Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks: Happiness in the Jewish Perspective

the first of our three speakers is chief rabbi lord jonathan sachs you can find an extended biographical note in your program and i will not embarrass the chief rabbi by repeating all the incomians contained therein including his having been made a life peer and member of the house of lords i will say however that i have over the years observed the chief rabbi in many different situations and he has an uncanny ability at all times to know what the lord doth require of him but to do justice to love mercy and to walk humbly with his god please join me in welcoming lord jonathan sachs chief rabbi of the united hebrew congregations of the british commonwealth [Applause] uh friends david asks am i correct to which the answer is an unequivocal yes and no but david you have set us on the right path because you have told us that you're unhappy and for a jew to be happy is to have something to be unhappy about if i were to sum up purely philosophically for a moment the jewish attitude to happiness i would say it is this um it is max goldberg who in his seventies suffers a problem with his heart is immediately rushed into the hospital that i am told is the best in the united states massachusetts general he is there for seven days and after seven days in this magnificent hospital he checks himself out and goes to a very run-down jewish hospital in new york's lower east side and the doctor is just fascinated to know why did he leave this magnificent hospital to come to this run-down place and he says goldberg tell me gobo what was the matter there the doctors didn't they understand your condition and gobo says the doctors double einsteins about the doctors i can't complain was it the nurses didn't they look after you about the nurses angels in human form about the nurses i can't complain so what was he going the food didn't you like the food goldberg said the food man are from heaven about the food i can't complain so goldberg why did you leave there and come here and goldberg with a big smile says because here i can complain all of this all of this leads a french contemporary scholar esther ben bassa i think her name is to write a book about contemporary jewish life entitled published this earlier this year suffering as identity and it is that very negative approach to life which has dominated jewish life in recent decades not not unsurprisingly after two centuries of anti-semitism culminating in the holocaust but my latest book future tense actually says this is the wrong road to go down so friends what i'm going to do very simply is to say this um as david has uh since uh john is here sorry i should say before i say anything else if heaven is anything like the emory university center for law and religion i will be happy in the world to come so john thank you for all you've done for me [Applause] it's very interesting the first word of the book of psalms is ashrae which means happy but it's a very interesting word there's no english equivalent because ashrae is a plural construct it doesn't mean happy it means these are the happinesses of as if in that first word already to hint to us that there may be many forms of happiness in judaism and there are indeed and i'm only going to look at three one which i think david will meet you halfway a form of happiness or at least of existence in judaism that is radically different from the kind of life that we hear from the dalai lama that is the first the second will be one that is very similar to that advocated by the dalai lama and the third will be one on which i believe our various traditions can converge as it were from different starting points so let me begin by saying and of course david is right happiness is not the core concept in judaism we do not hold like aristotle that it is that at which all things aim in judaism we would sum up judaism as life liberty and the pursuit of holiness not happiness and and that incidentally is not an unsound way of proceeding because as i mentioned yesterday as many thinkers have realized from aristotle to what's mr flo mihali chick sent mahali yeah mr peak experiences you do not arrive at happiness by pursuing it directly and that is how maimonides defines in the 10th chapter of hill history what is somebody who serves god with love in his fine words he does what is right because it is right and the happiness will come so happiness is part of judaism but it is not that at which we aim now the first thing that is very obvious is that you read the bible happiness is not something you necessarily associate with the biblical heroes the heroes of the religious imagination in judaism they struggle they wrestle they argue they contend they fight with the people for the sake of god they fight with god for the sake of the people at least four biblical heroes pray to god to die moses elijah jeremiah and jonah and of course job likewise the figures of the bible no exile and no persecution they no defeat but they know happiness all too rarely nowhere is there a more ironic word in hebrew than the name of the first jewish child isaac the hebrew means yitzhak he will laugh and yet isaac's life is not full of laughter as a child he sees a father who is prepared to sacrifice him as a father himself he sees his two sons engaged in sibling rivalry and is deceived by one of them so in judaism happiness is at the end of a long and winding road when in the 20th century the late rabbi soloveitchik spoke of jewish life he spoke of it as thesis and antithesis without the mediating synthesis when a contemporary talmudic scholar aden steinseltz wrote a book about jewish life he called it strife of the spirit the talmud says that sages