High Holiday Series 5772
Sermons Delivered in Gold Coast, Australia The Road to Happiness
Rabbi Don Levy
28 September, 2011
Rosh Hashanah Evening
Family
Most of us, if asked what is the thing we most wish for in our lives, will respond: “I want to be happy.” In doing so, we instinctively name the one thing that is probably more elusive in our lives than just about anything else. And that only makes sense. Happiness, if we think about it, is far more elusive than, say professional or financial success. Either of these is probably far easier than happiness for most of us to achieve.
Now let me state from the outset that I’m not knocking success: professional, financial or both – and they often do go together. That success is a blessing cannot be denied. There is no question that success makes a big contribution to one’s sense of self, to one’s security and well-being. These are not things to sniff about. As Tevye the Milkman said so eloquently in Fiddler on the Roof: “It’s no shame to be poor, but it’s no great honor either. So what would have been so terrible if I had…a small fortune?” And then he breaks into the song, If I were a Rich Man. The song humorously expresses sentiments each one of us have harbored at least once in our lives, and probably many more times! But having said that, we all know – at least intellectually – that there are far more important things to achieve in life.
I specify that we know this ‘intellectually’ because of the Great Paradox. The paradox is this: while claiming that happiness is our more cherished goal in life, most of us invest far more of our time, energy, and initiative to achieving professional and financial success. So why the paradox? I believe it is attributable mainly to two things.
The first thing is the notion that success will, or at least likely will, lead to happiness. I think that, in our heart of hearts, most of us buy into this notion at least partially. Success leads to the things I mentioned above – sense of self, security, and well-being. Most of all, though it leads to stuff. Stuff that we can own. Stuff that can make our lives easier, or more fun, or inflate our egos. But stuff does not lead to happiness. It can impede our quest for happiness if we let it. But it does not bring happiness.
The second thing is the reality that we often have no clue as to how to quest after happiness. In fact, I would take it a step further. I would venture to say that, while we understand that happiness is such a sublime goal, at the same time we don’t really have a clear vision as to what, exactly, happiness is. If we don’t know what it is, or what it looks like, or what brings it, then of course we have a hard time seeking it out.
Some of you who are history buffs or America-philes are aware of the famous line from my country’s Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
I understand that I have to be careful about my America-centric view of the world here, but Stephen E. Lucas, author of The Art of Public Speaking considered the phrase “…life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…” to be “one of the most well-crafted, influential phrases in the history of the English language.”
So the Pursuit of Happiness is one of the ‘trinity’ of rights that the founding fathers of my country considered to be not only among the most important, but even God-ordained.
Being that this is Rosh Hashanah, I have not come tonight to lecture you on American history or the history of English rhetoric. I would, however like to talk about the pursuit of happiness. In doing so, I realize that I may be taking a risk. You may find it jarring that I have chosen this as the subject not only of my sermon for Erev Rosh Hashanah. If so, than how much more so that I intend this to be the theme of all my sermons for these Days of Awe. So, having taken the risk, I beg your indulgence and ask that you listen with an open mind. Look at the bright side; at least I’m avoiding politics!
Now why would I suspect that my talking about happiness of all things in the course of the High Holy Days might be jarring to some in this room tonight? Perhaps because it seems such a personal topic. Many of us have come to see these Days of Awe as a time to focus not on personal issues, but larger issues of concern to the entire community. I’ve been told in the past: Rabbi, talk about Israel and Peace in the Middle East. Talk about assimilation and its implications to the survival of the Jewish people. Talk about the need for a rational approach to religious faith in the 21st century of the Common Era. After all, it’s Erev Rosh Hashanah, the most-attended Jewish service of the year except for the one that we’ll all attend ten days from now, on Erev Yom Kippur.
But consider this. It’s true that the large crowd we have in attendance tonight of all nights might argue for speaking to a larger theme. On the other hand, most of you are here in search of some personal connection to Judaism, some personal message relevant to your own lives as a take-away from these days which many consider the most holy days of the year.
I’ll take it a step farther. I have heard many Jews complain that they show up for services on Rosh Hashanah, perhaps after having avoided attending synagogue the rest of the year, hoping for some message to help them connect in some personal way to the spirituality of the Jewish Tradition. They then hear a sermon about Middle East peace and go away disappointed. Not that Middle East peace isn't an important topic, mind you. But they had hoped for some message that would touch them in a very personal way, to help them with their internal struggles as they try once again to connect. If this describes you, then please relax and lsten on.
