Can We Have A Little Purim Around Here?

 

Very loosely inspired by the Book of Esther

Now, back in the day, Esther was a babe.  She went in where a babe should go in, and she went out where a babe should go out!  She had hair the color of a raven's wing, skin like a creamy olive sunset and eyes of a profound earnest brown.

See, the king of Persia in those days, Xerxes, or Ahasuerus, had a big party for all his buds and tried to get Queen Vashti to come out of her boudoir and do a little shimmy for his boys and she wasn't buying it! So out she goes on her ear.  Some say divorce and some say execution! 

King gets lonely, no queen....so they talk him into a beauty contest for all the best of the local talent.  Esther won the contest hands down, because the head beautician liked her and gave her special enhancements, including the finest Kohl for her eyes made of burnt rose petals and spices.  She was suffused with the finest perfumes. Her hair was braided in fantastical arrangement.  The king was so blown away that he put the crown on her head himself!

Now, Esther had been raised as a daughter by her cousin Mordecai, since her parents had died.  Mordecai told her "do not tell anyone that you are a Jew!" Not prudent to let that out!

So, next, Mordecai hears a couple of guards muttering about a plot to do in King Xerxes!  So he tells Esther to tell the king, and she does and she also gives cousin M the credit for foiling the plot.  The guards are executed.

Right around then, Mordecai refused to bow down to Haman, kind of the Sheriff of Nottingham around Persia at that time.  Haman runs to King Xerxes and whines that there are a bunch of characters in Persia who are not following the king's rules.  Haman gets the king to agree to kill all these lousy Jews.  

So Mordecai begs Queen Esther to Do Something but she is afraid to step up.  After some more pleading, she agrees.  But just like in  the old folk tales, there is a requirement first.  She asks that all the Jews there in Persia fast for three days with her, while she readies herself to appeal to the king for mercy.

After the three days of fasting, Queen Esther gets dolled up and goes to talk to the king.  He asks her what her request is.  She says she wants both King X. and Haman to attend a banquet with her and she will explain what she wants at the banquet.  OK so far? Not so ok!  Haman was still so pissed that he had the gallows  pole for Mordecai put up in readiness!

So, King X. has a really bad night.  He goes over the books and accounts and history of his reign and stuff and is reminded of what Mordecai did for him, like saving his life already!  X. tracks down Haman and asks him what he should do for a man who has pleased him greatly.  Haman thinks he means himself. (Doesn't this sound just like something in a storybook?)  So he really lays it on.  Riches etc etc, honors and like that.  Imagine how enraged he is when he finds out all the loot is for Mordecai!

So, at her big dinner the next day, the king asks Queen Esther again what her request is.  She asks if she and her people can be spared in spite of Haman's plot to kill all the Jews.  King Xerxes is getting tired of this business with Haman and the Jews and becomes furious!  He has Haman hung on the pole that he had set up for Mordecai.

Queen Esther and Cousin Mordecai were given all Haman's holdings and property and stuff and a decree was written to protect the Jews in Persia!

Ende

Until next time.

🏶🏶🏶🏶

Well, everybody knows the story.  Esther ends up saving her people by being in the right place at the right time and being truly virtuous.  It is the only book in the Bible in which God is not mentioned.  

In tone it is like many folk stories, but that might be because they took their tone from Bible stories.

Jews all around the world have a bit of a party on Purim, with costumes, general silliness and certain foods.

A fancy dinner for Purim.

A Real Purim Story: How Hamantaschen Cookies Got Their Name

My Rosen great grandmother made these, but not with corners.  My great grandparents were Swiss, so maybe it was different there.  Hers were like a little round pie with a round opening in the top layer.  Same fillings.  We have used date, prune, raisin, poppy and apricot jam for them.  They are super. 

One Purim at our congregation I made a poster bidding one and all to come hang with us for the party after meeting.  The poster had two feet hanging from the top!  Murray, my rabbi, let me do it too!  

 

Oh, No, Now It's Poetry! LOL!

