Permission to be Joyful
We’re living through wild times. Everyone is navigating their own slew of personal and familial challenges while also looking out at an unstable world that seems on the verge of chaos.
And yet I find myself in the midst of a Jewish Holiday, Succot - the Festival of Booths, with an Instruction, a Mitzvah, to be happy. What a paradox.
And I am happy! I’m also distraught, stressed, worried, and at times scared and nervous.
And I am full of joy and gratitude and delight.
It’s curious. Can we really be instructed to feel something? Can joy be commanded? Doesn’t that risk bypassing grief, anger, or fear?
“Don’t worry, be happy,” the song goes.
But how do we be happy without ignoring reality?
A lovely teacher, Rabbi Shai Held, points out that in the Jewish tradition we’re also instructed to Love. To love the Divine Source of Creation and to Love our neighbors. He suggests, that while we often talk about and think about love as a feeling another way of looking at it is a posture of living, or an orientation towards life.
Not only does this address the strangeness of being instructed to feel a particular way, but it also addresses how we’re meant to ACT our love into the world, not just feel feelings.
Maybe joy, like love, isn’t a mood but a muscle. Perhaps we engender Joy through attention, practice, and gratitude.
So maybe here too, the idea is to have a Posture of Joy. The instruction to be happy is an invitation to live in gratitude and appreciation for the gifts of Life. This doesn’t mean we ignore the bad or avoid feeling grief and sadness, it’s means we open ourselves to both.
I recently went to a party with a group of friends. One of those friends is going through a particularly challenging time. I checked in with him, “How are you? Is this genuinely fun? Are you just here because you’d committed? Fake it till you make it?”
It felt good to connect a bit deeper in an otherwise bright and lively space. He unabashedly acknowledged it was an effort to be there. He wasn’t really even trying to have a good time, but he was showing up. In a way, he was holding a posture of openness to Joy, to Celebration, to being in the midst of happiness despite his struggles.
He ended up having a good time. Maybe he didn’t have as much fun as I did, but he gave himself permission to show as he was, to be in the atmosphere of Joy even while weathering his own storm.
(I’m grateful to have cultivated friendships with this level of truth and authenticity - it felt so good to actually know where he was at, for me and for him).
Perhaps this is about PERMISSION…
In times that are dark, do we feel guilty to be happy…?
Maybe we need permission from the divine or from each other to celebrate, laugh, and have fun.
I’ve been hearing a lot the notion of Joy as Resistance. Joy as Activism. It’s a lovely idea that says helping ourselves and each other find moments of relief from the onslaught of world events, and from the throes of our personal lives is a gift; it’s a form medicine.
Being joyful doesn’t mean we ignore the hard and tragic things in our lives and in the world; it means we also celebrate the goodness!
Being joyful is not disrespectful to grief or pain. It’s a way of trusting the tides of life.
It can offer a chance for those experiencing hardship to remember that Joy is possible.
Maybe the mitzvah/instruction isn’t just a command to be happy — it’s permission to cultivate joy as a way of resisting despair.
May this day and week bring you glimmers of joy and of gratitude for the goodness in your life, big and small. And may you allow yourself to feel that joy all the way… into your heart, into your nervous system, and down to your bones.
And may that joy propel you to spread goodness and connection and love to those around you, offering a gift of light in less bright times.
If you’re wanting space to find your way back to Joy, there are few spots left for The Gathering Ground.
And if you’re dad who would like support we have a few spots left in our next 8 week cohort of Council of Fathers…
With love and joy,
Noah