Over the next ten days, I would like to talk about The Road to Happiness, or one way we can achieve it. But first, returning to my original premise, I think it necessary to define happiness. And when you hear from me my working definition of happiness, you shall understand why I consider happiness to be, in the words of the American-Jewish commentator Dennis Prager, 'A Serious Problem.'
It’s not easy to define happiness, in part, because there are a lot of distractions out there that we often mistake for happiness.
We mistake pleasure for happiness. Now pleasure is a good thing. It can make you feel…well, pleasured! Physical or emotional pleasure leaves you with a glow that is certainly good and therapeutic. A little pleasure can compensate for lots of pain and drudgery. When we experience pleasure, all seems right with the world. But once the pleasure ends, the feeling fades quickly. It doesn’t endure like happiness endures. Pleasure isn’t happiness.
We mistake fun for happiness. When we’re having fun, it’s easy to think or say, “I’m happy.” But we’re not necessarily happy; the only sure thing is that we’re having fun. And once the fun ends – you guessed it, the feeling fades quickly. Fun isn’t happiness.
No, happiness is far more enduring than pleasure or fun. It isn’t dependent on being in the middle of doing something in particular. When I say happiness, it means felicity. Blessedness. A deep satisfaction. Wholeness. In my working definition, Happiness is not an emotion, but a state of mind and being. Happiness can actualize all manner of positive emotions, but it is something far more lasting than an emotion. Happiness is having that sense of self that makes others say of you, ‘He is comfortable in his own skin.’
Now let me let you in on a secret; we can’t have another skin. Oh, we may try to manufacture one! Many of our fellow human beings spend much time and money going to plastic surgeons in the hopes that, at the end of the day, they’ll have a different ‘skin.’ That they’ll be a different person. A more attractive person. A person better positioned to achieve success, love… happiness. Michael Jackson, poor tragic Michael Jackson, proved that, if you try hard enough to create for yourself a new skin, your obsession may very well turn you into something too freakish to behold. At the end of the day, we are stuck with the skin we were born with…so we would be well-advised to become comfortable in it. When we do, that’s about as close to happiness as is possible.
Now please do not understand my remarks as an indictment of plastic surgery, plastic surgeons, or those who seek out their ministrations! It’s wonderful that modern medical science can help us overcome unsightly conditions that we may have been born with, or which we possess as a result of an accident or other injury. It was truly a blessing, for example that surgeons were able to give a new face to the woman in Connecticut who had lost hers to a mauling by a chimpanzee. The miracle of plastic surgery, in effect, gave that woman’s life back to her. It is truly amazing how modern plastic surgery can help many seriously afflicted individuals to feel a new confidence to face life. It is also wonderful that we can easily be cured of minor, unsightly features that would not necessarily impair our happiness but would be a constant thorn in our side. It’s wonderful that such things as sagging skin, growths, scarring and other non-life threatening conditions can be made to look normal. It is not my intention to criticize in any way, those of us who have sought the surgeon’s knife, or laser, to correct these imperfections.
So now that we’ve determined exactly what happiness is – at least according to Levy which is as good a definition as any – let me proceed to the heart of my thesis which I’ll propound over the next ten days. For a number of years I’ve pondered the question of happiness, and why it seems so difficult to achieve. In the 15 years of my rabbinate, many people have sought my counsel on many issues. In so many cases – whether marital or other relationship issues, substance abuse problems, whatever – I’ve come to see that unhappiness was at the root of so many of them. But beyond my counseling ministry, let me offer the self-disclosure that I’ve spent a lifetime seeking out happiness myself. I therefore understand the difficulty of the process. And I cannot claim to have the final answer, either. But, once I began to understand exactly what happiness is, I was able to contemplate how one might achieve it. I never felt I had a very clear vision of the means, until one day when I heard the sociologist Charles Murray speak on the radio, offering his own thesis as to what enables a person to achieve happiness.
