gut khoydesh,

One who enters Adar increases in joy

This is a baffling saying of our sages in the gemara. What does entering a particular month have to do with joy? To be honest, there have been many years where all I’ve felt at the beginning of Adar is a pressure toward a kind of (at best) fake-it-till-you-make-it playacting at joy.

The Meor Einayim teaches that the name Adar (אדר) stands for “א דר עם התחתונים — the letter א dwells among the low”. The א here stands for haShem, because just as א is the first of the letters, haShem is the first of existences. And so this is what אדר means: that haShem dwells among the low.

I wonder if this is what it means to enter Adar. Not to enter a specific month, a particular time in the year. But to enter the gate of this understanding: that haShem dwells among the low.

I’ve found that experiences of suffering often tend toward what Rav Kluger calls an “isolated reality”. A complete world, on its own, where the only things that are real are the suffering and its attendants.

It can seem impossible to find a way out — because there is no “outside” of a complete world. But there is a way, the Baal Shem Tov teaches, and that is simply to be aware: oh, I am suffering.

Because once I am aware that this world I’m in is called “suffering”, that means there’s a world called “joy”, too. And if I am the lowest of the low, that means there is a height beyond all heights…

And once I’m aware that I am low, I can enter the gate of Adar: the gate of understanding that haShem — who is the height beyond all heights, the depth beyond all depths — is dwelling here, within this suffering itself. My suffering is not an isolated reality, it is not a complete world. There is, right here and right now, a spark of an infinite love. And that understanding, in itself, is the beginning of true joy.

One who enters Adar increases in joy

This language is precise. It is not that one who enters Adar is transported, Star Trek style, from the depths of suffering to the heights of joy. The suffering remains; the suffering is real. But it isn’t everything. And even the smallest seed of joy, planted in the soil of this understanding, can grow and multiply…

One who enters Adar increases in joy

“This is surprising”, says the Meor Einayim, “because the essence of the miracle [of Purim] is on the 14th and 15th [of Adar].” So the miracle does not come before joy. Joy comes before the miracle.

One who enters the gate of Adar understands that there is no reality isolated from haShem. There is no reality isolated from joy. And the fruits of joy are miracles.

Pischu li, shaarei Adar…
Open for me, O Gates of Adar!

B’simchah,
ada

Sources

Maseches Taanis 29a
Me’or Einayim on Parshas Terumah
Kesser Shem Tov 139 (from the Toldos Yaakov Yosef on Chukas)
Rav Kluger, first maamar of Yichud haHisbodedus
Tehillim 118:19
I was also inspired by Rav Joey Rosenfeld’s recent shiur, “Who Told You That Katnus HaMochin Exists?”