HAMANTASCHEN: A PRUNE-PAVED KABBALISTIC SOJOURN (1/26/04)

Judaism is replete with funky little holidays. Probably only the Catholics beat us out. We try to impute some sublime, contemporarily relevant meaning to each one, but the result is usually sheer sophistry.

The funkiest of them all is dippy little Purim, which defies deeper analysis. It celebrates the victory of good guys over bad guys, lifted from Persian mythology overlaid with a whiff of historical significance, in which, naturally, the Jews are the good guys.

The observance of Purim has its benevolent dimension: alms to the poor, an exchange of culinary gifts among the more fortunate – Hershey Kisses and a bottle of grape juice if you are a piker, an ornate fruit basket and a fifth of Glenlivet if you want to impress the boss.

For the kiddies, Purim is a time of noisemaking, costume parades, goodie bags (starting to sound like Jewish Halloween, huh?), silly skits and a one-day reprieve from Hebrew school narcolepsy.

For adults, the down-and-dirty of Purim may also include cross-dressing and drunken stupor. In my yeshiva days, Purim meant license to brutally satirize our rabbis and to give guided “tours” of the labyrinth of tunnels underneath the dorm to girls of dubious repute.

The common denominator of Purim celebration is the omnipresence of the triangular Hamantaschen pastry, named ironically for the Hitlerian antagonist of the Purim story, Haman. The word literally means “Haman’s pocket.” Israelis refer to them as “Haman’s ear,” while American Hebrew school children will tell you that they symbolize Haman’s tri-corner hat. I theorize that the association of Hamantaschen with Haman’s hat derives from medieval Jews projecting upon their archenemy the same three-cornered hat that they were obliged to wear to distinguish themselves from the gentiles. Are Hamantaschen also the inspiration – God cut out my tongue for this – for the Pepperidge Farms popover?

The minority opinion on the Hamantasch’s exterior is that it be of a yeast-based dough, not unlike the consistency of challah, resulting in an oversized, sodden Danish. Majority rules, however, that the shell of the Hamantasch be of a sugar-cookie dough, albeit slightly more resilient. These, when mass-produced, are often hastily pinched together to form a sloppy scalene. My nitpicking grandmother, however, would fuss over each Hamantasch until it was a perfectly domed pyramid that would make Cheops proud.

[An aside about my Grandma Ida: I shared a bedroom with her until I went off to college. In addition to repressing my nascent sexuality, Dr. Freud, she suffered from sleep apnea, so that multiple times each night I was certain that she was stone-cold dead in the bed right next to me. My bipolarity may be due to a neurochemical imbalance, but my basic neuroses derive from inescapable proximity to a cranky old woman whose favorite pejorative was “Feh!”]

In my youth, overwhelming popularity went to only two fillings for Hamantaschen: “mohn” and “lekvar.” Mohn is poppy seed. I abhorred it and still do. That casts no aspersion, though, on mohn devotees. Lekvar is prune butter of the two-fisted variety. It bears the color and consistency of axle grease that had lustily matured for 20,000 miles under the chassis of a ’57 Ford. I love lekvar and curse Dr. Atkins for refusing me even a sniff of the magnificent stuff.

Grandma Ida had a different take on Hamantaschen filling. She would mince raisins and walnuts with the tip of a knife and bind the mixture with a combination of strawberry and pineapple jams. I was crazy about that filling, one of only a handful of positive memories that I have of that thoroughly difficult woman.

The repertoire of fillings has by now expanded beyond mohn and lekvar, to include raspberry, apricot, peach, and just about any other house brand of jam you can find at Safeway or Waldbaums. I imagine that the Juppies of the Upper West Side have broadened the Hamantaschen landscape to include honey-pistachio and cream-cheese-raisin, like that sumptuous strudel at the Carnegie.

The Kabbalistic masters – listen up now, Madonna and Britney – do impute metaphysical significance to biting into a toothsome Hamantasch. They say that, when deeply contemplated, it symbolizes the Divine spirit piercing our corporeal exterior and penetrating our sacred soul.

Ponder that tidbit of esoterica the next time your mouth lovingly embraces a perfectly symmetrical Hamantasch oozing lekvar. After Purim, I may even try finding that mystical truth in a California roll.