We went today to a local synaogogue’s Purim celebration for kids. It was incredibly well-organized and thought-out. Volunteers from all segments of the congration, including teenagers and staff and those from the sisterhood and brotherhood were on hand to make balloon animals for kids, paint their faces, help them throw rings around small objects, and watch them jump up and down in one large and one small bouncing air machine thing. Drawing and crafts abounded. The rabbi (I think it was the rabbi because it typically is for some reason) got to have sponges thrown at his face while staring through a Daffy Duck cutout. He took it serenely and with good humor.
I thought that his response to having small (and some not so small) kids throwing sloppy, wet objects at his face was the response that I would like to have to general setbacks. How do you get that? I figure it comes with a bunch of humility mixed in with nerve, self-confidence, a belief in goodness coupled with a sense of complicity with the most honest facets of the world. Mix in a little humor, a love for innocence and an acceptance of self-violation as well as a bit of sheer naivite and you’ve got a mensch.
Happy Purim.