Confusing Haman and Mordechai

Rava said: A person is obligated to drink on Purim until he is so intoxicated that he does not know the difference between “cursed is Haman” and “blessed is Mordechai.” (Megillah 7b) 

I will never forget how it felt to watch videos of ordinary people across the United States tear down posters of Israeli hostages in the months immediately following Oct. 7. 

No hostage was spared. It did not matter if the picture showed a man or a woman, an adult, a child or even an infant. All the posters met the same fate — ripped from telephone poles and bulletin boards, then tossed in the garbage.

When confronted, the culprits responded without shame, utterly convinced that they were acting morally and that the long arc of history would come to vindicate Hamas’ massacres, as well as their own acts of petty vandalism. 

This phenomenon is just one of countless ways in which moral discernment — the ability to tell good from evil — has been conspicuously absent since the start of the war.

Human rights advocates have cheered or dissembled when faced with Hamas’ weaponization of sexual violence. Bodies sworn to defending the international order have openly aligned themselves with belligerent terrorist groups. Students at America’s most venerable institutions of higher learning have made no distinction between a state — however imperfect — that goes to great lengths to defend its people with military force, and a terrorist group that goes to great lengths to protect its military with human shields.

From a biblical perspective, the ability to discern good from evil is synonymous with the human condition itself. Eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is what ended Adam and Eve’s stint in Eden and began the long saga of human history. 

It is thus both a superpower — a divine gift snatched from heaven by our misbehaving ancestors — as well as a curse, a symptom of our fallen, exilic existence. 

Seen one way, life was better before we ate the forbidden fruit. We were naked and unafraid. We lived in harmony with ourselves, with one another, and with all of creation. We were innocent like children, as it says in Deuteronomy, “your little ones … your children who do not yet know good from bad, they shall enter [the land]” (1:39). 

Seen another way, it was a dangerous time, when we lacked the capacity to distinguish friend from foe and blithely followed the advice of snakes in the grass without ever suspecting that not everyone has our best interests at heart. In other words, it was a period of untenable and reckless naivety. 

Perhaps the injunction to drink away our moral discernment on Purim is motivated by a thirst for redemption — a yearning to cast off the shackles of exile and claw our way back to Edenic consciousness. 

Or perhaps this is a mystical practice. As the Hasidic masters have suggested, the duality of good and evil conceals the deeper unity of God Himself. As it is written in the Kedushat Levi, “from all of Haman’s evil came goodness … this causes us to realize that everything comes from the Creator… and that even things that appear to be evil, when one rejoices in them and says ‘this too is for the good,’ they are transformed into good. Such a person will fear nothing.” 

This is an intriguing teaching, but it is also a frightening one. What does it mean to suggest that good and evil are superficial distinctions that conceal a deeper unity? What does that say about the entire project of religious life? What does it mean to those who have experienced evil — who have been victims of cruelty, oppression, and violence? 

Watching the world fail one test of moral clarity after the other, Jews have clung ever more intensely to our convictions about right and wrong. There are, however, spiritual risks involved in this. A fixation on evil may leave us feeling more embattled, paranoid, and isolated. We may also succumb to self-righteousness, so bewildered by the evil of our enemies that we fail to hold ourselves to account for our own moral failings. 

In life, it is rare to find anyone as purely righteous as Mordechai or as purely wicked as Haman — though there are exceptions. And so perhaps the heart of this commandment is an injunction to shatter our moral idols — our caricatures of the other and our simplistic notions of the world as a place divided cleanly between light and dark like a black-and-white cookie. 

Or possibly the sages just want us to have some fun on Purim — to forget ourselves, to forget the cosmic battle of good and evil, to forget the poster-tearers and the hypocrisy of the international community, and to lay aside our sense of embattlement. If we do, perhaps we can return to that state of Edenic innocence for just one day — like children who neither know good or evil, who assume, naively, blessedly, that the world is safe.

Matthew Schultz is a Jewish Journal columnist and rabbinical student at Hebrew College. He is the author of the essay collection “What Came Before” (Tupelo, 2020) and lives in Boston and Jerusalem.