It's Happy Hour! The Joy of Adar

Today is Rosh Chodesh Adar, the beginning of the new Jewish month of Adar - a month designated as a time period of Joy, including the celebration of Purim, “the Happy Holiday.” So, how does this work? Is there some kind of spiritually engineered supplemental Joy hormone that gets chemically embedded into this particular time period? Does it get released, incrementally, into each day of the month, kicking up our happy “levels” as we approach Purim?

I'm afraid not. The spiritually rich benefits of Judaism are set to optimize against a backdrop of emotional well-being and joyfulness, not unlike life itself. If Judaism has a designated time for moral reckoning during the High Holidays, then it must designate a similar amount of time to scrutinize the levels and quality of Joy in our lives.

The spiritual serotonin of the month of Adar IS that effort itself. The uptick of Joy doesn’t appear magically. The sound of the Shofar during the high holidays is merely an alarm clock that pushes us to begin heading in a different moral direction, but won’t take us there on a magic carpet. The heralding of the month of Joy is no different. It is Judaism's way of letting us know that being happy is as important to Judaism as living a morally upright life.

But like anything else, the joy that we experience, the kind that wells up from inside us and fills us with a profound sense of calm and peace, can be nothing more than fleeting moments of utter clarity, and even those are hard-fought and don’t simply and suddenly appear in a vacuum.

To be continued… but meanwhile Shabbat Shalom. Also, a little Lchaim before Shabbos can be a good thing too if it helps get us on the road we have to take, as long as we don’t confuse it for the road itself!