Rabbi Arthur Waskow: Bloody Purim & the Bloody Passion

From "Bloody Purim & the Bloody Passion," by Rabbi Arthur Waskow, at Sojourners:

...the event [the massacre at Hebron] must teach us to recognize and transform the murderer that hides within each people, each person, rather than asserting it lives only in our enemies...

I hope that Christians and Muslims will take this occasion to read the Scroll of Esther in the light of the appearance of The Passion film, to open again their hearts to the centuries of fear that not only corrodes the memory of many Jews but turns that corrosion into rage.

And I hope that Jews will reread the scroll this year after going inward through the Fast of Esther, after remembering the aspect of Haman that we also (not only Baruch Goldstein) carry in ourselves, after saying mourners' Kaddish for those whom we have allowed some among our own people to destroy.

And then, but only then, to celebrate the ultimately hilarious joke of Purim - that the attempt to oppress others ultimately turns the attempt itself upside down.

This Holy Week, may we all take the opportunity to look inside ourselves with 'objectivity' - in terms of what others may see there - within the challenge of the often-disturbing Reality of the Passion Story, played out again and again in our lives and in our world. May we resist the temptation to distance ourselves with academic, theological, political, and social platitudes. May we find the courage to just sit there for a time, and know, within that reality, who we REALLY are, as sometimes opposed to who we are in even our most personal rhetoric. And may each of us know, along with Bonhoeffer, that "whoever I am, I am thine, O God."

Jenee