Now Charles Murray is a somewhat controversial figure. Back in 1994 he co-wrote with the Harvard psychologist Richard Hernstein, a book entitled The Bell Curve that was reviled as racist in some circles. I read the book at the time to see what the controversy was all about and was surprised to find it not racist as charged; it was an examination of the role of IQ in American society. Murray and Hernstein labeled those with higher IQ’s as being a ‘cognitive elite,’ and they made a number of observations about the distribution of IQ’s in the population. They attributed low IQ levels among minority groups to partly-genetic, but more preponderantly to environmental factors. Their conclusions – that every effort had to be made to help minority group members to overcome all factors in order to get them into a more advantageous position in society – was, as the kids like to say today, hardly rocket science. But that they would dare suggest that genetics had any role in the reality – that caused both authors to be labeled as racist.
In the presentation Murray was making the day I heard him on the radio, he offered four areas of our lives in which happiness rests. Murray’s thesis immediately resonated with me, in part because I like formulae that are symmetrical in their structure, and what could be more symmetrical than a four-part theory? Besides, as I listened, I realized that the four areas he identified made his theory a perfect framework for a series of sermons for the High Holy Days! So here are the four areas which according to Charles Murray, if we tend them assiduously, we are most likely to achieve happiness. They are: Family, Community, Faith, and Vocation. Exactly in that order. They are precisely the things that are most difficult to achieve in life…and that’s why happiness so often eludes us.
That Family forms the most basic building block in this equation should be, as the kids also like to say today, a No-Brainer. Healthy and productive family relationships result in a functional family that can be a safe haven in life’s storms. But that’s not to say that it is easy to achieve: far from it! But if I’m correct, then why is a functional and loving family so hard to achieve? Allow me to offer some thoughts:
In the micro-environment of family, we expect love to flow between members. But we mistakenly expect that love to flow unconditionally. A parent should love a young child unconditionally. A young child needs to understand that she has the unconditional love of her parent in order to feel the security she needs to live and grow. But for the rest of us, the notion that unconditional love is our due is, well, infantile. Any grown person who believes that his spouse, his children, his extended family are obligated to love him unconditionally, no matter what he does or doesn’t do…and if he bases his behavior on that assumption…he’s going to be awfully lonely most of the time. An adult is not obligated to be with another adult and accept him unconditionally. Just as an employer can fire an employee who isn’t doing his job, a spouse can divorce a mate who isn’t doing his job – showing high regard, cherishing his mate, his partner, his spouse, his children. With very little social onus to pay for divorce today – and that is surely a two-edged sword if ever there was one – it’s a relatively easy thing to ‘fire’ a spouse who doesn’t measure up. Now, please don’t think that Levy is advocating divorce without deep thought and consideration as to its consequences – G-d forbid! All I’m saying is that the one who thinks his spouse is required to love him unconditionally – who doesn’t think he has to work for his spouse’s love – is committing a grave mistake.
So love is not necessarily unconditional, but in family we can and should experience love that is not judgmental, that gives the benefit of the doubt, that tries to see the positive in the family member at all times. That contextualizes a moment’s indiscretion or grumpiness in a lifetime of herculean efforts to make – and keep – things right. The family is the basis of our lives; it provides the haven from which we can take risks in the ‘outside’ world. Without family, we are nothing.
We therefore would be well-advised to place our strongest concentration on developing, nurturing, and protecting the relationships that together, form family. We of the Y-chromosome brotherhood often, mistakenly, direct the lion’s share of our efforts outside family: to our work, to earning a living, to making our mark in the world. Look, it’s of no small importance to make a living; one of the most basic needs of a family is, after all, a measure of financial security. But if we’re honest, and I return to the point I made several minutes ago, we confuse the importance of taking care of our family’s needs, with providing for their desire for stuff. The latter is not important in the greater scheme of things. I see so many adults – men and women unfortunately – measuring the good they have provided for their children by how much stuff they’ve been able to buy them.
To paraphrase an oft-repeated maxim: many have, on their deathbeds, regretted not spending more time with their spouse and kids; but nobody on his deathbed has ever regretted not spending more time at work.
I’ll talk about work – actually vocation, a related concept – later during these High Holy Days. I’m not knocking work. Work ennobles. But in the greater scheme of things, our relationships – specifically our family relationships – are the most important thing in moving us toward happiness. Family is the blessing from which all others flow.
