“There is significant irony in contemporary traditional communities on Purim…”

There is significant irony in contemporary traditional communities on Purim; rabbinic overexertion of the laws of Purim has led legal-minded individuals to compel themselves and others to attend punctiliously and with all seriousness to the reading of the Měgillâ – a work of bawdy comedy. The image of a costumed clown ritually reading the Měgillâ with more precision than the weekly Torah reading is more than a bit farcical.

Barry Wimpfheimer, Narrating the Law: A Poetics of Talmudic Legal Stories (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 28.