Feast of Fools

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The Feast of Fools or Festival of Fools (Latin: festum fatuorum, festum stultorum) was a feast day on January 1 celebrated by the clergy in Europe during the Middle Ages, initially in Southern France, but later more widely. During the Feast, participants would elect either a false Bishop, false Archbishop, or false Pope. Ecclesiastical ritual would also be parodied, and higher and lower-level clergy would change places. see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feast_of_Fools

Carnival typically involves public celebrations, including events such as parades, public street parties and other entertainments, combining some elements of a circus. Elaborate costumes and masks allow people to set aside their everyday individuality and experience a heightened sense of social unity. Participants often indulge in excessive consumption of alcohol, meat, and other foods that will be forgone during upcoming Lent. Traditionally, butter, milk, and other animal products were not consumed "excessively", rather, their stock was fully consumed during Shrovetide as to reduce waste. This festival is known for being a time of great indulgence before Lent (which is a time stressing the opposite), with drinking, overeating, and various other activities of indulgence being performed. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnival

also Mardi Gras

Holi (IPA: ['hoːli:, hoːɭiː]) is a major Hindu festival celebrated as the Festival of Colours, Love, and Spring. It celebrates the eternal and divine love of the deities Radha and Krishna. Additionally, the day signifies the triumph of good over evil, as it commemorates the victory of Vishnu as Narasimha over Hiranyakashipu.

It lasts for a night and a day, starting on the evening of the Purnima (full moon day) Holi is celebrated at the end of winter, on the last full moon day of the Hindu luni-solar calendar month, marking the spring, making the date vary with the lunar cycle. It is a cultural celebration that gives Hindus and non-Hindus alike an opportunity to have fun banter with other people by throwing coloured water and powder at each other. To many Hindus, Holi festivities mark an occasion to reset and renew ruptured relationships, end conflicts, and rid themselves of accumulated emotional impurities from the past. see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holi

"All of the Hebrew scripture is represented at Qumron (Dead Sea Scrolls) except for the Scroll of Esther [and] it is possible that the sectarians did not observe the Purim festival and rejected the book which enjoins its observance. (see pp 106-107, 113 - 114 and note 301, The Canonization of the Hebrew Scripture

by Sid Z. Leiman, Archon Books, 1976)

בְּסוּמָא (m.)

(בסם) sweet-meat, delicacy. — Pl. בְּסוּמֵי. Erub. 82ᵇ; Meg. 7ᵇ רווחא לב׳ וכ׳ Ms. M. (ed. sing., Var. in ed. בסימא, בסימה) for delicacies there is always room (appetite). V. בָּשׂוּם.

The first mention of the notion of Jews dressing up in costume seems to be in the responsa of one of our Poskim from Italy, Rav Yehudah Mintz (Responsa #17). Rav Mintz lived in the late 1400’s and died in Venice in 1508. The Teshuvah says that there is no prohibition involved in dressing up on Purim even in dressing like a woman – since the reason is for Simcha and not for the purpose of immorality – to violate Torah law. The Ramah quotes the Psak in Shulchan Aruch Orech Chaim (696:8). See: Purim Costumes – A History, Reasons, and Origins By Rabbi Yair Hoffman

Moritz Steinschneider, (1816-1907) the great bibliographer whose impact and opinions are still felt today, brilliant though he was, cannot fathom that the minhag developed independently. He attributes the development of the Minhag to the direct influence of the Roman Carnival. Carnival is a festive season which occurs immediately before the Catholic season of Lent. The Roman Carnival involved a public celebration and or parade that combined elements of a circus, the wearing of masks and public street partying. People would dress up in masquerade during these celebrations. Carnival is a festival traditionally held in Roman Catholic and, to a lesser extent, Eastern Orthodox societies. It originated in Italy and was held in February. see Hoffman ibid.

born in 1929 he earned a Bachelor of Divinity degree from Yale Divinity School in 1955, and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in the history and philosophy of religion from Harvard University in 1963. He was ordained as an American Baptist minister in 1957 and began teaching at Harvard Divinity School (HDS) in 1965 and in 1969 became a full professor. He was to become "the single most heeded professor in religion at Harvard."

Cox became widely known with the publication of The Secular City in 1965. It became immensely popular and influential for a book on theology, selling over one million copies. He argued that "God is just as present in the secular as the religious realms of life". Far from being a protective religious community, the church should be in the forefront of change in society, celebrating the new ways religiosity is finding expression in the world.

