Purim: Classmates Show Up Wearing Same Existential Nihilism

“The two of them stared daggers at each other for a full fifteen minutes.”

Ra’anana, March 10 – Students at a local high school recalled an embarrassing episode that took place on Sunday, when two of their number observed the traditional dress-up-for-Purim celebration by coming in identical philosophical positions that life has no inherent meaning or purpose.

Members of the senior year at Ostrovsky High School in this middle-class city northeast of Tel Aviv told journalists Sunday evening that they felt palpable awkwardness all day following the arrival at school of two female classmates in the same existential nihilist outfit, with each one accusing the other of stealing the idea.

“Oh, the temperature dropped twenty degrees when they walked in like thirty seconds apart,” recounted Bar, 17. “Maya shows up all life-is-meaningless-you’re-deluding-yourself-if-you-think-otherwise, and boom, along comes Hila, rocking her meaning-is-an-arbitrary-construct-that-always-proves-illusory. The two of them stared daggers at each other for a full fifteen minutes, I swear, until one of them realized caring, or at least appearing to care, about that, ruined the effect of the nihilism.”

“It was perfect, actually,” recalled Linoy, also 17. “The whole philosophical underpinning of Purim is the epic conflict with Amalek, the villain Haman’s ancestor, who represents the very core of the existential nihilist position. Making a joke of everything is a very nihilist thing to do, but then to go the extra step and turn nihilism itself into the vehicle for the joke, well, that’s our class for you. We’re very highbrow.” She punctuated the last sentence with several armpit farts.

Like most other public schools in Israel, Ostrovsky High invites its students to attend in costume on the last day of sessions before the Purim festival. Purim reenacts elements of the Book of Esther, in which the Jews of the Achaemenid Empire turned the tables on the would-be perpetrators of genocide. The book contains no explicit reference to God, an unusual feature for a text of the Biblical canon, in keeping with the “disguised” or “hidden” mode of divine conduct in the post-prophecy era that the story heralds. Jews have included costumes in their observance of Purim for several centuries at least, as a way of marking this hidden presence of the divine in events that to the casual observer appear to occur by mundane mechanisms.

The incident provided a break from the drama surrounding the regular costume fare at the school, where most of the males dress up as cavemen and most of the females as slutty butterflies or slutty devils.

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