A Year of Jewish Joy
Yom Kippur Morning 5785 – 2024
As you disembark the ferry connecting Manhattan to Brooklyn, you are greeted at the Williamsburg ferry stop by a bright yellow, larger than life statue made up of the letters O and Y. Depending on which side you view the sculpture from, this iconic sculpture by American Jewish artist Deborah Kass either spells out “oy,” or “yo.” Since its initial installation in Brooklyn, the piece has found its way to California, to the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, and to countless reproductions in print, in jewelry, and in take-home size sculptures. “Oy” speaks to the quintessential Jewish Yiddish expression that has trickled into colloquial English. The Jewish English Lexicon, a dictionary that tracks the usage of Jewish words in English, defines “oy” as an “Exclamation of dismay, exasperation, or surprise.”[1] “Oy” can sometimes seem like it is the essence of what it means to be Jewish – to be perpetually dismayed with the state of the world, with the prospect of the Jewish future, with the horrors held in the Jewish past (and in the Jewish present). And yet, if we stay stuck in “oy” mode, we are missing out on a significant part of our Jewish equation. What’s the explanation for nearly every Jewish holiday? “They tried to kill us…we survived…let’s eat!” Our Judaism does not stop with “They tried to kill us.” They didn’t kill us. We did survive. And then we celebrate.
Over the course of our High Holy Day journey together, I’ve offered different motivations for “Why Be Jewish,” as we’ve explored what has brought Jews towards Judaism in the past year. Some are motivated to lean into their Judaism because of fear, because of the mandate of the weight of our collective history. Some are motivated to be Jewish because of the strong sense of community, of Jewish peoplehood, of connection to our beloved State of Israel. But what if we put the J back into our Judaism? Add J to OY and it becomes…JOY. As Michael Lopez introduced last night, this year we are embarking on a Year of Jewish Joy here at Temple Shalom.
Jewish joy might seem impossible, or even disrespectful, at this time in our history. How can we lean into Jewish joy with 101 hostages still somewhere underground in Gaza? Is Jewish joy even possible when we can’t gather for services without security at our doors, when we know far too many stories of synagogues and Jewish schools here in KW, throughout the Greater Toronto Area, and around the Jewish world, that have been the targets of antisemitic hate crimes? Not only is it possible, but joy must be the inevitable outcome of all of the oys that our people endure now and have endured in the past. Ross Gay, a Black American poet and author, took on the challenge of writing a short essayette about something delightful every single day for a year. He published the results of that project in The Book of Delights, a stunning collection of joy, from the beauty of the natural world to the joy of our human relationships. He writes of what it means to experience joy, to write joy, as a Black man: “It is a fact, that one of the objectives of popular culture, popular media, is to make blackness appear to be inextricable from suffering, and suffering from blackness. Is to conflate blackness and suffering. Suffering and blackness.”[2] We too, have conflated suffering and Jewishness, making it an essential, inextricable part of Jewish identity and the Jewish experience. The time has come for us to reclaim Jewishness from the chokehold of suffering and history – not to deny our legacy of suffering, but to declare, proudly, that suffering is not the sum total of Jewish identity.
Our suffering and our joy go hand in hand. Our history of suffering allows our joy to shine even more brightly. In The Book of Delights, Gay references Zadie Smith’s 2013 essay, “Joy.” Smith describes being en route to visit Auschwitz, to confront the worst examples of the capacity for evil and hate – the exact opposite of joy. And yet, on the way, her husband touched her gently, a small act of human intimacy and care. “We were heading toward that which makes life intolerable, feeling the only thing that makes it worthwhile. That was joy.”[3] Our knowledge of suffering and evil goes hand in hand with our experience of joy. We ritualize this idea every time a couple stands underneath the chuppah, the wedding canopy, and smashes a glass. Replete with multiple meanings, this ritual at its essence is a reminder of the brokenness of the world, of the destruction in our history, even at our most joyful moments. We cannot live a full Jewish life without both.