[in Just-]
BY E. E. CUMMINGS
in Just-

spring when the world is mud-

luscious the little

lame balloonman

whistles far and wee

and eddieandbill come

running from marbles and

piracies and it's

spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer

old balloonman whistles

far and wee

and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it's

spring

and

the

goat-footed

balloonMan whistles

far

and

wee

*********************************************************************

As I was driving southward on the freeway Saturday's early evening, I was thinking on that strange little flick of memory's tail that hits at the oddest times. A sweet and wistful almost there sense of something long-long gone, and not being able to call it back, but just remembering a taste on the mind and sometimes the sting of unbidden tears.  Then there can be grief also.  I am glad He keeps our tears.

Psalm 56:8

8 You number my wanderings;

Put my tears into Your bottle;

Are they not in Your book?

I am not up on official interpretation of this old poem , but it struck me that those little old memories whistle far and wee. Perhaps I could call them the little old balloon man, for they are mythical and enigmatic.

It had been on my mind since first encountering this poem long ago, who or what the balloonman represented to cummings.  Oh I suppose he could also represent the natural forces of life, but no need to pin it down so tightly.

e.e. himself.  No accounting for poets! Especially official poets.

Not of this world.

Rebirth

 

You Must Be Born Again

John 3:1-21
3 Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. 2 This man came to Jesus[a] by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him.” 3 Jesus answered him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again[b] he cannot see the kingdom of God.” 4 Nicodemus said to him, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born?” 5 Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. 6 That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.[c] 7 Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You[d] must be born again.’ 8 The wind[e] blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

9 Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?” 10 Jesus answered him, “Are you the teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things? 11 Truly, truly, I say to you, we speak of what we know, and bear witness to what we have seen, but you[f] do not receive our testimony. 12 If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things? 13 No one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man.[g] 14 And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 15 that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.[h]

※※※

Mikvah (Baptism): The Connection Between Immersion, Conversion and Being Born Again

Many Christians think that baptism originated with Yeshua’s (Jesus’) cousin Yochanan (John), who is known in the Bible as “John the Baptist.”

But baptism is a Biblical ritual that has been practiced regularly by all of Israel since the days of Moses.

The word baptism comes from the Greek word baptizó, which primarily means a thorough change of condition accomplished through immersion. It is written in Bibles to take the place of the Hebrew word tevilah (to totally immerse).

This ritual immersion in water is carried out in a mikvah, which is a Hebrew word meaning gathering of waters.


An Israeli mikvah (immersion site for ritual cleansing) for men.

For the observant Jew, the mikvah personifies both the womb and the grave and consequently, rebirth. It is regarded as a pure, unadulterated avenue of connection with God; and for that reason, it is a place where hope is reawakened and strengthened.

The mikvah, therefore, plays an important role from preparation for marriage and Yom Kippur to the purification of menstruant women.

Tevilah (full-body immersion) marks a change of status from being tamay to tahor—ritually unclean (impure or unfit for the presence of God) to ritually clean. This is necessary because anytime a person is to come into the presence of God, they must come tahor (pure).....

Entering a mikvah, therefore, is commanded in Scripture for a number of common life events.

For example, it was forbidden to come into the presence of God in the Temple without first passing through a mikvah (today, Chassidic men, or ultra-Orthodox Jews, enter the mikvah before Shabbat, and some even go every day of the week before morning prayers).

Scripture instructs that anyone who becomes ritually unclean through contact with a dead or diseased person needs to be immersed in water before re-entering the Temple.


Before entering the Temple, Jewish men immersed themselves in a mikvah, such as this one from the Second Temple period.

A mikvah was also to take place after a leper had been declared healed by the priest.

“The Lord said to Moses, ‘These are the regulations for the diseased person at the time of his ceremonial cleansing… He must wash his clothes and bathe himself with water and he will be clean.’” (Leviticus 14: 1–4, 7, 9)

and so on....

