Rebbe Nachman of Breslov taught us that we are commanded to be happy all the time. Not an easy commandment to keep. What about the days of mourning for the Temple, or the days when we mourn our family or friends? Surely these are times when it’s a mitzvah to be sad?
I never could reconcile this dichotomy until I sat shiva for Lucy, Maia, and Rina. One evening during the shiva, when all the guests had left, my sister told me a story about one seminary girl who had come seeking inspiration. Unable to enter the crowded shiva tent, she approached my sister and started asking her deep spiritual questions.
My sister is wonderful, and a professional psychologist, but she had no idea what to answer this girl. She told me later that she felt like someone had come to meet a guru and ended up having a consultation with his cleaning lady! I laughed, and then I felt guilty for laughing. After all this was the shiva for my dear wife and daughters, how could anything ever be funny, ever again? Over time I realized – there is no contradiction between being happy and sad at the same time.
In the English language, the opposite of happy is unhappy, but in Hebrew simcha and etzev are two different words. Simcha, according to Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, comes from the root tzmicha meaning growth, because when we are growing, we are happy. That may apply to growth in knowledge and good deeds, or growth in our relationships, or growth in wealth or status. However, when we plateau or even decline in any of these processes, we may feel pain, sadness, and even despair.
Once I recognized this, I realized that my feelings of pain, sadness and despair are actually blessings from Hashem (literally – The Name; God). We do not understand why bad things happen in our lives, although perhaps in the World to Come we will come to understand why that suffering had to happen, but we should try to think of our feelings of sadness after any tragedy as a blessing.
Turning sadness into blessing
How is it possible to turn sadness into a blessing? That has been my challenge over the past 18 months, and it’s not an easy one. Since October 7, most Jews have been struggling with the same sense of sadness and pain. So, we have to work hard to react to sadness by making changes in our life. It’s like an alarm clock going off on Shabbat morning. If I lie in bed and decide to ignore it, it gets louder and louder, and the pain of the ringing is a chronic pain that doesn’t go away. I may get used to it, but it continues to affect me, even if I manage to fall back to sleep. However, if I choose to react to that pain by jumping out of bed and going to synagogue then that pain has become a blessing.
MANY PEOPLE struggle with processing their emotions and pulling themselves out of depression. But let me share my thought process, and maybe it will help someone.
After the tragedy, I was prescribed tranquilizers to help me sleep and breathe, because I couldn’t breathe without wheezing for weeks. After a fortnight, I realized that this wasn’t doing me any good and I weaned myself off of them in order to embrace the pain. Sometimes dulling the pain just serves to prolong it.
Then I realized that everything I do is driven by some sort of pain. I eat because I have the pain of hunger. I drink because I have the pain of thirst. I work because I have the pain of feeling I need to be productive, and because I imagine the pain of being penniless. And so on.
There is a bracha (blessing) that we say after drinking a glass of water. We say “Borei nefashot rabot vehesronan al kol ma hebarata” – “Who creates many souls and numerous living beings and what they lack.” We thank Hashem for what we lack, for the pain of lacking, because that’s part of the motivation for progress. That pain is the start of simcha.
Communal pain
What about our communal pain? Does the same rule apply? Are the events of the past year really a wake-up call, like a shrieking alarm clock? What if Hashem is telling us to act? Is there an equivalent of a tranquilizer for communal pain? I mentioned this idea recently at a talk I gave to some Americans in Israel, and one lady in the audience raised her hand and said that, as a response to the antisemitic marches in her neighborhood, her shul had hired two extra security guards to stand outside on Shabbat mornings. I thanked her for giving me a tangible example of a communal tranquilizer.
The appointment of extra security guards is not dealing with the pain, it’s just trying to pretend it doesn’t exist. Dealing with the communal pain might involve confronting the question of whether we still want to remain in a country inhabited by so many antisemites?
SO, HOW should we approach this Rosh Hashanah and the task of teshuvah (repentance, return)? Rebbe Nachman suggests that the process of teshuvah should start with writing our own song. He suggests that we start by thinking of something we did during this past year that we’re proud of, and something else that we respect ourselves for, and so on.
By linking them together in a logical way, just like we do when we compose a song, we can discover our best character traits – kindness, patience, wisdom, or compassion. We can identify what drove us to do these good deeds, and start thinking about how to use this trait even more in the year ahead.
As long as we are utilizing our strengths and growing from them, then we will feel simcha. Our souls shout out to us to help other people, to learn more Torah, to be a better person. Our souls know what’s best for us – we just need to listen to them.
Of course, we also need to learn to deal with our yetzer hara – our bad inclination. Occasionally it tries to confuse us and make us believe that the best thing for our soul is not to learn Torah, because we need that time to relax at the end of the day. Or it might guide us not to help others, not to invite lonely neighbors to join us for meals over the festivals, and not to consider coming home by making aliyah. We need to learn to recognize when we’re being ruled by the bad inclination and how to take back control. Generally, when it’s purely selfish motivations that are driving us, our soul is not in control.
As we prepare for Rosh Hashanah and say the slihot prayers, let’s focus less on the list of sins that makes us depressed and unmotivated, and more about the opportunities that we can take to change ourselves for the better. Once we have apologized to Hashem and to our loved ones for our mistakes and decided not to do them again, Yom Kippur will wipe our slate clean. We will be left with a clean sheet of paper to start the New Year. And that should become our focus – what are we going to write on that clean sheet in the months ahead?
The Torah tells us that Hashem gives us a choice every day between a blessing and a curse. Every day! Because every moment there is a chance for us to change and to feel joy in our lives. Let every day be that moment when we choose to fill our blank sheets with positivity, and with good, in the year ahead, rediscovering faith in ourselves, and in others, and in the promise of redemption – speedily in our days.
Shanah tova and ketiva ve’hatima tova. Happy New Year and a good inscription and sealing in the Book of Life.
The writer, a rabbi, is an educator living in Efrat. His book Transforming the World: The Jewish Impact on Modernity was republished in English and Hebrew in memory of his wife Lucy and daughters Maia and Rina, who were murdered by terrorists in April 2023.