When Adar comes in, I don’t naturally marbim be-simcha. If anything, I shrink. I retreat inward. It’s not a month of joy for me—it’s a month of grief.
I lost a baby brother in Adar. I was seven. Old enough to understand loss, too young to understand how to process it. I watched my parents fall apart, and for the first time, I asked the kind of questions that shake a person to the core. Where is God? How could He do this? And if He could, then what does that say about faith? About the safety of the world? About justice?
I didn’t have answers then. If I’m honest, I don’t always have them now. But I do know this: every year, as Adar begins, something in me tightens. I feel restless. Less confident. More prone to doubt—about myself, my choices, my direction. It’s as if my body still remembers, long before my mind catches up. Something was taken from you in this month.
But this year, it’s not just my grief.
This year, all of Israel is carrying grief.
This year, Adar comes in, and we are still at war. Hostages are still in Gaza. Families are still in mourning. Soldiers are still fighting. Communities are still displaced. And yet, the calendar doesn’t stop. Purim is here, with its songs, its costumes, its noise, its unrelenting demand that this is a month of joy.
And I have to make a choice.
Do I resist it? Or do I lean in, despite everything?
Laughter as Survival
Since October 7, I’ve noticed something.
I’ve started following more and more comedians. The kind who take the absolute horror of our reality and twist it into something absurd, something funny, something that lets us breathe for a moment. Dark humor, gallows humor, the kind of jokes that, if you’re on the outside, might make you uncomfortable—but if you’re on the inside, you know. You need them.
I see the same phenomenon everywhere. In our WhatsApp groups, where even on the worst days, someone will send a meme that makes everyone laugh. In the families who go to bar mitzvahs and weddings, who fill their lives with as much celebration as possible because that is the ultimate revenge.
In the way we joke—sometimes with bitterness, sometimes with joy—about how Jewish history can always be summed up in three sentences:
"They tried to kill us. We survived. Let’s eat."
Rabbi Sacks told a story about a Holocaust survivor who made a pact with another prisoner in Auschwitz: every day, they would find something to laugh about. Something, however small, that was absurd or ridiculous or ironic. And at the end of each day, they would share it with each other and laugh.
That, the survivor said, is what kept him alive.
Purim in a Time of War
So what do we do with Purim this year?
How do we celebrate in a time of war?
We do it the way we always have.
We give mishloach manot, because even in wartime, we strengthen our bonds with each other. We give matanot la’evyonim, because we take care of our own. We sit down for the seudah, because our enemies don’t get to dictate whether we live fully. We make noise at the name of Haman—not just the Haman of then, but the Hamans of now, the ones who thought they could break us.
And as we celebrate, we hold in our hearts those who cannot celebrate with us.
We hold the hostages who are still in Gaza. We hold their families, who wake up every day to the nightmare of their absence. We hold the soldiers who are still out there, defending us so that we can gather, so that we can dress up our kids and make them laugh. We hold the families who will sit down to Purim meals with empty chairs at the table.
And because of them, we celebrate louder.
Not because it is easy. Not because it is natural. But because it is what we do.
Because they want us to live in fear. They want us to drown in sorrow.
And we refuse.
Because Purim has always been our answer. Because joy is the most counterintuitive, the most powerful response to fear.
The Most Counterintuitive Response to Trauma
Rabbi Sacks, z”l, wrote that Purim joy is not an ordinary kind of joy. It’s not the joy that comes when something good happens. It’s not the joy of higiyanu la-manchah, where we finally reach a safe place. It’s something much harder.
It is the joy that defies.
It’s the joy of a people who heard the words, “to destroy, kill, and annihilate all the Jews—young and old, women and children—on a single day” and refused to cower in terror. It’s the joy of a people who, centuries later, heard similar words in different languages, in different centuries, in different empires—and kept standing. Kept celebrating. Kept living.
It is the most counterintuitive response to trauma. They want to destroy us? We will dance.
Purim, at its core, is not a holiday of naive happiness. It is a holiday of defiance. A holiday that stares into the darkness of Jewish history and laughs in its face.
And if ever there were a Purim that requires defiant joy, it is this one.
So this Adar, even as the grief lingers, even as my body remembers the loss it suffered long ago, even as the country mourns and fights and struggles, I will send mishloach manot. I will laugh at the absurdity of our existence and celebrate it anyway.
Because that is what Jews do.
That is how we win.
Purim Sameach. And may we soon hear good news.
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