Now I know that this is about as basic a wisdom as one can find. If only we were all wise…but sadly we’re not. We squander our family relationships in pursuit of things that don’t matter nearly as much. Yet a supportive, loving family based on a web of positive relationships is the first building block toward achieving happiness. We humans were designed and built to function in a family, unlike some other of G-d’s creatures that thrive alone. We make the mistake of thinking that independence is an important end-state of the growing process. We push our kids to gradually separate from us until they’ve achieved it.
Let me be clear: independence is a vitally important state. If we cannot let our kids achieve a degree of independence, we’re stunting their emotional growth. Believe me, I love my children as much as anybody else in this room, but I consider the idea that they might still be dependent on me in their thirties, a nightmare! I want them to experience independence at a young age. But I do not want them to stay in that state. Rather, independence should be a jumping-off point to achieving the ultimate state – interdependence. This is what family is all about, and this is what we human beings are all about, and yet it is a difficult state to achieve. We enjoy watching western movies about the odd lone wolf, the drifter who saves the town and then drifts back into his solitude. But we don’t really think of his loneliness as the ideal state. We were created to form close family units.
Happiness is achieved in ever expanding, concentric circles. And the most basic of these circles is that of family. Take care of family and only then move outside to the next ring. I’ll talk about that ring – community – tomorrow, but for now let us all contemplate family. Are we nurturing our family relationships? Are we putting them first? Worthy thoughts to think, as we enter these most thoughtful days of the year.
High Holiday Series
The Road to Happiness
Rabbi Don Levy
29 September, 2011
Rosh Hashanah Morning
Community
Last night I told you that I’m going to spend these High Holy Days exploring the sociologist Charles Murray’s thesis concerning what brings us enduring happiness. He named four sources: family, community, faith, and vocation. Some time ago, I heard him speak on the radio, presenting this thesis, and it immediately hit home. In fact, almost my first thought was that he had outlined for me a High Holy Days series of sermons! Inspiration has come, at least for me, from stranger places!
As you remember, last night I defined ‘happiness’ for the sake of this thesis. I used four words – yes, I seem to like the symmetry of fours! And they are: felicity, blessedness, satisfaction, and wholeness. The biggest problem with happiness is that we are conditioned to think of it as an emotional state. As such, it is easy to mistake other emotionally-based states for happiness. We experience pleasure, and we think we’ve achieved happiness. Or fun. Or sometimes, excitement. When we think of happiness as being emotional, it is easy to let these lesser things fool us. But happiness is far better. If we achieve it, it endures, even when we’re not being pleasured, or having fun, or getting excited about something.
But as important as it is to form close and loving families, that is not enough. We need a community in which to find our sense of place. A community is a group of families that band together for mutual support. A community is not the town or city in which we live. Geographic proximity does not, in and of itself, create community. Rather, communities are formed by families with deeply-held common values, with common interests, with common concerns.
I often refer to a congregation as a community, for in the ideal sense it provides a way for us to join together in community. It provides us a framework for joining with others who move to a distinct rhythm – a Jewish rhythm – in their lives. I’m not advocating that your Jewish congregation is the only milieu for creating community. In my home country, many Jews create real community around other affinity groups. Around the parent-teacher alliances at our children’s schools. Or their sports teams. Or scout troops. Some of us, although our college years are a considerable distance behind us, maintain our community with those who were our mates in school. A variant: I feel that I still belong to a community of the guys with whom I served in one particular unit in the US Navy when I was flying reconnaissance missions over the Mediterranean Sea many years back. The fact that we worked and played in isolation and shared the experience of war and danger together, banded us together more solidly than other groups of friends. Thanks to the miracle of list-serves and Yahoo and Facebook groups, we still keep in close touch and see ourselves as a community.
But communities are not mutually exclusive. By this I mean that we can belong to more than one community simultaneously. So if any or all of the affinity groups, formal and informal, to which we belong constitute communities, that certainly does not preclude your Jewish congregation from serving that purpose as well. Communities are formed in partially-overlapping circles, not concentric circles. One can form a close community with one group, and it does not preclude creation of a second community with a second group, most of whose members are distinct from the members of the first group.
