In the Talmud discussing the laws of observing Purim, Rava asserts that the mitzvah of drinking is not done solely to become drunk. Instead, he offers a specific and narrow formulation for how to fulfill the mitzvah of drinking on Purim.
According to Rava, we are commanded to drink “until [we] don’t know the difference between ‘cursed be Haman’ and ‘blessed be Mordechai’.” The Talmud requires that during our celebrations, we forget who the villain and the hero were – who did the persecuting and who was persecuted.
This is not a minor detail. It’s the hinge of the entire mitzvah. Most holidays ask us to remember with precision the ways in which we were persecuted; the Passover Haggadah demands we see ourselves as if we personally left Egypt. Purim, however, asks for the opposite. Why celebrate a holiday where we survived persecution by forgetting who our persecutor was?
The Megillah itself offers a clue. In Esther 9:1, describing the day on which the King’s decree was supposed to be executed, the text uses the phrase “וְנַהֲפ֣וֹךְ ה֔וּא” – “it turned upside down.” This is no coincidence. וְנַהֲפ֣וֹךְ ה֔וּא describes the structure of the entire story.
The gallows Haman builds for Mordechai becomes his own. Haman parades through the streets expecting honor but instead leads Mordechai’s horse. The thirteenth of Adar, designated as the day of Jewish annihilation, becomes the day of Jewish survival. Positions reverse. Fortunes flip.
Even the decree itself gets flipped. Achashverosh can’t revoke the decree he’s already signed, so he issues a second decree, a mirror image, granting the Jews the right to do unto their enemies what their enemies planned to do to them. The very mechanism of Jewish survival mirrors that of their destruction. The megillah names the inversion to force us to notice the pattern, not just the outcome. This isn’t a story about good defeating evil. It’s a story about a world where power is reversible and where the categories themselves aren’t stable.
In Esther 1, we are told about King Achashverosh’s 180-day party in obsessive detail: gold and silver couches, marble pillars, curtains of white cotton and violet linen. The wine flowed freely, served in vessels of gold, each one different from the last. This wasn’t excess for its own sake. It was a display of power. The party was 180 days of uninterrupted opulence designed to overwhelm anyone in attendance with the resources at the King’s disposal.
Ancient Persian royal feasts weren’t social occasions, but strategic political instruments. To attend was to be incorporated into the empire’s orbit, an implicit acknowledgment of the king’s power and legitimacy.
The text states that everyone in Shushan was invited — “high and low alike” — and notably, that “the drinking was according to law; none did compel.” This qualification signals that although nobody was forced to drink at the party, a law guaranteeing freedom from compulsion only exists because compulsion was the default expectation. No king would legislate the absence of pressure unless pressure was already the norm.
The freedom not to attend was technically real but extremely inadvisable. And for diaspora Jews with no army or political leverage, refusing the King’s hospitality could easily be seen as provocation. The text of the megillah is careful to note that although nobody was forced to attend, the choice to participate was still a choice people made.
And that distinction matters. Had the Jews been compelled to attend, they would be pure victims, with nothing to examine or reckon with. But by framing attendance as voluntary — however constrained that freedom actually was — the megillah creates space for a more complicated moral question. The Jews were there. They drank the wine. They absorbed the spectacle. What does their presence mean?
The Rabbinic tradition takes up this question directly. In a Talmudic discussion about why the Jews of that generation deserved Haman’s evil decree, the answer given is their attendance at the feast.
The Rabbis are not making the illogical claim that Jews being at the feast caused Haman’s hatred. Rather, the Jews deserved the decree because Jewish participation in the empire’s spectacle represented a dangerous comfort, a forgetting of how precarious diaspora existence always is.
The feast and the decree are two faces of the same imperial reality. The same king who welcomed Jews to his party signed their death warrant. The text of the megillah and the Rabbinic tradition that followed wanted readers to notice something about empires; they often extend hospitality and terror through the same hand.
Unlike the Exodus story, where Pharaoh is unambiguously the oppressor and Moses the liberator, the Purim narrative refuses clean moral lines. The king is both a threat and a savior. He signs the decree authorizing Jewish annihilation, then signs the counter-decree that allows their survival. He’s not evil or good; he’s arbitrary, which is somehow worse. Haman’s genocidal rage isn’t inspired by ideology or even Jew-hatred, but by wounded ego over one man’s refusal to bow to him. And by the end, the Jews are authorized to kill their enemies using the exact mechanism that was used to target them, signed with the same exact royal signet ring. The story’s resolution mirrors its threat.
But the strangest blurring happens between Haman and Mordechai themselves. Haman builds a gallows seventy-five feet high, intending to hang Mordechai on it, but ends up being hanged on his own gallows instead. Haman parades through the streets expecting honor but is instead forced to lead Mordechai’s horse and proclaim Mordechai’s greatness. The thirteenth of Adar is designated as the day the Jews will be annihilated, but it becomes the day the Jews defend themselves and ultimately survive. Haman rises to the position of second-in-command under the king, until Mordechai inherits that exact position after Haman’s death. By the story’s end, Mordechai doesn’t just defeat Haman — he becomes him.
When Rava says we should drink until we can’t tell them apart, he’s not asking us to invent confusion. He’s urging us to finally feel what the narrative structure has been showing us all along.
So perhaps the mitzvah to drink on Purim isn’t about forgetting at all. It’s about seeing differently. Alcohol dissolves the rigid categories sober reading insists upon. The drunkenness gives us access to what the narrative structure has been showing all along: that the line between oppressor and victim, between Haman and Mordechai, was never as stable as we need it to be. And sitting with that instability — rather than resolving it into a cleaner story — might be the most honest way to remember what survival in diaspora actually required.
With this in mind, the mandated Purim drinking takes the empire’s feast — the scene of complicity, the tool of domination — and transforms it. We drink again, but this time in our own community, on our own terms, with our own purpose. The feast that once absorbed us into imperial power becomes the feast of our deliverance. That’s venahafoch hu enacted in ritual.
By drinking on Purim, we take what was once the empire’s weapon and make it our own. Not by denying what it was, but by transforming what it means. Our drunkenness doesn’t erase Jewish complicity in that ancient feast. It ritually revisits it, this time with agency, this time with survival intact, this time with the knowledge that we made it through.
