Purim and masks

When I was a child, masks were just big cheap ugly plastic things that covered your whole face except for your eyes — I don’t remember how you breathed except that the thing was so ill-fitting that it couldn’t have been a problem — and hung on your face with thin elastic. They smelled bad. They appeared in stores around October, for Halloween. They were not appealing.

Masks weren’t a big deal at Purim, at least when or where I was a child. Little Esthers and Mordechais didn’t need them.

Masks, I later learned, could be much more sophisticated; elegantly gowned and jeweled or tuxedoed adults would wear them over just the top halves of their faces, their eyes glittering through the black velvet, as they glided around Viennese ballrooms. Or at least that’s how I imagined them.

It’s different now.

It’s helpful to think about masks. We wear them to shield our faces, to hide our identities, to protect ourselves, to protect others, to pretend to be someone we’re not, or not to be who we are.

Masks came back into our everyday awareness with the covid pandemic restrictions that started right around now, just around Purim, in 2020. Until then, masks were full-faced for kids, top face for glamor and mystery, or mouth-covering for healthcare workers.

Now, all of a sudden, masks were for all of us, and they were broadcasting messages.

Most of us wore masks during covid. They were a nuisance but they provided safety, both for us and for the people around us. The mask wars that were so prevalent in other parts of the country didn’t really explode here, possibly because our culture, in very broad terms, tends toward the communal rather than the ruggedly individual. But the anti-maskers’ argument was that the government had no business telling them what to put on their faces or bodies. And they didn’t believe that masks stopped covid anyway, they’d often add, muddying the clarity of their anti-mask rhetoric.

Next, college students demonstrating for Palestine — and often virulently anti-Israel, and not infrequently openly antisemitic as well — started to wear masks, to hide their identities. Because those students tended to be on the left, calls to unmask them came from the right.

But soon that controversy vanished as the federal government changed hands, and masking came to be associated with being woke or in favor of diversity, equity, and inclusion — there’s much to unpack there, but let’s hold that for another day — and ICE agents theoretically pursuing undocumented immigrants, but rounding up citizens too — wear them. That’s because they feel the need to be unidentifiable. They otherwise would feel unsafe, and possibly even be at genuine risk, were they not to mask, they say.

Now they look threatening. Ominous. Certainly not what we’re used to.

Masks can hide. They can give us the freedom not to hide who we really are. They’re complicated.

And so is Purim. Complicated. Multilayered. Fun and happy and profound and deadly, with masking and unmasking, hiding and seeking and finding.

We hope that everyone has exactly the Purim that they most want. Chag Purim sameach.

—JP