**Why Are Israelis Happy?**
There is something puzzling about Israeli happiness.
The World Happiness Report 2026 ranks Israel 8th in the world, with an average life evaluation of more than 7 out of 10, close to the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands. The result is all the more remarkable because the ranking covers the years 2023 to 2025, a period largely marked by October 7, 2023, and the war that followed.
How can this be explained?
The World Happiness Report does not measure good cheer. It asks people to assess the quality of their lives as a whole.
A person can be worried, grieving, or deeply dissatisfied with his government and nevertheless feel that his life is worth living.
The “happiness” measured here is therefore less about pleasure than about existential satisfaction, whose main determinants are well known: the importance of family, high fertility, sociability, networks of mutual support, a sense of belonging, and the ability to mobilize collectively.
Israeli surveys confirm the strength of this sense of belonging. In 2025, despite low levels of trust in many institutions and deep political divisions, more than 70% of both Jewish and Arab respondents said they would rather remain in Israel than move to a Western country under favorable conditions. A majority also continued to regard Israel as a good place to live.
Israelis can be dissatisfied with Israel and deeply attached to life in Israel. They can criticize their leaders, demonstrate against their government, denounce the cost of living, and worry about the future while still giving their own lives a high rating.
But what gives Israelis the feeling that their lives are worth living?
Alongside the sociological explanations, there is a much older cultural dimension: the place of שִׂמְחָה — simḥa, joy, in the Hebrew tradition.
The Torah does not present joy as something reserved for those to whom everything goes well. It makes it an obligation:
« וְשָׂמַחְתָּ בְּכָל־הַטּוֹב »
“You shall rejoice in all the good” (Deuteronomy 26:11).
And the Psalms specify:
« עִבְדוּ אֶת־ה׳ בְּשִׂמְחָה »
“Serve the Lord with joy” (Psalm 100:2).
More surprisingly, Deuteronomy reproaches the people:
« תַּחַת אֲשֶׁר לֹא־עָבַדְתָּ אֶת־ה׳ אֱלֹהֶיךָ בְּשִׂמְחָה וּבְטוּב לֵבָב »
“Because you did not serve the Lord your God with joy and with a glad heart” (Deuteronomy 28:47).
Joy, then, is not produced by favorable circumstances. It is a way of receiving existence.
This injunction runs throughout Jewish thought. The Talmud speaks of simḥa shel mitzvah, the joy associated with fulfilling a mitzvah. Maimonides describes this joy as avoda gedola, a “great service.” The Maharal associates joy with shlemout, wholeness: a person experiences joy when he realizes what he is called to become.
Rabbi Naḥman of Breslov would turn it into a genuine existential program:
מצוה גדולה להיות בשמחה תמיד
“It is a great mitzvah to always be joyful.”
For Rav Kook, joy takes on an additional dimension. It accompanies a person’s reconciliation with himself, his integration into the whole people and, ultimately, into creation as a whole. It becomes the sign of an existence that has rediscovered its unity and direction.
Yet it would be reductive to explain Israeli happiness solely through religion.
A large proportion of Israelis are not religious. But a culture can transmit its categories far beyond their original sources.
Shabbat, festivals, the family seder, weddings, collectively experienced mourning, family meals, attachment to children, and mutual assistance in times of crisis constantly place the individual within a family, a community, and a history.
Perhaps this is where we find an essential difference between two conceptions of happiness.
The contemporary model says: “I am happy when my life corresponds to my desires.”
Biblical simḥa suggests instead: “I can experience joy when my life has meaning, even when it does not correspond to my desires.”
This distinction helps explain how a society can be deeply anxious and nevertheless describe itself as happy.
The data from the Israeli Democracy Index regularly reveal this contradiction: concern about the future and criticism of the way the country functions, but an exceptionally strong attachment to Israel.
In the recent period, 75% of Jews and 67% of Arabs consider Israel a good place to live.
Strong majorities also preferred to remain there rather than move to another Western country.
Among Jews, the national-religious community displays the highest average level of optimism about Israel’s future: 82%, compared with 60% among secular Jews.
These figures obviously do not prove that religion “makes people happy.” But they make it difficult to dismiss two notions deeply rooted in Jewish tradition: meaning and belonging.
After October 7, the war makes the phenomenon even more striking.
A survey by the Israel Democracy Institute found that about one-third of Jewish respondents said they had grown closer to religion.
But the phenomenon goes beyond religious observance. Israeli crises regularly trigger a movement toward family, community, volunteering, and solidarity.
When institutions are challenged, when the government is divisive, and when the future seems uncertain, bonds between people appear to take over.
This may be one of the keys to the paradox: the happiness measured by surveys is individual, but some of its driving forces are collective.
Nevertheless, one should avoid idealizing “Israeli happiness.”
Israel’s ranking does not mean the absence of suffering, the disappearance of inequalities, or uniform happiness across all segments of the population.
Surveys show significant differences between Jews and Arabs in optimism, perceptions of the country’s situation, and sense of belonging.
But that is precisely what makes the Israeli case so interesting.
It suggests that the opposite of happiness may not always be suffering. It may also be a lack of meaning, isolation, and the feeling that our existence belongs to nothing greater than ourselves.
For thousands of years, Hebrew culture has responded to this threat through family, community, memory, the calendar, study, action, and hope.
It does not promise an existence without hardship. Jewish history would make such a promise absurd.
It offers something else: to transform existence, with all its trials, into a meaningful story.
Perhaps this is how we should understand Israel’s remarkable position in global happiness rankings.
Israelis are not necessarily happy because everything is going well, but because many believe that, even when everything is going badly, their lives, their relationships, and their history have meaning.
And the ancient Hebrew injunction:
עִבְדוּ אֶת־ה׳ בְּשִׂמְחָה
“Serve the Lord with joy”
then takes on an unexpectedly modern resonance: joy is not merely the result of a successful life; it is a way of living it.