have no rest neither in this world nor the next so i think we can say this that there is a very very beautiful image of happiness as being at one with the universe but that is not the jewish way in judaism at least in the mainstream judaism is a religion of active engagement with the world driven by the cognitive dissonance between the world that is and the world that ought to be judaism lives in that dissonance we live in this world but we know just how far from the ideal it is and all our actions are intended to reduce that distance between the is and the ought however i want to say this that there is a kind of happiness in all of this think of abraham the grandfather of the world's three great abrahamic monotheism think of his life he has to tear himself away from everything that makes somebody feel at home in the world has to leave behind his land his birth place his father's house and travel to says god the land will which i will show you as soon as he arrives in the land there's a famine and he has to leave twice his life is in danger and sarah has to pretend she's his sister rather than his wife because he's afraid they'll kill him god promises him children as many as the stars of the sky as the grains of sand on the seashore he has to wait till he's an old man before he has even one child god promises rise walk through the land the length the breadth thereof i give it all to you and when sarah dies he does not have one square inch that he can call his own in which to bury her and he has to pay an inflated price for the burial plot and yet the end of his life the bible says and abraham died of good old age zakin versaver old and satisfied with life one of the most serene deaths in the bible there is a kind of happiness in all this it is not happiness written by johann sebastian bach this is happiness at which beethoven arrived at the very end of his life in those late string quartets or to take a non-musical analogy you know when when when when i went to study philosophy at cambridge the invisible hero he died more than the decade earlier was ludwig wittgenstein now wittgenstein was a serious depressive three of his siblings committed suicide his whole life was spent in anguish and self-doubt you know he once said to bertrand russell russell tell me am i a complete idiot or not if i'm a complete idiot i'll study aeronautical engineering if i'm not i'll study philosophy i mean you know i love bertrand russell you know he was so unjewish you know bertrand russell once said about ge moore i only once heard g e moore tell a lie and that's when i asked him more have you ever told a lie and he said yes sorry okay that's what you get by studying philosophy anyway so so wittgenstein you know even to think straight has to leave cambridge go to a little fjord in norway in total isolation this man i actually had my room in cambridge oh just above his doctor's surgery where where he died vickinchai's last words were tell them i've had a wonderful life can you understand i think i i think one can so that is the first kind of happiness that i associate with judaism which is so radically unlike you know the serene buddhist happiness it is the happiness not of being a peace in the universe but the happiness that comes from challenge struggle sometimes sacrifice for high ideals a life that has its setbacks and its moments of despair those moments that you hear so absolutely in moses in jeremiah the point you know for me as a jew the point in the new testament that that speaks most closely as a jew is the last words of jesus when he is quoting the targum the aramaic translation of psalm 22 my god my god wife if you've forsaken me that's a really jewish moment that you find god in the very act of asking of doubting of questioning and there is i think a certain kind of it's what herbert schneider once famously called sacred discontent anyone know of a guy called bob geldoff who used to do this you come across this man oh sorry do you you don't want the bible according to bob all right we'll move on anyway so there it is so there is i think fulfillment vividness passion in the struggle and moments of exhilaration you hear that exhilaration in the song the israelites sing as they cross the red sea and that is i think a certain kind of happiness in judaism happiness is struggle it is it comes in that last in those last moments of life where you look back and you say you know in the words of rabbi tariffen it is not for you to complete the work but neither are you free to desist from it from having taken part in this struggle knowing that you struggled in a noble course that's happiness one there is a second kind of happiness in judaism and i call this the happiness of the wisdom tradition in judaism the happiness you find in the book of proverbs and some of the psalms and so on and so forth and that kind of happiness is comes closest to the kind of happiness which the dalai lama speaks and with shaded variations the kind of happiness at which the various strands of the greek philosophical tradition also spoke that is a happiness of balance a virtue of compassion of living well and faring well that kind of or share that kind of osha is the happiness of one who is good who does good who has been blessed in life and who has been held in high regard and that is the happiness set forth for us in psalm one happy is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of markers but his delight is in the law of the lord and on his law he meditates dare night he is like a tree planted by streams of water which yields fruit in its season whose leaf does not wither whatever he does prospers that's happiness as rootedness you know there's something very interesting in hebrew the word secular where's the