Unfortunately, many people know the holiday of Purim, which occurs next week, only as the “Jewish Halloween” – as a big dress-up (or strip-down) party celebrated with meaningless mirth and carnival-like abandon.
I beg to offer a more sober, theological, and kabbalistic gloss on the holiday.
Tanach (the Bible), Talmud, Halacha, and Kabbalah elevate wine from beverage to blessing – linking joy to holiness, song to gratitude, and harvest to hope.
Drinking wine on Purim is a method of catapulting our consciousness to a perfected world where God’s presence is dominant and evil is vanquished.
Throughout the Jewish canon, beginning with the Bible, the vital relationships between man and woman, between man and God, and between the Jewish people and their God are expressed via the metaphors of vine and wine.
“Your wife is like a fruitful vine in the innermost parts of your house, and your children are like flowering olive plants gathered around your table (Psalms 128).”
“Oh God, look down from heaven and be mindful of this vine, of Your stock which You planted” (Psalms 80) – meaning the Jewish people in the Land of Israel.
Indeed, the Bible (Ezekiel 36) and the Talmud (Sanhedrin 90a) relate to the bountiful harvest of grapes and other fruit by Jews prophetically returning from exile to the Land of Israel as a sure-fire sign of Divine favor and as a marker of extraordinary joy.
There are magnificent biblical descriptions of festivity at the grape harvest (see, for example, Judges 9 and Isaiah 16).
The harvesters would enter the vineyards in gladness (besimcha), and they would sing out and shout in joy (meranenim u’mre’im), in exultation (gil), with jubilant cries (hillulim), hollering hooray (heidad), and with song and harp (zemer and nevel).
(Nevel is a play on words because it means both a harp and a flask of wine.)
Indeed, “wine makes the heart of man glad, lighting the face even brighter than oil” (Psalms 104), and “wine cheers God and man” (Judges 9).
Based on these verses and other sources, the Talmud rules (Brachot 35a) that you can’t really give thanks to God unless you have in hand a Kos Shel Bracha, a glass of blessing, a goblet of wine.
This is where we get the idea of using wine for Kiddush (sanctification) at all Jewish ritual events.
Jumping two thousand years forward, there is a great passage in the journal of a young man who worked for Baron Edmond de Rothschild at his new winery in Rishon Lezion when the pioneering Zionist grape crop was harvested in 1890.
David Yudelevich describes how “the bell rang at 4 a.m. to wake up the army of young men, women, and children armed with pruning shears. The carts overflowing with grapes began streaming into the crushing vats, and they all sang: ‘Awaken, oh people of Israel, your youth has returned to the land, your redemption is near,’ followed by song and dance.”
There also is a beautiful story told about Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin, the great rabbinic leader in Volozhin, Lithuania, known as the “Netziv,” who exulted when a first bottle of wine from Carmel Winery in Israel reached him in the spring of 1893.
He understood that the fine taste of terroir had been restored to the Jewish people.
His son, Rabbi Meir Bar-Ilan, relates that despite the Netziv’s severe illness (from which he died later that year), “his eyes brightened and shone with joy,” and he dressed in his finest Shabbat clothes before opening the bottle.
“I thank God for the zechut, the merit, of drinking wine from a vine planted by Jews in the Land of Israel,” the Netziv exclaimed. He then made the special sheheheyanu blessing on drinking the wine “and this practice continued for several days.”
Today, we take it for granted that we eat the fruit and drink the wine of the Land of Israel. But these passages are a reminder that what for us has become everyday reality is in fact a fulfillment of prophecies and dreams.
Modern Israeli winemaking is the concretization of Jewish repatriation, re-indigenization, and redemption.
Wine as redemption, not revelry
Which brings us to Purim. In traditional Jewish sources, the Book of Esther is an admonitory tale about the disastrous confusion of good and evil.
It is about rejecting the creeds of a wicked kingdom where every major decision – including the decree to exterminate the Jewish people across the Persian empire – was taken during wild parties marked by inebriation, idolatry, and lewdness.
To counter this criminality and immorality, the spiritual work that Jews attempt on Purim is a reestablishment of the boundaries between good and evil. We seek to drown out the name of Haman (the villain of the Purim story who was of “Amalekite” ancestry) and everything that he represents.
That is where wine comes in. It is an intoxicating double-edged sword.
It can push you to do the worst things, or it can raise your consciousness to a place of clear thinking and pure intentions. Wine has a way of blurring the differences that don’t matter while clarifying the realities that do.
Indeed, according to one opinion in the Talmud, it was grapes that grew on the “Tree of Knowledge Good and Evil” in the Garden of Eden, and wine that Eve gave to Adam. Drinking wine forces a choice whether to respect or reject Divine authority, then and today.
In Torah thought regarding Purim, then, Jews strive to clear a path towards an elevated existence where there is no confusion – nothing but the unadulterated good that existed, say, in the Garden of Eden prior to sin.
Instead of the ancient Persian world of royal drunkenness, bloodthirsty passions, and atheistic dogmas, we aim to exalt ourselves to a refined world where God’s presence and teachings are ascendant.
This explains the unusual Purim concept of Ad D’lo Yada, of purposeful disorder. We imbibe on Purim to the point where the arrogance of the supposedly superior materialistic world – what is today sometimes called the “enlightened world,” which can be extremely fascist or Marxist – is tempered by mind-bending drink.
We try to erase the “Amalekite” influences in our world and overcome the tangle of good and evil that distances us from God.
This is a bit esoteric, but the Kabbalah insists that such effacement has the power to connect us to whispers of Divine communion that run through the universe.
Therefore, we raise a glass and say Lehaim (To Life) to express our determination to strive for the good. We articulate our desire to reveal Divine currents embedded in the universe and the powers latent in Jewish history.
And we drown our adversaries in drink – from the exterminationist tyrants of ancient Persia to the annihilationist ayatollahs of modern Iran. (In defeating our current enemies, a couple of B-52 bombers might help too.)
The writer is a managing senior fellow at the Jerusalem-based Misgav Institute for National Security & Zionist Strategy. He is also a WSET Level 3-accredited wine enthusiast, and he conducts wine tours and tutored tastings with Zionist/Jewish flavors. For an expanded discourse on Torah and wine, listen to his episode on Simon Jacob’s Kosher Terroir program entitled “Drunk on Zion: The Soul of Israeli Wine” (December 2025), available on all podcast platforms.
This Purim, he will be pouring the following quality Israeli kosher wines: BinNun Reserve Marsalis, Dalton Galilo, Flam Even Sapir, Hayotzer Lyrica GSM, La Foret Blanche Ya’ar Levanon, Lueria Sayada’s Vineyard Edition, Munitz Shikma, Oryah Old Musketeer, Petit Castel, Teperberg Essence Cabernet Sauvignon, Tura Limited Edition, and Yatir Forest. www.davidmweinberg.com.