So I went back, and this time I showed up early—well before the drinking started, and well before the spectacle began. And this time, I didn’t take very many pictures. It’s not that there wasn’t anything interesting to photograph just because they weren’t drinking, it’s just that I somehow ended up standing in the corner of the main room at the Toldos Aharon synagogue while they spent two hours reading through the entire story of Esther. The doors were shut, it was packed to the brim, and there wasn’t really any way to get out without interrupting and making a huge scene. I couldn’t really move around to get any decent pictures, and after a little while I finally realized that it wasn’t appropriate to try. So for most of the time it took to read the scroll from beginning to end, I just watched.

The rabbi was ancient. They helped his frail body onto the elevated platform that was situated in the middle of the room. He clutched the railing as he ascended, supported himself heavily on the lectern when he arrived. The entire congregation kept quiet enough to hear his trembling voice. They had what looked to be an impressive sound system, but he didn’t use it. My guess is that there were at least 600 congregants, all crammed into an area about the size of a tennis court, each following along with their own copy of the story. The Rabbi’s reading voice seemed strained. There were times when I thought about the cruelty of forcing such an fragile, elderly man to stand and shake and read for two hours nonstop. It was a physical thing, his reading. He didn’t just shake; he rocked his whole body back and forth in long, rhythmic motions that didn’t quite match the cadence of his chanting. I couldn’t discern any emotion in his delivery; it seemed like enough of a struggle for him to get the words out at all. This was nothing like the fire-and-brimstone preacher who whips the crowd into a frenzy. He wasn’t really making any effort to influence the emotion in the room. There was no charisma, barely even a melody—only the weight of a long tradition and a community’s obsessive sense of duty. People were here to be a part of something. The overall vibe in the room was of joy.

Each time Haman’s name came up in the story, the entire congregation started yelling and spinning their noisemakers. They all shouted some variation of “boooooo,” and the noisemakers sounded like a hundred roulette machines spinning off at once. Together they blotted out any mention of the story’s villain with a unified ruckus that might have had a whiff of competition to it. Most people had little plastic noisemakers that were probably made in China. A few had big ones that were made of wood. One guy’s wooden noisemaker required two hands to hold and looked like it was passed down generations.

For me, two hours was more than enough. By the time they finally opened the doors, I was among the first to leave. I didn’t stick around much longer, and I certainly didn’t stay long enough to see or document the drunken shenanigans that I knew were to follow. The kids smoking, the irony of their drunkenness, the thin layer of cherry vodka vomit everywhere, it all lost its luster. It wasn’t all that exciting anymore. I’m not saying that it isn’t an interesting thing to see, or that you shouldn’t be interested, or even that you shouldn’t be rubbernecking at it—people are weird, societies are weird, and cultures are even weirder. They all do weird things, and weird things they do are interesting. You should probably take the time to learn about them.

I left because I felt like an intruder. I already had some pictures, and I had hung around enough to get a sense of what the holiday was all about. I just didn’t have much of a reason to stick around anymore.

More pictures of drunk people stumbling around wasn’t going to add much to the story. These were people engaged in something that was meaningful to them. It doesn’t matter that some of them were just excited at the opportunity to transgress a little and let loose, and it doesn’t matter that some of them may have taken things too far. In most of their minds, getting drunk on Purim is no different than any other religious practice. For them, binge drinking scratches the same itch as does keeping kosher, or having exactly four glasses of wine during the Passover meal. They are simply rituals. They find meaning in them, and they are the foundation of their community. I don’t think it should be ridiculed, and I don’t think that there is much point in criticizing it—even something as shocking to us as parents encouraging small children to smoke. These chaotic, drunken festivities are a part of something that matters to these people for reasons that are ultimately good, and that has a way of blurring the lines—of making it just a little harder to tell the difference between good and evil.