Sukkot is known in rabbinic tradition as zman simhateinu, the season of our joy. Yet it comes on the heals of a time of year during which we focus on the large issues of life and death, of human frailty and resilience, on what our purpose on this planet is, and on how we are using (and on how we are meant to use) our time. The months of Elul and Tishri, containing the Days of Awe offer a natural invitation to introspect, to stand before God in our nakedness, which is to say, in complete honesty, unfeigned, as we truly are. The season bids us to take stock in our strengths and to honestly assess the challenges that yet remain. This is true for us, both as individuals, and as members of Am Yisrael.
Whatever our individual conditions during the penitential season, it has also been a trying summer for us as members of Am Yisrael, the Jewish people. Bombarded by missiles from Iranian and Syrian supplied Hezbollah attacks, as well as from the still-newly-independent Palestinian Authority, which now includes the terrorist Hamas in its government, democratic Israel responded to the final straw of the abduction of its soldiers with a massive military response against Lebanon that tragically left hundreds of thousands of refugees, and resulted in a large number of civilian deaths. The tragedy of the violence consumed many rabbinic sermons this Rosh Ha-Shanah and Yom Kippur. But not now. What I’d like to focus on with you as we prepare to celebrate the Yom Tov of Sukkot is a quotation that came out of the crisis, one which reveals a deeper and more abiding error that requires our focused attention.
On July 15th in the days leading up to the outbreak, the Los Angeles Times published this quotation from an unnamed Hezbollah guard: “People are begging Sheik Hassan Nasrallah to fight,” he said, “they want to be human bombs. This is the difference between us and them. They fear death and love life. We are believers in another life, and we welcome death.”
Jews “fear death and love life,” claims a self-appointed enemy of the Jews. He believes that assertion to be insulting, as if there is something wrong with Jews because we love life. I think his description is correct: we do, indeed, love life. So the question remains: Is that such a terrible virtue? Is it a moral or religious lapse to love life? Is that love a betrayal of God, or religion, or humanity?
The Religious Obligation to Love Life
On the level of fact, this nameless guard is correct: Jewish religion explicitly mandates the love of life:
Who is it who desires life and loves long days, in order to see good? Keep your tongue from evil, and your lips from speaking guile. Depart from evil, and do good; seek peace, and pursue it (Psalm 34:13-15).
The psalmist recognizes that desiring life and loving long years entails moral commitments to oneself, other human beings, and creation. It is precisely because one desires life that one would refrain from speaking ill of others, that one would seek peace and pursue it, that one would depart from evil and do good. The love of life ought, and in Jewish terms is understood, to inspire righteousness, goodness, and engagement with one’s fellow human beings. The Talmud in Massekhet Eruvin tells us, “Grab and eat, grab and drink, because this world from which we depart is like a wedding feast (54a).” A wedding feast — what a sumptuous image for life itself! We have all been summoned to a magnificent party, a glorious feast that we didn’t have to prepare, but which was already set up for our arrival. Our only task is to revel in its joy, to marvel in its beauty, to acknowledge its wonder and its delight.
The insistence on loving life reflects a solid theological commitment. Sefer Bereshit, the Book of Genesis, opens the Torah with the repeated reminder that God assesses each day’s creation as ki tov, “it is good” and finally celebrates the totality of creation, ki tov me’od: “It is very good.” To refrain from enjoying life is to spurn God’s sweet gift, it is to rebel against God’s judgment on such a fundamental a issue as the magnificence of being itself. Small wonder, then, that Rav Sa’adia Gaon reminds us, in his magisterial Sefer Emunot ve-De’ot, “The first of God’s acts of kindness towards all creatures was the gift of existence.” It may well be that some other traditions understand life to be a curse and an imposition, our poor benighted souls exiled from a place of purity to become enmeshed in the dross of carnal existence. But not us; we understand God’s birthing us into the material world as a boon and a blessing. The philosopher/theologian Franz Rosenzweig articulates deep Jewish insight when he writes, “Life is not the most precious of all things; nevertheless it is beautiful.”
