More than a l'chaim? Maimonides, drunkenness and Purim

When I was a yeshiva student, I remember stumbling around the academy’s dining hall in a drunken stupor. This was not an outrageous crime, I was in good company. The room was filled with hundreds of such students and rabbis, all similarly shikkur (drunk). It was Purim and this was the accepted practice. Although intoxication is generally scorned by Jewish tradition, I believe one day a year it should be seen far more favourably.

The esteemed Cairo Geniza historian Goitein related that, despite the Islamic prohibition against alcohol, "in the Mediterranean area wine was almost as basic a constituent of the regular diet as bread". It was "not a luxury, but a daily need", the consumption of which was believed beneficial for one’s health. Maimonides, one of the greatest scholars and physicians of that era, prescribed wine with one’s meals and in a medical treatise composed for Sultan Saladin’s son (also a sultan), described the beverage as "the best of all sustenance".

Yet Maimonides' opinion beyond such moderate drinking was less tolerant. He maintained that a scholar who becomes drunk is "a sinner and shameful". Even more vividly, in his Guide for the Perplexed, he asserted that "a drinking party is more disgraceful than a gathering of naked people [who] defecate together in daylight in one place… Drunkenness, which ruins the mind and body of man, reason stamps as a vice". Excessive boozing, then, seems to be shunned completely.

Strikingly, however, there remained one exception: the Purim banquet. Maimonides ruled that at one’s Purim feast one should "drink wine until he becomes intoxicated". Why? What happened to its depravity? One answer is that such alcoholic indulgence is meant to mimic the extravagance and over-consumption of Achashverosh’s Feast, where "royal wine was plentiful according to the bounty of the king" and serves to bring us back to the days of the Persian Empire, where the Purim story is set. I’ve always rejected this approach, which considerably downplays the significance of such inebriation.

I see this festive drunkenness differently. Purim intoxication should instead be viewed as a means to let one’s mask fall and inhibitions relax, thereby enabling a person to express one’s inner self. That Purim, in the yeshiva dining hall, I pleaded with my teacher to help me pray as fervently as he and to study with the same diligence. Others exposed serious fears and problems about their existing relationships, bottled up until then. It was, without question, a cathartic experience. I want to argue that, within a safe, suitable setting, once a year such excessive drinking can be constructive. It provides an opportunity to express one’s worries and dreams that may have been suppressed until then.

Although I wouldn’t force anyone to do so. Instead I would follow the attitude of the Persian banquet of old, where "the drinking was according to the law [with] no one being coerced, for so had the King ordered, to do according to every man's wish" (Esther 1).

By Gav Cohn

This essay was longlisted for the JR Young Journalist Prize 2020.

Read the other prize entries on the JR blog.