word secular come from sekulum meaning this worldly what would that be about right in hebrew the word for secular is whole and whole is the hebrew for sand why because sand gets blown by the wind you're not rooted anywhere and that is exactly what psalm one says lokeinhara in the wicked aren't like the righteous they like the chaff that the boy blows away so there's happiness as rootedness and giving forth fruit and all that kind of thing and and that is the happiness of the wisdom tradition of course the most remarkable account very complex account of this kind of happiness it is challenging and it is very subversive is the happiness mentioned in the book which you quoted the book of kohelet of ecclesiastes who is ecclesiastes the man who has everything he has a wardrobe full of armani suits a garage full of lamborghinis he does the shopping in the lamborghini he has uh second home in the south of france you name it what else do you have to have in order to be ecclesiastes and of course as you will know having a garage full of lamborghinis yourself that that does not buy you happiness and there he is saying you know meaningless meaningless everything is meaningless and uh i just want to be tiny bit homological here because let's do a little bit of stuff that actually works in life i once was able to decode ecclesiastes because the when i was a student in 1968 and for the first time i met a man who had great influence on my life rabbi menachem mendel schneiss and the late lubavitch and i was just about to go in to see him and his followers told me a lovely story which i share with you somebody had written to the rubber you know he was a great holy man somebody had written to the robber i need the robber's help i am deeply depressed i can hardly find the will to go on living i pray and i am not moved i fulfill the commands and yet i feel no satisfaction i need the rabbi's help and the rubber who used before he was a leader of the jewish people ran a publishing house and so is used to using typographical symbols sent him the most brilliant reply and it did not use a single word he simply ringed the first word in every sentence the first word in every sentence was i if you want to know why you're miserable because you start every sentence with the word i and it's exactly as as john said yesterday the truth is as victor frankl always used to say in the name of kierkegaard the door to happiness opens outward you have to you have to abandon the eye and focus on the you on the other and if you actually look and this gets a little bit diluted in english but if you look at the hebrew of the first two chapters of the book of ecclesiastes there is no other book in the bible that uses the first person singular so much banitili asitili kanitili each one of those is a double i i made for myself i bought for myself i acquired for myself i planted for myself it's all for myself and that is why he does not find happiness and eventually exactly as you said david he finds happiness in the now in love in work sweet is the sleep of a laboring man uh rejoice with the woman you've taken in he even finds uh even finds a bit of epicurean happiness in eating and drinking and a touch of the robin williams in dead poets society you know carpe diem rejoicing your creator in the days of your youth etc etc so that is the wisdom tradition it is the most universal it is there in ancient egyptian wisdom literature it's in the whole philosophical tradition of the greek greeks uh in different ways in aristotle the stoics the epicureans and others and almost all the great religious traditions it comes in many shapes and sizes some are more this worldly others are less this worldly but that is the life of balance and beauty and goodness and virtue and order and inner peace which is the exact opposite of the first kind of happiness which is a life of struggle and passion and that is another version of happiness in judaism do not believe that there is only one way to live a good and happy life even within a single tradition so that's number two and finally number three the point that i just hinted at yesterday the point where i think we can converge whatever our tradition and that is what i called um social happiness and it is far too little spoken about nowadays this is a rare idea and this comes from the concept of covenant social happiness comes from the concept of covenant and covenant itself comes out of the paradox set forth with beautiful clarity in the first three chapters of the book of genesis on the one hand the human being is supremely valuable every one of us regardless of color class culture gender every one of us is in the image and likeness of god this i think the singular most single radical assertion of monotheism as if discovering god singular and alone humanity found the human person singular and alone only in monotheism do you get the birth of the individual as having ultimate significance against that is and again in hebrew this is is it's it's like a discord in the middle of the mozart symphony because we have had genesis 1 and god saw that it was good and god saw that it was good and suddenly seven times and suddenly in genesis 2 we hear the words not good the words not good only appear twice in the whole of the pentateuch what is not good it is not good for man to be alone so on the one hand this almost infinite dignity of the human individual but on the other hand the inadequacy of the human individual and out of that tension the whole human drama as conceived by the judaism that the whole drama is generated by that one single paradox which mean to sum up what the problem is how do we construct relationships of trust that are not relationships of dominance how do we establish human bonds