This Shabbat is known as Shabbat Shekalim, the Sabbath of Coins. Observed at the new moon of Adar, it is the first of four special sabbaths marked annually in the run up to Passover.
This week, an additional reading will be added to the Shabbat Torah service: Exodus 30:11-16, which describes the requirement for all Israelite men aged 20-60 to donate a half shekel to the community shrine. While the Temple stood, this half shekel was also collected annually to purchase atonement offerings for the community. So on a practical level, in ancient times Shabbat Shekalim announced that only one month remained to make this contribution, since the annual calendar would turn over with the start of the month of Nisan.
But the import of the coin extends far beyond this to Purim, which arrives in a fortnight with the full moon, and to the potent and paradoxical nature of the month of Adar in which it falls. The Talmud explicitly connects Purim with the half-shekel collection, suggesting that these funds served as a sort of pre-emptive expiation (or counter-ransom) to the genocidal coffers amassed by Haman, the villain of the Purim story. As the rabbis put it, these coins have been instituted by God as a “remedy to precede the wound.” (Megillah 13a) But the linkage between Purim and coins goes deeper.
The word Purim itself means “lots,” and a sense of life’s inherent uncertainty pervades the Book of Esther, filled with elements of chance and sharp reversals of fortune. The holiday’s catchphrase is v’nahafoch hu, literally: “It flipped.” Esther is the only biblical book in which God makes no explicit appearance, asking us to see deeper than physical forms for the divine play concealed therein. Indeed, the Hebrew name for the Book of Esther can itself mean “revelation of the hidden.” In life as in the Purim story, much remains unseen, for we only ever know part of any story. This is another way to understand the instruction to collect a half, rather than a whole, shekel.
One thing fundamental to a coin is that it has two sides. This duality is particularly apt to Adar. The final month of the biblical year, Adar looks both back and forward. Astrologically, Adar maps to Pisces, similarly represented by two fish facing in opposite directions. Adar also has an inherently dual quality, since roughly every three years it occurs not once but twice (to keep the Jewish lunar-solar calendar in step with the spring equinox), a mutability consonant with the watery dissolution of Pisces.
This duality is true of Purim as well. A day of excess materiality, of drunkenness and social license, Purim is paradoxically considered as profound as its opposite the fast of Yom Kippur, known in the Bible as Yom Kippurim — literally, “a day like Purim.” Indeed an ancient tradition holds that in the messianic age, the only Jewish holidays that will still be celebrated are Purim and Yom Kippur. It is worth noting that the central sacred action of Yom Kippur also involves the use of lots and elaborate costumery in preparation to meet a king with the power of life and death.
That costume and masquerade reveal even as they conceal is self-evident, and we should remember that as important as any two sides of a thing are its inside and outside (panim). Plays on the name Adar underscore this point. The word aderet means “cloak.” The mystics were also fond of noting that Adar could be read as Aleph dar, or “Aleph (the prime mover, i.e. God) resides.” Read backwards (flip it!), Adar is an acronym for the kabbalistic term reisha d’lo ityada, which refers to the site of consciousness beyond even its own awareness, an epicenter of divine being from which all possibilities proceed. Ultimately the shadow play of Purim is supposed to shift our perspective on uncertainty: whereas Haman signifies doubt, Esther calls us to reach the exultant level of not-knowing, rejoicing in the universe’s apparent fusion of chaos and order.
Darkness and light, chaos and order, doubt and curiosity — all are two sides of the same coin. But coins are not merely metaphors for duality, or for the greater unity that can encompass both sides of a thing. Coins also signify knowingness, as in the English word ken, meaning knowing, or the Hebrew kinui, an epithet or handle by which a thing is known. The coin is a representative object, signifying the authority which gives it value.
Ultimately, this is one of the most powerful ways the rabbis understand the significance of the coin: Just as human beings are cast in the same mold, each of us is unique. But where money is lifeless and generic, people are not. “When a person mints a coin,” notes the Mishnah, “each coin from the mold is identical. But not so the Supreme Ruler, the Holy One of Blessing: for each human is minted from the mold of Adam, and yet no two are alike.” (Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5)
May we learn to honor the divine design stamped on all our human family.
This article initially appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Shabbat newsletter Recharge on February 14, 2026. To sign up to receive Recharge each week in your inbox, click here.
