How is everybody doing? Chodesh Tov. I do hope everybody's doing well. Of course, today is Rosh Chodesh Adar, and our rabbis tell us, “When Adar enters, we increase our happiness.” You have to look at that and wonder: How is it even possible to increase my level of happiness? How does that work? First, how do you even tell me to be happy? And then you tell me to increase it at certain times of the year. I have a spout, a faucet of happiness that I could just increase, turn on, and make more than usual. How does that work?
So I happen to be reading today a study that finds that 22% of adolescents suffer from some sort of disordered eating. Not an official eating disorder, but some sort of disordered eating, something not normal. That comes from me today. Depression or anxiety: 5.5% of people in this country are clinically depressed. 5.5% of men and 8.7% of women in this country are clinically depressed. That's a lot. And 15% of people overall are going to have some sort of depressive episode in their lives. Those are staggering numbers. I mean, he's talking about a large percentage of the population. He's not just not happy, but clinically depressed. It's so sad.
You know, Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that every single person has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It seems so, it's an interesting language. Now, I do understand why he wrote it. He wrote it because each person has the right to go from rags to riches. But the language is interesting. There's no pursuit of life; there's just life. There's no pursuit of liberty; there's just liberty. But happiness is something you pursue. I almost look at it as a microcosm of this country: everybody's pursuing happiness. Everybody's looking for it, but nobody really gets it. Nobody ever attains it. They're always trying to, but they never get it. And there's a very simple reason why: when you look at things in this world—stuff, people, money—as your vehicle to happiness, you're just going to keep pursuing it. You're never going to reach it. You're never going to attain it, because those things will never make you happy. So you keep spinning your wheels.
Unbelievably, I had a boy tell me today, “You know, Rabbi, people see things on TikTok, like a guy who sees someone dancing better than him, and he feels bad; he wants to dance like that. Or they'll see pictures of fancy cars, and they want those fancy cars. Or a girl will see a picture of a beautiful girl, and she wants to look like that, and she doesn't. And you'll never get there, so you keep doing that. So you try to get the car, and then when you get the car, it just doesn't change things. It doesn't make you happy. And you'll eat, have an eating disorder to look like that girl, and you finally look like the girl, and you look in the mirror, and you're still not happy with what you see.”
So sad. Because when you tether happiness, when you connect it to things around us, to this world, you can never get there. So yeah, if happiness is, to you, something you attain because there's more money in your bank account, or because you feel like a success in your life, or because you have a lot of people who are your friends and respect you, yeah, you'll never get there. You'll never be happy, because there'll always be somebody with more than you.
You know who very famously was like that? Haman. Haman had everything, was the richest man in the world. One of the three richest men in the history of the world. He had a wife who seemingly supported him. He had a lot of children. Great children. He was on top of the world. He had everything. But he very famously said, “All this means nothing to me. It means nothing to me. The entire time, I see the Jew Mordechai, who won't bow down to me. This is not making me happy. This is not helping me in any way, shape, or form. When I see Mordechai, I'm sad.”
So how do we become happy? It's a very simple thing. What was the entire lesson of Purim? When one reads the Megillah, one reads the piece of the whole story, of the story of Esther. It reads like a political novel. You don't really see Hashem in any of it. Hashem's name is not written in it, very famously, because it's hidden. And Esther's name—Esther is called hidden, meaning this world is a big facade and a big fake and a big sketch. But when we unpeel it, when we unmask it, and we see Hashem, that's the key. That's it. It's God. It's me getting closer to Hashem. That is what happiness is. That is how I attain it. Because I see the fakeness. I see the craziness of this world. I see it all. It's all sketch. What I want is to be closer to Hashem, and then I can be really happy. And that's why that's a faucet that I turn on and off. Yes. Get closer to God. Get closer to Hashem. The closer you are to Hashem, the closer you are to that source, the closer you are to realizing everything around you is fake, and the only thing real is Hashem, the closer you are to true happiness.
I wish everybody a great, happy month.