JOY??? Now?

We are supposed to be happy on Purim. How can we be commanded to feel happy? There is tragedy all over the world – Japan, Israel, Many Middle East and North African countries. It seems as though every day we hear more and more horrible new – this can make one feel scared, worried, depressed, sad and angry. How are we supposed to just turn these emotions off and experience JOY?

The answer of the Torah is that joy is natural and inherent to every person. Joy is not something that we experience as a response to external triggers, but it is a part of us that we need to learn how to reveal. It is part of our essence, but sometimes it is repressed. Experiencing joy means to dig through everything that is suffocating our inner happiness. Just witness the natural happiness and cheerfulness of a young child. The bright joyous face of a child is something that every adult envies. A child begins to lose his natural cheer due to external causes. His inherent joy starts to erode when he begins to experience the disappointments and tragedies of life events, the despondent attitudes of parents, educators and other adults affecting the child.

We access the inner joy innate in each of us by accessing the cheer and enthusiasm of our inner child -- the part of us connected to God that precedes the sadness that life circumstances imposed and continues to impose upon us.

Purim is a day of joyous abandon that transcends conventional boundaries. We are told to celebrate “ad de lo yada” - which means to be joyous until you reach a place beyond the doors of perception, where we transcend dark and light, even the pains and disappointments of our lives. The story of Purim teaches us that despite how dark it gets, even when all hope seems to be lost, the joy of the inner child surfaces in an eruption of joy. It is a delight that transcends any pain you may be dealing with in life.

We cultivate the inner soul child by internalizing the feeling that God put you on Earth for a unique purpose, that we have an indispensable contribution to make, realizing that all else in life pales in comparison to the essential power of our soul.

Joy is contagious. Often when we can't access it on our own, a way of igniting it is by celebrating in dance and song with others. Behavioral change, acting joyous (even when you don't feel like it), coupled with the fact that deep inside (or not so deep) lies a reservoir of pure joy, is a way to actually become joyous.

So it is possible to be happy even while the whole world is experiencing pain???

It’s an interesting custom in Jewish tradition under the chuppah, the wedding canopy, to break the glass at the end of the ceremony. One of the reasons they do this is that it’s a reminder of the destruction of the Temple. So I always wondered, of all times to choose a reminder of the destruction of the Temple, it’s at the high point in two people’s lives, their wedding, the highest simcha, the highest joy? Couldn’t it have been done seemingly at the end of the wedding, or on another day? Why at that high point?

And the point is this. Those who know how to remember others’ pain at the height of their joy will also know how to remember to have joy at their height of pain. *

If you’re sensitive because you’re not so consumed with your own feelings, no matter how justified they are, but you leave that little opening, then one day, if G-d forbid you should be challenged where you’re faced with a trauma or some loss, it also won’t be all consuming. You’ll have that one percent opening of joy and happiness. And I think that’s the balance.

Life is about experiencing it all – we are never %100 happy or %100 sad. We need to learn to find the joy despite the pain, and to be sensitive to the pain despite the joy.

But – Purim is a time to try to uncover the joy, to experience as much happiness as possible!

Happy Purim!

____

* Interestingly, when the Jews came out of Egypt (the Egyptians had oppressed the Jewish people for many years, and they were enslaved by them, and after the Jews left Egypt, the Egyptians still didn’t give up but pursued the Jews), and the Egyptians were drowning in the parted sea and the Jews began singing praise to G-d, the Talmud says that G-d said to the Jewish people, “My children are drowning and you’re singing praise?”