מסגורם של חגים: המקרה של פורים

Holidays are cultural hubs that play a dominant role in shaping and representing society’s time perspective, its values, and its identity. Although the holiday system is perceived as a stable cultural cluster deriving from the group’s heritage, it is infact exposed to change: to additions and subtractions, to selection and retention. In this article we examine Purim as a test case for mapping the dynamics conditioning the communication and retention of holidays over time by looking at three types of elements that are relevant to holidays generally, and to the case of Purim in particular.One is a set of five variables proposed by Michael Schudson for understanding “how culture works.” They include retrievability: the extent to which a particular cultural item, such as a holiday, is physically and cognitively part of people’s world; the rhetorical force of the cultural item that derives, in the present case, from both the meaning of the holiday and the effectiveness of its “story”; resonance” referring to the way the holiday is related to the group’s current needs and values; institutional retention, referring to the mechanisms that shape the holiday and sustain it in social subsystems; and resolution, namely, activities and practices that relate to the holiday,and, like the other items, affect its preservation. Alongside these general mechanisms,the article points to a set of contextual elements that are particular to holidays and are instrumental in conditioning their preservation capacity. They include season: the holidays’ connection to seasons of the year and particularly to their change; nation, or the holiday’s place in national life and in the nation’s ethos; family, namely, the role of the holiday and its celebration in the practices of family life and in the cohesion of families; the religious roots that a holiday may have and the nature of its religious sanction; and finally, the ways the holiday reflects and affects the contemplation,life world, and existential experience of the individual. The third overall element in interpreting the cultural role of holidays is specific to the Jewish case. It relates to the casting of holidays in Jewish tradition, which in turn reflects the unique place of history in Jewish culture. According to this analysis, a holiday, in order to be part of Jewish culture and to survive as such, must be paradigmatic. We suggest that Purim represents and celebrates the paradigm of Diaspora as the expected Jewish habitat. The holiday and the story of Esther serve as a foil for contemplating Jewish existence in the Diaspora, and their message is to “remain,” celebrating national life sans a homeland.The article concludes with the question of how this paradigm, and the holiday that marks it, has continued to survive after the Holocaust and the establishment of the state of Israel, and offers a preliminary answer