My father’s all-purpose costume for Halloween and Purim turned him into a five-foot-eight sunflower, a three part transformation that made an American Jew into an American seed into a symbol of Jewish passing in ancient Persia.

Essentially, he would put on a green turtleneck and his green courduroy pants, dot his face with my mother’s eyebrow pencil and strap on the piece-de-resistance, a coronet of petals cut from yellow construction paper and tied with a ribbon. Thus attired, he and five to eight additional Budabin McQuowns (there were really a lot of kids in my family) would venture off to synagogue for the annual Purim party. I can’t remember everyone else’s costumes, but I was mostly Hamman, my brother Nick was mostly Vashti, and my brother Mike was mostly Esther, or sometimes King Ahasuerus (when given the opportunity to cross-dress, my family never demures). My mother came at least once as “Barefoot and Pregnant” which was both a quick costume and a clever nod to the swarm she had in tow.

My father probably never knew it, but his costume was highly apt for Purim, for which nuts and seeds are traditional fare (at least according to Wikipedia, my current rabbi). The story goes that Queen Esther, during her years in hiding as a non-Jew in Shushan’s palace, survived on seeds and nuts in order to maintain her kashrut, and thus, perhaps, her cultural integrity. It’s an interesting idea to me, since food is so often a way to interact with other cultures, and for Jews, it’s also a way to resist assimilation while living among other religious or cultural majorities.

And in a way, if my dad did know that Esther ate seeds and nuts (my hazan might have told him, he was a compendium of Jewish factoids) then he would have been working a very interesting bit of American alchemy on a story that’s in some ways about the dangers of assimilation, because while the sunflower is certainly a seed, and an exceedingly healthful one at that, Esther wouldn’t have been eating it–sunflowers are native to America, and in my experience they’re also mainly absent from Jewish cuisine.

Esther probably would have been consuming things like lentils, almonds, pistachios, chickpeas and melon seeds. She wouldn’t have gone wrong with the old Helianthus, though. A quarter cup of sunflower seeds contains enormous amounts of vitamins E and B1, with plenty of manganese, magnesium, copper, tryptophan, selenium and phosphorus (get the full nutritional lowdown here), all hard to find minerals that are essential to human health. If she’d had the time and know-how (and she was quite legitimately otherwise occupied, I’d say) she could have sprouted raw sunflower seeds or grown them into baby greens . It would have increased the nutritional benefits of the seeds and also maybe made it seem a little less like bird food. She could have sprouted lentils and chickpeas, too.

Sprouts and triangular cookies aside, though, Purim is a Jewish feast that doesn’t focus so much on food. The holiday’s “Traditional Foods” tab on Wikipedia discusses the aforementioned nuts and seeds, dried fruits, hamantaschen, and triangular kreplach, while other Purim information on the web talks mainly about the permissibility of drunkenness (and non-permissibility of cross-dressing, which is disappointing, yet somehow not deterring). We’re supposed to fast, we’re supposed to send sweet baskets to our friends and money to charity, presumably so that others can eat, and we’re supposed to have a Purim meal, yet only a few foods are sacred to this time.

Perhaps the more fuzzy than usual food traditions are a nod to the more fuzzy than usual cultural interactions in this story. As opposed to the Pesach or Hannuka stories, the Purim story doesn’t set out clear lines of good guys and bad guys as Jews versus non-Jews. Sure, Haman is the antagonist, but there are plenty of Persians in the megillah who are presented as merely dangerously ignorant. There are hostile towns people, too, who are eager to take ownership of their Jewish neighbors’ homes and property. One of the four main characters, however, is King Ahasuerus, and once he’s educated by his intermarrying, covertly-kosher wife, he’s revealed as not so much hostile as almost-fatally misinformed.

As a North American Jew, child of an intermarried couple, I find that the mixed messages of Purim fit my religious sensibilities well. The story examines ideas of assimilation, heroism, and the dividing line between good and bad in a morally ambiguous world. It’s about two people from an oppressed minority who make it to the top by passing as the majority, and then succeed in bypassing all the temptations that comfort afforded them in order to use their power to stop genocide. The world I live in is both culturally variant and morally ambiguous. It lets me freely be a Jew in a country the majority of which is Christian, and it lets me be Jewish while choosing the political responsibilities of being American rather than of being Israeli (I’m not saying that’s necessarily moral though). As a middle class Jew, who looks far more like her Nebraskan fore-bears than her Sephardic or Ashkenazi ones, I’m definitely living in a culturally ambiguous body, too. As the story of Esther’s choices, the Purim story is a symbolically rich look at passing, responsibility, privilege and assimilation.

Food-symbolism-wise, I find the sunflower, as an indigenous American seed, to be a wonderful food for Purim in America. I plan to use the ground seeds as extra flour to sprinkle on the board when I roll out my hamentaschen dough, and to make a salad of sprouts, nuts and dried fruits as a seasonal accompaniment to the pre-megillah-reading meal.

As far as lessons learned from Esther, I consider the holiday’s big miracle to be the full realization of responsibility, the bravery it takes to see your chance, use your power and speak up, and the miracle of that effort’s success. Using sunflowers in my Purim foods will be a tiny reminder of my own responsibilities as a Jew in the far easier and as morally ambiguous situation of being American in 2009.