Purim

This past weekend was Purim – the Jewish Halloween.  I’ll let you look up the story on your own (if you are really interested), but all you really need to know (beyond it being like Halloween) is that it is one of two night (the other being Independence Day) when the police don’t care how late, how loud, or how drunk you are.  In fact – maybe you do need to know one more thing – the point of Purim is to “drink to the point of Adloyada, an Aramaic word meaning “not knowing.”  In the Purim context Adloyada is said to mean drinking to the point of not being able to distinguish between Haman and Mordecai.” (Haman and Mordecai are the good guys and bad guys in the story.)   (My friend wrote that for me.)  Adloyada was also described to me to mean not being able to distinguish between good and evil or between human and demon. 

So on Saturday night after dinner at a friend’s house, we packed into a tiny car and rode over to the hip side of town with friends to see what Purim was all about.  The dinner was really fun as was evidenced by the fact that I agreed to trek across town at 230am.  I honestly thought it was a like 1130, maybe 12.  And, I wasn’t going to drink…I had my camera in hand and I wasn’t going to risk it. 

I got some really great pictures but they aren’t necessarily the thing I want to highlight on the blog.  Let’s just say I have a great picture of a fairy kissing a giant baby, of three ancient Egyptians dancing to techno music, and another of a cow making out with a cowboy.  It was interesting, but not as popular as I’d have though it would’ve been.  We were at the street party in Florentine – which is supposedly the biggest, crazies and world famous!  There just weren’t that many people and not everyone was in costume.  Either way, it was really fun to see and my Israel experience wouldn’t have been complete with out it.