Who can laugh at a time like this?

It’s a ques­tion I ask myself mul­ti­ple times every day, par­tic­u­lar­ly in these nerve-wrack­ing times. It’s an espe­cial­ly awk­ward one, con­sid­er­ing that my pro­fes­sion is ​“com­e­dy writer.”

This ques­tion froze me in place as I sat before my key­board on Octo­ber 7, 2023. I was in the mid­dle of writ­ing The Jews: 5,000 Years and Count­ing, my new book, a comedic look at the entire his­to­ry of the Jew­ish peo­ple. Work­ing for late-night hosts like Jon Stew­art and Conan O’Brien, I was con­di­tioned to write hun­dreds of words a day but now it took me near­ly a month to be able to come up with one sentence.

And yet, it is hard­ly the first time in our his­to­ry when we Jews — espe­cial­ly the tumm­lers, bad­chan­im, and var­i­ous oth­er shtick­sters — have faced this question. 

Their response, just like mine, ulti­mate­ly became: what oth­er choice do we have?

And it’s a ques­tion that sur­faces in a lit­er­al and legal sense this week, as we cel­e­brate Purim — a hol­i­day in which we are com­mand­ed to feast and par­ty, cen­tered in a month in which we are com­mand­ed to turn grief to joy.

Yeah, so what? I can hear the skep­tics crow­ing. We’re com­mand­ed to do a lot of things. Many of us don’t. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to the new H&H pop­up to eat a bacon-egg-cheese bagel sandwich.

Well, to them I would respond that delib­er­ate­ly cul­ti­vat­ing Jew­ish joy — quite tru­ly laugh­ing in the face of despair — is vital to our people’s mak­ing it through what­ev­er this is. Even if it’s just to the next this to come along. And let’s face it, there’s going to be one. Then another. 

But as Rab­bi Tova Lei­bovic-Dou­glas writes: ​“This prac­tice – choos­ing joy despite dif­fi­cult cir­cum­stances – is a core part of why our peo­ple have not only sur­vived but, in many ways, thrived through the generations.”

I remind you that Purim is a hol­i­day that arose from a sit­u­a­tion in which the Jews were framed as a threat to soci­ety and it was deter­mined that they need­ed to be erad­i­cat­ed. This all took place in ancient Per­sia, mod­ern-day Iran, where the lead­er­ship want­ed to wipe Israel(lites) off the map. Sound familiar?

And yet, it gave rise to the famous­ly most uproar­i­ous and com­e­dy-dri­ven annu­al tra­di­tion on the Jew­ish cal­en­dar. How did that come to be? 

At the end of Megillat Esther, the ascen­dant epony­mous queen ordained that Jews com­mem­o­rate our near-miss from anni­hi­la­tion through a few con­crete mitzvot, which we still observe: help­ing the needy, sup­port­ing our com­mu­nal cen­ters, and send­ing gifts to friends and loved ones. And, of course, retelling the sto­ry behind the holiday.

But that’s just the thing. How do we bring this old sto­ry alive, in that dra­mat­ic and immer­sive way that we’ve mas­tered for Passover, Sukkot, and Hanukkah? Queen Esther’s decrees, and sub­se­quent Rab­binic law, didn’t take up this ped­a­gog­i­cal chal­lenge, out­side of rules on how/​when/​where to read the Megillah, and that we should get real­ly drunk (which is not nec­es­sar­i­ly a guar­an­tee of happiness!).

So that’s where Jews his­tor­i­cal­ly stepped up with the Purim spiel. We may think of these loud, out­ra­geous, irrev­er­ent restag­ings of the sto­ry of Esther, Mordechai, and Haman (I’ll pause) as a rel­a­tive­ly recent ​“Hey kids, tem­ple can be fun too!” con­ces­sion to moder­ni­ty. In fact, Purim spiels date back over 500 years, a tra­di­tion kept dur­ing some of the most har­row­ing chap­ters of Jew­ish history. 

The ear­li­est doc­u­ment­ed ​“Purim spoof” actu­al­ly dates back to four­teenth cen­tu­ry Italy, when Kalony­mos ben Kalony­mos, a rab­bi (and appar­ent­ly, nepo baby) wrote a Tal­mu­dic par­o­dy called Masekhet Purim. In the six­teenth cen­tu­ry, the Venet­ian Jews — sequestered in the first exam­ple of a ghet­to, kept from leav­ing by armed guards, and severe­ly restrict­ed in life and liveli­hood — penned a comedic poem recount­ing the sto­ry of Esther. How could they laugh at such a time? The Jew­ish answer is: how could they not?

Oth­er par­o­dies of Jew­ish texts, from the litur­gy to the Hag­gadah, began to appear in the Venet­ian ghet­to, unit­ed by the theme of drunk­en­ness and a recur­ring mock-prophet char­ac­ter named Bak­buk (Hebrew for bot­tle). Already there was an expan­sion from mere­ly ​“humor­ous­ly recount­ing a sacred sto­ry” into ​“open­ing the flood­gates of address­ing tragedy through laughter.”

Soon after, Ital­ian Jews began dra­ma­tiz­ing the sto­ry by burn­ing, and some­times attack­ing on horse­back, effi­gies of Haman, accom­pa­nied by trum­pet blasts. Not exact­ly hilar­i­ous, but also not exact­ly the Mourner’s Kad­dish either.

In the sev­en­teenth cen­tu­ry, the tra­di­tion of the Purim spiel— some­times a lav­ish stage pro­duc­tion with wardrobe and orig­i­nal music — began to take off across Europe, even as numer­ous unspeak­able things were being done to Jews. Even as they were trapped, geo­graph­i­cal­ly and oth­er­wise, in misery.

Per­haps the most arrest­ing exam­ple, though, of a Purim spiel staged in the face of hor­ror was the one put on by the Bobover sect of Hasidic Jews in 1948. Still reel­ing from near-dec­i­ma­tion by the Nazis, this sect cob­bled togeth­er mem­o­ries of the spiels they used to put on in Bobowa, Poland, and reignit­ed the tra­di­tion — one that con­tin­ues to this day. 

As you may have gleaned by now, I per­son­al­ly have a pas­sion for Purim spiels. When I lived in New York City, I used to recruit pro­fes­sion­al writ­ers and actors to mount an annu­al show I called ​“The Shushan Chan­nel,” which played in New York City Jew­ish venues for eight years. Since mov­ing to Los Ange­les, I’ve been help­ing make elab­o­rate ones at my own shul for the past decade and a half. Yes, even through those times. Especially.

And that’s the spir­it in which I wrote my fun­ny book about Jew­ish his­to­ry. Now. You heard me.

Because, as absolute­ly hor­ri­fy­ing as the moment we seem stuck in, look­ing at the big­ger pic­ture of all of Jew­ish his­to­ry can be exis­ten­tial­ly ther­a­peu­tic. It reminds us that we’ve been through dif­fer­ent hor­rors, many times, and we’ve always made it through. 

Look­ing at all of this, liv­ing through this, with an eye towards irrev­er­ence, sub­ver­sive­ness, and dig­ging hard with­in our­selves to unleash joy — that’s how we’ve made it. Tak­ing the long view of Jew­ish his­to­ry is crit­i­cal to the con­tin­u­a­tion of Jew­ish his­to­ry. And find­ing a way to laugh even amidst the tears is how we stay Jews.