In its glorious disorder, Purim reminds us all how to survive

Add to that the sweets and the dancing and the general, magical oddity of it – all that exultant, carnivalesque disorder – and I knew I’d found my festival.

Nowadays, yes, I’m aware it’s more focused on younger people in the shuls I go to, at least - but I still revel in it. I also look with longing at how they do it in Israel … over there Purim’s very much still for adults, apparently a sort of spicy mix of Mardi Gras and Hallowe’en (with costumes intriguingly abbreviated for the sunshine).

Even putting all of that aside, there’s the megillah. I find myself swooning with joy that we have something like it in Judaism. For the rest of the year I’m appropriately awed by the grandeur and inscrutability of our sacred texts, but then at Purim, suddenly, there’s something a little more frolicsome. I’m also not the first to spot Queen Esther as a potential gay icon – with her blend of secrets, bravery and hotness, and Vashti’s refusal to come and dance for the king has always felt camply fabulous (I see her played by a young Elizabeth Taylor, rolling her eyes and drpping with diamonds). What with the beauty pageants and mistaken identities and evil viziers, it’s got a slight quality of light opera about it (even a pinch of panto) and it’s all utterly, gloriously Jewish.

But for all its exuberance, Purim exists in the shadow of something immensely serious – an attempt at our destruction. Haman trying “to destroy, kill and annihilate all the Jews young and old, women and children – on a single day”. Where does it end? With his humiliation and overthrow … because those who seek our destruction will fail.

It has an important message for these uneasy times. My friend, the brilliant therapist Owen O’Kane, has just written a best-selling and important book ‘Addicted to Anxiety’. To escape anxiety, says Owen, we must break with the ongoing thoughts that perpetuate and underpin it. In fact, he explains, we should see it as useful part of ourselves … it becomes our enemy only because most people are scared of what it brings. It’s an idea that shines through Purim. The horror of Haman’s decree is undone by Esther and Mordechai. But every year, it’s also undone by us. We don’t shy away from it, we stare it down. There’s no attempt to erase the name of Haman – scrape his name out of the records and pretend he never happened – instead, we wrap it in happy noise. We raise jazz hands to it, with middle fingers extended.

Because that’s what the festival is. Noting the danger, but laughing at our success over it. As the wonderful Rabbi Sharon Brous says, “Purim is both an acknowledgement of life’s unpredictability and a wholehearted, last-ditch effort to pierce the chaos and shatter the darkness.”

After all, there’s little point just commemorating just being alive, we have to remind ourselves what it is to live in the first place, and to do it with giddy, heavenly, abandoned delight.

So, pass the hamantaschen – the good kind. I simply can’t wait.