Purim is the queerest holiday on the Jewish calendar. The time when we put on masks that show the selves we keep hidden the rest of the year. The time when we bring the shadow out for full display and celebrate it. So it is of course no surprise it is the time when you’ll see men in drag — since there’s no shadow men are more afraid of than their own connection to the divine feminine. Sometimes this is true even of gay men, who today, have bought into the hyper-masculinity sold in the magazines that reflect the fantasies we are told are acceptable to have. If we’re going to love men, then they have to be masculine men — fey boys who serve the goddess aren’t allowed. Except on Purim.
This year, the Purim full moon is also the night of a full lunar eclipse. When the moon masks itself with the shadow of the earth. And what happens when it takes off its mask? What happens when we take off ours?
Years ago (so many I was still a teenager) I tuned in to WBAI late one night and came in a couple of paragraphs into a story that I hadn’t heard introduced. The reader told a story of a rather plain bartender who met a blond woman in a bat costume on the subway and found himself on an adventure with her downtown in what seemed to be a citywide costume party. The played and flirted with each other all night, running through the streets amid the revelry. And at one point, they won a prize for their costumes. At midnight, they kissed, and the blond bat said to the bartender, “Take off your mask.”
Of course, he wasn’t wearing one.
Eventually I learned the story was by Spencer Holst, and I like to read it aloud to friends at times when costume parties are the custom. You can find it in his anthology, The Language of Cats.
So here we are on the night Jews commemorate Esther’s removal of the mask — revealing herself as a Jew to the King. And many of us who are queer Jews celebrate and reveal the hidden “other.” For some that means opening to the feminine within. For others who aren’t quite a Kinsey 6 it means opening to our heterosexual desires (assuming we don’t fall prey to heterosexual panic, a defense I don’t believe I will ever hear in a court room).
Then there are the queer Jewish Buddhists among us. This gay jubu finds meaning in the holiday’s union of opposites. Not merely that of masculine and feminine, but also in the exhortation to become so divinely drunk that we can’t tell Haman from Mordechai. To get beyond good and evil.
This is not to deny the evil of Haman. But often Jews wonder about this tradition of the holiday. My take on it is entirely Buddhist. Haman is suffering — and like many who are not awake, he acts out his suffering in the world and creates more, for others and for himself. And thus, while we should do everything in our power to prevent his carrying out plans to spread suffering, he is just as deserving of compassion as Mordechai. Not a popular message nowadays. Not even an easy practice for those who take it on. But the heart of the Buddha’s teaching.
All this I hope serves as an introductory ramble to this new blog — Just Another Queer Jewish Buddhist. While I expect to offend Jews, Buddhists, and many in the GLBT community, my hope is to create community of people of GLBT people who cross boundaries and transcend categories in the search for the heaven that exists right here on earth in front of us at every moment of the ongoing creation.
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