Purim Is Scary

When I was a kid, Halloween was a night we dreaded. We stayed in and kept the lights off to avoid any prospective trick-or-treaters. And we saw the results of the festivities the next morning: egged cars, shaving cream and toilet paper. And perhaps some candy wrappers.

In contrast, Purim was fun. We got dressed up in costumes and drove around town delivering baskets full of treats to all our friends. A task that would have normally been pretty fast took hours because of the sheer chaos on the roads. Drivers stopped their cars in middle of the road to shmooze, oblivious of the honking behind them. Drunk yeshiva bachurim swerved, narrowly missing pedestrians and other drivers. Hyper kids overloaded on sugar were everywhere. As I look back, all that fun might not have been such a good thing.

When you really sit down and think about it, Purim is an insane holiday. People are actually encouraged to get drunk. Just in case someone might think that the mitzva is to drink but not to excess, it says specifically to drink until you don't know the difference between Mordechai and Haman. That, my friends, means drinking to excess. And it says nothing about refraining from driving while doing said drinking. Okay, operating a horse and wagon - they wouldn't have known about cars when this stuff was written.

I wisely stayed off the roads today. I have had enough of the chaos. The clogged roads, the honking horns, the decorations that regularly fall off moving cars. It's pretty scary actually.