Shabbat Zachor 5785
Shabbat Zachor 5785
If you were the kind of person who read popular social science books in the '90s or '00s, chances are you read one of these two books:
No Logo by Naomi Klein, a foundational exploration of the role that big brands like Nike and Pepsi play in our world—a book that sparked at least two summers’ worth of programming at RSY summer camps.
And The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf, which made its author one of the leading voices in the nascent third-wave feminist movement and popularized ideas about the way beauty norms inhibit women’s success in multiple areas of life. Ideas that now casually underpin our conversations as if they were always as obvious as they seem today.
Two Jewish women, born eight years apart, both with brown hair, both named Naomi, both married to men called Avram. Both known for their feminism and their writing, which emerged from a similar strand of the intellectual left. It’s probably not surprising—and something they had both come to terms with—that they were often confused for one another.
That confusion was largely benign—until suddenly, it wasn’t. Naomi Klein started to notice Naomi Wolf going— as we might put it Jewishly—off the derech. It started slowly, in ways that perhaps allowed for ideological disagreement between the two women. Then, Wolf embraced conspiratorial thinking.
At first, her conspiracy theories focused primarily on the American government. But with the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, Naomi Wolf went all in with the anti-vax movement, 5G chip conspiracies, and COVID-19 misinformation—even dabbling in antisemitic conspiracy theories about U.S. healthcare professionals and their relationship to Israel.
And so, Naomi Klein realized she had to do something about her doppelgänger—the title of her book exploring what she calls her shadow self and what she describes as the mirror world she entered into.
What started as a case of mistaken identity became an exploration of how someone could make what seemed like a sweeping ideological shift—and how terrifyingly close some of the conclusions she preferred to keep worlds apart actually were.
When you think you are clear about who you are, how your values drive your place in the world—when you actively work to make your mark in a particular way and not in another—being associated with things that feel like the antithesis of your values can be hugely destabilizing.
And that experience doesn’t just belong to the more bothered of the two Naomis.
This sense that things that should be far apart are, in fact, far too close for comfort—that every one of us has a shadow or a mirror world, maybe even that we rely on it for our own existence—is, in some ways, the essence of what we’re dealing with as we approach Purim.
Rabbi Sharon Brous writes:
On Purim, the tradition is to drink until “we can no longer tell the difference between good and evil,” as the Talmud puts it, embracing true moral ambiguity. We wear costumes that simultaneously conceal and reveal, exposing the aspects of ourselves we work all year to hide.
Ad delo yada—until we can no longer tell the difference—is the rabbinic imperative to understand that the two Naomis aren’t the only people who have a shadow self. In the Purim story, Mordechai, as a representative of the Jews, and Haman, as an archetype of those who seek to destroy us, are imprints of each other.
That’s what the story alludes to when it says v’nahafoch hu—“and things were turned upside down.” Suddenly, in the chapter of the Purim story that we do our best to avoid around children, the heroes become villains, and the villains become victims.
Chapter 9 of the Megillah is the hardest part of the story. It’s the reason that, for a long time, progressive synagogues avoided the festival altogether. It was too difficult, too distasteful, to read the story in full and revel in its triumph, but it feels empty without the crucial chapter that brings the deeply embedded paradoxes of the story to the fore. The choice was to leave the chapter unseen, unread—and the festival uncelebrated.
Over time, that changed—largely because, honestly, who wants to argue with families and children and tell them they can’t have their fun festival? But I don’t think people’s discomfort with Purim ever really disappeared. Every now and then, our contemporary reality sharpens our focus on a particular dimension of the story that pushes emotional buttons in a way that is hard to cope with and hard to talk about.
There are some conversations that are always difficult to have, and the Purim story is deeply conscious of that fact. So much so that we dress up, get drunk, and engage in all kinds of silliness to create enough distance from the horrific realities the story exposes—so that we can even tell it in the first place.
It’s absolutely unbearable to think about how easy it is for people to attain power, manipulate a state, and turn it against its own people—as Haman tries to do. And it’s even harder to realize that, despite having known this was possible for all the years we’ve had this story, it still happened to our people in living memory.
It’s terrifying to acknowledge that there is no interventionist God who comes to save us—that it’s all in our hands, as typified by Esther, who represents the human face of the intervention we wish God would provide.
