Re(joy)cing
some thoughts on doing
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May's Zoom Salon is coming up!
What We Say Tells Us Who We Are: Torah and Metaphor
Sunday June 8th, 2pm ET/1pm CT /11 am PT
We talk about sacred text as fire, as water, as the living tree. As the inverted mountain. As so many other things. Why? What does that tell us about who we are, and what we seek; how we see ourselves; about facing ultimate truth; and the difference between what we want and what we need.
Join a rollicking journey through delightful, thought-provoking midrash that offer the soul nourishment we badly need today.
(As always, cost should never be a barrier to Torah; info at bottom of email to get in touch if you want in but paying's not for you now.)
Shavuot, the holiday marking the wheat harvest and the giving of Torah on Sinai, begins tonight.
As it happens, we've been hanging out in Deuteronomy 16 (which is giving Leviticus 19 a run for its money for most posts for a single chapter!)
And in this same chapter, there are some verses about this very holiday that can teach us a lot about what it is to experience, and create, joy.
It's been seven weeks after Passover/Pesach, the holiday of leaving Egyptâ before which we removed all traces of old leaven from our homes. The barley harvest began on the second day of Pesach. And laterâ Sukkot marks the last fall harvest.
If you recall, a major innovation of Deuteronomy was about centralizing the Temple in Jerusalem; Pesach, Shavuot and Sukkot became, through this, the shalosh regalim, the three pilgrimage holidays.
First, the Deuteronomy 16 tells us to observe Pesach by doing the paschal sacrifice and not eating leaven/chametz â
so that you may remember the day of your departure from the land of Egypt as long as you live..... (Deuteronomy 16:6)
But then it seems to get more... emotional... when we get to Shavuot, tonight's holy day:
Then you shall observe Shavuot for God your God... You shall be joyful before God with your children, your workers, the [landless] Levite in your communities, and the non-citizen, the orphan, and the widow in your midst, at the place where the God will choose to establish the divine name. (Deuteronomy 16:10-12)
"You shall be joyful."
The chapter commands something similar around Sukkot (the one with the huts, yeah):
"You shall be joyful in your festival," (Deuteronomy 16:14)
Can you legislate a feeling? Can God tell people what they should feel? Can Jewish law obligate a person to feel happy?
Except the commandment isn't to feel happy. Not really.
If we could all easily turn on the joy fountain on command, our culture would look very different, would it not? Whole profitable industries are built around selling the idea of happiness in some form or anotherâ and then selling you Happiness, Part Two when the first edition doesn't actually deliver as promised.
V'samachtaâ "and you shall rejoice."
In context, âto rejoiceâ really is the better translation. Which is to say: you should do a series of actions.
The TL;DR of the Shavuot commandment is: You should come together with your family, your workers, and the various people in your community who are most on the margins and/or struggling to get by. You should come together and engage in acts of celebration.
The commandment to be joyful is really a commandment to throw a party, to have a celebration, to bring people together, all the while making sure that even those most on the margins of society are enfranchised.
Because our joy isnât really joy if itâs only available for the privileged. Thatâs not holy rejoicing.
And, this text seems to suggest, as a result of this celebration, the text tells us (with regards to Sukkot),
âYou will have nothing but joy.â (Deuteronomy 16:15)
What does rejoicing involve, exactly?
The Rabbis of the Talmud (Pesachim 109a) ask, referencing the passage above, how should we bring joy to our family on the festivals?
They come up with a few suggestions, including such mystical notions as "new clothes," and "meat," (actually, tho) and ultimately land on an answer of mixed pragmatism:
But now that the Temple is not in existence, rejoicing is only with wine, as is written, "And wine shall gladden the heart of a person." (Psalms 104:15) (Babylonian Talmud, Pesachim 109a)
Because the Jewish tradition, anyway, isnât ascetic.*
The body and its pleasures are considered a holy good in their own right.
Even when the Rabbis want to lift up the joys of Torah learning, they won't leave the joys of the body behind:
âRabbi Eliezer said: âOn a festival, a person has nothing to do but either to eat and drink or to sit and study.â Rabbi Yehoshua said: âDivide it: half for eating and drinking and half for the House of Study.'â (Talmud Pesachim 68b)*And/though health is the most important thing to the tradition--and obviously alcohol is contraindicated to some people's health, whether physical or otherwise.
And yes, other kinds of bodily pleasures, tooâ the same word used to "rejoice" is also used as "to make happy" with regards to spousal obligations. (More on all that here).
Rejoicing also involves reveling in nature, and greenery. The Rema, aka Rabbi Moses Isserles (16th c. what's now Poland) commented in the authoritative law code the Shulchan Aruch,
We have the custom to spread out plants on Shavuot in the synagogue and in houses, as a memory for the joy of the receiving of the Torah. (Shulchan Aruch OC 494:3)
Connect with green things! To help extend the memory of joy! (One might suggest that one could also, you know, go out into nature, if one is not a KrakĂłw/Lublin city slicker such as the Rema.)
