The Roles of Happiness and Mourning
In my post college years I wanted a life where I could be happy regardless of life’s events. I’ve spent many years researching and thinking about happiness. Let me share something I’ve worked out.
The Maharal, a 16th century Jewish mystic, defines happiness in his work on the Ethics of Our Fathers. Happiness flows from completion, just as grief flows from loss and deficiency. Happiness is what we feel in the presence of completeness. Grief is what we feel in the presence of loss.
The Maharal supplied what I had been missing. A definition of what happiness actually is.
Our lives hold two kinds of completeness, and therefore two kinds of happiness. There is the completeness of our life as a whole. We are alive. We are aware. We are here, connected to other people and a vast universe. And there is the completeness of the experience in front of us, the meeting, the meal, the gathering, whatever is happening right now.
We see both at work at a family gathering after the loss of a loved one. Someone says, “This is such a happy occasion. It’s a shame Aunt Susan is not here to enjoy it.” The gathering sparks an awareness of life completeness. The absence of Aunt Susan is an incompleteness in the experience. It diminishes the moment but does not eliminate the life completeness underneath, which is why the participants can honestly say yes when asked whether they are happy.
Life completeness is always available. Most of the time we don’t feel it, because our attention is on the experience in front of us, and life completeness stays quiet in the background.
It stays quiet until something calls our attention to it. Sometimes what calls our attention is a gathering. Sometimes it is a loss. Jewish tradition takes the second case seriously and builds practices around it. Grief, in this tradition, is a way of making incompleteness visible so we can respond to it.
When a close relative dies, Jewish law instructs the mourner to sit for a week, receive visitors, and focus on the loss. The task is to feel the incompleteness. We mend it by shifting our focus from the physical relationship, which is over, to the spiritual essence of the person we lost. What they meant. What they gave us. What of them lives on in how we act.
We are now in a three week period on the Jewish calendar during which we mourn two ancient Temples in Jerusalem, destroyed about 2000 years ago. Communities have always marked the anniversaries of their catastrophes, and this is one of ours. We do not hold weddings or celebrations, so we can feel the incompleteness of a world without a central place of worship, and let that felt incompleteness move us toward the actions and character that would restore it.
Happiness rests on a completeness we do not have to build. Grief is honest attention to what is missing. Prescribed mourning is not the opposite of happiness. It is how we rebuild the completeness that happiness depends on.
