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Focusing on the Judaic tradition, what are some of the darker stories that trouble you personally?

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Focusing on the Judaic tradition, what are some of the darker stories that trouble you personally?

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One of the dark stories in our tradition that we celebrate every single year, which I will not be able to celebrate this year, actually comes in March. It’s a festival called “Purim.” Purim is a festival in which the Persians wanted to kill the Jews … [and] we wound up winning. At the end of the Scripture, the scroll of Esther says in the ninth chapter, “And we went to war. And we killed 75,000 of them. And there were no casualties on our side.” That fantasy of destroying the “other” as a way to deal with your own powerlessness is fine, I guess, when you’re powerless. But when you’re powerful, that’s a tradition that needs to be cleansed. You simply cannot teach that tradition, chant that tradition, in the same way. If you’re very traditional, you can chant the tradition, but then you’ve got to address it and say, “This is something we will never do again, and that’s why we chant it.” If you’re not traditional, and you want to eliminate it, I understand that you have to eliminate it.

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