By Samantha Hulkower

Now that we have that straightened out, the next question you may have is, "Why Adar out of all the months?" (or to paraphrase from the famous four questions, "Why is this month different from every other month?"). The most simple explanation is that by adding or not adding Adar, the month that comes before Nisan, we are better able to control Pesach occurring in the spring. The more spiritual answer is because, as we learned last month, Adar is the month of joy. If you have to add in an extra month - why not make it the happiest month of the year? Actually, it's even deeper than that. There is a mathematical concept in Torah that if a drop of something unkosher gets into kosher food, as long as the ratio is 1/60 treif/kosher the treif (unkosher) part gets nullified and the whole thing is fine to eat. Now, the two months of Adar together equal 60 days, so the Lubavitcher Rebbe said that these sixty days in a leap year can lead to the nullification of all the treif or undesirable things in our lives.
Every year when we have just one Adar it's Adar Beit, and on the leap year we add Adar Aleph. It's an interesting quirk that probably has very deep Kabbalistic significance, but it just feels more correct to have Purim the month before Pesach. If Adar Aleph was the standard one and we added Adar Beit, then we'd have 6 weeks in between Purim and Pesach. While it might be a relief for harried mothers to have the extra time to let their family enjoy their shaloach manot before they have to get rid of all the leavened products, it just wouldn't be the same!
No comments:
Post a Comment