Purim: Dancing in the Dark
Purim is for masquerading and drunkenness - where is the spiritual significance in that?
I hosted my first purim retreat in 2025 and, to be honest, when I decided to schedule it for Purim I hadn’t put any thought into the spiritual connotations this would entail. Purim is for masquerading and drunkenness - where is the spiritual significance in that? In fact, at the start of the retreat, I asked participants if they had ever found Purim to be spiritually meaningful in the past - most agreed they had not.
But this was my task - how do I create a nourishing four day retreat rooted in the spiritual foundations of Purim? For that, I spent time with my chevrutah (study partner) pouring over the words of Rabbi Shagar - a postmodernist Neo-Hasidic spiritual leader in the late 20th century. His teachings on Purim were many but what I took from them, in the most broad sense possible - was a feeling that we spend much of our lives wishing we were someone else, someone better. We imagine ourselves smarter, or harder working, or more accomplished and because of this, we are rarely happy as we are, where we are.
Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that the fundamental human problem is to be in one place and at the same time to wish ourselves somewhere/someone else. In a way this is a great lacking of beingness. - Rabbi Shagar
In a way, this is a sort of attachment, spending our lives attached to something not here. I can’t help but compare this teaching to what the Upanishads - the primary texts underlying Yogic and Buddhist philosophy have to say about attachment - Raga in Sanskrit. It is described as the affliction of pleasure, being attached to that which brings joy. But Shagar seems to indicate that the Jewish experience is seemingly the opposite, being attached to our own suffering, a continual feeling of not enoughness.
So what is the solution? Well, says Shagar, in a teaching in which he ruminates on the oscillating joyful and depressed nature of Rebbe Nachman of Breslov - the great Chasidic scholar - the goal is to realize that any attachment to a fixed sense of ourselves is foolish. At Purim, we put on a mask and become someone else in jest, a reminder that identity is fluid. We are no more the character we wear at Purim, than we are the character we inhabit in our day to day lives. The ultimate joke is to step outside of a fixed sense of self, and to laugh at our self-delusion that we are any one thing. We will never achieve the idealized version of ourselves, why not laugh at our own foolishness.
How do we get out of our way long enough to experience this dissolution of ego and dance in jest of it all? That was the challenge of the retreat. Moving into the more accurate perception of self is not a form of spiritual bypassing - it begins with a deep understanding and holding of who we are - the heartbreaks and the joys. Purim, after all, starts with a story of an attempted genocide. It’s not a holiday of pretending the pain doesn’t exist, in fact, it commands us to remember the pain and then find joy in the face of it.
This was the Torah I came into the retreat with, although, if I’m being honest, I was scared about how it might be received. Finding joy in the face of a painful world? I’d be chastised out of the room. The critics in my mind chided: “people are dying in Israel and Gaza, anti-semitism is on the rise, how can you expect to find joy at a time like this?”
Purim comes on the full-moon of Adar, the month of the year in which Jews are commanded to increase our joy. As my friend Charly Jaffe reminded me last year, we wouldn’t need to be commanded to find joy if this was already our default state. Only a people perpetually plagued by abuse and discrimination would need to create a broad decree to find joy despite the state of the world.
We built a retreat around dancing with both the darkness and the light through practices of yoga, meditation, text study, sensory deprivation, and dance. By the time we donned our Purim masquerade masks on the final evening, we had created more spaciousness to hold these many parts of ourselves in dance. It was a liberating and sweaty experience that for the first time, provided me with deep spiritual resonance within Purim.
I can think of no better practice for holding all our parts than in dance. It is a medium that invites me into perpetual change - changes in shape, body, emotions, at literally any moment. This is one of the reasons I love polyrhythms in DJ sets - they say to us - don’t get too comfortable in one place, the beat is always changing, the music is always changing, and we too are also always changing. Why not laugh and find joy in it? It is a dance floor after all.