masking our identities; we shout and make noise in our sanctuaries, drowning out the name of Haman; we tell a story that is farcical and bloody, with caricature-like characters who indulge in extreme behaviors themselves. Our tradition even takes us to an extreme of generosity on this day, demanding that we give tzedakah to anyone who asks for it, whereas in the rest of the year we are supposed to make sure that our tzedakah goes to a worthy cause. On this day, we do not say no.1

Purim is raucous and chaotic. It flows with gifts and sweets and wine. It rides roughshod over rituals we typically treat with stateliness. And it does so to show us what extremes look and feel like:

It masks us in order that we, like Esther, can unmask.
It lets us play at drowning out the name of a failed villain so that we may be able to name and confront real evil in the future with fortitude.
It shows us a weak and slovenly king in order that we might know what real strength looks like.
It lets us know what fully giving feels like, so that we will know how to give of ourselves the rest of the year.
We think that balance is achieved by willing ourselves to have proper boundaries and intentions. We try so hard to do it “right.” But Purim teaches us that balance can be found by another path: allowing ourselves to journey to one end of the spectrum, so that the next day, we can let those extremes go and relax into the pose.
1. “Whoever stretches out their hand on Purim should be given tzedakah” (Talmud Yerushalmi, Megillah 1, 4).