An outgrowth of Cox's second marriage to Nina Tumarkin, a devout Jew and a professor of Russian history at Wellesley College, was his book Common Prayers: Faith, Family, and a Christian's Journey Through the Jewish Year (2002), which is a look at the Jewish year through its major holidays, as seen by him an outsider who is an equally devout Christian.

After his international best seller, Cox thought he might have "peaked" too soon at age 34, as he experienced a "second book crisis," but he then wrote The Feast of Fools (1969), which he has said "still remains my own favorite ... the 'one book' I recommend to people who ask me at parties which one of my books they should crack." Originally Cox presented it as the William Belden Noble Lecture at Harvard in 1968, which included music, dance, film, and balloons...

"there is an unnecessary gap in today's world between the world-changers and and the life-celebrators. ... There is no reason why those who celebrate life cannot also be committed to fundamental social change. And world-changers need not be joyless and ascetic.

The Feast of Fools thus had an implicitly radical dimension.

It exposed the arbitrary quality of social rank and enabled

people to see that things need not always be as they are. Maybe

that is why it made the power-wielders uncomfortable and

eventually had to go. The divine right of kings, papal infallibility, and the modern totalitarian state all flowered after the Feast of Fools disappeared.

The festival, the special time when ordinary chores are set aside while man celebrates some event, affirms the sheer goodness of what is, or observes the memory of a god or hero, is a distinctly human activity. It arises from man's peculiar power to incorporate into his own life the joys of other people and the experience of previous generations. Porpoises and chimpanzees may play. Only man celebrates. Festivity is a human form of play through which man appropriates an extended area of life, including the past, into his own experience.

Fantasy is also uniquely human. A hungry lion may dream

about a zebra dinner but only man can mentally invent wholly

new ways of living his life as an individual and as a species. If

festivity enables man to enlarge his experience by reliving

events of the past, fantasy is a form of play that extends the

frontiers of the future.

Man is homo festivus and homo fantasia. No other creature

we know of relives the legends of his forefathers, blows out

candles on a birthday cake, or dresses up and pretends he is

Someone else.

Consequently Western Christian culture, though we rightly

speak of it as “highly developed in some senses, is woefully

underdeveloped in others. It has produced too many pedestrian

personalities whose capacity for vision ànd ecstasy is sadly

crippled. It has resulted in a deformed man whose sense of a

mysterious origin and cosmic destiny has nearly disappeared.

A race that has lost touch with past and future through the

debilitation of ritual, revelry, and visionary aspirations will

soon shrink to a tribe of automatons. Machines, as we know,

can be astonishingly efficient. But there are some things they

cannot do. Among other things they cannot really play, pre-

tend, or prevaricate. They cannot frolic or fantasize. These

activities are somehow uniquely human and if they vanish man

loses essential reminders of his singularity.

A festive occasion has three essential ingredients: (1) conscious

excess, (2) celebrative affirmation, and (3) juxtaposition.

(1) By excess I mean that festive activity is revelry. We

always overdo it," and we do so on purpose. We live it up."

We stay up later, eat and drink more, and spend more money

than we ordinarily would. Perhaps we laugh or cry or both. In

(1) Festivity is not superficiality. It recognizes tragedy, This

may help to explain the marked contrast between the lack of

real festivity in most middle-class American religion on the one hand and the ebullience of some forms of Latin Catholicism.

The latter is festive not because it ignores or represses the evil

side of life, but precisely because it recognizes and even affirms

it. ... "tragedy, brutality, chaos, failure, and death, as well as triumph and compassion, aim at order, and earthly life are an essential part of the glory of man." In observing the religion of the poor and the black in America it is clear that the ability to celebrate with real abandon is most often found among people who are no strangers to pain and oppression.

There is another kind of frivolousness, however, ... It is the frivolousness of taking oneself and one's effort too seriously. Cocteau says he accuses of frivolity "any person capable of trying to solve problems of local interest without the least sense of absurdity."

But what does festivity have to do with all of this? Festivity is the way we cool history without fleeing from it. Festivity as

both “legitimated excess" and as joy and juxtaposition plays

an indispensable role in restoring to man his sense of the larger

landscape within which history proceeds. It gives him a per-

responsibility he bears as a history-maker. How? Let us look

one more time at the phenomenon of festivity for our answer.

Many of our human celebrations are spur-of-the-moment

affairs, like the sudden picnic or the party that erupts when

friends drop in unexpectedly. But our most significant celebrations occur on stated occasions like Brazil's Carnaval or the

all-night flings of high school seniors on commencement night.

