October 16, 2008
Not every culture recommends joy as wholeheartedly as America does. To hear us tell it, we are entitled to joy unbridled. When we embrace Beethoven’s ultimate symphonic movement, we are proclaiming an “Ode to joy.” Light opera more to your taste? Gilbert and Sullivan end HMS Pinafore, singing “O joy, O rapture unforeseen.”
Even when we wash dishes, we employ a detergent that embodies “Joy.”
Well, why not? Isn’t it natural to seek happiness?
The quest goes back at least to Kohelet (Ecclesiastes), who sought to maximize life by denying himself no enjoyment, only to find that once he had it, it deteriorated into “hevel havalim” (“utter futility”).
The rabbis assigned Kohelet for Sukkot because Sukkot was already associated with the pursuit of enjoyment. The Mishna describes a Temple ceremony back then, by commenting, “Anyone who hasn’t experienced it doesn’t know what joy is.” What did the Temple know that Kohelet didn’t? The Yerushalmi explains that at the Temple festivity, the holy spirit rested on the throng of celebrants. More familiar language would say: “The people in attendance felt God’s presence.”
What can that mean for us? People who nowadays testify to the presence of God are considered loony. An attendee at a synagogue convention in Montreal describes returning home to New York and being stopped by customs officials who asked what he had to declare. Moved by the convention’s patent spirituality, he replied, “I declare the greatness of God.” That did not go over so well at the border.
Could Temple pilgrims once upon a time really have known the consummate joy of experiencing God? If so, where is God now? Put your hand up if you expected God to show up at synagogue services this Sukkot. Put your other hand up if you think God shows up anywhere.
Actually, I think God does show up. Consider this story:
Some years back professors at the University of Notre Dame dispatched priests to ask Catholics if they experienced the presence of God. Some 95 percent answered affirmatively. Curious about the outcome at the time, I sent students to their weekly congregations to try the experiment there; to no one’s surprise, only 3 percent of the congregants said “Yes.”
What should we conclude? That God visits Catholics but not Jews? Dubious.
So I repeated the experiment, this time altering the question to, “How many people have experienced spiritual moments?” The number now rose to over 20 percent. But the clincher came with a third try. If asked about intensely profound moments, 95 percent of Jews concurred. The important thing is that when asked to stipulate what the profound occasions were, Jews mentioned exactly the same experiences that Catholics identified as God’s presence. Jews just named them differently.
And not all those moments were joyous. Alongside the obvious candidates like weddings, childbirths, and magical sunsets on mountain tops, it was not unusual to hear about moments of crisis, even of death — like holding hands with a dying parent just before the end. Even if (like the Temple ceremony) all occasions of absolute joy involve the presence of God, not all occasions of the presence of God are absolutely joyful. The rabbis are equally adamant about finding God in exile: They describe God metaphorically crying with our foremother Rachel over the fate of her children. God, they say, sits with patients in the hospital. In my synagogue experiment, one man (who described himself as an atheist) allowed that he may indeed have seen God when he visited the remains of victims on the killing fields of Cambodia.
“But why call that God?” people ask. Why not? We are taken in by grade school textbooks that suggest our only hope for knowing God is a burning bush, a sea split in half, or a mountain named Sinai. But the prophet Elijah found God in “a still small voice,” not in lightning and thunder. He could have mistaken it for a desert breeze and gone back to reading a book. Or, suspecting God after all, he might have visited the biblical equivalent of a therapist to rid himself of the delusion. He didn’t. He named it “God,” and, as they say, the rest is history.
Not everything we encounter need be divine. But some things are. God is present in those profound breakthrough experiences where we sense that we stand at the limits of mortality: births, deaths, insights of genius, connecting with another human being, and experiencing ourselves at one with history or with nature.
The Temple is gone, but life is equally profound, equally ecstatic, equally mysterious, and equally painful. Kohelet had it right: “For everything there is a season.” The only way to avoid “utter futility” is to entertain the possibility that God can show up at any of them.
Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman, cofounder of Synagogue 3000, is the Barbara and Stephen Friedman Professor of Liturgy, Worship, and Ritual at the Hebrew Union College in New York. He is the coeditor, with David Arnow, of My People’s Passover Haggadah: Traditional Texts, Modern Commentaries (Jewish Lights).
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