When I went on my rant about alcohol on Purim one commenter said that fine, we all thought the drinking was a bad thing, but he didn't think that anything would come of all the complaining on blogs.
In a case of strange Jewish geography someone who read that rant told a friend of theirs to read it and that friend emailed it to another friend who passed it on to someone else who passed it to a friend in a different city and that friend actually knows who I am and sent me an email. The gist of the email is that she, as president of the sisterhood, complained to her sister in law that the over drinking on Purim has to stop and that the sister in law needed to take steps to stop it. Said sister in law also happens to be the wife of a rabbi of a shul in the city. End result? The rabbi announced from the pulpit that drinking on Purim at any place but the Purim seudah was assur. Furthermore, he said that only wine could be served at the seudah. And then he proceeded to give mussar about letting young children not legal to drink have any alcohol.
Okay, one posting is not going to stop the drinking problem single handedly. But it did plant one little acorn. And if it planted one then maybe it can plant others. Maybe you, too, could speak to the rav of your shul. Maybe you, too, could lay out for him that there is power in his pulpit to put a dent in the drinking.
Someday soon I hope that there will be a whole forest of mighty oaks keeping drunks out of the Purim celebration equation. But first you have to plant the acorns.
5 comments:
Wow. You're famous. ;-)
Shhh Bas-Melech, I'm anonymous, or at least that is what blogging promises us. Fame requires shouting your name from the treetops. Not really a treetops kind of person.
Another way your post(s) about Purim and alcohol can help is by parents taking more responsibility. Not only can they pay a little more attention to their own children, if they see other children taking alcohol, they can alert those children's parents. In a caring way.
Teach your children it's not cool to be a drunk.
Keep it up.
The thought came to me that this 'crusade' has parallels to some of the temperance movements in the America in the past (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrie_Nation).
Is this the genesis of the Frum women's temperance union ? ;-)
Don't know if it would work everywhere but we daven in a small shul. A few months ago someone was giving a kiddush in shul and had a sign by the liquor that said "Not Legal? Not Allowed." Caused a whole bunch of talk but the parents all agreed that too many teenagers were being introduced to drinking as something that is okay for them because nobody polices a kiddush to see who is taking alcohol.
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