This is a curious time of year. Though snow still covers the earth and cool winds linger, the sun shines brighter and warmer. Ice thaws. The air softens. Neither fully winter nor yet spring, this season exists as a threshold between them. Boundaries blur. Contradictions coexist—not in tension, but in concert. This is Adar.
The Sages teach that “just as joy is lessened when the month of Av arrives, so does joy increase when the month of Adar arrives.”1 We tend to associate this maxim with Purim, the holiday remembering the Jews’ unlikely survival in Persia despite Haman’s genocidal plot. While this holiday, marked with costumes and gifts and a tradition to drink to excess, is certainly festive, the language of the Talmud hints at a greater mystery.
Rather than command the reader to become more joyful in Adar, the Talmud simply states that joy is increased—a seasonal fact, not a moral imperative. And the word for “joy,” simha (שמחה), is phonetically linked2 to the word tzmiha (צמיחה), “growth,” “sprouting,” “expansion.” If Av, marked by Tisha B’Av and the destructions of the Temples, is a month of contraction, Adar is a month of expansion.
The short recension of the Sefer Yetzirah3 links Adar with the Hebrew letter ק, the digestive anatomy, and the mazal (constellation) of dagim, the fish (Pisces). Rather than a disparate collection of arbitrary symbols, the Sefer Yetzirah paints a cohesive psychological map of expansion through softened boundaries and integrated opposites.
The letter ק is associated with disillusionment: the unsettling recognition that reality is less stable than it appears. The veil is rent. “Truths” are reversed. Some understand ק as the meeting point of Divine transcendence and immanence—not opposing conceptions of Godliness, but rather parallel and intersecting revelations.
How are these coverings torn, these illusions dismantled, and these opposites integrated? Not through escape, but through digestion. Ideas, judgments, certainties—when rigid—are indigestible. But when broken down, examined, and metabolized, they become energy. What once obstructed now nourishes.
The fish, Pisces, is the symbol of the open heart and mind, effortlessly moving between dimensions of existence. Not confined like humans to a singular plane of motion, the fish moves freely through the fluid environment. But the fish also represents reversal. A midrash4 recounts Haman’s miscalculation when searching for an auspicious time to destroy the Jews:
[Haman] arrived at the sign of Fish [Pisces], that serves during the month of Adar, and no merit was found for it. He immediately rejoiced and said: ‘Adar has no merit and its Zodiac sign has no merit…. Just as fish swallow, so, I will swallow them.’ The Holy One blessed be He said to him: ‘Wicked one, fish sometimes swallow and sometimes are swallowed. Now, this man will be swallowed by the swallowers.’
Esther Rabbah 7:11
Haman’s error is emblematic of the reversals and concealments throughout the Purim story. God’s name is absent. God’s presence is hidden. Esther hides her identity. Power structures invert. And we ritualize this instability by wearing masks and blurring distinctions.5 This is not chaos, but rather a softening of boundaries, an acceptance of the unexpected. Binaries are unsettled, and sometimes overturned.
Adar invites us to dismantle the barriers we erect in our minds and hearts, to recognize that all is not what it seems. Often, it is when we are most certain we possess the truth that we are most mistaken. Conviction is not the problem; inflexibility is.
This month asks not for naïve joy, but for metabolism—to take what unsettles, challenges, and contradicts us and process it until it nourishes us. Expansion is not disorder. It is transformation.
The following sources can be viewed at https://voices.sefaria.org/sheets/709721?lang=bi
- B. Talmud Taanit 29a ↩︎
- Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808-1888) developed a systematic phonological approach to Hebrew language and Torah commentary known as “phonetic cognates,” wherein he argued that Hebrew roots with consonants produced by similar parts of the mouth share similar meaning. ↩︎
- Sefer Yetzirah 5:2 (Short Version) ↩︎
- Esther Rabbah 7:11 ↩︎
- A rabbinic dictate in the Talmud (B. Talmud Megillah 7b) famously decrees that one should imbibe on Purim “until one no longer knows the difference between ‘blessed be Mordecai’ and ‘cursed be Haman’”. ↩︎