Purim, the Feast of Lots, the silliest of Jewish holidays is coming Thursday & Friday March 20th & 21st . It’s a raucous, drunken party holiday with costumes and funny plays. You don’t have to be Jewish to celebrate it. For non-observant people, here’s how.

Update? How can there be an update on a holiday thousands of years old? It's not. It's about the Purim party this Saturday far after the jump.

Purim celebrates a fabled victory of Jews over their enemies in Persia thousands of years ago and follows the time honored tradition: They tried to kill us. We won. Let’s Eat. For the full story, people read the whole Megillah – the scroll in which the Biblical Book of Esther is written. This is not really much a religious holiday. God appears not at all in the story which is an entirely human tale of struggle.

A bare-bones plot summary via Wikipedia:

In the story, Ahasuerus, the Persian Emperor is married to Vashti, whom he puts aside after he asks her to appear "before the king with the crown royal, to show the people and the princes her beauty: for she was fair to look on", and she refuses.[1][2] Mordecai's cousin Hadassah, also called Esther, is selected from the candidates to be Ahasuerus's new wife. The King's prime minister Haman (an Agagite) and Haman's wife Zeresh plot to have Ahasuerus kill all the Jews, without knowing that Esther is Jewish. Esther saves the day for her people: at the risk of endangering her own safety, she warns Ahasuerus of Haman's plot to kill all the Jews. Haman and his sons are hanged on the fifty cubit gallows he had had built for Mordecai, and Mordecai becomes prime minister in Haman's place. However, Ahasuerus's edict decreeing the murder of the Jews cannot be rescinded, so he issues another edict allowing the Jews to take up arms and fight to kill their enemies, which they do, killing 75,000 men, in addition to women and children.

So how to celebrate?

Give food to others – the technical term is Mishloch Monot. Jews For Racial & Economic Justice, for example, has been visiting people on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, talking about affordable housing and bringing baskets of hamantashen and candies. Give to friends, neighbors and to poor people.

Listen to a Megillah reading. More formal ones take place Thursday night in synagogues. People wear costumes, make noise when the name “Haman” (the bad guy) is mentioned and watch very silly (often musical) plays called Purim spiels.

An excellent, much less formal place for lefty Jews and non-Jews alike will be at the Workmen’s Circle-Arbeter Ring this Saturday March 22. 45 East 33rd Street, from 7PM to 1 AM.

There, with great food supplied by Domestic Workers United will be an Affordable Housing Purim spiel to remember. I was there last year. It was great and there was opportunity to observe another Purim commandment: Get so drunk you cannot distinguish between “Cursed be Haman” and “Blessed be Mordecai.” See you there.

UPDATE: Dancing, the Rude Mechanical Orchestra and much more (The Rude Mechanical Orchestra, for those unfamiliar, is a funny, jazzy marching band which --from time to time -- has graced NYC political protests.) Do not miss this chance to hear them up close and personal.
For a more serious Purim riff, try Rabbi Jill Jacobs thoughts on Purim & Spitzer at JSPOT or my favorite and most moving retelling of the Purim story by Ellen Kushner on Sound & Spirit “Esther: The Feast of Masks”

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