The boy’s not quite aware, certainly not calculated, maybe not even fully conscious. But he’s singing into the darkness

It’s nighttime in Yerushalayim, and Purim should be over. This has been a historically long Purim, a rare Purim Meshulash extended over three days (though if you start counting from the kids’ dress-up school parties, it’s actually five days, and from the bochurim’s fundraising campaigns, it’s more like two weeks), and twelve hours ago, when morning dawned, we wondered if the revelers could summon the energy for yet another day of Kol Haposhet Yad and Ad d’Lo Yada. Turns out they could and did.

Purim arrived this year along with a stretch of unseasonably hot weather, and even though the sun has long disappeared from view, the air is still warm and heavy. The apartments lining the streets of Yerushalayim are all alight, windows wide open, music wafting out. Thanks to the curious law of physics that provides onlookers on darkened streets with an unfiltered view of any illuminated home, you can make a pretty good guess as to the occupants of each apartment. That one, with the tight knot of bochurim endlessly jumping up and down, must belong to a maggid shiur or rebbi. The other one, with lots of little people hanging on to the window bars and shadows of all heights and dimensions behind them, belongs to grandparents hosting the extended family.

Outside on the streets, there’s more music: a crowd of bochurim dressed in matching black vests and red bowties, carrying a speaker, staggering toward the next building to make their pitch yet again. A car blasting Purim music on repeat through open windows.

In the traffic island bisecting the main street, a slight bochur stands at attention, a snare drum hanging from his neck. A bus approaches, and he steps in its path and holds out his hand. Then he gets to work with his drumsticks, rattling out a DUM-DUM-dum-dum-dum. The bus driver obligingly plays back the same motif, honking out a HONK-HONK-honk-honk-honk, and the bochur-turned-drummer graciously waves him on. The driver of the minivan behind him should be annoyed — the seats are full of cranky kids who have school tomorrow — but, when stopped by the self-appointed traffic cop, he rolls down his window and extends a warm one-handed hug.

At each bus stop stand families headed home after spending Purim with Savta. Like most young Israeli couples, they can’t afford to buy apartments in this city where they grew up, and so they’ve made their homes in outlying areas. They already celebrated Purim on Friday, but today they’ve brought their parents their nachas, all dressed in matching clown costumes, nurse-and-doctor ensembles, or classic Yerushalmi outfits: for the boys, miniature gold caftans, and for the girls, black tights standing in for headkerchiefs, knotted elegantly at the napes of little necks.

A tall, broad young man steps out of an apartment and begins walking up the street. The apartment is pumping with trance music that magnetically draws in more and more costumed young men, but he seems to have had his fill of the electronic rhythms. There’s a certain stillness in the way he moves.

The boy is wearing a vintage-style Dodgers uniform, a striped shirt paired with striped pants that reach just past his knees, along with the requisite knee socks. The costume isn’t a great fit; clearly he doesn’t spend his days doing push-ups or pitching fastballs. Some of the local Yerushalmi kids snigger as he walks past, but he doesn’t see them. He’s in his own Purim bubble, singing “Ani lo nikreisi... zeh shloshim yom, zeh shloshim yom.” His version isn’t fast or festive; it’s a contemplative, yearning ballad that shimmers in the humid night air.

The night grows darker, the streets noticeably quieter. The day of costumed bodies and bared souls should be over. But Purim doesn’t depart that easily, not even after three-plus days. In some houses, the music is still going, “Im Al Hamelech” giving way to strains of “Bar Yochai.” Through the bright windows you can see a few stalwart figures still dancing, arms interlinked — proof, if anyone needs it, that there’s an inverse relationship between amount of alcohol consumed and one’s concept of personal space.

But the washing machines are working, too, as industrious mothers and wives and grandmothers begin their inner calculations… it’s less than four weeks to Pesach now, less than four weeks to subject the contents of every single cabinet and closet to a punishing trial at which they will have to justify their existence, otherwise be tossed forever. And rivulets of water are beginning to stream from sponja pipes, as floors cede their black, purple, or sticky taffy stains, their slivers of meat and crumpled cups and orphaned ribbons and shards of wine-stained glass held by too-shaky hands.

Because tomorrow there is school, tomorrow there is seder, tomorrow there will be work and bills and laundry and lists and shopping and speech therapy.

But tonight, even as the switch is happening — even as the buses transport their overtired passengers from the bright houses pumping music and the technicolor tablescapes fade into staid living rooms and the gaudy costumes are washed and stowed away to await another twelve months of black pants and white shirts — there is a boy in a vintage Dodgers costume walking the streets of a modest neighborhood in Yerushalayim. It’s a neighborhood that boasts no soaring buildings or smart parking solutions, just a jumble of stone with bikes and cars crammed into any available spot and enough room — hopefully — for a bus to rumble by. In his ill-fitting stripes and knee socks, the boy’s not quite aware, certainly not calculated, maybe not even fully conscious. But he’s singing into the darkness.

It’s been thirty days, he sings. It’s been so long. It’s been thousands of years since You’ve invited us inside Your inner chamber. Maybe it’s hard to recognize us in these costumes, in the layers of artifice and camouflage and crusted exile that cover us. And we’re so immersed in our Schedules and Routines, in keeping the bills paid and the floor clean, that we don’t always feel the distance. But in these last moments while the music’s still playing and the final revelers are still dancing, the last chance before the curtain goes down on this yearly show in which our costumed selves can be real and raw and honest, can we just say it straight? It’s been thirty days, it’s been an eternity.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1054)