“Have you ever heard of a shiv­i­ti?” Emi­ly asked as I shrugged bash­ful­ly. ​“It’s a typo­graph­ic orna­men­ta­tion of the Torah that was once deemed hereti­cal but is now received as sacred.” Inspired by this inver­sion of val­ue and mean­ing, Emi­ly, a fel­low Philadel­phia comix mak­er, took the pas­sage in Exo­dus about invad­ing frogs and reimag­ined it as the ICE-protest­ing mas­cot frog pic­tured below. Emily’s rein­ven­tion of the shiv­i­ti res­onat­ed with me, espe­cial­ly now, as the sea­son of Purim is upon us and the rebel­lious rib­aldry of the sto­ry of Esther reap­pears in our lives. But like a white­fish-filled haman­taschen, some­thing about this sea­son of code-switch­ing feels espe­cial­ly pecu­liar, and kin­da off.

The revenge fan­ta­sy with­in the Book of Esther hits dif­fer­ent­ly in a post – Oct. 7 world. And when the author­i­tar­i­an king’s sin­is­ter, xeno­pho­bic advi­sor is the Jew­ish char­ac­ter , it makes one won­der what an Elpha­ba-style treat­ment of Haman would look like. 

The world we live in is more top­sy turvy than the streets of Shushan. How do we flip what’s already flopped?

If ever there was a moment to chal­lenge our pre­con­ceived notions about our rela­tion­ship to Purim, it is now. It’s time to read against the grain of the text and move past the sur­face tale of racial prej­u­dice and court intrigue. Tak­ing a page from rab­binic ped­a­gogy, let’s uti­lize the Pardes frame­work to delve into the nar­ra­tive in new and unique ways. How can we drash (wan­der) our way to new aha moments with Esther? 

In this tale that pos­tu­lates that one mem­ber of the tribe can imper­il us all just as anoth­er can lead to our sal­va­tion, can we find the bless­ings of a skinned knee? Alone and togeth­er, like our Jew­ish ances­tors of the Per­sian empire, we know the stress of hav­ing a pre­car­i­ous sta­tus among oth­er nations. Alien­at­ed from our home­land for mil­len­nia and now from each oth­er and our cohab­i­tants on earth, we feel the frac­ture. Like every char­ac­ter in Megillat Esther, we as a peo­ple are in rebel­lion. As the Jew­ish elec­tro­clash icon Peach­es recent­ly pro­claimed, ​“We need lube to smooth out the fric­tion in the world.” What bet­ter time to rail against our­selves and the machines that made us?

To sen­si­tive read­ers, Megillat Esther is akin to maneu­ver­ing through a mine­field of stereo­types and clich­es about women, queer­ness, and being ​“Judean.” From Vashti and Mordechai to Big­tan and Teresh near­ly every char­ac­ter is engaged in some form of rebel­lion. And our pro­tag­o­nist? She is the boss bitch who kills her ene­mies’ sons and then hangs them on a tree, Vlad Tepes (the his­tor­i­cal basis of Drac­u­la) – style. ​“If I per­ish, I per­ish,” she cav­a­lier­ly quips like a mod­ern day hero­ine. Esther joins a long lin­eage of badass women in Jew­ish lit­er­a­ture who rebelled against the sta­tus quo. From the non­cha­lant trans­gres­sion of Eve tast­ing a for­bid­den fruit to the more John Wick approach of Yael or Judith, one can almost imag­ine Esther shout­ing, ​“Fair is Fair!” like a defi­ant Helen Slater in the 1980s clas­sic film The Leg­end of Bil­lie Jean. Both casu­al and dead­ly, Esther is defined by a series of rebel­lious acts. Just like the shiv­i­ti, she becomes the oppo­site of where she began, the out­sider rul­ing from within;she is like tzitz­it gath­ered togeth­er dur­ing tefillah, the fringes touch­ing the whole.

In his ear­ly-aughts polemic, Noth­ing Sacred, Dou­glas Rushkoff posit­ed that ​“rad­i­cal rein­ven­tion was not mere­ly Judaism’s birthright, but the ongo­ing and defin­ing char­ac­ter of the Jew­ish exper­i­ment. It is a way of main­tain­ing con­ti­nu­ity with the past while allow­ing for a faith to evolve into the future.” Rushkoff artic­u­lates what fuels con­spir­a­cies about Jew­ish peo­ple while also dri­ving the engine of our sur­vival. We’re still here. Wel­come to the rebellion.