Perhaps you’ve heard the idea that Inuit language has at least a couple dozen words for snow, if not more. Given our litany of expulsions, pogroms, and destructions over the centuries, you might think that Hebrew has a long list of vocabulary for sadness and suffering. Although once you expand to synonyms, the list might grow, there are essentially three words for sadness that show up in our texts, our liturgy, and in modern Hebrew: atzuv, yagon, and tza’ar (which of course becomes the Yiddish tsuris). And yet, our list of vocabulary for happiness and joy is lengthy. Rabbi Jodie Gordon and Rabbi Jen Gubitz identify 8 different words for Jewish joy, each with its own nuances: simchah, orah, rinah, gilah, ditzah, sasson, osher, and chedvah. I want to dig a little deeper into chedvah, which Rabbis Gordon and Gubitz translate as “the happiness of being together.”[4] Many joys can be experienced solitarily, and yet our joy is amplified when we share it. In her memoir, I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself, Glynnis MacNicol writes of her trip to Paris in August 2021, after over a year of Covid isolation living alone in New York. Her summer spent in Paris is a return to embodied pleasure, to being with other humans. MacNicol eats, dances, walks, sits for hours over wine with friends. She writes of the return of the gaze of others to her life: “Gone are all the reflections of myself I have depended on for the last year, what feels like an eternity. Gone is the understanding of myself from the me I see looking back. Gone is the me who existed to so many loved ones only from the neck up, in a square box staring back at me from a screen. I am fully inside myself and only looking out.”[5] MacNicol’s pleasure is embodied. She experiences it by showing up, by being fully present with other humans, both beloved friends and near strangers. Our Jewish joy is embodied. We experience it when we show up to be with our community – it is the joy of a wedding couple under the chuppah, shared with their loved ones surrounding them. The joy of our holidays, of Shabbat, of the tiny rituals that build on each other to create a Jewish life. In his essay “Found Things,” Gay writes about sitting in an airport and noticing birds swooping through the terminal. In the moment, merely noticing the birds is not the endpoint of the joy. Gay finds himself:
…looking around, searching among the commuters for fellow compatriots of glee. I wonder if this impulse to share, the urge to elbow your neighbor, who maybe was not even your neighbor until the bird flew between you up into the pipes and rafters you did not notice until you followed the bird there, is also among the qualities of delight? And further, I wonder if this impulse suggests – and this is just a hypothesis, though I suspect there is enough evidence to make it a theorem – that our delight grows as we share it.[6]
Our delight grows as we share it. We do a lot of sharing of the horrible parts of life. Jewish WhatsApp and Facebook groups are often a litany of all of the ways that the world is turning against us, becoming a dangerous place to live as a Jew. We are quick to share news of the latest antisemitic incident, whether close to home or across the globe. This sharing is important and necessary, and allows for us to be together in our sorrow and to respond collectively. But do we share our delight in the same way? This year, let’s change that. Let’s share our joys. Let’s show up to celebrate them together. As you heard from Mike last night, this year, the board and I are inviting all of you to share your joys with this community – birthdays, anniversaries, professional and academic accomplishments. Not merely to share, but to celebrate together, with our community – with bimah blessings and onegs, hugs and mazel tovs.
In the introduction to The Book of Delights, Gay writes about how the year of daily writing about delight shifted his own attitudes, forming “a kind of delight radar…Something that implies that the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study.”[7] The more we seek out joy, the more joy there is to be found. There is no scarcity of joy in this world; we need not hoard it for ourselves, worried that a moment of joy is ephemeral and will disappear if we focus on it too hard. Our joy can be a constant, an abundant ongoing source of uplift.
It may seem counterintuitive to stand here in front of you, on Yom Kippur morning, the most solemn day of the Jewish year, and speak about joy and delight. When we list out the themes and motifs of this day, joy is usually not one of them. Midrash offers another way of looking at Yom Kippur, connecting it to that most joyful of holidays – Purim – with a play on words. Yom Kippur is also called Yom HaKippurim, and with a slight change of the vowel signs, this becomes, “the day that is like Purim.” What on earth could these two drastically different holidays have in common, beyond a similarly sounding name? The rabbis teach that in the Messianic Age, all of the Jewish holidays will be canceled – except for Yom Kippur and Purim. Every other holiday celebration, including the three pilgrimage festivals that are at the heart of our Jewish calendar, will be irrelevant in the world-to-come – except for these two.[8] Our mystical tradition goes even further to imagine that Yom Kippur will become a day of celebration akin to Purim.[9] What is eternal about Judaism? Not our suffering, and the sacred ways we memorialize it. Not our pilgrimage festivals. But our joy at surviving, and our commitment to the ongoing work of repentance, which will remain even in the world-to-come.
