By Rabbi Matt Derrenbacher
Rabbi Matt Derrenbacher
The beginning of spring is one of my favorite times of year – the air is still brisk, the sun begins to shine more regularly, we get the refreshing rains, and we can feel the annual rebirth of nature all around us. The beginning of the secular month of March also happens to coincide with the beginning of the Hebrew month of Adar. Now, regarding the month of Adar, there is a particular sentence in the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Ta’anit, which has always bothered me:
כְּשֵׁם שֶׁמִּשֶּׁנִּכְנַס אָב מְמַעֲטִין בְּשִׂמְחָה — כָּךְ מִשֶּׁנִּכְנַס אֲדָר מַרְבִּין בְּשִׂמְחָה
“Just as when the month of Av begins, we decrease our joy, so too when the month of Adar begins, we increase our joy.” – Babylonian Talmud, Ta’anit 29a:18
Our tradition has an incredible number of teachings, instructions, and commandments, some more perplexing than others, but this one always got me. How can we be commanded to be joyful and filled with awe if these two emotions and experiences are organic and can’t truly be manufactured? Often, joy and awe are found in the most unexpected places, especially when we are least expecting them.
In the Book of Bereshit (Genesis), Jacob stops in a particular place for the night to get some rest along his journey. When he finally falls asleep, the Torah tells us that he had a fantastic dream where angels were ascending and descending on a ladder that reached from the earth to the heavens. As he wakes up, filled with joy and wonder from the experience he just had, he proclaims:
אָכֵן יֵשׁ יְהֹוָה בַּמָּקוֹם הַזֶּה וְאָנֹכִי לֹא יָדָֽעְתִּי׃
“Surely God was in this place and I, I did not know it!” – Genesis 28:16
Fast forward to the Book of Sh’mot (Exodus) to our Torah Portion from just a couple of weeks ago. Moses, Aaron, Miriam, and the Israelites all experienced miracle after miracle: the magic battle between Moses and Aaron and the magicians of Pharaoh, the Plagues, the parting of the Sea of Reeds, and the presence of God accompanying them on the dry land between the parted seas as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. As Moses recounts all the things that God had done for the Israelites, Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law, is filled with joy and wonder, proclaiming:
עַתָּה יָדַעְתִּי כִּֽי־גָדוֹל יְהֹוָה מִכׇּל־הָאֱלֹהִים… וַיֹּאמֶר יִתְרוֹ בָּרוּךְ יְהֹוָה
“Blessed be Adonai…surely Adonai is greater than all of the other gods!” – Exodus 18:10-11
One of the things that makes this encounter so awe-inspiring is that Jethro was not an Israelite. In fact, Jethro was a Median priest, someone who actively practiced and was presumably a leader of his own religious tradition. So, the Torah, then, places the very first explicit utterance of Baruch HaShem in the mouth of the priest of another religious tradition. But how could this be? Shouldn’t those words of praise come from the mouth of Moses, Aaron, or Miriam? Is this a mistake?
Now, I choose to believe that there are no mistakes in the Torah and that every letter has something to teach us. So, as I was sitting with this section of text about Jethro, it hit me. The Israelites, after being bombarded with miracle after miracle, probably became a bit desensitized to the joy and the awe that are inherent in the experience of miracles. It took someone on the outside, someone like Jethro, to remind the Israelites and us as the readers of this text just how spectacular their experience and their story was. After this recalibration of the story, we are then ready to continue on and read about the miracle of Moses receiving the two Tablets of Covenant, open and ready to receive both the joy and the awe.
Perhaps, then, our focus on the results of joy and awe leads us away from the real invitation of the beginning of the month of Adar. We don’t need to force ourselves to experience a false sense of joy – we are instead invited to open ourselves up to the possibility of finding joy and awe. If we can open ourselves up to the possibility of experiencing these qualities, we re-sensitize ourselves to finding God and miracles even in the smallest and most unexpected places.
As we make our way into the month of Adar and the season of spring, I pray that each of us can have the courage and the intention to explore what it could mean to welcome the experience of joy, wonder, and awe in our everyday lives.
Matt Derrenbacher is Assistant Rabbi at The Temple