All of that was in aid of my rather plain opinion that what Jesus was talking about was a change of state.  Among other things, internalizing the word of God, instead of cookbooking it by following rules.  Following rules would not cut it anymore.  

There is a plain sense in which we are reborn constantly just by the processes of life and the passing of time.  Each morning is a kind of rebirth.  All the events of life are changes in state.  

Nicodemous sounds to me like he was not arguing honestly.  He knew all about change of state.  Maybe he wanted to be reassured that he was doing it all right.

He got a rather bracing answer in that case.

So, please tell me, how would you plainspeak this new state...so new that it's a new kind of rebirth, a transcendent rebirth like had never been before?

How does it work?  What does it look like? How does it change a person?

Jesus, The True Crown Of Creation

 

I had a little idea last night.  See what you think. It came to me as a vision of layers of flowering, one leading to the next.

 

I was thinking about stages of deep time and a possible process of development. 

What if, first God made the universe, including this little planet, I don’t pretend to understand that creating.  But what if, He set it up and it cooked a long time, deep, deep time. When it was ready, He made all the forms of plant and animal life.  Then he let them live and develop for time that we can’t even really understand, it not being just a bunch of days like we have now.

Then out of this matrix of creation, He brought up the flower of that creation, rational mankind with the breath of His mind in them, awareness, and it was a flowering out of all that had gone before?

Once mankind had been living on earth for great spaces of time and had had their glories and their utter crashes, He called Moishe up into a mountain for a meeting about an ethical system that was meant to be internal.  He wrote it in stone.  It was a flowering of all that had gone before. 

The crux of the thought is that the practices of Judaism were designed to create a mental framework, that was new and different.  Going through the motions, obeying the rules was making a new kind of mankind.  I’m trying this idea on like a coat. The idea is that it was a process of further creation, an internal, mental creation. It was meant to change the mentality of the whole world, I think.

And then, when that whole system was pervasive enough, just barely, apparently, but maybe God was urgent about this…the ultimate, ineffable Flowering, out of all that had gone before was born into the world in Bethlehem.  The house of bread.

A Butterfly Post

by Priscilla King

This week's butterfly is one of a large group of subtropical and tropical Asian butterflies whose fore and hind wings, as spread out in a museum's display case, form an x shape. Their nickname is "windmills," With a wingspan of typically 4 inches, up to 6 inches, dasarada is one of the larger species, so it's often called the Great Windmill.
Its scientific name has been changed twice. At first naturalists thought that a swallowtail is a swallowtail, and classified all of them in the genus Papilio. Then they split the dark-winged, red-bodied Asian group off into the genus Atrophaneura, and recently they subdivided Atrophaneura into a few more new genera, such as Byasa. For all of these genera, more information is likely to be available when you look up Atrophaneura, but newer information is found when you look up a new genus name like Byasa.

The name dasarada sounds like words and names in several Indian languages, and the butterfly is most often found in India. (Sub-species are found in Thailand, China, and other countries.). Because the dark wings looked funereal to early naturalists, and they had already established a tradition of naming Swallowtails after characters in ancient myths and legends, they formed a tradition of naming the Atrophaneura group after figures associated with death. "Dasarada" may identify this butterfly with King Dasaratha, who, according to some sources, married sixty thousand wives (presumably in a symbolic way). According to the story Dasaratha lived and had children with only three wives. One of those children was Rama, who was said to be a mortal incarnation of a Hindu god. The heroic feats Rama undertook to rescue his bride, who had been kidnapped, were seen as symbolic of virtue itself. Dasaratha was remembered as a tragic character; he let envious people persuade him to banish Rama from the palace, and he was very sorry. He and his household were often chosen as subjects when artists wanted to create imaes of sorrow. Dasaratha's punishment was that he had no chance to be reconciled with Rama before he died, so he was associated with a funeral--his own--and thus would have seemed to fit into the naming tradition for this group of species.

If this butterfly reminded anyone of a funeral, it must have been an ancient king's. Though dark, it looks positively gaudy.



