Not Today, Haman
Chag Purim Sameach 🎭🍬🎉
By Cantor Rabbi Jacqueline Marx (Pluralistic Rabbinical Seminary, Class of 2022)
I’m an Esther. I’m a Vashti. I’m a Miriam, Devorah, Hulda, Judith. I have a Haman to vanquish. Call it what you will: Amalek, Ferdinand, Isabella, Popes Lucius III or Gregory IX. The intruder lives in my brain. I have nicknamed her Kristi, and she wants to kill me.
Oh, she’s not the first. She’s had predecessors: I had Adolf excised nearly three years ago. Then we irradiated Benito. Last summer we zapped Vladimir, and now it’s Kristi’s turn to say her final Vidui. My Hamans (Adolf, Benito, Vladimir and Kristi) are all small tumors, or “mets,” from ovarian cancer. Six years ago, I called my primary villain “Audrey 2,” in case you know the musical Little Shop of Horrors. Audrey 2 was big, she was ugly, and she was as voracious as her chlorophyllic, Brobdignagian namesake. A team of surgeons took five hours to strangle and slice her out of me. It’s just too bad she couldn’t sing like Levi Stubbs. Six rounds of infusion chemo later, I declared: “She tried to kill me, I won, let’s eat.” For a while.
Did you know that metastasis doesn’t just spread? It can actually hop. Like a flea (gross!). Though Audrey 2 was vanquished, she sent friends from Gehenna to finish her dirty work. Apparently they can pole vault. My BRaCa2 gene mutation status blueprint, and the itinerary it mapped out, portends that I’ll be entertaining such guests for the foreseeable. I’ve always been a gracious host, but here I draw the line. The gloves are off: I sentence Haman to the gallows, and any ten or more children he cares to send after him.
So why me?
Why not me? My diagnosis came as no surprise; I lost my father, my paternal aunt, and my first cousin to the same double-helix hiccup of doom. I miss them deeply; their memories are a blessing.
Why now?
1. Because medical research has caught up with my legacy. I wish my family members had been as fortunate. Better the 2020s than the 1980s.
2. Of course, now! Perhaps it was for just such a time that I reached this season (adapted from Esther 4:14). Perhaps it was for just such a time that I earned my semicha. Rabbis and cantors have ample opportunity for pastoral care in our professional lives. My pastoral care has become a little more personal, though no less professional. When I listen, my humans know I’ve been where they are. I’m still there.
Today is the 6th of Adar. For me, it’s really the 12th of Adar. Because tomorrow, the 13th of Adar, when Haman planned to gloat over the demise of our entire people in Persia, will be the day he meets Cantor Rabbi Esther Vashti Kickass. And then he will meet Moses. And Mordechai. We believe in medical hubris.
Tomorrow, my armor will be the helmet of a radiation mask. I’ll be lying in the arms of G🎶d, my ancestors, and my BRaCa2 forbears as I receive the healing laser knife whose gamma rays will vaporize The Evil One – b’ezrat haShem. Maybe I’ll stop by the Weaver Street Market on the way home for some early hamantaschen to celebrate. They have good fruity-nutty ones. Sarah Tuttle Singer calls hamantaschen “vulva cookies.” I like that representation: Not the casually tossable hat of Haman the attacker, but the very core of Esther and Vashti, the defenders. The rechem, or womb, from which we get the word rachmanut, or empathy (Yiddish: rachmones).
Stay strong, beloveds. Evil may lurk all around us; even within us. But we are not alone. We will win. We will dance again. They always try to kill us. Let’s eat.
We will win. I will win.
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