Sunday is Rosh Hodesh Adar Bet. Having two Adars itself is fascinating. Why do we repeat this month?

The simple answer is that we have a lunar calendar that is adapted to maintain a normative solar regularity. To keep Passover as the spring holiday we have an 18 year cycle of adding in leap months. The month we add in is Adar, hence we have an Adar Alef and an Adar Bet. We celebrate Purim during Adar Bet so we keep one redemption next to another –somchin geulah le-geulah (Megillah 6b).

Looking into this we read an interesting mishna:

If the people read the Megilla during the first Adar and subsequently the year was then intercalated by the court and now the following month will be the second Adar, one reads the Megilla again during the second Adar. The Sages formulated a principle: The difference between the first Adar and the second Adar with regard to the mitzvot that are performed during those months is only that the reading of the Megilla and distributing gifts to the poor are performed in the second Adar and not in the first Adar.

Megillah 6b:13

It is interesting in that there are some ways that Adar Alef itself is Adar. What is the Jewish conception of time? Why do we think that we are reliving time again and again every year? What is the significance of having Adar twice?

Edward Bellamy, 19th Century American author, journalist, and political activist, wrote:

Human history, like all great movements, was cyclical, and returned to the point of beginning. The idea of indefinite progress in a right line was a chimera of the imagination, with no analogue in nature. The parabola of a comet was perhaps a yet better illustration of the career of humanity. Tending upward and sunward from the aphelion of barbarism, the race attained the perihelion of civilization only to plunge downward once more to its nether goal in the regions of chaos.

Looking Backward

In my mind Adar is the holiday in which we content with chaos itself. It is critical to relive this moment every year and some times twice in order to keep us away from the brink of destruction of not reflecting on the impact of chaos on our lives.