magid

Tonight is Purim, so today is Taanit Esther, a dawn-to-dusk fast. I fast ok, but my thoughts get a bit scattered, with a higher ratio of "look, food!" than usual. Not the right time to write up the other play I saw last week, for instance. What does feel like it can be typed about is some of my favorite Purim costumes of years past.

When I was little, my mom dressed me up with a triangle of posterboard on front, with a big S on it: I was Super-Mun. I didn't know that mun was poppyseed*, so I went around being rather bewildered that year, but in retrospect, I'm amused (and I come by the punniness legitimately :-).
* one of the traditional fillings for hamantaschen**, the three-sided filled cookies made for Purim (by more enterprising bakers than I).
** I think it means "Haman's ears", or something like that (Haman being the villain in the story (see Esther, book of)), but I've always thought they looked a lot more like his hat, if he'd been of an era to wear a tricorne. (Did I mention scattered thoughts?)

The first year I was learning in Israel I came up with a last-minute costume that pleased me greatly: I went at the chapter of Sanhedrin we were learning (perek 10), in which the four types of death a Sanhedrin could apply are discussed. To wit: stoning, burning, strangulation, or by the sword. I wore two scarves (one was to be wrapped in the other for strangulation), and had a bag with a rock (stoning = toss over a cliff and throw a rock after), matches, and two plastic, retractable knives. Plus a kippah, for kipa, which is when the court has judged that the person has committed crimes, but the extremely-difficult-to-meet standards of evidence* have not been met, the person can be put in jail, fed some kind of uncooked grain, then water, until his stomach explodes.
* The person has to be warned that what s/he's about to do is a sin/crime with the punishment of death, and has to say that they know, and are going to do it anyway. And there have to be two eyewitnesses. It's pretty difficult to meet, and there are stories about how a Sanhedrin that put someone to death every 10 years (or something like that; I'm too lazy to check just now) was considered bloodthirsty.

And a couple of years ago I wore a crown with a picture of a turkey in one hand (I'd looked for a stuffed one, but couldn't find one then), and a Koosh ball in the other: I was "ha-molech may-Hodu v'ad Kush," the ruler from Turkey to Ethiopia.

This year, alas, I'm not particularly inspired.