But in both spontaneous and scheduled celebrations we celebrate something, and that is a very important point. Festivity

is never an end in itself. It expresses our joy about something.

It celebrates something that has a place in human history, past

or future.

But celebration is more than a mere affirmation of history. It

also provides the occasion for a brief recess from history-

making, a time when we are not working, planning, or recording.

Hence the wise custom that outlaws talking business at parties.

People who exploit festivals for purposes other than festivity

endanger the festive air. Celebration, in short, reminds us that

there is a side of our existence that is not absorbed in history-

making, and therefore that history is not the exclusive or final

horizon of life. As both an affirmation of history-making and a

side, and the expressive, playful side. Festivity periodically

restores us to our proper relationship to history and history-

making. It reminds us that we are fully within history but that

history also is within something else.

In festivity, paradoxically, we both heighten our awareness of history and at the same time we take a brief vacation from history making.

In imagination, we set aside for a moment our usual decorum and social inhibition. This imagination in all its forms resembles the legitimated excess" of celebration. This is why the costume party, in which we playfully suspend for awhile our normal roles and

become pirates and princesses will always have a place. At the

Halloween party and the masked ball, imagination and celebration merge." As in the Feast of Fools, we see their natural consanguinity.

Imagination opens doors that are normally closed to us.

Through its power we sneak into forbidden situations, we explore terrifying territory, we try out new styles. We may tell off

a boss, seduce a gorgeous woman, or even run a spear through

an annoying neighbor. Or we sketch the outline of a situation

we will soon face, and rehearse our performance. We can even see

ourselves a year ago or a year hence, and speculate on what

might have been or what may be. All these are familiar functions of the imagination.

Fantasy, as I shall use the word, is advanced imagining." In

fantasy, no holds are barred. We suspend not only the rules of

social conduct, but the whole structure of everyday reality.

In fantasy we become not only our ideal selves, but totally

different people. We abolish the limits of our powers and our

perception. We soar. We give reign not only to socially discouraged impulses but to physically impossible exploits and even to logically contradictory events. Fantasy is the habitat of dragons, magic wands, and instant mutations. It is the waking state that borders most closely on the realm of sleeping dreams. But unlike dreams, in fantasy there is an element of art and conscious creativity.

They .. found that Anglo-Saxons daydream less than

Jews and Italians, and that black people daydream more frequently than any other group. ... if it is true that black people in America seem to have a richer and more extensive fantasy life than other people do, this could mean there is a positive correlation between fantasy and what sociologists have sometimes called "marginality." Maybe groups and individuals who are cut out of the benefits of a given society are the ones who most often dream about another, and sometimes act to bring it about.

Method of Juxtaposition

The theological method we need today cannot be content to

explain and interpret the past. Nor can it focus entirely on

present experience or bind itself wholly to future hope. Most

importantly, it cannot try to smooth over the obvious contra-

dictions in these dimensions of faith and experience nor attempt to reduce or reconcile them to each other. Rather it will accept and even exemplify the differences among these dimensions by juxtaposing them to each other. Recalling one of the principal ingredients of festivity, let us call this theological method the "method of juxtaposition."

The experience of discontinuity is also an authentic one. It is the very oddness, incredibility, and even at points weirdness of traditional faith that makes it interesting to us today. A religion must be to some degree "out of step" with the assumptions of the era or it becomes banal. Juxtaposition sees the disrelation between inherited symbol and present situation not as a lamentable conflict to be resolved but as a piquant cacophony to be preserved.

Juxtaposition celebrates the collision of symbol and situation as the occasion for new experience and unprecedented

perception. It denies the radical theologian's apotheosis of

present experience, not just in the name of memory but in the

name of fantasy. Along with radical theology it discards any

nostalgia for the past, but in line with the theology of hope it

admits to a nostalgia for the new. It therefore refuses to trim

the symbol to fit the situation because it sees that, precisely in

the bizarre conjoining of the two, both symbol and situation

break open to disclose newer and richer perceptions of reality.

It sees the friction between what was and what is providing the

fuel for motion toward the not yet.

Political Vision

The rebirth of fantasy as well as of festivity is essential to the

survival of our civilization, including its political institutions.

But fantasy can never be fully yoked to a particular political

program. To subject the creative spirit to the fetters of ideology kills it. When art, religion, and imagination become ideological tools they shrivel into caged birds and toothless tigers. However, this does not mean that fantasy has no political significance. Its significance is enormous. This is just why ideologues always try to keep it in harness. When fantasy is neither tamed by ideological leashes nor rendered irrelevant by idiosyncrasy, it can inspire new civilizations and bring empires to their knees.