And it’s almost overwhelmingly difficult to acknowledge that the tables can turn so quickly—that a people threatened with the worst destructive impulses of another can, as the Jews do in Chapter 9 of the Megillah, become a force of vengeance and violence.
It’s deeply confronting—with very little consolation. And so, we dress up, laugh, and drink.
Because otherwise, we’re stuck.
But today isn’t Purim. We’re not dressed up, drunk, or giggling. It’s Shabbat Zachor, and we’re looking ahead to Purim. With none of the support apparatus that helps us process it, I wanted to have a frank conversation about how hard it is to go to the places that the Purim story takes us.
But here’s the thing: I’m actually not sure going there is useful—because of how high the stakes are and because of how many people are feeling this mix of vulnerability, anger, moral outrage, disenfranchisement, and even hatred.
It’s not that we don’t know. I don’t think you need me—or anyone else—extrapolating at length, in any political direction, the potential parallels between the world we live in and the Purim story.
Not because the parallels don’t exist—in abundance—but because I’m not convinced this endless extrapolation gets us anywhere except into further entrenched camps, where the distinctions that the Purim story seeks to blur become more rigid.
I could, with total integrity to Jewish texts, stand here and give a drash about Baruch Goldstein, Gaza, and Jewish violence. I could, with total integrity to Jewish texts, stand here and give a drash about Amalek, Jewish self-defense, and the importance of Esther’s Jews-first approach.
I suppose you might call these are our mirror worlds. But, of course, they aren’t—they’re the same world. These perspectives exist within the same community and thought world.
There are parts of us that are very different to other parts of us, and we are capable of brilliant and awful thinking and actions.
The Talmud discussed the description of King Achashverosh as a king who ruled from Hodu to Kush—places that Rav says are at opposite ends of the world, while Shmuel says they are adjacent. To me, this encapsulates the difficult conversation before us: perspectives and characteristics that are simultaneously worlds apart and yet right next door.
We live in a world where it’s entirely possible and true to be acting in what it feels like the best interests of those you have a moral obligation to, where the threat of a hateful and destructive enemy is real and active, and where it can feel like in the pursuit of what seems it should be right, the path is littered with situations that put you in the wrong. It is not simple. And I think, although it’s hard to admit, that we know it; it’s just if we say it then we’re stuck with it, and have to figure out where to go next.
Naomi Klein reflects on how it was possible for her and her doppleganger to diverge in quite the way that she did. She reflects that one thing she learnt from her entry into the world of conspiracy theorists is that in her view they ‘get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right’.
So much of this comes back down to raw feelings, the rawest and most basic human feelings. And it’s those feelings that it feels to me that Purim exposes our need to spend more time with, even if we first need to acknowledge how unsafe it feels to do so. Fear that has nowhere to go very quickly becomes defensiveness, hurt without any prospect of an answer can turn into hatred.
When we notice others, or even ourselves, speaking the voices of our shadow side, it makes me wonder what’s underneath.
The ultimate message of Purim is one of Jewish survival, and when I think about Jewish survival in 2025 I’m not just thinking of external threats, I’m thinking of what these splits in how we understand and process our feelings about the world around us are doing to the internal integrity of our people- and to put an even finer point on it, to the integrity of our synagogue.
It’s nice to think of all the good stuff, the ways we can be unashamedly proud, and Purim creates space for that, but it also forces us to confront where have we become corrupted and broken, where have we fallen victim to our worst natures, and where we have lost our way.
Yehuda Kurtzer teaches: If the world is upside down, maybe the final message of Purim is, so straightforwardly, just do the kinds of things that turn it back over again.
And that’s maybe where I hope we can begin- less labelling of each other, and more listening- less outrage and more concern. When I hear someone act or speak in a way that touches a nerve for me, it’s a great opportunity to learn a bit more about what that nerve is, just as it ought to be when something I say or do pushes a button for someone else. I’m glad and grateful that the week after Purim we get to begin a series of conversations as a community about how we talk together, and then to practise listening and learning.
This begins with a conversation before our AGM on March 20th, and will continue throughout the year. I hope we can bring a spirit of lo yada to those too- accepting the certainties we cling to and the instability that causes us to need them so much, as we learn and talk together, and try to find a way forward in community.