based on the recognition of the independence and integrity of the other and that is the problem whose solution is covenant covenant is a moral commitment in which two individuals or more each respecting the dignity and independence of the other come together in a bond of love and trust to do together what neither can do alone and the paradigm case of that is marriage and the most daring really audacious proposition of the hebrew bible is that the relationship between god and humanity is just that the relationship of a marriage it sounds sacrilegious blasphemous what is there that god cannot do alone but there is of course one thing god cannot do alone which is to live within the human heart for that he needs our partnership and this generates a third form of happiness which is not the struggle form one it's not being at peace with yourself form two this form of happiness is all about relationships the quality and depth of our relationships with the other with the human other and the divine other which is god and the bible sees this kind of happiness not just as a personal matter but essential to the health of the society as a whole in other words a society is made by the extent to which husbands and wives parents and children communities and ultimately a whole society can achieve that happiness based on relationships of mutual respect and mutual responsibility and the bible says something astonishing it really is astonishing you you kind of miss it if you're not concentrating and here it is we have two passages of curses in the by in the mosaic books one at the end of leviticus leviticus chapter 26 the other towards the end of deuteronomy deuteronomy 28 terrifying terrifying literature of curses the one in leviticus happens because of national apostasy you you reject me says god you abandon me you treat me negligently so i will abandon you that's big time national apostasy what is remarkable about deuteronomy is there's no apostasy the only reason the curses happen is because you did not serve god with joy vetuvlay valve and gladness of heart may rov cull out of the abundance of all good things it is a stunning insight a society that loses the art of happiness is a society on the brink of decline and that makes happiness a social and in the broad broadest possible sense a political issue so i think what uh and let us just chase that for one moment we'll do it very quickly what does social happiness entail first of all um can i just point out one feature of the bible which i think is tremendously important which is that the book of genesis comes before the book of exodus isn't that interesting what do i mean and and christians should see this much more readily than jews because in the christian bible the book of ruth appears before the first book of samuel right and it's very interesting in the hebrew bible the book of ruth appears nowhere near the book of samuel but the christian bible gets it in the chronological order what is exodus about the birth of israel as a nation what is the first book of samuel about the birth of israel as a kingdom they are both political moments but what is genesis about human relationships it's about husbands and wives parents and children siblings and their ivory about abraham and sarah and then and and isaac and rebecca and jacob and rachel and leah that's what is about personal relationships the bible tells us the story of the personal relationship before it begins to talk about the political phenomena phenomena of the book of exodus ditto with one samuel which talks about the birth of israel's monarchy for saul and david it tells us the story of ruth of the kind what's the phrase that lovely phrase the kindness of strangers of ruth's attachment to naomi and bowie's kindness to both of them and right at the end of the book of ruth comes the punch line that ruth is in fact the great grandmother of king david israel's greatest kings the torah is telling us something extremely important the primacy of the personal over the political do not expect to create a happy society simply by political institutions which if necessity use force cohesive power that's what politics is about the primacy of the personal over the political uh oh okay oh i like that [Applause] you have made somebody very happy thank you okay that's number one number two uh a fundamental jewish distinction as you know it follows from this is that happiness is to be found down here in the here and now in this world in this life in the physical universe that god created in seven times called god good it is here in this embodied existence that wonderful mix as the bible calls it of dust of the earth and breath of god in other words judaism rejects a whole tradition in religion gnosticism manichaeism even platonism that sharp separation of body and soul the physical the spiritual the time and the eternity the particular and the universal happiness is down here in the particularity of our embodied existence and that's that's uh and and and uh it was the late sydney morgan besser if i'm not mistaken professor of philosophy at columbia who once proved how useless platonism can be in the real world you know plato's theory of forms that the reality is not all these particulars down here it's the form of things up there he took his philosophy students to a restaurant in the lower east side he's called over the waiter and said waiter i'd like to order soup so the waiter said yeah pizza chicken soup we have a wonderful borscht none of those says morgan beza i just want soup if you want to drink soup you've got to drink it in its particularity you cannot drink the platonic form of soup so okay so judaism is down here in the particularity that's point two number three there is in judaism and this