WHERE—AND HOW—SHOULD WE LOOK FOR OUR HAPPINESS?

At Avot 4:1 Ben Zoma teaches (among other things):

אֵיזֶהוּ עָשִׁיר, הַשָּׂמֵֽחַ בְּחֶלְקוֹ, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר: יְגִֽיעַ כַּפֶּֽיךָ כִּי תֹאכֵל, אַשְׁרֶֽיךָ וְטוֹב לָךְ, אַשְׁרֶֽיךָ בָּעוֹלָם הַזֶּה, וְטוֹב לָךְ לָעוֹלָם הַבָּא

Who is rich? One who is happy with his lot. As it states (Tehillim 128:2): "If you eat of the effort of your hands, you are fortunate and it is good is to you"; “you are fortunate" in this world, "and it is good for you" in the World to Come.

The notion that happiness and the feeling that one is wealthy are contingent on being happy with what one has is a popular truism that seems to be expressed in many different ways and in every culture with which I am familiar. Jewish literature is rich in teachings that support it. We all know, as humans, that we want more than we have and that, once we obtain the object of our desire, we begin to want something else, something better or more appropriate for our needs. We know this because, if we are honest with ourselves, at one stage or another in our lives we have personally experienced it.

The party line is eloquently expressed by Rabbi Yisrael Miller (The Wisdom of Avot) where he writes, citing Rav Yerucham Levovitz:

… [W]e can all find happiness and success inside ourselves, and need not—and should not—allow our happiness to depend on external factors or circumstances; and with this understanding, “thank Hashem, I am happy always”.

A baraita in the sixth and final perek emphasizes this notion with specific reference to the Torah scholar and citing the same verse in Tehillim. At Avot 6:4 we learn:

כַּךְ הִיא דַּרְכָּהּ שֶׁל תּוֹרָה: פַּת בְּמֶֽלַח תֹּאכֵל, וּמַֽיִם בִּמְשׂוּרָה תִּשְׁתֶּה, וְעַל הָאָֽרֶץ תִּישָׁן, וְחַיֵּי צַֽעַר תִּחְיֶה, וּבַתּוֹרָה אַתָּה עָמֵל, אִם אַתָּה עֽוֹשֶׂה כֵּן, אַשְׁרֶֽיךָ וְטוֹב לָךְ, אַשְׁרֶֽיךָ בָּעוֹלָם הַזֶּה, וְטוֹב לָךְ לָעוֹלָם הַבָּא

Such is the way of Torah: Bread with salt you shall eat; water in moderation you shall drink, and upon the ground you shall sleep. Live a life of deprivation and toil in Torah. If so you do, "If you eat of the effort of your hands, you are fortunate and it is good is to you"; “you are fortunate" in this world, "and it is good for you" in the World to Come.

It is possible to employ an objective test in order to establish that a person is fortunate. However, prima facie it seems both unnecessary and wrong to tell a person that they are happy or to prescribe in blanket terms that they will be happy. Happiness is experienced by every individual in a unique manner and to a unique degree.

One can go further in questioning the utility of the teachings in Avot concerning happiness, since there are a number of unstated assumptions that underpin the notion of true happiness being the feeling of being happy with one’s lot. For example:

If I want something that I do not have, I am discontented.

If I want something and God does not provide for me to obtain it, I am criticizing God’s assessment of what I am entitled to have and therefore implicitly consider Him unfair.

My being happy is a conscious choice, an exercise of my free will.

My lot consists of what I have or can access for myself, and not what I should have or need to have—but do not.

These assumptions, like the notion that one should be happy with one’s lot, are important because they play out in a person’s behaviour and response to factors that go beyond personal contentment. They therefore affect middot, norms of behaviour, and are not absolutes. This means that, while we can cheerfully endorse the idea that it is good to be content with one’s lot, we can drill it full of exceptions. Thus we can recite all 13 of the bakashot, the requests that form the heart of the weekday tefillah, without fear. We can seek to make provision for the needs of our family and, to a lesser extent, our wider community even if, in doing so, we make demands for things that we do not want.

Rabbinical thought does not challenge these teachings of Avot, but it does examine them in a variety of ways that make them less sententious and more appealing. Thus, for example, the Ben Ish Chai (cited in Mima’ayanot Netzach) explains that the “lot” (chelek in Hebrew) with which a person is happy is the chelek of his assets that he allocates to the benefit of the poor. He can rejoice in the fact that, by giving away this portion, he increases his own portion in the world to come.

I would like to suggest that there is a practical use for the concept of being happy with one’s lot. 

In our lives we inevitably find there are things we don’t have but would wish to acquire, as well as, less often, things we do have but which we neither need nor want.  Why not use the criterion of happiness with one’s lot as a sort of yardstick by which to measure our position regarding what we do and don’t want.  When contemplating whether to acquire or indeed pray for something, we should ask: “can I honestly say that it will make me happier?”  Likewise, when retaining or hoarding something, or dealing with another person’s requests that are made of us, we should ask: “can I honestly say that the loss of this article or acceding to this request will make me less happy?” This mental audit of our wish lists may not bring us to a state of permanently radiant happiness, but it will force us to confront the question of how much our happiness means to us in material, social, emotional and intellectual terms.

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Greeting others with genuine happiness: what is expected of us?

Rabbi Yishmael, at Avot 3:16, teaches a three-fold message. There is no consensus as to what the first two parts mean, but the third part is both simple to comprehend and hard to put into practice: a person should receive everyone besimchah, literally "in happiness". What did Rabbi Yishmael mean by this?

