Purim/Tetzaveh -- 5775

Tough-as-nails.  Airhead.  Sweetheart.  Mama’s Boy.  Tom Boy.  Golden Boy.  Peacemaker.  Caretaker.

Everyone possesses multiple identities, aspects of ourselves that we don for certain occasions – in the workplace with bosses, co-workers, or customers, at home with parents, partners, or children, out in public or home alone.  These personae are the faces we offer the world.  We use them to instruct people how to interact with us.

In Parshat Tetzaveh, the priests’ holy clothing is made.  Once they don their gaudy garb, they leave the ordinary behind.  They do their sacred work and serve God in the special precinct.  In their uniforms, they are distinct from other people and from other times in their lives.

At Purim, children don masks of heroes and villains, queens and kings.  But do not mistake their costumes for child’s play.  Each moppet reminds us that it is a natural aspect of social life to wear masks through the day.  What’s dangerous, though, is to hold on to a mask so tightly that we mistake it for our own, true Self.  It’s tempting to forget who we really are and to think that we are, instead, nothing more than a kindly grandmother, disciplinarian dad, identified patient, expert, hot-head, has-been, or screw-up.

I encourage you, this Purim, to make a list – an actual list – of your multiple identities.  Name them and acknowledge them, and remind yourself: they are aspects of you but they are not who you are.  You are not the masks you wear. Rather, you are the one who wears the masks.