Right or Wrong- Pure Joy This Sukkot

I spent the last few mornings learning Jewish texts in our Sukkah with students, teachers, and parents. On Monday, I had the great pleasure of learning in chevrutah with my daughter Sally as part of our annual Family Mishnah Study in the Sukkah for fifth and sixth grades. Yesterday, I learned with two wonderful parents (Libby's dad, Robbie, and Sadie and Nathan's mom, Melissa) during our Gan Parent Breakfast in the Sukkah. Yesterday, my colleague Lisa Exler led us all in a text study of the sources for Sukkot, and of course, I read the familiar texts differently than ever before. 

The Torah famously commands us in the book of Devarim to "rejoice in our holiday" of Sukkot and to be "exclusively happy," and we refer to this chag as "the time of our joy". Feeling commandments are not unusual - fear God, love God, be happy, etc.- but they are hard to understand, let alone observe. Our earliest commentators struggle to translate these commandments into actionable steps. Some years, they are harder to observe than other years. This year in particular, precisely a year after Shiva B'October/October 7/The Black Shabbat, the command to be "only happy" tonight and tomorrow feels tone-deaf to our lived reality as a people and as individuals, so many of whom will be marking a first Yahrzeit tomorrow. 

Every Israeli is thinking about this, and all of us in this community and other Jewish communities are as well. Jewish communities and their leaders are all over the spectrum on how to observe Simchat Torah this year- even the hardest hit places like Sderot, Ofakim, Kibbutzim in Otef Azza, and communities that have lost members or are still waiting for the return of friends being held hostage, have made radically different choices on how to come together tonight and tomorrow. Jewish communities around the world have also landed in vastly different places. No one knows the correct answer. There is no right answer to such a wrong set of circumstances. There is no right answer to the paradox of being commanded to be "only happy" on one of the saddest Yahrzeits in Jewish history.

With that in mind, I want to share one takeaway from my chevrutah yesterday that feels helpful to me and might resonate with you as well. There is no way I can be only happy over the next 24 hours; I have not felt that way for any 24 hours during the last year. And, truthfully, when you care about so many people close and far it is tough to hold that care and ever be "only happy," even during objectively better times. But, taking a beat to lean into one emotion is incredibly helpful to me: pausing, even for a couple of moments, to focus only on happiness- only on the good, the inspiring, the joyful. Focusing even briefly on things that make me happy and that I feel grateful for, from the micro to the macro, stays with me for far longer than those few moments of pause.

I mostly pray for objectively happier times for our people and the world. In the meantime, I pray that we can each take a few moments to pause over the next 24 hours and focus on the things that make us "only happy."