I’ve known many people who dislike the holiday of Purim. They object to the glorification of violence at the end of the Megillah, where in Chapter 9, verse 5, we read, “And the Jews smote all their enemies with the stroke of the sword, and with slaughter and destruction, and did what they would unto those that hated them.” They are uneasy about the raucous, uninhibited nature of the holiday, which seems to be a pure expression of what Freud called the “id”, expressing our hun
