Tevet / Shevat / Adar

The tribe of Dan — lowly son of a maidservant, rear guard of the camp — partnered with Judah to build the Mishkan and will one day bring the Mashiach, teaching us that in every person and every month that appears diminished, there is more than meets the eye.

Emunah (faith) is not the absence of inner turmoil but the willingness to negotiate with it — swinging between despair and hope, anger and trust, then choosing again and again to focus on what is life-affirming today.

From Kayin and Hevel to the siege of Jerusalem, the cost of broken sibling relationships echoes through our history — and the path to redemption, Zecharia promises, runs through choosing dialogue, compassion, and genuine connection over righteous division.

When seventy-two elders translated the Torah into Greek, the sages called it darkness — not because beauty and intellect are wrong, but because stripping sacred text of its spiritual depth leaves only a shell, and Tevet invites us to carry the light of both.

Moshe spent his last month teaching Torah not so we would store it away like a cistern that loses nothing, but so that each of us would become a well — connected to living water, with our own original insight waiting to burst forth.

In Shevat we discover how truly similar we are to trees - with deep roots of emunah, the flexibility to bend without breaking, and the strength to survive and thrive after loss.

Esther cried out to God alone and called a whole nation to pray with her, and that is the quiet heart of Adar — the mishloach manot we hand a neighbor are made not of silver but of longing, a golden heart that gives.

Just as the glass and the water need each other, the body is not an obstacle the soul must endure but a holy vessel — and honoring both as sacred partners is how we fully serve God.

When God told Avraham to count the stars from within his great darkness, He was passing on an inheritance — the power to discern light in the blackest sky — and Esther proved we have never forgotten how.