How to Find Joy

Yesterday we talked about the difficulty of choosing to praise when your world is crumbling.  We've been looking at this verse from Romans 5:3:  "We continue to shout our praise even when we're hemmed in with troubles . . . "

Rabbi Simon Jacobsen has a talk radio show, and I found a transcript from a show on March 5, 2000, called "How to Find Joy in Your Life."  I'd like to share some of it with you (go to http://www.meaningfullife.com/torah/holidays/6b/How_to_Find_Joy_in_Your_Life.php to see the entire transcript):


"As I said, the antithesis of joy is sadness, and these emotions are forces in our lives that have a very strong impact. I believe that some of these emotions are critical in our own growth and healing process...

"Many of us feel that we are victims of circumstances. If something in our daily life brings some joy in our lives, great, we thank G-d for it, but is there something that we can actually do, that we can actually initiate, that can help us bring joy?

"So question number one is, is joy genetic? You do find people who are just naturally joyous, who have a kind of laid-back attitude where it’s just good to be in their presence, and then there are others who may be very serious, but at the same time, they always bring us down.

"At the outset, let me give an overview from a Torah perspective about what this concept called joy, simcha, is, and whether it is considered genetic— nature vs. nurture.

"We can learn a lot by observing children at their quintessential selves, because before children have been affected by society, parents, and community, they can sometimes give us a specimen of what our lives would be like before we were abused or hurt or disappointed.

"Children have natural cheer. They have a natural, enchanted air about them; some would call it naivete because they haven’t yet tasted of the pains of life, but you can also say that it does definitely reflect on a certain natural state that we all have within us.

"When does a child cease to be consistently cheerful? When a child first gets disappointed: the first grief or the first loss or the first disappointment. I would say, to put it in more cosmic terms, that you experience sadness the first time there’s some deception, some type of split in a person’s life. Sadness for the loss, sadness for what could have been, sadness for not getting what you want. But naturally speaking on a cosmic level, a soul, a spiritual entity or spiritual state, where you’re in complete touch with who you are and what you’re supposed to be doing, should be literally a seamless flow of joy.

"In other words, from that perspective, joy is a completely natural state. It’s not even an expression of a spiritual type of existence, it’s equated with life itself. Like a fish swimming in its own waters has that type of natural cheer.

"Now, living in a world of so much grief and pain, when we see someone joyous, it’s like a novelty for us, an exotic experience. But for someone who has that flow, that seamlessness, where there isn’t a dichotomy in life of what you want and what you expect or a deception of different forms, then joy comes very naturally, and that’s why children are joyous.

"So their naivete in a sense serves them well because they haven’t yet tasted from what it means to live in a world of deception. Once they get those disappointments, the joy begins to bottle up to the point where it becomes so locked up for some, that it can’t even be accessed again.

"It’s critical to see joy from this perspective, because if joy is an acquired state, something that you develop at some point (later) in your life, then a very strong argument can be made that once you’ve lost a reason to be happy, or you’ve suffered grief, there’s no way of reconnecting.

"However, if joy is a natural state of feeling a certain sense of belonging, a feeling within that you are important and you have a value, then it’s just a question of reclaiming that right, not creating something new.

"So the argument that I’m submitting to all of you is, that joy is something that each of us has in our hearts. Even if you are the saddest person and you haven’t smiled in years, you have a joy, a gladness in your heart, that may in some way be blocked or sealed away because you may not feel that there’s any reason to access it, but it’s there, and the key is learning how to dig into those reservoirs and draw from those wells of joy."

I'm letting Rabbi Jacobsen do all the work today.  I'll comment tomorrow.  Have a great day!