The most widely read portraits of the future in recent years, 1984 and Brave New World, are not utopias at all but "dystopias," warnings to us of how awful things will be if we continue on our present course.

Nor should we make the mistake of trying to understand the

neomystics and the new militants merely as reactions against

our society. In part they are. But they may be signs as well as

symptoms, the most visible surface ripples rising from tidal

movements that will eventually change the contours of our

whole civilization. If this is so, then it is important to examine

the other side of the ledger for the possible danger they reflect,

not as critics of our society, but as symptoms of its malaise.

of

During a fiesta, as Octavio Paz says in his book on Mexico,

the ranks and stations of life are violated. We poke fun at the

army, the law, the church. We flagrantly violate the authori-

tative hierarchies of life. We pretend for a moment that we live

in that free, nonoppressive world of our hopes and fantasies.

We resurrect the Feast of Fools.

Also, at a celebration, we want everyone to take part. We

dislike wallfiowers, party-poopers, cliques. A festival seems

successful only when everyone has imbibed its spirit. If some-

one is left out, everyone feels the worse for it. Thus, the very

essence of celebration is participation and equality, the aboli-

tion of domination and paternalism.

No doubt what the new militants need more than anything

else is a heightened sense of festivity. Their moral earnestness,

though welcome, can make them too grim. Their burning

desire for a better future world can sometimes prevent them

from savoring this present one. In certain festive and fanciful

moments history allows us to taste in the present the first fruits

of what we hope for in the future.

The flaw in the new militants is that in their passion to live

in a more human world they sometimes fail to relish those first

fruits that are present today. They lack a festive élan. Earnest,

committed, even zealous, they often suffer from a fatal humor-

lessness. Their “no" is so much louder than their "yes" that

they seem to skirt very close to the borders of nihilism. But

revolution need not be nihilistic. As Albert Camus himself

says in The Rebel, one of the central texts for the new mili-

tants, "History may perhaps have an end; but our task is not

to terminate it but to create it ... The procedure of beauty,

which is to contest reality while endowing it with unity, is also

the procedure of rebellion " 7

The great attractiveness of Camus, and the momentous truth

he has to teach all who fight for a new society is that the basic

task is creative not destructive, that rebellion" cannot exist

without "a strange form of love," and that love is not just for

the future but for the present in all its torpor and turpitude.

Can we wholeheartedly strive for a radically different tomorrow

while at the same time affirming what is wholesome and human

about today? Can we live occasionally in the tomorrow which

has not yet come? If we cannot then cynicism seems almost

inevitable. For Camus, however, whose main concern was to

understand and participate in the great metaphysical rebellion

of this age, cynicism need not conquer. Is it possible," he

asked, "to reject injustice without ceasing to acclaim the nature

of man and the beauty of the world?" His answer was "yes."

That simple "yes" is a vitally important syllable, especially

at a time when some serious radicals believe it is enough just to

say "no." To say no is certainly important. And there are times

when there is nothing to say but no. But in saying yes, as

Camus knew, '"we prepare the way for the day of regeneration."

In saying "yes" along with our "no" we define the world we

want in the face of the world that insults it."

In a world as tortured by war and hunger as ours is, anything

less than anger and resentment from the young would hardly

reasonable. We do need a worldwide human revolution. In

all of this the new militants are right. But as the history of

revolutions so cruelly shows, today's zealous rebel can quickly

become tomorrow's repressive tyrant. The revolution we need

now must be more encompassing than those of China, Russia,

or Cuba. We cannot derive revolutionary models from the past.

We must create our own. What we can learn from the past is

that rebellion, when it does not include a strange form of love,"

fails.

The new militants have already derived in part from biblical

faith a hunger and thirst for righteousness ...Yet in its secularized form, this passion runs the danger of collapsing into mere negation or noisy, ineffectual clamor. ... perhaps [what we] may bring to the new militants is a sense of festivity. Without for a moment tempering their ardor for a new tomorrow, one could

help them to see, again in the words of Camus, that real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present." If

we can celebrate what we now are and have, even while we

struggle to abolish the “now" for a better “not yet," the not yet

will be richer when it becomes the now.

... the celebrators of life today and the seekers of justice tomorrow

need each other in the world. Celebration without politics be-

comes effete and empty. Politics without celebration becomes

mean and small. The festive spirit knows how to toast the

future, drink the wine, and break the cup. They all belong

together.