Flowers decorating the Great Synagogue of Rome, Italy for Shavuot in June 2019
Joy is about connecting with each other and the Earth, about celebrating, about pleasing the senses, about enjoying beauty and special opportunities (either of which might be what the ânew clothesâ thing is about), about sights and sounds and tastes and smells and also laughing and hugging and connecting.
This ethical/mystical text by Rabbi Isaiah HaLevi Horowitz was written in Ottoman Palestine in the early 17th-century. In it, he taught some ideas in the name of the 12th c. Tosafist Eliezer of Metz:
a person is obligated on the holiday to engage in any proper enjoyment and any joyful thing which makes them rejoice; with anything from which their heart derives joy and bliss, like eating, drinking and strolling. So a person is obligated to do everything that makes them rejoice. And just like one is obligated to make oneself rejoice; so too is one obligated to make their children and his household rejoice...[and the] others....[who are marginalized, mentioned in the verse.] (Shenei Luchot HaBrit, Aseret HaDibrot, Sukkah, Ner Mitzva 85)
tl;dr: whatever works for you, whatever will fill you up. And then you have to do what will work for those with whom you live, with whom you are in community, those to whom you have obligations of mutual care. One size does not always fit all, but joy? Must be sought, must be found.
Yes, even now.
Even given everything that's happening, we must aggressively, ferociously celebrate every single win. Guard every spark of light. Let them fuel us. And let them help us bring the world we need into being.
Emma Goldman â the late 19th-early 20th c. Jewish anarchist, activist, writerâ is often quoted as saying,
âIf I canât dance, I donât want to be in your revolution.â
But actually that's a paraphrase of a longer, more interesting paragraph from Goldmanâs autobiography Living My Life:
At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha, a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause. I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business. I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal... should demand the denial of life and joy.
From Lilly Drosch's adorable illustration of the above quote. (Blue and red crayon-looking illustration: Sascha's cousin yelling angrily, Emma rolling her eyes, her dancing away: happily-- we see him in one frame, still angry, but farther away, and then in the last frame, it's just her, dancing even more fluidly.) We have all met some of Sasha's cousins. Dance away, literally or metaphorically.
In other words, we must, in the ways that we can, live the future we hope to bring into being.
There's plenty that is hard, that is painful, that demands serious work of us. Engaging of acts of intentional rejoicingâsinging together, dancing together, marking important moments and milestones, coming together to break bread and maybe open a bottle of wine and breathe with the trees and connect and experience the beauty of being alive is crucial, too.
And it's not about how we feel, it's about choosing to do.
If authoritarianism is about fear and obedience, acts of rejoicing upend that agenda.
And collective joy? All the more so.
And for those who have been most harmed by the systems and structures of power? As Black South African feminist malebo sephodi frames it,
âradical joy is... an act of defiance. a reclamation of our right to thrive in the face of systems that seek to diminish us.â
And collective joy?
All the more so.
So make joy.
Make joy for you, and the people who are yours, and the people who are all of oursâ
Do the action of choosing celebration, community or beholding exquisite art or hanging with the trees or delicious food or exaltation or something else entirely.
Because it's Shavuot, because it's Wednesday, because we're all at the protest so we may as well dance, because you're not going to let them win, are you?
Because maybe today demands it, because it's time.
Because, as Emma Goldman reminds us, our life should not be denied of it.
The Vilna Gaon (Rabbi Elijah ben Solomon Zalman 18th c. Lithuania) ruled that the aforementioned decorative green plants and flowers weren't going to be a thing in his turf (because this too closely resembled local observances of the Christian holiday of Pentecost) so a practice evolved of doing pepercuts ("Shavuoslekh") that, as you can imagine from these late 19th c. examples, may have originally evoked the idea of flowers. More on some traditional sources here. (Thanks to Russel Neiss for sharing them with the internet.) (Images of three intricate, round white papercuts, with bird and leaf shapes, with Hebrew words on two of them noting that it is the holiday of Shavuot, the time of Revelation.)
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May's Zoom Salon is coming up!
What We Say Tells Us Who We Are: Torah and Metaphor
Sunday June 8th, 2pm ET/1pm CT /11 am PT
We talk about sacred text as fire, as water, as the living tree. As the inverted mountain. As so many other things. Why? What does that tell us about who we are, and what we seek; how we see ourselves; about facing ultimate truth; and the difference between what we want and what we need.
Join a rollicking journey through delightful, thought-provoking midrash that offer the soul nourishment we badly need today.
(As always, cost should never be a barrier to Torah; info at bottom of email to get in touch if you want in but paying's not for you now.)
