Feeling Strong and Happy

             

By the last month of the year (which we entered today) and after a long winter, one would expect a person to be depleted and melancholy (especially after the winter America had).     Granted, the finish line is near, but it is not quite spring.   The internal perspective is different.  The name of the month, אדר, means strength and the famous refrain from the Talmud is that as soon as אדר comes we increase our joys.  The two perspectives could not be further apart- how can we understand it? 

  We have to go back to the beginning where the Torah teaches us some alchemy about how to make a human being.  So first, you take misty water and sprinkle it over a large swath of dirt. Let it soak for a period of time. Then, take the mud and form it into a human like figure and let it dry.  After that, blow into it and you get a human- just like that- if you are G-d that is.  Given that we are not G-d, and that this process won’t get us very far aside from making a statue, what is the point of telling us about the process to make man?  There must be secrets here that do matter for us.

                The key line is Genesis 2:6, ‘And a mist אד went up from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground’ (that was step one of human creation above).   What was this mist?  It is made up of the letters א ד, which are the first letters of man, אדם, and the first letters of our quandary, אדר.  The mist represents spirituality emanating from the physical earth.  The Kabbalists says that א, the ineffable letter of Oneness, and hence spirituality, is coming up from the ד, the 4th letter that represents our physical world (think the four direction we travel as represented by a compass, think poverty as the physical world always lacks something, it always needs a fix and the letter daled means in Hebrew dal- poor).  

                And that is the role of man in this world.  It is to bring out spirituality, ethics, and morality from what looks like a natural world.  That is also what the last month of the year is all about.  We started with Passover in Nissan where we are showered with miracles and spirituality from G-d and we end with Adar where we shower G-d with a display of our own spiritual prowess.  It is the month where we realize that we are strong and capable and when a person sees that he is capable and strong, the natural reaction is an increase of joy.