120 Richard Rosenthal
it. Dissolution and reconstitution occurs. The bride and groom reenact Adam and Eve, who define the basic human relationship. Amidst masked play that explored potential human relationships the newly married couple took their place in the community of Israel .
These Purim and wedding customs continue in some form or another until the present day. In a 1780 engraving by P. Wagenaar we see stylish, elegant men and women dancing at a Purim ball in Amsterdam . Masking is connected to the Purim shpiel, which brought the drama into Jewish life. Yiddish motion pictures continue the tradition. The secular Jews who created them gave their interpretation of Jewish life. In one of the classics, Yidel Mitem Fidel, Molly Picon disguises herself as a boy as she travels with her father working as a traveling klesmer.™
As happened with Carnival, weddings were regularized and controlled so that in a tamer form they would not challenge the proper order. But since alcohol was involved with both, there was no way that the community could always control events. There is an astonishing comment in Arukh Hashulhan on the words of Isserles permitting masquerades in the Shulhan Arukh: “Concerning the custom of former days of wearing masks and of men and women exchanging clothes nowadays we do not behave in this way.””' Rabbi Epstein, writing in the late nineteenth century, must have lived a sheltered life for the riotous celebration of Purim had a rebirth with the rise of Hasidism . Life is With the People describes how it was celebrated in the shtetl.
The favorite historical holiday is Purim ... the gayest of all.... the child sees his elders in an unfamiliar light... frivolity is permitted and even prescribed... Suddenly on Purim things“criticized as un-Jewish ” are“becoming.” Drinking, even to excess, practical jokes, masquerading in odd costumes, wearing of women's clothes by men... The license of Purim is exercised more by the Hasidim than by the rabbinists and the very sheineh layt unbend only enough to do honor to the tradition, without violating the decorum that is their second nature.