again very distinctive a rejection in the jewish mainstream not on the borders but in the in of the voluntary embrace of suffering or poverty with the exclusion of the qumran sect there are no monasteries no convents in judaism there is no virtue of celibacy in judaism there are no holy mendicants who give away their wealth and live as paupers and there are some remarkable statements in judaism we have one classic example of a person who does give up something the nazirite who force wears wine and all the products of grapes and doesn't have a haircut either and the truth and the bible says when he comes to the end of his period of nazarite ship he brings a sin offering why does he bring us in offering now the plain reading of this is obvious he's bringing a sin offering because he's going from a high state of holiness back into ordinary life but the rabbis read it exactly the other way around why is he bringing a sin offering for the sin of becoming a nazarite in the first place he gave up wine god created wine he gives it his personal texture sometimes god created wine for us to enjoy and this man turns his back on one of god's blessings so that rejection of rejection is very central to judaism then and uh and maimonides says something so profound here maimonides in the guide of the publix talks about the perfection of the body and perfection of the soul the perfection of the body is you know creating a society where you can live earn a living living safety the perfection of the soul is something we all do in the innermost resources of our own consciousness and maimonides who is a great perfection of the soul guy says nonetheless perfection of the body takes priority because you don't believe that if you're sick or you're hungry or you're homeless you can think noble thoughts about god poverty humiliates and that is a very jewish approach very different from other religions in order to be able to have the higher spiritual achievements your basic human needs need to be satisfied and that's why judaism from the very earliest days and always throughout all the diaspora had its own voluntary welfare state which made sure that no one lived at the extremes of poverty then of course we have david's point which is very often life is boring you know and and it is a matter of taking the kids to school or or it would be if i ever took the kids to school i learned especially not to be able to drive in order to anyway and and here i would say david one of the most glorious things of judaism it's the way i call it the poetry of the everyday you know when when you s when food comes with its aura of sanctity the whole laws of kashrut when when when when on shabbat you know you take a simple glass of wine and and two loaves of bread and you welcome the divine presence you know to share it with you when you sing a hymn of praise to the woman of the family when you bless your children judaism etches the quotidian with the charisma of sanctity and that is what we call halacha it's there in the bible it's that way in which we made the home the locus of so many of our important ceremonies and rituals not the synagogue and that i think the poetry of the everyday is what makes the boring nonetheless happy making and that that's very important and then i mentioned the sabbath this too is important for societal happiness read the classical writers on judaism the greek and roman writers who wrote about judaism were scathing about one institution above all the sabbath they couldn't work out the sabbath what is this sabbath jews are lazy that's what they said that's it they couldn't believe greeks everyone knows what is a holy day everyone knows that but a holy day whose holiness consists in the fact that you don't work that they didn't understand the talmud says and i have no i never checked that somebody here will know the talmud says that when the scholars you know in the letter of aristeas gathered together those 72 or 70 scholars to translate the bible into greek the septuagint they deliberately changed certain sentences that they thought would be unintelligible in greek and according to the governor and the mengele if i'm not mistaken one of those was the sentence on the seventh day god completed the work which he had done and instead they wrote on the sixth day because they didn't think the greek could understand that sabbath is itself a creation now it is interesting that greece and rome declined and fell with remarkable rapidity and jews in judaism are still here and the re yeah and the reason is that just like individuals civilizations can suffer from burnout and the sabbath is the antidote to that and that is why the sabbath is societal happiness at its very best go to jerusalem on a sabbath morning breathe the quiet understand that on the sabbath where there's no working no shopping no driving we're all enjoying god's world on equal terms shabbat is civic time the way a wonderful park is civic space it's beautiful and we all enjoy it on equal terms that is part of societal happiness then gratitude you will know from the famous so-called nuns study which began in the university of minnesota i don't know where it began where it followed up but this was looking at a number of nuns who at the age of 20 or so had written on their entrances navitiates their own autobiography in their own words and 60 years later they found that those who expressed at the age of 20 the most uh gra the greatest gratitude thankfulness for life were the ones who lived longer or longest and that is one of the great things about religion in general it teaches you gratitude i think in one longitudinal study they discovered that uh people who go regularly to ours worship live seven years longer than those who don't or as