Delighting in life is more than a theoretical truth – it constitutes a behavioral imperative woven throughout the strands of Jewish deed. The Halakhah repeatedly directs our attention to the religious beauty of life and the behavioral expression of its appreciation. “Nothing stands in the way of saving a life outside of idolatry, illicit relations, or murder (Yoma 82a, Sanhedrin 74a).” The Halakhah famously limits which sins a person can seek to avoid through recourse to suicide to these three. Why? Because our ancestors were all too aware of worldviews that think it is a mark of depth or piety to readily take one’s own life. After all, what better way could there be to show love of God than to shed this material coil? And the religion forbids it. We are commanded to honor life, above virtually every commandment. The Talmud elsewhere instructs us, “In cases where the issue is the preservation of life you are obligated to rule leniently (Yoma 83a),” meaning, the ruling that best ensures the successful preservation of life. The sages of the Talmud, in commenting on the verse in Leviticus, “You shall live by them (18:5)” adds the mandate – “you should not die by them (Yoma 85a).” The mitzvot, according to this reading, are not intended to restrict our life, but to enhance our living. The observance of mitzvot allows us to appreciate beauty more profoundly, makes us attentive to the passage of time and its sacred seasons, connects us to our fellow human beings, and enlists our responsibility in coming to the aid of one another. The mitzvot are not there to remove us from the mainstream of life, but rather allow us to immerse in its flow. This link between life and religious affirmation is why Massekhet Shabbat reveals, “Once a person dies, that person is free of mitzvot.” Mitzvot and life: these entwined gifts are to be cherished. They are to be celebrated.
From Anger and Fear to Acceptance, Laughter, and Joy
The unnamed Hezbollah guard has it all wrong. If I had a chance to speak to him, I would read him wise words of my son Jacob. Jacob, has struggled with the impact of autism his entire life. He is now 14 and this past year has constituted a watershed in his understanding and response to his disability. Here’s what I’d share with the Hezbollah guard who is perversely proud to welcome death:
For most of my life, my existence was controlled by autism. Autism was at the root of every experience I had or didn’t have. I lived with constant anger at my disability and fear that it would isolate me forever. One day last year, my wonderful physician and mentor asked me what is the opposite of anger and I realized that it is not the absence of anger, but rather acceptance, laughter and joy. I also realized that fear and anger just produces more fear and anger, while acceptance brings connection to God and humanity. For many years I had been praying for God to cure my autism and wondering why God didn’t answer my prayer. I realize now it is because I had been praying for the wrong reason. I started to pray for the strength to accept autism and life with joy, laughter and connection. My prayers have been answered more richly than I could ever have imagined! I still passionately hate autism, but now I love life more than I hate autism.
To move from the trap that is anger and fear into acceptance, and laughter and joy, that is the task of an entire lifetime. It is our deepest and most pressing soul work.
About anger our tradition has very little praise. In Massekhet Shabbat we are told, “One who breaks his garments in anger, breaks his utensils in anger, or scatters his money in anger should appear to you as one who is performing idolatry, for anger is the craft of the Yetzer Ha-ra, the evil inclination (105b). In anger we lose control of ourselves; we lose all sense of perspective, all direction in life. We lose the ability to savor what is most truly ours. The Tzava’at ha-Rivash, a letter of advice attributed to the Ba’al Shem Tov, observes, “When tempted by anger which is an expression of sinful fear and derives from the attribute of Gevurah, overpower your yetzer and transform that trait into a chariot of God.”