Photo donated to Wikipedia By Balakrishnan Valappil - Byasa dasarada (GREAT WINDMILL)_2012_10_11_10_10_57_kamlang, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67293755 .

The species as a whole is neither rare nor endangered, but some recognized sub-species are rare and may be endangered.




Photo donated to Pinterest by projectnoah.org. These two are probably drinking buddies (drinking water from wet sand) rather than a couple, but male and female dasarada look pretty much alike.

All the Atrophaneura group feed on plants that are somewhat toxic to humans; dasarada eats Aristolochia griffini. They get their vivid "warning" colors from toxins found in the plant. They're toxic only if swallowed, but they're among a very few butterflies who retain the ability some Swallowtail caterpillars have to emit an odor if disturbed. People who have traditionally agreed that they look beautiful also agree that they small nasty if you get too close.





Unlike the colorful northern swallowtails, in the /Atrophaneura group even the males are pollinators rather than composters. They live in woods and are often photographed pollinating flowers high in trees.






Photo donated to inaturalist.org by J.M. Gang.

Though they are definitely butterflies rather than moths, some of the big butterflies share features with the big moths. The inner edges of Byasa hindwings are furry, and the pupa can squeak if disturbed.


In its final instar the caterpillar develops an osmeterium, the "stinking horns" or "forked tongue" some American swallowtails and push out of their humped backs to confuse bothersome birds. All caterpillars survive by looking repulsive and dasarada caterpillas apparently do this so well that nobody wants to photograph them. The mature caterpillar about to pupate is described as gray with black lines and reddish warts. The osmeterium is orange.

🦋

Thank you Priscilla!

Intermission

 

A Third Chapter, Not Quite Finished Maybe

 

Hi This Is Lou

Jen was strutting along up there like she was on a mission from God.  She had these long spidery legs like a boy.  Her ponytail was almost swinging in complete circles!  That’s how crazy she was. The sun was in my eyes, and I was hungry.  She always said I was fat.  She treated me like I was retarded.  I was not fat, I had a waist and looked more like a woman than she did. Ha.  You can’t believe everything she tells you!

***

Someone had trained Buddy.  I wished I knew his real name. I bet it wasn’t Buddy.  Hopefully not King or Rex.  He stayed right at my left side.  Sometimes he would stuff his big black muzzle in my hand, reassuringly.  Sometimes he would glance back to make sure that Lou was still back there.  He would stop and I would stop and we would wait for her to catch up.  I knew she didn’t like walking very much. She was a tired looking small figure in funny clothes.  I loved her so much. Except for Buddy, she was it, all I had.

We had to cross a bridge over the river, and it was pretty steep. Our trip into Milltown was because we had to pick up our funny money.  The State gives unemployed people a little money.  It doesn’t look real.  It comes in little books.  To use a bill, you tear it out of the book.  If there is change due, we get it in old coins. They were still in circulation. There isn’t any record keeping really.  We weren’t important enough to keep track of much.  They hand these out at the Post Office.  Our names were on a list. We could buy a few things to carry home then.

The river is cleaner than it used to be.  There was no industry, left making it dirty. It was about thirty feet down to the water.  Looking over, we could see one guy fishing a little upstream. I was not sure that I would want to eat whatever he was catching.  I waved, Lou smiled.  We didn’t see many young guys.

Now the sidewalk began.  Power poles and streetlights. Stapled onto one of the power poles was large sheet of red paper with the word “NO” spray painted on it, in white.  We looked at each other and laughed.  NO, what? Might have had something to do with the news yesterday.

Next, we noticed stenciled words on the sidewalks.  Somebody had been making a trail of these stencils. They said “Follow Me” in more white spray paint.  We started to look for them all the way to the Post Office.  On every block, there were two or three of these stenciled messages. Things were starting to get interesting.  Who did this?

The Post Office was one street over from Main.  I went in and gave our names, leaving Lou outside leaning on the window, watching the street, hanging out with Buddy.  Walking back out, I carefully put our little books of funny money in the inside pocket of my pea coat.