Why We Rejoice
The seventh blessing of the wedding’s sheva brachot offers words to express the inexpressible. It represents an effort to answer the question of how does one describe pure joy?
Here is its attempt: “We praise You, Adonai our God, Sovereign of the universe: Creator of joy and gladness, love and companionship, laughter and song, pleasure and delight, harmony and celebration, peace and friendship.”
The blessing offers a litany of synonyms. Its words are rhythmic. “Sasson v’simcha, gila, rina, ditzah v’chedva, ahava v’achava shalom v’reiut.” Even though I have recited these words on countless occasions and offered them to hundreds of couples, I wonder if any words can ever fully express our sense of joy.
As we look forward to our celebration of Simhat Torah, Joy of Torah, I ask, is it possible to fully rejoice in the shadow of October 7th? Do these attacks now cast darkness over this day? The attackers not only murdered thousands but desecrated our holiday. Their hate clouds our joy. They must not be allowed to obscure our celebrations.
There is always pain. Every joy is tempered by loss. At every wedding someone is absent. I wonder if we use words like celebrate and rejoice too freely. We rarely think about their profound meaning. What is the meaning of joy? Rabbi Alan Lew anticipates this dilemma when he writes,
Joy is a deep release of the soul, and it includes death and pain. Joy is any feeling fully felt, any experience we give our whole being to. We are conditioned to choose pleasure and reject pain, but the truth is, any moment of our life fully inhabited, any feeling fully felt, any immersion in the full depth of life, can be the source of great joy. (This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation)
Death and pain are not antithetical to joy. Too often we confuse happiness with joy. Simcha, however, is a feeling that we feel deeply. It is something that consumes our whole being. There can be joy where there is also pain. Even when happiness is absent and smiles come less frequently, joy can exist.
Although all holidays, with the exceptions of Yom Kippur and Tisha B’Av, are supposed to be filled with joy, only Simhat Torah has joy in its actual name. What then is so joyful about concluding the Torah reading cycle and beginning it again?
Maybe it is as simple as we have lived another year with all of life’s wonders and disappointments, joys and pains, celebrations and tribulations. We have been privileged to bear witness to another year marked by the words of our Torah. They are of course the same words year after year, but we are different. And therefore, the Torah’s meaning, is different.
We do not arrive at answers. We are travelers on the pathway of this sacred scroll. We rejoice in the journey.
Thom Gunn writes, “Reaching no absolute, in which to rest,/ One is always nearer by not keeping still.” (On the Move)
We rejoice that we might find new meaning in these same words.