That Frozen Feeling

From Mordechai to Moses

The human brain isn’t made to constantly take in streams of missile launches, exoatmospheric interceptions, and immense explosions on a daily basis. But that’s what’s been happening over the last week. Some of it is posted by the US government itself: bright flashes, interceptions, the kind of visuals that look like they were designed for a movie trailer except this is real war, real explosions, and real people, packaged and served to my phone like highlights from a game I didn’t sign up to watch.

And I notice something happening in me when I see it. It’s not numbness exactly but there’s a seizing up. The scale is so enormous, the forces so far beyond anything I could touch, that the part of my brain that normally asks “what should I do?” just goes quiet.

But what do we do?

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That’s the question that’s been on my mind since last week’s war began and one that was on my mind as I read the final words of the Megillah this past week. Purim is over. Now what? I’ve been sitting with that frozen feeling as we move from Purim into the weeks before Passover. And I think the Jewish calendar is trying to tell us something.

The last line of the Megillah describes Mordecai as someone who was

speaking peace to all his descendants

A 19th century Hasidic master, the Tiferet Shlomo, Reb Shlomo Rabinowicz, the first Rebbe of Radomsk notices something striking about this image. He contrasts Mordecai with Ahasuerus, who threw an enormous banquet for his people and then, the Megillah quietly reveals, taxed them to pay for it. Every act of apparent generosity was really self-serving underneath.

Mordecai was the opposite. His entire orientation, the Tiferet Shlomo argues, was outward. He didn’t lead to accumulate power or even to be remembered. He led because his people’s wellbeing was indistinguishable from his own inner life. Their pain was his pain. Their flourishing was his flourishing. The speech that came out of his mouth was chesed embodied, already an act of drawing blessing downward toward others. It wasn’t a performance of leadership but the natural expression of someone who had dissolved the boundary between self-interest and communal care.

The Tiferet Shlomo then makes a fascinating comparison to Moses. Moses had that same original love. When he first went out to his brothers in Egypt, he saw each person as genuinely his own kin. But Moses had a moment of anger, a flash where his personal feelings eclipsed that love, and its cost was a delayed redemption. The return to that original love, the Tiferet Shlomo says, is what finally made the redemption possible.

Mordecai, in this reading, is Moses’s love without the interruption. He’s what it looks like when that total chesed-orientation toward others holds.

The Jewish calendar reflects this. The rabbis ruled that we begin preparing for Passover thirty days out, starting our immediately after Purim. We’re meant to carry Mordecai’s orientation directly into the Passover season, not set it down when the megillah scroll gets rolled up. The question the calendar is asking is: can you hold that posture, that total outward turn, long enough to let it transform how you show up for the next redemption story?

This then brings us to a strange little Mishnah. The Mishnah at the very beginning of tractate Pesachim (the tractate that deals with the laws surrounding Passover) says something that has always struck me as almost stubbornly inefficient. On the night before Passover, you search your house for chametz by candlelight.

The Talmud later asks the obvious question: why bother? You can simply nullify the chametz, declare it ownerless in your heart, and be done with it. The legal requirement is arguably met without the physical search.

And yet the Mishnah insists: go look anyway; get into the nooks and crannies.

I think this is the metaphorical antidote to the frozen feeling.

When the world is too large to fix, when the bombs are too big, the geopolitics too tangled, the suffering too vast, the spiritual temptation is to nullify. That voice within us might say,

what I could do is so small it barely registers, so I’ll just acknowledge the problem internally and move on

Maybe that’s even legally defensible, but it’s not the tradition’s instruction.

The instruction is to pick up a small light and search, not because the ‘search’ will resolve the war. But because chametz, the stuff that sits too long and ferments into inaction, grows fastest in the places we don’t look. Apathy isn’t dramatic. It doesn’t announce itself. It quietly expands in the corners of our days while we’re busy feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of everything.

The search is the practice of refusing to let it.

And when you find it, when you find the place in yourself that has gone cold or given up or decided that caring is pointless, the Tiferet Shlomo’s Mordecai has something to offer. It’s Not a grand gesture that will solve a geopolitical quagmire. It’s the practice of turning outward anyway and asking whose pain is inside my reach today.

It’s asking, where can I embody Mordechai’s unbridled posture of kindness?

It won’t stop the bombs or the overwhelm but it might unfreeze us. Perhaps it will allow our brains to find redirection. In a season built around redemption, it might be the move that we all need.

Shabbat Shalom, Happy Weekend, and may peace come swiftly.