Content warning: This article references mental health, anxiety and depression in children.
“Can we talk about the big feelings of Purim in class next time?”
Her bright green eyes, heavy with the tears that she’d just been shedding, locked onto mine, searching for an answer. The tears emerged as an internal conflict she’d been having over her chosen costume for this year’s Purim celebration bubbled its way to the surface.
While she had joyfully settled into her family’s superhero theme, she was now lamenting the fact that her character did not wear a tiara. She was a student in one of the first grade classes I teach. In class all year, we had been talking about what emotions are, how they express themselves in the body and mind, and the different scenarios in which our “big feelings” emerge. With each class, we built more language around emotions, more skills to cope with challenging situations, and more nuance to the experience of everyday life. As I sat with her, we reflected on the complex emotional reality of Purim — a holiday where extreme joy and celebration are paramount, despite what one might truly feel about it all.
In all of her six-year-old wisdom, she wondered why it was so necessary to follow these rules of celebration — and actually, what if we didn’t want to do it at all?
As a woman, a parent, a youth community organizer, and a teacher, holiday preparations can feel particularly onerous for me. Even this Purim celebration we were sitting in took several months of deliberate planning, preparation, and coordination. It is sometimes difficult to take a breath during the planning process, especially when it coincides with the planning, organizing, and coordination of Purim in the classroom, and for our family.
The same cycle repeats on Passover too — months of planning and coordination to be able to provide appropriate care for the children of our community. All the while, shopping, cleaning, clearing, and preparing in our own home. There are moments where I sit down in the midst of it all, and think “I can’t do this anymore.”
One of the most clear directives about holidays, according to the Shulchan Aruch — the most widely consulted code of Jewish law — is that we must be joyful. It says: “It is an obligation for a man to be happy and in good spirits on the holiday—him, his wife, his kids, and all who are with him.”
In fact, as soon as the month of Adar begins, there is an expectation in its very description that we must increase our joy. This culminates on Purim, where one of the key mitzvot (sacred obligations) is to hold a feast and celebrate the Jews being saved from massacre during the Persian empire. In Jewish schools across the world, the month of Adar boasts special treats, carnivals, costume days and — on Purim — often a full throttle jamboree.
But clearly, the little girl in front of me was not a celebratory spirit, even as the children around her danced and laughed in their costumes. Her question also spoke deeply to me at this moment — wondering why as women we need to push through, and why we feel the need to model such invincibility to the young girls in our lives, our daughters, younger sisters, and students.
The holiday of Purim, and the one that quickly follows it — Passover — tell the story of Jewish people exulting at being saved, liberated, and led to freedom. The reality on the ground however, both in the stories of both of these holidays, and for many families, is far from exhilaration. While both stories hold strong themes of continuity for the Jewish people, they are not without instances of deceit, violence, death — and very confusing narratives around celebrating the suffering of others.
Therefore, teaching the stories of Purim and Passover to young children proves especially tricky. So instead, we choose to focus on ritual —the giving of gifts and extreme celebration on Purim, and the retelling of the part of the story of Passover where we are saved. Perhaps we hope that we can escape the inherent curiosity of children around why we do what we do, so that we do not have to face our own feelings around it.
The children of today are not fooled. Our modern world demands emotional resilience from children in ways that contrast sharply with the narratives of over-the-top joy and celebration. The stormy skies outside their windows are a part of their awareness of illness, financial uncertainty that reaches their families, and stories of war and protest from around the world. Additionally, many more children these days struggle with the squalls inside their own minds: instances of anxiety and depression in young children as young as six have grown, especially since the days of pandemic lockdown.
The ritual preparation for Jewish holidays can be — and often is — quite beautiful. It invites the participation of the family, the community, and especially the children to grow and learn through tradition. The emotional preparation, however, sometimes needs a little bit of assistance.
In the classroom, the children and I discuss how to recognize our big feelings, and how to tend to them in ways that are both supportive and progressive. Thanks to the first-grader’s question, we did have a class discussion on the big feelings of the holidays: the anger, sadness, and embarrassment of characters in the story; their courage as well as their worry.
These are lessons that I wish I had learned as a child, that I learned to integrate into my practices of wellness through illness and struggle in my adolescence and early adulthood. Today as a mother and teacher, when I find myself in moments of “I can’t do this anymore!” I have to remind myself to stop, breathe, and ask, “What emotion is speaking to me right now? What is my body telling me? And what can I do, right now, to help tend to this?”
To help children move through the big feelings of these holidays, we first and foremost need to acknowledge the real feelings that come up for us during these holidays.
Children learn and grow when they see us modeling that we are okay feeling sad, angry, and frustrated — and that we can help ourselves move through the big feelings, or ask for help when we can’t! Their faces light up when I ask them to share ideas about how to help the people in the stories, and the people in their families. They can’t wait to talk about the calming strategies they know.
They are excited to share how they might help those they love, having learned from the stories that define who they are. We, as adults, have much to learn from them too.
At The Well uplifts many approaches to Jewish practice. Our community draws on ancient Jewish wisdom, sometimes adapting longstanding practices to more deeply support the well-being of women and nonbinary people. See this article’s sources below. We believe Torah (sacred teachings) are always unfolding to help answer the needs of the present moment.
Puim 101, My Jewish Learning
Shulchan Aruch 529:2, Sefaria.org
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Yali Szulanski (she/her) is an educational wellness consultant, teacher, and writer. She is in rabbinical school at Yeshivat Maharat, the first Orthodox rabbinical school to ordain women. She is the Youth Director of The Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, the founder of The “I Am”' Project/ The Neshima Initiative, an integrative program which introduces four-body (spiritual, emotional, mental, and physical) self-care into secular and Judaic classrooms. Find her on instagram at @the_i_am_project or at her website yaliszulanski.com.
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