“This is the day that the Holy One has made, let us exult and rejoice in it.”
What a puzzling scriptural mandate. Generally you don’t have to remind people to have a good time; celebrating is a response that just comes naturally.
But in these trying times we do need a reminder and a nudge. These days have been so challenging for the world at large, for those who love Torah and the Jewish people, not to mention for those who care about human dignity and inclusion: those who yearn for a world of compassion and welcome, a world that honors the planet on which we live, a world that lifts the marginalized, celebrates multiple opinions through open conversation and persistent engagement in curiosity rather than silencing. In so many areas of society and life, we still haven’t recovered from the burden and isolation of COVID and from the years of forced separation from each other. It is not good to live apart. We are still paying a price.
So, in this year buffeted by anxiety, depression and isolation, I take heart in the fact that we are commanded to rejoice. Sometimes joy is an act of resistance. To those who would smother our divergent humanity, to those who insist we must march in lock step or get out of the way, we respond like King David, dancing with abandon when some think we’re not supposed to. Our joy is a choreography in the values that feed our courage, strength and resilience. “Serve God with joy!” the Psalmist says.
This imperative to rejoice is especially important because there are many lurking people who seek to shut down our happiness. It was H.L. Mencken who wrote years ago that the definition of puritanism is “the haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy.” The Jewish tradition responds in the words of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, “it is a great mitzvah to rejoice.” Rebbe Nachman personally knew the work and focus it takes to rejoice; he was a man who suffered repeated depressive bouts and he understood that joy is worth fighting for. We don’t fight for joy with our fists, we don’t fight for happiness by marginalizing other people. Instead, true joy emerges when we double down on what makes us happy, on whomakes us happy, on where makes us happy.
The tale is told, from some 2500 years ago, of when the Jews had first been exiled and were banished to the waters of Babylon. Seventy years into their exile, a hearty band were allowed to return to our homeland, the Land of Israel and they came back to a Jerusalem that had been left in ruins. Little was left of its former glory, and so they launched the patient and tireless work of rebuilding the holy city their grandparents remembered.
On their first Rosh Hashanah back in Jerusalem, the very first Rosh Hashanah celebrated back in the land of Israel, Ezra ana Nechemia gathered the entire people as one. They erected a balcony, raised Torah scrolls, (the first time in the Tanakh we’re told they read from a book called the Torah). They unfurled the scroll of the entire Torah and started to read aloud the whole text, from start to finish. (I can imagine the look of panic on your faces! Our generations have been inured to the practice of long Torah readings, but for these pioneering people, the concept of sharing the message of Torah was fresh and new!) Ezra read and read, and when he finished reminding them of the laws they were supposed to have maintained, the people burst out in tears. Nehemiah the Governor, Ezra the priest and scribe, and the Levites who were explaining to the people said to everyone, “This day is holy to the Lord your God: you must not mourn or weep,” (Nehemiah 8:9), for all the people were weeping as they listened to the words of the teaching.
How astonishing that their first response to bathing in words of the Torah is sorrow, fear and recrimination. What was intended as a gift, an inspiration and a heritage was taken to be condemnation and blame. How often do religious voices pervert a message of loving redemption into the peddling of guilt?
You see even Jews can be Puritanical. There are people in our number as well who would turn our religion into a cudgel of fear. And they would use their suspicion that somewhere someone is having a good time, to distract from the truth that maybe, God forbid, Judaism is meant to be a source of human thriving and celebration. Perhaps Judaism can remind us that we were a slave people brought out to freedom by the most powerful force of love in the world and that our mission is to be a dancing people of liberation.
There are those would-be authorities who hate that vision and its possibilities, who recognize that the message of Torah is destructive of everything, and an attempt at repression and marginalization. The controls might be loosened. People might realize they are God’s children, each and every one of them, all made in God’s image. We are often taught this message of fear and despair by authoritative representatives of power, and so the Jewish people, when they hear this Torat Hesed (Torah of Love) for the first time, respond by sobbing because there’s an inner child that thinks we deserve to be silenced and put down. I love the Bible’s authoritative response to this infantilizing urge: go eat choice foods, drink sweet drinks, send portions to whoever has nothing, for this day as holy to our God, don’t be sad.
And then Ezra offers truly inspired words: “for rejoicing in the Lord is your strength” (8:10).
It bears repeating: Rejoicing is our strength. To those who would put us down, we dance. To those who say we don’t have the right to stand in the sunlight, to breathe our own air, to be able to determine our own futures, with our brothers and sisters, the rest of humanity, to be able to exult in our Jewish quirkiness even as our neighbors teach us about and celebrate their own uniqueness, to those people who would silence us and beat us back into fear, I say, rejoicing in God is what keeps us strong.
So I want to remind you of this open invitation to great joy, a joy that is no mere possession; it is an expanding web of relationships.
Give yourself the gift of diving deep into those relationships. Lean into being with the people we love and the people we like, the people we are curious about. Give ourselves to those relationships.
Joy is not a thing to be contained and possessed, it is a series of activities of what we do. We have to do joyous to be joyous, so give ourselves time: We don’t need an excuse to do something that makes us smile or giggle or dance as though no one’s looking. Just do it. Shakespeare writes, “Things won are done, joy’s soul lies in the doing.” Do joy, do it often, do it raucously.
Joy isn’t something we fossilize, hold on to, and place high on a shelf to examine cold and lifeless. Joy is what we share with each other. It’s what we give away, and in the giving the joy comes back to us. William Blake writes, “One who binds to themself a joy does the winged life destroy, but one who kisses the joy as it flies lives in eternity’s sunrise.” Kiss your joys and let them fly, because the more we do the more will come to us all.
For a moment, may I invite you, dear reader, to close your eyes and think of those who have loved us, who are not with us right now, some no longer in this realm, some simply not in our room. Can we give ourself the gift of thinking of them? They are very much with us in this moment, can we feel their hug, see their smile? See their nod? They’re saying, “I knew you could do this, I knew you could be this.”
Helen Keller writes, “As selfishness and complaint pervert the mind, so love with its joy clears and sharpens the vision.”
See how hard you have worked to become yourself, and rejoice: the hours we have put in, the sacrifices we have made to be able to stand in in the sunlight becoming sources of light and warmth for people who are cold and lonely and need us. Think back and recall all your teachers throughout life, those in the classroom and those not in the classroom, who have invited you to be yourself.
Our tradition quotes Rebbe Meir as saying that your rebbe need not be someone from whom you learned most of your Torah. Your rebbe can be someone who taught you as much as a single letter of the alphabet. The world has been peopled by rebbes for each of us and we have experienced hundreds of them. Let them come to mind right now, and let them sit on our hearts and carry us at this moment.
Rabbi Dr Bradley Shavit Artson is a Contributing Writer for the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles (www.bradartson.com). He holds the Abner and Roslyn Goldstine Dean’s Chair of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies and is Vice President of American Jewish University in Los Angeles.
