Beyond the Mask of a Single Story

Lately Tuesday evenings have become a highlight of my week, because I have the privilege of teaching BJ’s Introduction to Judaism class. Our class is amazingly diverse: students in their 20s and in their 90s; Jews by birth, Jews by choice and folks of other religions; people who grew up steeped in ritual and people opening a siddur for the very first time; lawyers and artists, retirees and graduate students, teachers and engineers. Each week we bring our many varied perspectives and experiences of Judaism to bear as we tackle a new topic in the tradition. 

This week we gathered to learn about Purim, which begins on Monday evening, and as an icebreaker at the beginning of class we discussed the following question: 

If the Jewish story were a movie, what genre would it be? A comedy? A tragedy? A survival drama? A thriller? 

The answers were as diverse as the members of our class. Someone argued that our story resembles a Shakespearean comedy, with its ups and downs but ultimately with a happy ending. Someone else suggested a “psychological thriller,” pointing to the undercurrent of danger and persecution throughout our history. One person said, “it depends on the century.”

Then we turned to the Purim story itself. As the story opens, the Jews of Persia are deeply integrated, comfortable, even thriving. A Jewish woman becomes queen! The first few chapters of the Book of Esther are a story of acceptance and success. But in the blink of an eye, a prime minister—Haman (boooo)—channels his wounded pride and jealousy into genocidal rage, condemning the Jews to death. And then of course, the story flips again; the Jews defend themselves against their attackers, Haman fails, Mordekhai rises, Esther acts with courage and clarity, and the community moves from terror to power, status and safety. And of course, that power, status and safety comes at a terrible cost for the Shushanites; in chapter nine, we read about the large massacre at the hands of the once-persecuted Jewish community.

So, what’s the story of Purim, especially as we read it as diaspora Jews in 2026? Is it a cautionary tale about the fragility of diaspora life? About how quickly belonging can turn into vulnerability? Or is it a story of resilience? Of hidden courage? Of survival against impossible odds? And what do we make of the violent act at the end—the uneasy reality that salvation for one group meant devastation for another?

Can we really, with integrity, summarize it the way it is so often summarized: They tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat?

As we tried to settle on one way of telling the story of Purim, we realized that the Megillah is just as inscrutable as Jewish history itself. The Jewish story—perhaps exemplified in the microcosm of the story of Purim—is not just one genre. It is all of them. Comedy and tragedy. Vulnerability and power. Exile and belonging. Existential danger and radical possibility, all at once. 

The mystic Isaac Luria taught a practice of reciting six daily remembrances—six zekhirot—that we are supposed to recall each day in our tefillah. Three of them direct us toward painful or sobering moments in Jewish history: our ancestors’ failure of faith in the wilderness when they created the Golden Calf, Miriam’s misstep in speaking against Moses, and the attack of Amalek—the archetype of those who seek to destroy us—which we remember this Shabbat as we read in the Maftir about Amalek’s attack on the Israelites as they wandered from Egypt to Israel. We are commanded to remember moral failure—our own and that of others.

But the other three remembrances are of an entirely different character: the day we left Egypt, the day we stood at Mount Sinai, and Shabbat. These latter three bring us out of the darkness of the Jewish past and into the light of the Jewish future. Leaving Egypt, standing at Sinai, entering Shabbat—all of these are moments when the future spreads out before us, full of possibility, discovery, and promise. 

Taken together, these six remembrances tell a fuller Jewish story than can be reduced to a single narrative. The truth is that our story is all of this, sometimes in the same generation, sometimes in the same week. We are the people of the Golden Calf and the people of Sinai. We are the targets of Amalek and, in our day, we grapple with what it means to hold power. 

Maybe the invitation of Purim—beneath the costumes and the noise and the hamantaschen – is to embrace this genre-bending nature of Jewish existence, and to drop the facade that we could ever fully comprehend the nature of Jewish history or the Jewish future. To resist collapsing our multi-faceted story into a single headline: “we are survivors” or “we are powerful” or “we are endangered” or “we are safe.” 

What might emerge if we held our versions of the Jewish story a little more lightly? What could happen if we held our narratives—about who we are as individuals and as a people—with a bit more spaciousness? If we allowed the story to be more than one thing at once? 

Of course, Shabbat itself is a corrective to our need for narrative certainty. It is a weekly opportunity to let down our guard, to breathe deeply, and to accept that we cannot tie up every loose end in our lives by Friday afternoon. Shabbat invites us to take off the mask of a single story about who we are, inviting us to see ourselves not just as productive members of society but as individuals with inherent worth that extends beyond our productivity. For 25 hours we step out of the rat race, and out of the relentless need to make sense of our lives and our world. We simply get to be.

This Shabbat, may we savor that liberatory feeling. And tomorrow night when we emerge from Havdalah and turn our sights towards Purim, may we remember that the Jewish story—like our own lives—is so much richer than any one telling.

Shabbat shalom,

Joe Blumberg