Rosh Chodesh Adar is supposed to bring in armloads of simchah right? So they tell me.
Well I do love Purim despite all the effort involved: the surprise visits from friends seeing the neighborhood kids in their costumes hosting a large rollicking seudah. (Our family name in Hebrew isn’t Ben-Shushan for nothing.) And yet I must admit rather guiltily that the advent of Adar always fills me with a certain sense of dismay of fear and trembling. Because just as you’re reeling with exhaustion from all that Purim revelry you wake up and realize the clock is somberly ticking towards … drum roll … the dreaded P word: Pesach!
The approach of Pesach forces me to throw a teary kiss goodbye to my normal routine and switch into high gear both as balabusta and journalist. Every Jewish magazine wants to put out its most super-special jam-packed edition for Pesach so we writers are all busily pulling together more than our usual quota of articles in between frantically trying to scrub out our cabinets and move all the furniture. In recent years Erev Pesach has been for me as much about nerves over deadlines as it is about swollen varicose veins from cooking and cleaning. Baruch Hashem.
Yet I do recognize that my tendency to recoil from the P word is a reflex springing straight from the yetzer hara. As I mentioned in my first post I have a nasty tendency to resist change (unlike those folks they call “early adopters” of new innovations). I get all comfy in my regular routine and shudder at the thought of having to overcome my inertia and rouse myself to do something really intense and taxing.
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