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Our Rabbi's Message
February 8th 2008
By Rabbi Aaron KriegelRecently I met a congregant that spoke to me about the dark times of December. She was not talking about the shorter days and the longer nights. She was speaking about a certain sadness which pervades her life during this time of year.
She just did not know how to get herself going. She saw parties happening all around her, and she was not part of those parties. She saw people having fun together and she was not with those people. At best she remembered the times when she was young and happy, filled with dreams and expectations of the future. Those days were long past. As far as she was concerned all that awaited her was the grave. As far as she was concerned life was just not worth living.
She came to ask me about the worth of life. All during the year she suffered, but she suffered most when the majority of people were having a good time. She suffered the most when her mind was constantly distracted by other people's good fortune. She looked at her life and could remember at best sparks of good fortune. Usually she only was aware of the dying embers of good times that might have been but were not more.
That woman was constantly distracted from the joys of living. However, the distraction appeared most in the midst of the winter. We Jews have a remedy for that kind of thinking. It is called the mitzvah. We are obligated to find meaning in the candles of Chanukah, even if no one celebrates them with us. And when Chanukah is over, we wait a while and then begin to think about the time of Adar when we are obligated to read the megillah and give gifts to both the poor and to our friends. The rabbis define this time, the Jewish time of giving gifts, as a time when joy increases.
For the Jew, joy increases in the month of Adar because we set our minds to being happy. We don't look at the missed times, and we do not wait for others to make good times for us. We are obligated to make good times for them
Hence, in this schul we send Purim baskets out in order to increase our joy of giving and create a joy of receiving in others. We recognize that people can become unhappy and disappointed with life, so we work our best to set an atmosphere that gives meaning into life and takes the embers of years gone by and creates from them sparks.
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