What does it mean to “transform anger into a chariot for God”? It means to so master and transform that emotion that it can serve as a vessel to contain the Holy. It means that through what was previously anger, we now have a portal opening to the world; that we are able to soar because of the energy liberated where the anger had formerly occupied. So, too, with the emotion of fear: Bava Batra points out, “However strong the body, fear will break it (10a).” Our task is to transform fear and anger into a chariot for God – a vehicle capable of shining God’s light in the world. To be able to transform these crippling emotions that trap us under the pretense of allowing us to express our deepest feelings, releases deep wells of resilience, renewal, and hope. It may be tempting to indulge a sense of being made a victim by whatever it is that has victimized us; to wallow in the injustice of whatever has been imposed upon us. Fear and anger, however tempting, are the expression of the Yetzer Ha-Ra. They trap and they isolate. And in their wake erupts a tidal wave of crippling rage that incapacitates productive life. It doesn’t have to be that way, says the Tzava’at Ha-Rivash, “Anger departs with the advent of joy and love (§132).”
Can we work — all of us — to focus on cultivating acceptance, and joy and laughter, instead of seeking out yet more things to put on our list of victim-hood (How we have been put upon! how we have been misunderstood! how we have been ignored!)? Can we allow the joy that we bring into each other’s life to so fill us with delight that all we can once again laugh and dance? In our learning, our loving, our challenges and our chores, can we recognize that we have been given inconceivable blessings; remarkable gifts?
I am not going to talk to you about the fact that relative to most humanity, now and throughout time, we are incomparably rich. We are richer than royalty. I won’t even insult your intelligence by talking about how the degree of physical security and safety we have is unparalleled. Or remind you how rare a privilege that we live in places of political freedom in which we can express our opinion, and that we live in an age in which the Jewish people once enjoy sovereignty in Jerusalem and Zion. I won’t speak to you of those mega-blessings. But I would like to direct your attention to the “little” miracles – the fact that the sun is shining, that we have shared a meal, that we are able to learn together, that we have the blessings of community and the blessings of life, and that these gifts ought to be sufficient to inspire in us life-affirming responses. The 18thCentury transcendentalist poet William Ellery Channing expressed it in these words:
To live content with small means,
to seek elegance rather than luxury,
and refinement rather than fashion,
to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich,
to study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly,
to listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart,
to bear all cheerfully,
do all bravely,
await occasions,
hurry never —
in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious,
grow up through the common.
This is to be my symphony.
Our challenge is to live our lives as a symphony we conduct; to be able to accept the commonplace and see in it, the sacred, to be able to enjoy each moment as an encounter with the divine, and each person as God’s messenger. The Torah commends joy as the pinnacle of divine service: “You are to rejoice before the Holy One (Dt 12:18).” In commenting on another verse in Devarim that explicates the observance of God’s commandment to rejoice, the Mishnah sees two complimentary facets of joy: “I have done as you have asked — I have rejoiced and I have caused others to rejoice (Ma’aser Sheni 5:12).” This joy is not narcissism; it is not about self-focus, nor about ignoring human suffering. This sacred joy is the tool for making oneself into a chariot for God. This is about radical celebration, a joy that overpowers injustice and blows away suffering, embracing the wounded, healing the sick, and pursuing Shalom. The Zohar tells us that such joy changes worlds, not merely our own:
The world below is always in a state of receiving, and the upper worlds give to it in accordance to its condition. If it is with radiating countenance, they will be radiant to it in kind from on high; if it is in a state of sadness, it is given judgment in kind. Thus is it written: ‘Serve God with joy,’ for the joy of a person draws forth another joy, a supernal one (II: 184a).
As we are agents of the divine in the world, eruptions of God’s consciousness within creation, so our joy expresses divine joy and shapes the cosmos. Our ability to rejoice, I have been taught by my teacher, Rabbi Simon Greenberg, is not a matter of happenstance, nor is it the result of what occurs outside of myself. It is an inner determination to inhabit a place of abiding joy: The joy of mitzvot, the joy of community, friends, and family, the joy of life, the joy of being God’s child.
So dear ones, as we enter our Sukkot and another cycle of festivals and holy days, as we enter another year of service and of growth, I seek to bless you: May we all this year find the inner strength to move from anger and fear to the shining radiance of acceptance and joy, and in the words of the Gemara, “May the One who gives life to the living, grant you a life that is long, and good, and sweet (Yoma 71a).”
Hag Sameah!