With Purim Imminent, Nation Prepares To Get Wasted on Zoom Chats

With just a few hours left until the beginning of Purim — the Jewish religious holiday marked by a traditional injunction for celebrants to become grossly inebriated — Anglos (and sabras) around Israel were on tenterhooks preparing to get absolutely wasted on Zoom calls with their friends.

Although After Aliyah was feeling too lazy this morning to reach out to Paneco — Israel’s online alcohol retailer — it has very strong reason to believe that the drinks retailer is currently preparing for a period of extremely buoyant sales.

Although this mental image isn’t grounded in empirical evidence or actual observations or anything other than a fleeting mental image while typing up this article, After Aliyah imagines that shlichim (delivery people) up and down the country are hurriedly getting patrons their booze in time for the big festival.

Likewise After Aliyah has reason to believe that this evening there will be considerable pressure placed upon the nation’s internet infrastructure due to the demands placed upon it by potentially hundreds of thousands of simultaneous Zoom calls.

Engaging in Zoom calls involves uploading considerable amounts of data to the internet. This technical fact — this website fears — could place extreme pressure on the country’s internet.

The traditional Thursday evening lockdown activity of getting plastered on Zoom calls while pretending to enjoy remote drinking with friends (read that to yourself again and tell us it’s not true) is expected to be compounded over the upcoming holiday by a triple shot measure of religious zealotry as even traditionaly sober people — such as your parents — figure out how to use Zoom and pour themselves an evening “nightcap” (or three).

Although Purim is usually celebrated in Israel with jubilant street parties and other festivities — along with the religious requirements like hearing the megillah — this year the country has decided to announce a three day curfew, limiting citizens to within one thousand meters of their homes between 20:30 and 05:00 each night.

While the traditional Purim social fixation is on coming up with imaginative costumes, this year equal attention will be devoted to which funny background people can put on their Zoom calls — or so says Shmuli Rubinstein, a sociological consultant plying his trade on Facebook and who contributed commentary to this piece.

Drawing his observations upon social media data, Rubinstein — who also described himself to us as a “big data consultant” — said that the conversation this year has shifted away from costumes and onto alcohol deals and Zoom backgrounds.

“I don’t actually have access to Google’s real-time search data,” Rubinstein candidly admitted. “But if I did, I could totally see how searches for ‘cheapest Arak Tel Aviv’ would be up by .. let’s say 512%. But that may or may not be true of course.”

Although anecdotal evidence suggests that the nation’s young people are ill-content with the idea of the upcoming lockdown, Rubinstein pointed out that alcohol’s soporific qualities could quickly change that dynamic.

“Right now we’re mired in what I refer to as the Pre Purim Rage,” he said. “This period is marked by a lot of anger about the imminent lockdowns and we’re seeing high volumes of rage against the government on social media,” he said.

“But by about seven or high o’clock this evening the first and second drinks should have kicked in and a lot of people will have reconciled themselves to vegetating on the couch after hearing the megillah,” Rubinstein said. “So I expect a downturn in the angry postings around then.”

Purim begins in Israel this evening after sundown.

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Article ID: 536

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