AUGUST 26 • 2021 | 61

The festivals as described in 
Deuteronomy are days of joy, precisely 
because they are occasions of collective 
celebration: “you, your sons and 
daughters, your male and female 
servants, the Levites in your towns, 
and the strangers, the fatherless and 
the widows living among you” (16:11). 
Simchah is joy shared. It is not something 
we experience in solitude.
Happiness is an attitude to life as a 
whole, while joy lives in the moment. As 
author J.D. Salinger once said: “Happiness 
is a solid; joy is a liquid.” Happiness is 
something you pursue. But joy is not. It 
discovers you. It has to do with a sense 
of connection to other people or to God. 
It comes from a different realm than 
happiness. It is a social emotion. It is the 
exhilaration we feel when we merge with 
others. It is the redemption of solitude.

A SHALLOW BREATH
Paradoxically, the Biblical book most 
focused on joy is precisely the one 
often thought of as the unhappiest of 
all, Kohelet, aka Ecclesiastes. Kohelet is 
notoriously the man who had everything, 
yet describes it all as hevel, a word he uses 
almost 40 times in the space of the book, 
and variously translated as “meaningless, 
pointless, futile, empty,” or as the King 
James Bible famously rendered it, 
“vanity.”
In fact, though, Kohelet uses the word 
simchah 17 times, that is, more than 
the whole of the Mosaic books together. 
After every one of his meditations on 
the pointlessness of life, Kohelet ends 
with an exhortation to joy: “I know that 
there is nothing better for people than 
to rejoice and do good while they live” 
(3:12). “So I saw that there is nothing 
better for a person than to rejoice in his 
work, because that is his lot” (3:22). “So I 
commend rejoicing in life, because there 
is nothing better for a person under the 
sun than to eat and drink and rejoice” 
(8:15). “However many years anyone may 
live, let him rejoice in them all” (11:8).
My argument is that Kohelet can 
only be understood if we realize that 
hevel does not mean “pointless, empty 
or futile.” It means “a shallow breath.” 
Kohelet is a meditation on mortality. 

However long we live, we know we 
will one day die. Our lives are a mere 
microsecond in the history of the 
universe. The cosmos lasts forever while 
we, living, breathing mortals, are a mere 
fleeting breath.
Kohelet is obsessed by this because it 
threatens to rob life of any certainty. We 
will never live to see the long-term results 
of our endeavors. Moses did not lead the 
people into the Promised Land. His sons 
did not follow him to greatness. Even he, 
the greatest of prophets, could not foresee 
that he would be remembered for all time 
as the greatest leader the Jewish people 
ever had. 
Van Gogh sold only one painting in his 
lifetime. He could not have known that 
he would eventually be hailed as one of 
the greatest painters of modern times. We 
do not know what our heirs will do with 
what we leave them. We cannot know 
how, or if, we will be remembered. How 
then are we to find meaning in life?

MEANINGFULNESS OF JOY
Kohelet eventually finds meaning not in 
happiness but in joy — because joy lives 
not in thoughts of tomorrow, but in the 
grateful acceptance and celebration of 
today. 
 We are here; we are alive; we are 
among others who share our sense 
of jubilation. We are living in God’s 
land, enjoying His blessing, eating the 
produce of His Earth, watered by His 
rain, brought to fruition under His sun, 
breathing the air He breathed into us, 
living the life He renews in us each day. 
And yes, we do not know what 
tomorrow may bring; and yes, we are 
surrounded by enemies; and yes, it was 
never the safe or easy option to be a 
Jew. But when we focus on the moment, 
allowing ourselves to dance, sing and give 
thanks, when we do things for their own 
sake not for any other reward, when we 
let go of our separateness and become a 
voice in the holy city’s choir, then there 
is joy.
Kierkegaard once wrote: “It takes 
moral courage to grieve; it takes religious 
courage to rejoice.” It is one of the most 
poignant facts about Judaism and the 
Jewish people that our history has been 

shot through with tragedy, yet Jews never 
lost the capacity to rejoice, to celebrate in 
the heart of darkness, to sing the Lord’s 
song even in a strange land. 
There are Eastern faiths that promise 
peace of mind if we can train ourselves 
into habits of acceptance. Epicurus taught 
his disciples to avoid risks like marriage 
or a career in public life. Neither of these 
approaches is to be negated, yet Judaism 
is not a religion of acceptance nor have 
Jews tended to seek the risk-free life. We 
can survive the failures and defeats if we 
never lose the capacity for joy. 
Hence Moses’ insistence that the 
capacity for joy is what gives the Jewish 
people the strength to endure. Without 
it, we become vulnerable to the multiple 
disasters set out in the curses in our 
parshah. Celebrating together binds 
us as a people: that and the gratitude 
and humility that come from seeing 
our achievements not as self-made but 
as the blessings of God. The pursuit of 
happiness can lead, ultimately, to self-
regard and indifference to the sufferings 
of others. It can lead to risk-averse 
behavior and a failure to “dare greatly.” 
Not so, joy. Joy connects us to others and 
to God. Joy is the ability to celebrate life 
as such, knowing that whatever tomorrow 
may bring, we are here today, under 
God’s heaven, in the universe He made, 
to which He has invited us as His guests.
Toward the end of his life, having been 
deaf for 20 years, Beethoven composed 
one of the greatest pieces of music ever 
written, his Ninth Symphony. Intuitively 
he sensed that this work needed the 
sound of human voices. It became the 
West’s first choral symphony. The words 
he set to music were Schiller’s “Ode to 
Joy.”
I think of Judaism as an ode to joy. Like 
Beethoven, Jews have known suffering, 
isolation, hardship and rejection, yet 
they never lacked the religious courage 
to rejoice. A people that can know 
insecurity and still feel joy is one that can 
never be defeated, for its spirit can never 
be broken nor its hope destroyed. 

The late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks made his 

teachings available to all. This essay was first 

published in 2015.

