By: Shari Kasman
If the only Jew you know is your accountant and all you know about Judaism is that Jews don’t eat pork, finding a flyer on your doorstep from Metro grocery store wishing you “Happy Purim” might make you wonder happy what? Upon scanning through bargains, you’d think: why’s there a sale on miniature bottles of grape juice (selected varieties) and Israeli wafer cubes? I was surprised to discover such a flyer on my doorstep in my predominantly Jewless Bloor and Lansdowne neighbourhood. The glossy, double-sided “Happy Purim” leaflet arrived with the pile of weekly notices from grocery stores, hardware stores, and the crummy audio video hi-fi store. My dozens of Portuguese, WASPy, and multiethnic neighbours must have been baffled. If you’re confused, don’t fret. It’s not surprising that you would be clueless when it comes to Purim, the wackiest of Jewish celebrations.
Because my knowledge of the Jewish holidays doesn’t stray far beyond what food to eat and when to eat it, and because I haven’t celebrated this one since childhood, my recollection of the Purim story is foggy. Despite the haze, here are my memories of the essentials: it’s the holiday when Jews go wild. It falls in late February or March, and doesn’t coincide with any other popular festivity. The story of Purim is about a couple of Queens (Vashti and Esther), a King named Ahashverosh (sounds like a sneeze), and a tough guy named Mordecai. They lived in Persia. The King throws wild parties with too much food and lots of booze. He’s gregarious, misogynistic, demanding, and not happy in his marriage. He breaks things off with his wife, Queen Vashti, and is desperate to find someone new. To get his hands on the most gorgeous gal around, he hosts Persia’s first ever beauty pageant, and when Esther wins this contest, she becomes Queen, replacing Vashti on the throne.
The entire story is confusing and its most dramatic scenes involve a villain named Haman–I always imagined that he looked like Gargamel, nemesis of the Smurfs, since I watched those little blue men on TV at roughly the same time as learning about Purim. Haman plots to kill all the Jews, but the Jewish heroes, Queen Esther and Mordecai, are amazingly clever and they foil his evil plan. Instead, the people who get hurt are Haman and his collaborators. Haman is hanged, and all the Jews in Persia celebrate their victory over the bad guys.
Some of the finer points in that story involve masked identities and subterfuge, so on Purim Jews go to synagogue dressed in costume–there are always some kings, queens, and evil viziers in the crowd, and I’m sure there was a handful of Michael Jacksons at the time when I was involved in the fun. A reader (appropriately disguised, of course) gets on stage in front of the seated, costumed crowd and reads in Hebrew from a scroll called the megillah. When the reader says “Haman,” the crowd boos to drown out the villain’s name, so it sounds like either being at a sports event when the team with no fans scores twenty successive goals/baskets, or having the Ford brothers show up as uninvited guests at your birthday party.
In addition to jeering, the crowd responds to Haman’s name by using noisemakers called graggers. A gragger often takes the form of a metal, rectangular box propped on a plastic handle. Spin the handle and the box spins, which generates a grating sound because of a mechanism at its centre. These days, it’s possible that graggers are more technologically advanced–is there an app for graggers? Purim is a time when Jews give money to people who are less fortunate. Isn’t that nice? Also, Jews everywhere are supposed to be happy, drink wine, and get wasted. Purim is the only day of the year when synagogue gets so carnivalesque and rowdy.
Like all other Jewish holidays, food is crucial. That’s the reason Metro sent the flyer. Cookies are the most important food to eat on Purim, but they’re not double chocolate fudge macadamia nut cookies or oatmeal raisin cookies, they’re hamantashen: triangular cookies with pinched corners and jam, poppy seed, or prune fillings (yum). Jews eat hamantashen because they’re in the shape of Haman’s hat (because he dressed like a pirate?) or pocket (because villains were the only ones with pockets?). Jews give their Jew friends baskets/packages called mishloach manot that are filled with treats, including hamantashen (hopefully not the prune kind), other kosher snacks from Israel, and miniature bottles of kosher grape juice.
The flyer from Metro is covered in ads for Purim goodies: Green’s Haman Tashen Cookies ($3.99 per box), Strub’s Pickles ($2.99), Lieber’s Assorted Chips ($1.67), Kedem Concord Grape Juice ($0.88), and other snacks from Israel, like Osem Bissli Wheat Party Snack (Pizza/Barbecue flavor, 2 for $1). Whether they’re meant to taste like pizza, onion, barbecue, or falafel, all kosher chip-like snacks have the same artifically-flavoured-with-generic-spicy-seasoning taste. There was also Fresh or Frozen Whole Chai Kosher Chicken on sale at Metro for $2.49/lb–something you wouldn’t want to put in that package of treats. At the bottom of the page, there’s a list of stores that carry these Purim-specific goods, the closest one to Bloor and Lansdowne being the Metro at Bloor and Spadina. Other Metro locations that carry these items are in Jewish neighbourhoods around Toronto, North York, Vaughan, and Thornhill, as well as in Nepean, Kingston, and Napanee (Jews really live in those places! Nepean!).
The flyer is well-designed: surrounding the specials on food is a party-style border consisting of confetti, hamantashen, and graggers. I’m not sure why “all prices & items are effective Friday, February 17 until Thursday, February 23, 2012,” since Purim begins at sundown on March 7 this year and ends at sundown on March 8. It’s true there are so many unnatural preservatives in those treats that they might last for well over a couple of weeks. Maybe the advance sale is supposed to grant basket-giving Jews ample opportunity to assemble their baskets.
It’s impossible to find Chanukah candles and matzah for Passover at Bloor and Lansdowne, and in my six and a half years living in the west end, I’ve never before received a flyer advertising anything for Jews–not even food for holidays that non-Jews might know about. If this Happy Purim flyer is setting a precedent for future junk mail advertising sales on food for the obscurest of Jewish holidays, I expect to be notified about discounts on frozen blintzes, lox, gefilte fish, and pickled herring for some of these lesser-known festivities.
To get involved in Purim fun, attend your local synagogue for a costume party and megillah reading on March 7, the night when celebrations will be held at synagogues across the world, including at the First Narayever Congregation (187 Brunswick Avenue, 6 pm), the Kiever Shul, (25 Bellevue Avenue, 6:45 pm), Anshei Minsk Synagogue (10 St. Andrew Street, 6:45 pm) and City Shul at the Wolfond Centre (36 Harbord Street, 6:30 pm).
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Shari Kasman’s writing has appeared on paper, on computer screens, and on many, many Post-it Notes.
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