Jewish Purim Date

Purim: the carnival of Jewish deliverance

Purim lands on the 14th day of the Hebrew month of Adar (Adar II in leap years), which works out to somewhere between late February and late March once you map it onto the Gregorian calendar. The conversion runs through hebrew_to_gregorian(year_HE, Adar_or_AdarII, 14). There's a wrinkle: in cities that were walled back in Joshua's day, Jerusalem above all, the holiday gets pushed a day later to the 15th of Adar, where it goes by the name Shushan Purim.

The day marks how the Jews of the Persian Empire escaped Haman’s plot to wipe them out, the story told in the Book of Esther (Megillat Esther). Its name comes from pur (Persian for “lot”), a nod to the lots Haman cast when he picked the date for the genocide. Four mitzvot define the day. You read the Megillah at evening and again in the morning, and the congregation blots out Haman’s name with groggers (ra’ashanim). You send baskets of ready‑to‑eat food to friends, the custom of mishloach manot. You give to at least two poor people, matanot la‑evyonim. And you sit down to the festive se’udah, a banquet so merry that the Talmud (Megillah 7b) tells you to drink “until one cannot distinguish between blessed Mordechai and cursed Haman.”

Applications

Costume parties, a custom picked up from Italian Renaissance Jewry, make Purim the nearest Jewish counterpart to Carnival. Kids love it, and you'll see that at schools like Bialik, Renascença and Peretz in São Paulo or Liessin in Rio. Bakeries around Bom Retiro and Higienópolis fill their cases with hamantashen, the triangular cookies stuffed with poppy seeds, prunes, dates or chocolate and named after Haman’s three‑cornered hat (or his ears, depending who you ask). Synagogues put on Megillah readings, charity drives and themed parties, while Chabad houses run Purim‑in‑the‑Park events that pull in thousands.

FAQ

Is the drinking obligation taken literally? Plenty of authorities (Rema, Mishnah Berurah) read it more gently: have a bit more than usual, then go to sleep, since once asleep you genuinely can't tell Mordechai from Haman. Driving while intoxicated is off the table for everyone.

What are mishloach manot? They're gift baskets holding at least two different ready‑to‑eat foods (say, a hamantash and a juice box) that you send to a friend or more on Purim day. The point is to knit the community together again after a story that nearly ended in catastrophe because of disunity.

Why is God’s name absent from the Book of Esther? Esther stands alone in the Tanakh as the one book that never names God outright. That silence carries a theological point, that providence works through hidden, “natural” means, and it's no accident that the Hebrew name Esther shares the root s‑t‑r, “hidden.”