Purim

I hda mentioned in a previous post that we were celebrating Purim, but hadn’t then shown you the awesome photos from the night!

The story of Purim is this: Mordecai is a bloke who does the King of Persia a favour, and then sits at the city gate. The king’s new Prime-minister, Haman has a bit of a problem with Mordecai because he won’t bown down to him when he walks past. This is because Mordecai is jewish, and yeah, he will only bow down to God. So Haman has this plot to kill Mordecai, which turns into a plot to kill ALL the jews in Persia. Esther is Mordecai’s cousin, and she is the Queen. She’s also jewish.

Haman manges to get the king to agree with his idea to kill them all (not knowing Esther is jewish) and Haman then casts lots to see when the murdering will be done. Mordecai and Esther find out about this plan, and they urge all the Jews to fast and pray for three days, and at the end of the thrid day Esther plans to seek an audience with the King.

Esther has a bit of a feast with the King and invites Haman and Mordecai. The two do not get along… but Esther invites everyone back for a second banquet the next weekend. So they have the next banquet and Esther tells the King that she is jewish, and that Haman is going to kill all her people (including her). Because the decree has already been made he can’t back out on it, but he lets Esther and Mordecai write a new decree, and they make it so that the Jews can fight back. Lots of people die, and Haman is executed by the king. Mordecai because the second in charge now, and creates an annual rememberance of the time the event, so that everyone can remember when the Jews were saved from annihalation.

WOAH. So, that is what Purim is all about. Traditionally the things you do are dress up in fancy dress, give each other gifts, gamble and drink. We did pretty well all of it except our gambling was without money (we played poker), and our drinking was minimal- everyone had to drive home!

It was a really, really fun night, and everyone got really dressed up! We did a ‘secret santa’ (for lack of a better word/phrase), and lots of chocolate went around!

Tags: celebration, feastofthelord, festival, jewish, purim

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