i said to elaine maybe it just seems seven years longer when a jew gets up he or she says a whole litany of blessings thank you god for giving me your back life thank you god for the crow who woke me up in the morning and i threw something at it thank you god for when i put my foot down you create some ground for it to stand on all the rest of you everything you can thank god for we thank god for every day and that every item of food every item of drink we thank god we do uh it was heidiger is not my favorite person who said thinking is thanking and that is true in judaism so there is the gratitude and then um and all of these things and then all of those things are embodied in jewish law and the result of which is to create what aaron lichtenstein calls societal beatitude um i would just add uh two other elements one that has become highly significant today with the um with the uh uh with the spread of the angry atheists you have some in america we have most of them in britain or we we exported some to you we sent you christopher hitchens we get richard dawkins in case we felt lonely and uh you know the angry atheist what i call the intellectual equivalent of road rage anyway and the essence of the angry atheists here we are in a universe that is meaningless we we we we we are an irrelevant spec on a minor third-rate planet and and in case we thought there was anything special about us uh stephen hawking and ed al think there are a billion infinity of other parallel universes we are totally insignificant we are we are born we live we die and it is if we had never been we are dust on the surface of infinity at the end of the day to contemplate the meaninglessness of the universe condemns you to an epicurean morality and i don't recommend an epicurean morality because its lifespan was one century i mean epicurus well it was revived by lucretius but one way or another a society that has gone epicurean as a society on the brink of decline in judaism we believe there is meaning we matter in the scheme of things that is what victor frankl discovered in auschwitz quoting nietzsche those who have a why can survive any how those who feel a sense of divine presence a task a call a vocation a mission can sustain the will to live even at the gates of hell on earth and that sense of belonging happens with special power in the abrahamic monotheisms it begins with god's call to abraham and it is there in maimonides who codifies the view of the rabbis that each of us should consider at every moment that the fate of the world will be dependent on how we choose our next action if there's one thing abrahamic monotheisms do it is attach significance to the individual life and finally the point at which we really converge with the dalai lama which is hope that last great dimension of happiness there is a direct contrast between the greek concepts of ananke and moira an inexorable fate on the one hand and the jewish concepts of freedom responsibility repentance forgiveness on the other do we face a closed or not available that believe in choice and forgiveness don't even understand the word tragedy for a people that suffered more than most you will be surprised to know that in hebrew there is no word for tragedy and when modern hebrew wanted it it had to borrow tragedy why because judaism and doubtless christianity likewise are the principled defeat refutation of tragedy in the name of hope and that i think is the final point of happiness so i hope i've given you an idea now of three kinds of happiness three strands in a very complex picture in judaism happiness is struggle let's call that prophetic happiness number two happiness is peace let's call that wisdom happiness and happiness as the thing we share let's call that covenantal happiness and i think that is enough at least to begin a conversation but let us end uh by saying you know let us have this confidence because it matters and it matters because only if we know where we want to get in our lives do we stand any chance of getting there so let me finally end with my favorite story of all time on just this point and it makes me happy here it is my hero philosophically ludwig wittgenstein the late professor david dauber regis professor of roman law once told me that wittgenstein i told dauber he said what are you doing i was a student at the time he said i said i'm studying philosophy dauber said dalby said terrible thing philosophy philosophers are so you know they're so up in the air with their own things they never know what day of the week it is terrible give up philosophy immediately and he told me the following story the wittgenstein was standing at the oxford station waiting for the london train with two of his disciples hla heart the private jurisprudence and elizabeth anscombe and they were so immersed in metaphysical conversation that they entirely failed to notice the trainers it steamed into the station and as people were getting off and so on and it was only as the train was leaving the station they looked up and they saw the train and as tauber told it professor hart ran and heaved himself on board and elizabeth anscombe an enormous woman ran and heaved herself on board and wittgenstein ran but could not catch up with the train and was standing there as it steamed out of the station and he was looking so crestfallen that people came up to a lady saw him and took pity on him and said don't worry there'll be another train in an hour's time and he looked at her and said but you don't understand they came to see me off thank you

Channel: Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory

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Length: 47min 1sec (2821 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 13 2020