Rosh Hodesh Blessing for the Month of Adar
“How long shall I wander without a home?” Ad matai ehyeh mithalech b’lo bayit?
This question — aching, intimate, imploring — appears in a midrash from Shemot Rabbah on the opening verse of our Torah portion, Parashat Terumah. According to the midrash, this is where the building of the mishkan begins. We are invited to imagine God knocking on the door of our hearts, and asking us: How long shall I wander without a home?
This, the midrash suggests, is what God is asking when God says, “Make me a dwelling place and I will dwell in their midst. Asu li mikdash v’shachanti b’tocham. This is what is at stake when we talk about creating a dwelling place for the divine on earth. Beneath and behind the elaborate details of this sacred architectural project is an urgent spiritual and moral question: Will we create room for the divine presence on earth, or will we not?
The question implicates us, and calls us to account. God’s presence — or absence — in our midst depends on us. As the teaching of the Kotzker Rebbe goes, “Where is God to be found? Wherever you let God in.” If this is true, then painfully, the converse is also true. As Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote in Man is Not Alone (1951): “The will of God is to be here, manifest and near; but when the doors of this world are slammed on Him, His truth betrayed, His will defied, He withdraws, leaving man to himself. God did not depart of His own volition; He was expelled. God is in exile.”
Heschel’s words — and the question of our midrash — are reverberating for me with renewed intensity as we move into the Hebrew month of Adar today. In less than two weeks, we will celebrate Purim, a raucously and darkly festive holiday on which we read Megillat Esther, the one book of the Bible distinguished by the complete absence of God’s name. Somehow, we insist on finding joy in the face of a cruel and chaotic world.
How do we find joy? In his commentary for Rosh Hodesh Adar, the Yismach Yisrael teaches that we enter the gates of joy by loving our friends, by joining in community, by seeing ourselves as connected to — and responsible for — each other. This intuition is reflected in each of the central mitzvot of Purim. What do we do in the face of God’s absence? We turn toward each other — by delivering gifts of food to friends (mishloach manot), by giving tzedakah to those in need (matanot la’evyonim), by rejoicing in each other’s companionship (Se’udat Purim).
For many years, I have thought of these acts of human friendship and care as a response to — and even protest against — God’s absence. Ribono shel olam, You’re not going to take care of us? Okay. Then we’ll take care of each other.
This year, I am thinking about these sacred obligations a little differently.
I’ve just returned from three days in England, at an extraordinary gathering of leaders called The London Initiative — Jewish Israelis, Palestinian Israelis, and diaspora Jews and non-Jewish allies. Against the backdrop of these heartbreaking times, I felt the heart-opening joy of insisting on making a home for each other. And I came away feeling that, in making a home for each other, we are also making a home for God.
This is my bracha for all of us as we enter the gates of Adar: wherever we find ourselves living and working and building the mishkan in our own time — may we know the deep joy of making a home for each other, and in doing so, may we make a home for God in our midst.
Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld is president of Hebrew College in Newton, MA.