Happiness is Overrated

Of all the Jewish holidays, the one most closely associated with happiness is Sukkot. The prayer service calls Sukkot Zman Simchateinu – the time of our happiness. The Torah instructs us to take the Lulav and Etrog and “rejoice” before Hashem. The Torah (Devarim 16:14) even seems to be telling us that there is a special mitzvah to make sure that the people around us are happy on Sukkot. Everything in the liturgy and the Torah is calling to tell us that this is the time to be happy. But to be honest, there is a lyric in a song that keeps coming to mind – “You need to calm down. You’re being too loud.” Like, I get it. We’re happy. Yippee. But, maybe enough already with the happiness?

It’s possible if you are a rando on the internet reading this you are concerned for my mental health. You might be thinking, what’s wrong with this guy? Who doesn’t want more happiness? That’s fair. (My friends will recognize my natural curmudgeoniness as my default attitude and won’t be worried at all.) But hear me out. Isn’t happiness like the small talk of emotions? Happiness doesn’t drive us to new accomplishments the way desperation does. Isn’t happiness something that slows us down? In my possibly unhealthy way of thinking, happiness stunts and delays progress. Happiness makes us lazy. That’s why I’m thinking that happiness is overrated.

You probably know that we read Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) on Sukkot – and I think you’ll agree that’s the curmudgeonest book in all of Tanach. In 2:2 Shlomo Hamelech writes, “לִשְׂח֖וֹק אָמַ֣רְתִּי מְהוֹלָ֑ל וּלְשִׂמְחָ֖ה מַה־זֹּ֥ה עֹשָֽׂה” “Of merriment I said, ‘it’s crazy’ and of happiness [I said] ‘what does it do?’” Is it possible we read this because we need a counterbalance to all that happiness? After a week of all that nonsense we need a book that tells us “לֵ֤ב חֲכָמִים֙ בְּבֵ֣ית אֵ֔בֶל וְלֵ֥ב כְּסִילִ֖ים בְּבֵ֥ית שִׂמְחָֽה׃” “The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning and the heart of the fool is in the house of happiness.” Sounds like Shlomo Hamelech also thinks that happiness is overrated. And that maybe you should calm down.

That said, it wouldn’t be hard to make the case that Judaism thinks happiness and joy are good things. Perhaps what I’m looking for is the Curmudgeon’s Guide to Sukkot.

There are at least two ways to explain why the Torah associates Sukkot with Simcha. The most obvious is that Sukkot is the Torah’s harvest festival. After the farmer has gathered in his fall crops (or I guess sometimes, as he’s about to) he looks out at his largesse and is filled with gratitude and joy. Perhaps he sees in the stockpile of wheat the hours and hours of field work. Perhaps in the fresh-pressed grapes he sees the rain that came benevolently at just the right time. He recognizes what he has and knows that even though it was his hard work, he couldn’t do it alone. And so we have the holiday of Sukkot – a festival to channel that happiness.

Another way to think about Sukkot is in the cycle of time that began with Rosh HaShanah, then the days of repentance, and then finally Yom Kippur. We had our day of judgment, then our days of penitence, then our day of atonement, and now we have our zman simchateinu, our time of happiness. Thinking about things in this cycle, other aspects of Lulav and Etrog and Sukkah come into view more clearly. Yom Kippur began with an announcement that, “we hereby declare it permissible to pray with excommunicated sinners” (more or less). In that moment, and in the hours that followed, we became one unified community, and that unity is reflected in the bundle of four species. We closed Yom Kippur shouting, “Hashem Hu HaElokim” “Hashem is G-d” seven times, and in the sukkah we recreate sitting directly in G-d’s presence in the Clouds of Glory of our time in the desert. The Chassidim and Kabbalists call the shade of the Sukkah the Shade of Emunah (faith) for that reason. In this system, the simcha of the holiday isn’t exactly the simcha of gratitude or the sense of accomplishment of a job well done. Maybe it’s the simcha of being enough. Maybe it’s the happiness of feeling together with everyone. Maybe it’s the simcha of coming home.

If you’ve been reading carefully you may have noticed that I’ve played a little “three card Monty” with my terms here. Sometimes I’ve used “happiness” and sometimes I’ve stuck with the Hebrew, “simcha.” The truth is, I think they aren’t exactly the same thing. By way of making an analogy, we can all easily agree that there are different types of love, right? Romantic love, love for a child, love for a parent, love for a brother or friend, and whatever I mean when I say, “I love my wife’s apple pie.” They don’t all mean the same thing. Similarly, I think that the pleasant feelings we have that are all “happy” aren’t all the same thing. I stand by my thesis that happiness dulls action, stunts growth and is generally unproductive. I’m going to guess that’s not the simcha the Torah expects us to wallow in.

If Sukkot were only a harvest festival then the holiday of Simchat Torah seems a bit of a non sequitur. But if Sukkot is part of a cycle that started with Rosh HaShanah, then I think it does fit. Sukkot is one more step on the way to Simchat Torah – and that’s the climax of this holiday season. If the simcha of Sukkot is a feeling of arriving, completing, and aspiring for more, then it makes sense that Jewish consciousness eventually gave us a way to connect those feelings to Torah study. And it makes sense that this Simcha is an end that leads to a beginning.

So in the end, the great curmudgeon in me still thinks happiness is overrated. But I think I can get on board with simcha.