Rosh Chodesh Adar 2: Joy
When I went to Google the phrase “mi shenichnas Adar marbim b’simcha” – I couldn’t remember where in the Gemara it appears (the answer is Taanit 29a) and I wanted to cite it properly here – the autocomplete results were all for different songs. Something about that pushed at the exact Adar-negative buttons I wanted to explore in this piece. I was looking for a line of Gemara, trying to find context and give a citation. And the internet, as trained by millions of users, was only offering me canned frum music.
I am a fan of Purim, as a lover of candy, costumes, and women crushing it. But I dislike every other day of Adar. It’s not that I object to the Gemara’s statement that Adar is a time of joy per se; I object to the flat, aggressive kinds of joy that crop up in Jewish communities. Last year I found myself, mere days after the end of the shiva for a close friend, walking through a sparkly fringed curtain to get into shul. It felt cruel. And even before that, I have never found much joy in the mandatory yelling, jumping, flashing-lights sorts of activities that defined Adar in day school and elsewhere. It is not the injunction to seek joy that bothers me; it is the insistence that joy looks a certain way.
What would a more robust approach to Adar as a time of joy look like? I’m struck first by the place this idea appears: Masechet Taanit. The phrase is a statement from Rav Yehuda, son of Rav Shmuel bar Sheilat, in the name of Rav: “כְּשֵׁם שֶׁמִּשֶּׁנִּכְנַס אָב מְמַעֲטִין בְּשִׂמְחָה — כָּךְ מִשֶּׁנִּכְנַס אֲדָר מַרְבִּין בְּשִׂמְחָה.” “Just as when Av begins one decreases rejoicing, so too when Adar begins, one increases rejoicing.” Adar joy is a corollary to the mourning of Av. It does not stand alone, but instead exists in relationship to grief. Furthermore, the reason this even appears in Taanit, the tractate about fast days, is that the original statement in the Mishnah in Taanit is only about Av: “מִשֶּׁנִּכְנַס אָב מְמַעֲטִין בְּשִׂמְחָה”, “from when Av begins, one decreases rejoicing.” It is a later Amoraic addition to think about joy at all!
The example the Gemara offers us of what this looks like is deeply non-intuitive. Instead of examples of ways to reduce and/or increase joy, we find a statement from Rav Pappa:
אָמַר רַב פָּפָּא: הִלְכָּךְ בַּר יִשְׂרָאֵל דְּאִית לֵיהּ דִּינָא בַּהֲדֵי נׇכְרִי, לִישְׁתְּמִיט מִינֵּיהּ בְּאָב — דְּרִיעַ מַזָּלֵיהּ, וְלַימְצֵי נַפְשֵׁיהּ בַּאֲדָר — דְּבָרִיא מַזָּלֵיהּ.
Rav Pappa said: Therefore, in the case of a Jew who has litigation with a gentile, let him avoid him in the month of Av, when the Jews’ fortune is bad, and he should make himself available in Adar, when his fortune is good.
There is something here about power and vulnerability. Adar is a maximally safe time to seek recompense from a more powerful person, while Av is a maximally risky time. And this power lens is not exclusive to the Gemara. Obviously, Purim is all about the shifting and conditional ways in which different kinds of people can have different kinds of power. One locus for this that we rarely think about is gifts in the form of Mishloach Manot.
Rav Yitzchak Hutner, in his 12th Maamar on Purim, develops on the idea that Purim is the day when the Jewish people are fully liberated from the power of Edom/Rome, which is represented by Esav and is the controlling power of the exile in which the Jewish people currently finds itself. The nature of being in relationship with Esav is that gifts are always tainted. Yaakov sent his brother Esav gifts (in Bereshit 32), says Rav Hutner, as a method of appeasement. He gave Esav gifts not to represent a genuine loving relationship, but to stave off harm. This is a form of falsehood, the gift as a lie rather than an expression of true affection.
“And therefore,” he writes, “on Purim day, which is a day of the destruction of the power of Edom…there is no giving of gifts for appeasement, and therefore the true friendship of giving gifts returns to its pure state. And in the place of the lie of the gifts sent to Esav stands the truth of the gifts given to Yaakov.” These gifts are Mishloach Manot.*
In other words, Purim is a day when we are able to give to each other and be in relationships absent the coercive structures that taint our everyday interactions. The freedom of Purim is that of liberation from empire, from having to constantly think about protecting ourselves. The joy of that experience is one of relief from oppression, albeit only for a day.
So how do we cultivate such a joy upon entering Adar? A joy that is not about specific experiences per se – a pop song about Purim sung by little boys, a prune hamentash that you thought was chocolate – but about building a world where we have genuine space and freedom to dwell in the joys of relationship?
The feminist philosopher Amia Srinivasan, in her book The Right To Sex: Feminism in the 21st Century, writes on questions of desire and morality that are sharply related to the “but how can Judaism require an emotional state from me?” questions that tend to arise around this time of year. Writing about social ideas of desirability, she says:
…properly understood, the radical demand that we liberate sex from the distortions of oppression is not about disciplining desire at all. When I wrote that "desire can cut against what politics has chosen for us, and choose for itself," I was not imagining a desire regulated by the demands of justice, but a desire set free from the binds of injustice. I am asking what might happen if we were to look at bodies, our own and others', and allow ourselves to feel admiration, appreciation, want, where politics tells us we should not. There is a kind of discipline here, in that it requires us to quiet the voices that have spoken to us since birth, the voices that tell us which bodies and ways of being in the world are worthy and which are unworthy. What is disciplined here isn't desire itself, but the political forces that presume to instruct it.
Through this framework then, the work of Adar is not to discipline ourselves into a specific private emotional experience. Rather, it is “the political forces that presume to instruct” joy. We must build a world that allows us to be open to true rejoicing, rather than moving directly to a shallow individual attempt at superficial cheer.
Adar joy will not be built from face paint and candy (though again, candy IS great). The work of Adar is to tear down the structures that keep us from being able to offer each other gifts in a spirit of friendship rather than coercion. We must look at all the ways Edom keeps us from relationship and solidarity and pleasure and ask what it would take to experience days without Edom’s domination. Then we will be truly marbin b’simcha.
*Thank you to my friend and Adar curmudgeonliness buddy Max Buchdahl for sending me a scan of this maamar!!
As somebody who dislikes mandatory fun in all its guises, religious and secular, I strongly resonate with this piece. But also... when I read R. Hutner, I can conceive of a reformulated social fabric outside Edom's hegemony, a culture that is thick and Jewish and free, at least in the abstract. But when I read your quote from Srinivasen, who I am not otherwise familiar with and which I find very powerful, I'm left with an idea that feels radically individualistic. Once I take on the discipline of better understanding what joy is to me, how do I then turn around and experience joy in community? I figure out how to give mishloach manot in a spirit of friendship, but how do I also accept them? This is a process that starts out alone, but it's not a mitzvah that can be done without relationship.
Please don't take this as criticism, your devar Torah is sticking with me and I'm trying to think with it, and ask, "What next? Thanks.