I don’t drink on Purim—unless you count a half a cup of Bartenura, which, for some reason, no one ever does. I almost never drink, because drinking gives me heartburn. People have suggested ways for me to build up drinking tolerance, but really, is this a tolerance I want? I don’t even like the taste of wine. The more expensive a wine is, the less I like it. In fact, I can tell how expensive a wine is by how little I enjoy it.

But people still bother me about it, especially around Purim. And especially my high school students who want nothing more than to see their teachers drunk. And to take pictures. “Isn’t there a mitzvah,” they ask, “to drink so much that you can’t tell the difference between Haman and Mordechai?”

For years, I’ve given myself heteirim for getting off the hook. For example, the Gemara says that you can drink a little more than you’re used to, and then go to sleep. And when you’re asleep, you don’t know the difference.

“We don’t rely on heteirim,” they say. “And like anyone takes a nap on Purim.”

So I’ve come up with an excuse which makes so little sense they stop arguing because they don’t know where to start. And that gives me the opportunity to go on with my lesson, which is the main reason I come to school.

How drunk do you really have to be to not be able to tell the difference between Haman and Mordechai? These are not similar people. Arguably, they’re not even comparable. They’re like apples and oranges, but they’re nothing like apples and oranges. Comparing them to apples and oranges would be like comparing apples to oranges. So it’s more like comparing the sun to a bowl of cereal. I don’t mean to insult the cereal. In other words, it has nothing to do with the sun. So how drunk do you have to be to figure that out? Maybe that’s why Chazal gave a whole extra day to recover.

This is really one case where being ignorant is a significant advantage. (In other words, my students have one over on me.) Sober or drunk, Mordechai and Haman are as different as night and day—another place where we’re supposed to try to find a difference between things, in this case, night and day.

At the beginning of Brachos, which is about the furthest that some of us have gotten in learning, the Mishna talks about what is the earliest possible time you can say the morning Shema. (They could ask this in those days, because snooze buttons hadn’t been invented yet. Also, if you had gathering of good rabbis for your seder, it could go on until Shacharis. I’ve heard stories.)

All the different opinions about when you can say Shema are concerned with whether there is enough daylight to help the naked eye differentiate between a techeiles thread and a white thread, and a techeiles thread and a green thread. One opinion even says that you have to be able to recognize someone from a short distance away. Not that any of this matters nowadays, because most of us are still in bed when people are figuring out whether it’s too early to start Shacharis. The only time this really concerns all of us is on Shavuos mornings, when we’ve been up all night and can barely tell the difference between caf and decaf, and we want to daven Shacharis already so we can sleep until lunch. But the point is that all these differences are visual.

And maybe because there wasn’t much differentce in appearance between Haman and Mordechai—it was hard to tell them apart. We always assume they looked very different; all the coloring books have Haman with a pointier beard and a twirlier moustache, so he could twirl it while he plotted stuff. But maybe they didn’t look all that different. Haman’s daughter wasn’t able to spot the differences from up on the roof, and she was Haman’s own daughter. And this is despite the hat, that we assume Haman always wore 24/7, even while swimming, even though most of us generally have different hats for different occasions. (And Haman actually was a man of many hats; he was a prime minister, a barber, a bathhouse attendant….)

So maybe you’re supposed to get drunk enough that you can’t tell the difference in appearance between Haman and Mordechai, but hopefully not drunk enough that you throw garbage on one of them and take a flying leap off the roof. When you’re drunk, everything is hazy, not that I would know, and sometimes you see double, and you have to wonder, is that two Hamans? Two Mordechais?

But really, why would someone who is drunk ever have to tell the difference in appearance between Haman and Mordechai? I guess it matters if one of them is approaching, and you’re quickly trying to figure out whether it’s Mordechai, and you should stand up, or whether it’s Haman, and you should bend over, and throw up on his shoes. It’s not like you can do an awkward combination of both. Fortunately, there are a lot of people named Mordechai nowadays, and not a lot of Hamans. But what if you’re not drunk? In what situation would it matter whether you can tell the difference?

And the answer is: Shavuos night. (Or Pesach night, if you have an all-nighter going.) In that case, you’re not trying to figure out a personal difference, you just need to recognize someone from a short distance away. You see someone approaching in the dark, and you want to know if it’s Mordechai coming to Shacharis, or Haman walking by to ask Achashveyrosh if he can hang people on the enormous 100-foot structure he spent all night building in the dark. Once you figure that out you can daven Shacharis and go to bed. But what if it’s still too early to tell the difference between techeiles (Mordechai’s favorite color) and Haman’s white barber smock?

If you go to sleep at night, you’ll never have to make that distinction, because, like we said, by the time you wake up, everyone else is asleep, and it’s definitely okay to start davening.

To sum up, because admittedly we haven’t been making sense, you may have to be able to tell the difference between Haman and Mordechai if one of the following two instances come up: when you’re drunk, or when you’ve stayed up all Shavuos night.

If you never get drunk and you go to sleep every night, this situation will never come up anyway. You’ll never have to tell the difference. So really, I’m okay with my half cup of Bartenura.

But that brings us back to the question of who sleeps on Purim? Definitely not people like me who pretty much get drunk on candy. But the truth is, you don’t really have to sleep. Look at Shavuos night. There is a minhag to stay up and learn all night. But they say that if you don’t learn, if you pretty much hang out and battul and eat cookies, then it’s like you’re sleeping.

So here’s what I do on Purim: I drink a little bit—more than I’m used to—and then for the rest of the day, I don’t learn. I pretty much hang out and battul and eat cookies, and voila! It’s like I slept.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The last time I presented this argument to my students and shocked them into silence, someone said it never occurred to him to come up with a vort on why NOT to drink.

“You came up with this sober?” he asked.

“Obviously,” I said. “I’m not going to drink on a day that isn’t Purim so I can come up with a dvar Torah as to why I shouldn’t drink on Purim.”

And yes, writing this article counts as battalah. So it’s like I was drunk.

By Mordechai Schmutter