The Vitriol Machine

Doses of Joy

By now, you’ve probably read the takes, seen the clips, or maybe you even watched some of it live. Normally, the State of the Union is offered as on opportunity to push policies and lavish praise on your own party’s governance. While there was some of the latter, there was little of the former. It read to me as masterclass in grievance. Not policy, not vision-just unbridled grievance. It came off as a settling of scores, an extended exercise in telling some people that they matter and others that they don’t. It was vitriol as statecraft, and if you sat there wondering how we got here, you’re not alone.

Here’s the thing though; we got here incrementally because hat’s always how it happens.

The Talmud in Tractate Shabbat (105b) has one of the most psychologically astute observations in all of rabbinic literature.

Rabbi Shimon ben Elazar teaches that someone who tears their garments in anger, smashes their possessions, or scatters their money in rage should be regarded like an idol worshipper.

That seems extreme, right? But the reasoning is precise:

שֶׁכָּךְ אוּמָּנוּתוֹ שֶׁל יֵצֶר הָרָע That is the craft of the evil inclination. Today it tells you: do this small thing. Tomorrow, do that slightly larger thing.

Until eventually, you’ve lost the thread of who you are entirely, and you find yourself bowing before something you would have once found unrecognizable.

The rabbis understood that the problem with rage and vitriol isn’t just the damage it does in the moment. It’s that it is a gateway. Their use of the word omanut here is penetrating. There is a devastating beauty to the seeds of vitriol. They get planted as something small and bloom into something that resounds.

Each act of spite, each bill passed out of vengeance, each speech designed not to persuade but to wound, is a brick in a structure that takes on a life of its own. You don’t end up in a politics of pure vitriol all at once. You get there one increment at a time, and by the time you realize where you are, the yetzer hara has already moved the goalposts again.

The Chiddushei HaRim, the first Gerrer Rebbe, Rav Yitzchak Meir Alter, has a striking insight on Parshat Zachor, the Torah portion we read this Shabbat immediately before Purim, which commands us to remember and erase the memory of Amalek, our forever external enemy.

He asks a deceptively simple question:

What exactly is Amalek’s zikaron-its memory that we are commanded to obliterate?

His answer is unsettling.

Amalek has no real memory of its own. It survives exclusively by what it steals from the Jewish people, by the foreign, destructive thoughts it plants within Jewish consciousness.

Amalek’s memory is our hijacked thoughts. That is the memory that belongs to it.

Read that again and think about the political moment we’re living in. The vitriol machine doesn’t really have its own substance. It runs on our attention, our outrage, our compulsive need to check the news, to post, to respond. It colonizes our inner lives the way the Chiddushei HaRim says Amalek does: not from outside but from within. It gets us thinking its thoughts and reduces our own to small mindedness and petty grievances. And the command to obliterate Amalek’s memory is, at least in part, an internal act, a refusal to let those thoughts take up residence.

So what do we do with all of this? We’re in Adar. We’re days away from Purim. And Purim, of all things, is asking something radical of us right now.

The Esh Kodesh, Rav Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the Piaseczner Rebbe, who wrote his teachings in the Warsaw Ghetto makes a powerful observation about the joy of Purim. He draws on the mystical text, the Tikkune Ha’Zohar’s teaching that Purim is like Yom Kippur (Yom K’purim, the day that is like Purim as ‘k’ in Hebrew means like).

Just as Yom Kippur’s fast and repentance are not optional, you don’t only fast if you feel like fasting; it is a decree; so too the joy of Purim is not conditional on your emotional state. Even if you are low, even if your heart is broken, and even if your mind and spirit feel trampled, it is a statute that you must find at least a spark of happiness in your heart.

The Esh Kodesh wrote those words surrounded by unimaginable suffering. He wasn’t offering cheap positivity. He was offering something harder and more true: a framework for refusing to let circumstances have the final word over your inner life.

That’s the off-ramp. Not a naive pivot away from the reality of what’s happening. The stakes are real and the harm is even more real. But he pushes us to refuse to let vitriol colonize us entirely. The obligation isn’t to be happy because everything is fine. Everything is not fine. The obligation is to find one spark. Because that spark is the part of you that Amalek, in all its forms, cannot touch. It’s the part that is still yours.

Purim isn’t escapism. The costumes and the noise-making and the drinking aren’t about pretending the Hamans of the world don’t exist. They exist. The story of the Megillah makes that clear. But the tradition’s insistence that we find joy anyway is, in the Esh Kodesh’s framing, a form of resistance. It is a divine decree that our inner lives don’t belong to the vitriol machine.

This Shabbat, as we read Zachor and begin the stretch run to Purim, maybe the practice is this: notice where your mind has been colonized. Notice which thoughts aren’t yours anymore; which fears and furies were planted by forces that benefit from your despair. And then, even incrementally, even imperfectly, find the spark. Not because the world deserves your joy right now. But because you do.

Shabbat Shalom, Chag Purim Sameach, and Happy Weekend.