Our Year of Jewish Joy has three parts, three ways that each of you are invited to participate: study joy, share joy, and show up.
Study joy. The study of joy is a reorienting of all our senses to notice joy, to become experts in the ways that joy manifests itself in our lives. To turn on our joy radar. Not to turn off our radar for all that there is to despair about (how many times did I check Times of Israel while sitting to write these words back in August?), but to put a little more energy, a little more attention to seeking out joy instead of seeking out hate. Perhaps Gay’s prediction will prove true, that as we study joy, seek it out, we will find even more of it. And I hope you’ll join me to study in even more depth what our tradition has to teach us about joy as we traverse the calendar of the year, through a series of classes exploring Jewish manifestations of joy, starting with Sukkot on Tuesday night, October 22.
Share joy. When something brings you joy, when you have a simcha, a joyous lifecycle occasion in your family, share it with us. Watch your email this week for instructions on how to let Temple Shalom know when you’ve got a joy to be shared. Gay writes that “joy is the mostly invisible, the underground union between us.”[10] Let’s make it visible, together. We’ll be celebrating our joys all year long with bimah blessings, announcements, special onegs, and together, as a community, turning up our joy radar.
Show up. Our joy grows in community. Even if you’re not feeling joyous on a particular Shabbat – the news from Israel is weighing heavily on your heart, it’s been a particularly tough week at work, you or your loved ones are facing the hardest of life’s challenges – come. Let us together lift up some of that heaviness, hold it with you, and create more space, more capacity for joy.
Last week on Rosh Hashanah, some of us studied a Talmudic text together that explains what is the correct procedure when a wedding procession and a funeral procession meet at an intersection. Talmud tells us that the funeral procession must give way to the wedding party, as the medieval French commentator Rashi explains, “When the bride comes out from her father’s home to the wedding hall at the same time [as] those accompanying a dead body for burial and both groups will be shouting – one group with joy and the other in mourning and we don’t want to mix the two, we reroute those accompanying the deceased…”[11] Rabbi Jen Gubitz adds, “What the rabbis of the Talmud nudge us to imagine is this: As the beloveds cross the road to their chuppah, and the mourners in the funeral procession look out from their sadness through the car window, for a split second they see one another and look each other in the eye. The mourners witness as joy proceeds, the beloveds witness the fragility of life, and neither one’s existence can steal from the other’s truth. Because loss and grief and joy and gladness are deeply intertwined at every moment of being human. So maybe we need the reminder to push ourselves, especially when the world is offering us more grief than gladness, to witness them both, but not to postpone the joy. Rather, let us allow joy to lead the way.”[12]
May we all allow joy to lead the way in this coming year. May we tune our radar to seek out Jewish joy, not only Jewish pain. May we lift up our joy, our delight at being Jewish, at being alive, at being in this world, and share it with each other. May we experience joy in abundance in this year to come.
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[1] “Oy,” Jewish English Lexicon, oy – Jewish English Lexicon (jewish-languages.org).
[2] Ross Gay, The Book of Delights (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2019), 220.
[3] Zadie Smith, quoted in Gay, 44-45.
[4] OMfG: Double the Adar, Double the Fun — OMFG Podcast: Jewish Wisdom for Unprecedented Times
[5] Glynnis MacNicol, I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman’s Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris (New York: Viking, 2024), 121.
[6] Gay, 173.
[7] Gay, xxiv.
[8] Midrash Mishlei 9:1
[9] Tikkunei haZohar 57b
[10] Gay, 163.
[11] Ketubot 17a.
[12] Why did(n’t) the Funeral Procession Cross the Road? – Lilith Magazine
