Putin, Zelensky and the Great Unmasking

The masks are coming off. More and more, I’m walking into retail stores, cafes and offices and seeing real human faces. As COVID restrictions are being relaxed nationwide, we are entering the period of the Great Unmasking, and not a minute too soon.

How ironic that this moment arrives just as many Jews are picking out their masks and costumes for Purim, that quirky holiday that commemorates how the Jews were saved from persecution in the ancient Persian Empire.

As we will read in the Book of Esther, the Jewish people of Shushan were threatened by the villain Haman, who convinced the King to kill all the Jews, because Mordecai refused to bow down to Haman. In the end, the Jews are saved by the heroic Queen Esther, Mordecai’s niece and adopted daughter, who married the King. When the King discovers that his wife is Jewish, he decides to reverse Haman’s decree, and instead of the Jews being killed, Haman and other enemies are killed.

This miraculous and unlikely turnaround has contributed to the “upside down” nature of this holiday, what Rabbi Lori Shapiro, in her cover story this week, calls a “topsy turvy” holiday. “Throughout Megillat Esther and the rabbinic discussions about it, the idea of ‘Hithafchut’ or reversal, spotlights the vertiginous experience of our observance,” she writes. “In addition to the commandment to get so drunk as not to be able to distinguish between Haman and Mordecai, the preponderance of these literary device reversals read like spinning teacups – a scroll within a scroll.”

The odd fact that a Jewish holiday of masks is coinciding with our great COVID unmasking is itself in keeping with the topsy turvy spirit of Purim—it’s another scroll within a scroll, another spinning tea cup.

This year Purim also coincides with the unmasking of two men who have dominated the headlines: Russian President Vladimir Putin, a modern-day Haman wreaking havoc in Ukraine, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a modern-day Mordecai and former comedian who has refused to bow down to him.

As if this weren’t enough, this year Purim also coincides with the unmasking of two men who have dominated the headlines: Russian President Vladimir Putin, a modern-day Haman wreaking havoc in Ukraine, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a modern-day Mordecai and former comedian who has refused to bow down to him.

After two decades of showing us a shrewd and calculating face, Putin went all in this year, taking off his mask and eliminating any doubt about his primal, predatory nature. Meanwhile, the former Jewish stand-up comic Zelensky, who no one took seriously since he became president, has revealed himself as a true hero by courageously standing up to the Russian bully.

That alone is a story worthy of Purim.

Even the Western nations, who have been divided and feckless in recent years, took off their masks since Putin’s invasion to reveal a ferocious unity and determination to sanction and isolate the rapacious Russian.

But what about us? What will happen after we take off our COVID masks for good? Who will we reveal? Will we be gluttons of the freedom that was taken from us these past two years, and regrab our pre-COVID lives with a vengeance? Or will we reveal our more modest, humbled selves, wiser to the things that bring us the most meaning?

What will happen after we take off our COVID masks for good? Will we be gluttons of the freedom that was taken from us these past two years? Or will we reveal our more modest, humbled selves, wiser to the things that bring us the most meaning?

I wonder if some of us may even miss the cocooning forced on us by COVID, an ideal excuse to stay away from the pressures of socializing. Will we miss the anonymity that the masks provided, the aura of “crisis” that the masks represented that relieved some of the anxieties of modern living?

The good news is that we’re in a position to even ask these questions — that we’ve reached a point where a lethal virus, while still not fully tamed, no longer dictates our lives.

In a sense, we’ve been living the vibes of Purim continuously since March 2020, with our lives and our worlds turned upside down and our faces hidden from one another.

Now, as we take our COVID masks off and look for our Purim masks, perhaps we can look for that singular mask that will reveal our best and deepest selves.