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Harvey Belovski, rabbi at Golders Green United Synagogue:

The Jewish festival of Purim starts in a few hours.Ìý Our Jewish community, usually conservative in its behaviour and somber in its dress, goes into carnival mode.Ìý Walk about tomorrow near to my home and you’ll see tigers, bananas and wizards wandering the streets.Ìý In previous years, I’ve dressed up as a flamingo, a duck and a ballerina, although I’m unable to reveal this Purim’s costume before tonight.

Purim celebrates events long ago when the Jewish community lived in the ancient Persian empire. An influential anti-semite rose to power and then colluded with a manipulable king to exterminate the Jews. The queen – a closet Jew – together with the leader of the Jewish community were able to see off the danger.Ìý We read the story from a special scroll, give food gifts, donate money to the poor and have a raucous, boozy, feast at the end of the day.

It’s a typically Jewish and ironic way to remember an existential threat, of which there have been many in our long history.Ìý We look back and laugh at the experience, poking fun at our enemies and parodying ourselves.Ìý But there’s actually a serious message amid all the jollity – we all need to find manageable and captivating ways to remember really difficult events.

The Jewish bible uses a single word for this – ‘zachor’ – remember, which really means more than just remembering.Ìý It forces us to never forget, to sear into our collective memories how we survived this long and how that process has shaped our religious and individual identities.

Purim – with all its craziness – is an odd way to experience persecution and survival.Ìý But as I say at the Belovski Purim feast each year, Purim somehow enables to connect with God and each other in unexpected ways.Ìý And even more, it allows us to touch parts of ourselves that we just can’t access the rest of the year, and emerge refreshed and changed.Ìý

A great historian, Yosef Haim Yerushalmi, put this in a intriguing way:Ìý

Holy days, rituals, liturgies -- all are like musical notations which, in themselves, cannot convey the nuances and textures of live performance.Ìý

Purim is the ultimate live performance of the Jewish year.Ìý I believe that we all need the chance to immerse in a ‘real’, live performance from time to time, although not necessary dressed as a duck.