In the month of Adar we are called to increase in joy. The call comes to us—an echo of an ancient celebration recorded in an old scroll folded up like a letter and addressed to the future, where it finds us, here and now, just a week after Shiri, Ariel and Kfir were buried in the ground.
Joy feels distant. Indeed, even sorrow feels distant. Instead, a cold anger. An incapacity to feel. In the scroll, God turns grief into gladness. For us, God has turned hearts of flesh into stones.
Yet still, we hear Adar’s call, and feel history’s echo, and obey the scroll’s commanding authority. Just as plants wither and bloom in accordance with the cycle of seasons, so too do we align ourselves with the inscrutable logic of sacred time.
So what will we make of joy this year? And what will joy make of us?
Will we eat and drink and be merry? Will we accept the cosmic dare to laugh at the absurd unfolding of Jewish history? To swerve and swagger and jeer with our God, Whose name does not even appear once in the scroll?
Because He is hiding. Or perhaps because He is not there.
Because life is a game of hide and seek. Or perhaps because life is just a game of seek, seek, seek.
Will we practice a defiant joy—a shrill demonstrative joy broadcast loudly and furiously so that the whole world will see and hear? Will we force ourselves to smile, because not smiling would mean that in the end Haman was victorious?
Or will we instead focus on the joy of others—baking cookies for our neighbors and making donations to the poor in accordance with Purim’s commandments, holding all that can be held of the heavy burdens on those trudging through this moment beside us.
Will we drink ourselves into a stupor? As it is written, on Purim, we are commanded to drink until we can no longer distinguish between the scroll’s hero—Mordechai—and its villain—Haman.
But what exactly is being commanded here? Is the heart of the commandment drunkenness—with the inability to distinguish Mordechai and Haman mentioned solely because it is an effective test to see if one is sufficiently inebriated?
Or is the softening of our moral judgements the heart of the commandment, with alcohol consumption mentioned solely because it is an effective way to accomplish this goal?
And if it is the latter, why exactly are we asked to give back the gift of moral discernment—the one we stole from Eden, the one that makes us “just a little lower than the angels.”
Can I willingly erase the line between Mordechai and Haman—even for a day?
This is the bewildering, audacious, radical task that Purim puts before us.
And we are to do it with a smile on our faces.
Who am I to resist?
Only a Jew like all those who came before and who have, for countless generations, opened up this letter from the past and tried, in the month of Adar, to encounter joy where it may be found—in love, in laughter, in friendship, in family, in defiance, and in absurdity. In the flow of tears where we thought tears had dried up. In the softness of winter mornings and the comfort of winter nights. In the wisdom of ancient scrolls and the unyielding presence of our hidden God.