On one view, a person should be genuinely happy to meet others. After all, every human is created, as it were, in God's image and there is no-one on the planet who does not have the capacity to improve the lot of family, friends or the wider community.

Another view is that, however miserable or angry another person has made you, it is still incumbent on us all to grit our teeth and put on a show of good cheer, to demonstrate that we can rise above the behaviour of others and not let them dictate how we respond to others.

Classical commentators have no doubt that Rabbi Yishmael meant his words to be taken literally and applied across the board. Rambam sees them as an upgrade on Shammai's teaching at Avot 1:15 that we should greet others with a cheerful face: now we should genuinely feel the happiness we show. The commentary in Rashi's name adds that we must speak pleasantly to all comers. Me'am Lo'ez takes the mishnah's words literally, as does Midrash Shmuel, who holds that even people who come to hurt you are in one way or another emissaries of God. Rabbenu Yonah does not even explain the teaching but merely repeats it, presumably because he regards its meaning as being self-evident.

Modern commentators, acknowledging the realities of contemporary society, are more nuanced in their advice to readers. Thus Rabbi Marc D. Angel (The Koren Pirkei Avot) prefers to apply this mishnah to 'the whole person' rather than 'every person'. He writes:

"...[Rabbi Yishmael] surely knew that it was unrealistic to expect people to cheerfully receive all human beings. Perhaps his statement should be understood as advising the maintenance of an optimistic overall view of humanity..." Receive the 'whole person' optimistically -- knowing that the good and evil will be judged by God".

Rabbi Shimshon Raphael Hirsch also qualifies the mishnah, but by reference to time, not the person being encountered:

"Do not reject anyone from the outset; instead, receive everyone gladly, and then consider whether or not he is suitable for you and your endeavours".

In the wake of the Holocaust and the many dreadful sufferings faced by Jews in both hospitable and inhospitable lands, one can appreciate the temptation to qualify Rabbi Yishmael's words. One contemporary rabbi has however held out against this temptation and his words are all the more poignant for his being a survivor of the Buchenwald death camp. Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau (Yachel Yisrael, ArtScroll translation) writes:

"We must gladly greet 'everyone': each human being... Although not everyone possesses this natural ability to empathize with others, it can be acquired, 'until gladness becomes part of one's nature' [citing Rabbeinu Yitzchak ben R' Shlomo]"".

In a world in which it is so much easier to hate than to love, and to distance oneself from one's fellow humans, but where we have come to accept that there are limitations on the extent to which we can live out the ideals of earlier generations, we should think carefully before imposing limits on any encouragement to do or to be good, so those limitations do not become norms in their own right.

A time to be happy -- in the long run

The festival of Simchat Torah (literally "Happiness of the Torah") is fast approaching. No matter how it came into existence and never mind that it is piggy-backing on to a day that is already a festival -- Shemini Atzeret (the Eighth Day of Solemn Assembly) --Simchat Torah is a well-established fact on the ground. It is a day for rejoicing in the giving of the law on Sinai and for both reaching the end of Deuteronomy and immediately starting all over again at the beginning of Genesis.

This happy event is generally celebrated by singing and dancing with the Torah scrolls and by indulging (sometimes over-indulging) in the pleasures of the material world -- in particular food and drink.

Pirkei Avot offers a more ascetic route to happiness via the Torah. A baraita at 6:4 states:

This is the way of Torah: eat bread with salt; drink water in moderation; sleep on the ground; live a life of hardship and toil in Torah. If you do so, "you will be happy and it will be good for you” —happy in this world, good to you in the World to Come.

This raises the obvious question: if this is a recipe for happiness, should we not, at least on this one day of the year, reduce our alcoholic and gastronomic intake, sleep on the ground, actually open the Torah and learn a bit of it rather than cavort around with a rolled-up version of it, and generally focus on its content?

This question is strengthened when one considers that Simchat Torah falls at the end of a three-week festive season that culminates in Sukkot (a.k.a. the Feast of Tabernacles), a full week of celebratory eating, drinking and being merry. In Temple times Sukkot was also the time for a remarkable event, the Simchat Bet HaSho'evah, an all-night spectacular with burning torches, acrobatic rabbis and mass festivity. Would not a day of self-denial and serious study be an appropriate antidote to all this protracted partying?

There are of course many answers to this question (readers are invited to submit their favourites) and most of them are surely correct. One is that the happiness celebrated on Simchat Torah marks our own sense of achievement when we get to the end of our reading of the Torah each year. In Avot 2:21 Rabbi Tarfon says, of Torah learning, "It's not for you to finish the task -- but nor are you free from undertaking it". On Simchat Torah we do not in any sense finish learning the Torah, but we can at least take heart at the fact that, from start to finish, we have had one more opportunity to do so". A bit like an runner who is competing in a long-distance race, we are encouraged by each lap we complete -- even though we are effectively back where we were when we complete the previous lap. We feel that, if we have not actually proved Rabbi Tarfon wrong, we have tasted what it would be like to do so.

The happiness of Avot 6:4 is of a different order. This is analogous to the case of the runner who has tackled a cross-country marathon. He does not take heart at each lap he accomplishes because he is not going round in circles. As he continues to run, his scenery is ever-changing and often unfamiliar. His happiness, his comfort, comes from the fact that he knows in his heart that every step he takes will bring him to his final goal and that, in a way he cannot yet fully experience or understand, he will be a better person for it. But to reach his goal he must stay fit, keep focused, disdain the pleasures of the dinner table which would only slow him down.

In wishing all the members of this Group a happy and joyous Simchat Torah, I respectfully remind them not to let their simchah be at the expense of the Torah.

Chag same'ach!