A reality of contemporary life in an open society is that, for a significant number of us, some or even most of our community-building energy is focused outside the Jewish community. If my observation is in error and does not at all apply to Australian Jewry, please correct me at some point in the near future. But if the sociology of Australian Jewry is at all similar to that of American Jewry, the realities is that, for some of you, this congregation does not constitute a community according to the definition I’ve presented. If my assertion rings true, then what is the impediment to forming close community in your Jewish congregation? What is it that causes some of us to see a congregation’s function primarily as a sort of business, providing specific services, in our lives? I think the primary culprits are two: our busy, busy lives, and the isolation we feel from one another.
That our lives are incredibly busy is indisputable. Many of us who are still in our working years feel incredibly insecure; we feel compelled to work harder and harder. This is in part due to our mistaken belief, which I pointed out last night, that it is stuff that will bring us happiness. Instead of working to create lives enriched by family, community, faith and vocation, we instinctively think that we need stuff to be happy. We repeatedly make major purchases that we think will bring us happiness yet which do not. But instead of seeing the folly in seeking happiness through an endless progression of stuff, we start looking toward the next big purchase! If we would only see the truth of this folly, we would at least be positioned to curb the busy-ness of our lives to make time for family and community.
If we do feel an essential isolation from one another in the congregation as I’ve just asserted, why is that so? In my experience, we isolate ourselves in large part, out of an internalized inadequacy in our Judaism. Maybe our Jewish education – if we have had any – wasn’t enough to get us over the ‘learning curve.’ Maybe we feel we’ve isolated ourselves from other Jews because of our lifestyle choices, or our marriage choices, or something else we simply cannot define.
Last year I officiated at a memorial service for a woman who had not been affiliated Jewishly; she had been on the fringes of the community in Colorado. Raised in a strongly-affiliated and identified Jewish household, she had made the ‘mistake’ of falling in love with a non-Jewish man. Then she made the ‘mistake’ of adopting his faith, Roman Catholicism, because he was more strongly rooted in it than she was in the Jewish faith.
(By the way, you’ll note that I used he term ‘mistake’ in quotes both times to make the point that I’m not at all being critical of this woman. Our life journeys often take us on unpredictable detours that lead to unfortunate circumstances; we can look at these as ‘mistakes’ or we can get over them and move on.)
At some point, this woman had recanted her adherence to the Catholic Church. But instead of returning to the Jewish community, her self-inflicted shame at having practiced another faith for many years made her unable to take the step of re-embracing the community to which she rightfully belonged. She feared that the community would judge her severely and was therefore unwilling to take that risk. As a result, she lived without the comfort of religious community; something that I believe would have been a great comfort to her in the last years of her life.
But the woman’s fear was as unfounded in Colorado, as it surely is here in Gold Coast, Australia! Unless my guess is way off base, all of us in this room, in different ways and to different degrees, have rebelled against, rejected, or pushed into the background our religious faith and involvement. The person in question, or someone like her, probably would have felt right at home in a group of Jews trying each in his own way, to reclaim a possession lost somewhere along the path of life. In that sense, we have far more in common than that divides us. In our isolation from one another, whatever the cause of that isolation, we lose sight of this common thread, of the fact many of our struggles follow common themes!
(By the way, please don’t read into my use of this particular example a criticism of the Catholic Church. The Catholic faith provides a deep sense of meaning to so many of its members, exactly in the way that Judaism should for its members. My point was that the woman in question that rejected the Catholic faith but not replaced it, in an operative way, with the childhood faith that she felt she’d reclaimed in rejecting Catholicism.)
Happiness is so elusive for many of us, but it certainly need not be. If you’re catching my drift from the first two installments of my High Holy Days message, it’s primarily a matter of keeping various needs in balance, of setting the right priorities and working to see a clear vision. This is not to say that it’s easy. Very little in life that is worthwhile, is also easy. But it isn’t complicated, that we cannot figure it out. It’s just a matter of seeing these simple truths through the clutter and distractions that conspire to prevent us from realizing the happiness that it is our potential to possess.
The High Holy Days, more than anything else, are about seeing through the clutter and distractions. As we enter the days of consideration, the intermediate days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, I hope I have given you plenty to think about. When the Day of Decision comes a week from this Shabbat, let’s be more ready than ever to decide to create lives of happiness in the coming year. We certainly deserve them; to achieve anything less is to short-change ourselves.