Adar arrives each year with a directive that sounds beautifully simple:

It is inspiring, deeply Jewish, and for many people, quietly complicated.

Because joy, when you already feel stretched thin, can sometimes begin to feel less like an invitation and more like a subtle pressure. Not imposed by tradition itself, but by the way we sometimes interpret it.

If you happen to feel overwhelmed, the experience can take on an additional layer of discomfort. Now you are not only navigating stress, fatigue, or uncertainty, you may also begin to feel as though you are somehow misaligned with the emotional tone of the season.

Modern life has made overwhelm feel almost unavoidable. The pace, the noise, the constant cognitive load, and the persistent sense that everything requires attention at once.

For those carrying responsibility for others – parents, caregivers, professionals, leaders – this state can feel especially familiar. Overwhelm often appears precisely where steadiness, clarity, and composure are most needed.

Yet we frequently treat overwhelm as though it were primarily a thinking problem, or a failure of perspective. Something that could be corrected if only we adopted a better mindset.

But overwhelm is rarely a philosophical error.

It is a nervous system state.

It is the body registering that something feels like too much.

And this is where Adar reveals something far more nuanced than forced cheerfulness.

Jewish Joy Has Never Been Naive

Jewish joy was not born from ease.

It emerged from a history intimately familiar with instability, reversal, contradiction, and uncertainty. It carries within it a kind of psychological elasticity, one that does not demand that reality become simple.

Perhaps this is why the invitation of Adar can feel less like a demand for happiness and more like an invitation toward flexibility.

Not the denial of difficulty, but a softening of the rigidity with which we sometimes hold our internal experience.

A reminder that even familiar thoughts and feelings are not always as fixed as they appear.

Keep the Thought. Change the Voice

Consider a familiar internal sentence:

When this thought arises with urgency and tension, it often tightens the body, accelerates the system, and narrows perception. The experience itself becomes more contracted and more convincing.

Yet the same words, delivered internally with a different tone, can feel noticeably different.

Whispered gently, the thought carries less force.

Rendered dramatically, it becomes theatrical rather than threatening.

Imagined playfully, it may lose some of its emotional weight.

Nothing about the sentence has changed.

What shifts is the emotional signal embedded within it.

The nervous system responds not only to meaning, but to tone, texture, and emotional flavour.

“I’m overwhelmed” is not simply a cognitive statement. It is an interpretation layered onto sensation.

When the tone changes, the physiological response often shifts alongside it.

Not because reality has been denied, but because the emotional data reaching the body has changed.

For those in leadership roles, this distinction carries particular significance. The internal tone of experience shapes how we think, communicate, decide, and respond under pressure.

There is something profoundly Adar-like about this move.

Instead of battling the thought or attempting to replace it with something artificially uplifting, variation is introduced.

The voice becomes flexible.

The Exhaustion of Arguing with Experience

There is a particular fatigue that comes from attempting to reason our way out of nervous system states.

The body, largely unmoved by internal negotiations, continues to signal activation.

Overwhelm is not persuaded by logic alone. It often softens through flexibility, shifts in tone, and gentle variability.

For those who struggle with what is perceived as seasonal “forced joy”, seen through this lens, Adar may begin to feel less like an obligation to be happy and more like an invitation to loosen psychological rigidity.

An invitation that may feel especially relevant for those whose roles require them to project steadiness while internally navigating complexity.

True joy is not the absence of overwhelm; it is the capacity to move within human states without becoming fully defined by them.

Overwhelm tends to feel solid and definitive.

Adar introduces fluidity.

It is a reminder that internal experiences are not always as fixed as they appear, that intensity can soften without requiring denial, and that regulation can emerge through subtle shifts rather than force. This may help explain why Jewish joy has always carried elements of theatricality, exaggeration, play, and inversion.

During Adar we are not merely working to increase joy. We can instead see the month as an invitation to expand flexibility.

Not to become happier on command, but to become less rigid inside our experience.

To allow movement where experience can otherwise feel solid.

To discover that sometimes relief is not found by changing the sentence.

But by changing the voice.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)