Moshe teaches us again and again that joy is what we should feel in the Land of Israel, the land given to us by God, the place to which the whole of Jewish life - since the days of Avraham and Sarah - has been a journey. There, says Moshe, you will celebrate the love between a small and otherwise insignificant people and the God who, taking them as His own, lifted them to greatness. It will also be there, says Moshe, that the entire tangled narrative of Jewish history will become lucid, where a whole people will sing together, worship together, and celebrate the festivals together, knowing that history is not about empire or conquest, nor society about hierarchy and power; that commoner and king, Israelite and Kohen, are all equal in the sight of God, all voices in His holy choir, all dancers in the circle at whose center is the radiance of the Divine. This is what the covenant is about: the transformation of the human condition through what Wordsworth called “the deep power of joy.”
Happiness, the philosopher Aristotle once said, is the ultimate purpose of human existence. We desire many things, but usually as a means to something else. Only one thing is always desirable in itself, and never for the sake of something else, namely happiness.
There is a similar idea in Judaism. The biblical word for happiness, ashrei, is the first word of the book of Tehillim and a key word of our daily tefillot. But far more often, Tanach speaks about simcha, joy – and this is different to happiness. Happiness is something you can feel alone, but joy, in Tanach, is something you share with others. In one of the most extraordinary lines in the Torah, Moshe says that curses will befall the nation not because they served idols or abandoned God but “because you did not serve the Lord your God with joy and gladness out of the abundance of all things” (Devarim 28:47). A failure to rejoice is the first sign of decadence and decay.
There are other differences. Happiness is about a lifetime, but joy lives in the moment. Happiness tends to be a cool emotion, but joy makes you want to dance and sing. It’s hard to feel happy in the midst of uncertainty. But you can still feel joy.
And yes, life is full of grief and disappointments, problems and pains, but beneath it all is the wonder that we are here, in a universe filled with beauty, among people each of whom carries within them a trace of the face of God.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, z”l
