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Can you command joy? If by command we mean tell someone to do something, it seems highly unlikely that one could command someone else to feel or show joy. On the other hand, if by command we mean draw full attention, well, perhaps we should investigate what would draw our full attention to feeling and to showing joy.
On the festival of Sukkot, we are told V’Samachta b’Chagekha (to be joyous on our holiday). In some sense that is easy. Who isn’t happy to have a holiday (especially if there is no penalty for not working)? Sukkot, though, adds an odd dimension. It’s a holiday when we go out of the comfort of our homes into outdoor huts, usually at the start of the rainy season. Autumn may be beautiful, but it can sure be cold, dark, and dreary. Where is the joy in that?
Monday’s Albert Einstein Academy Jewish Day School all-school field trip to HersheyPark for Chol HaMoed Sukkot Day offers an answer. Tablet Magazine’s article “A Holiday Pilgrimage to an Amusement Park” explains more about the day itself. Our trip, though, was all about getting out of our usual routine for a long day in the dreary mist, all in the name of joy.
It is fun to ride rollercoasters and smaller rides at an amusement park. It is super-sweet to tour the Hershey’s Chocolate World factory tour and get a sample of their candy; Hershey is “the sweetest place on earth.” It is also incredibly empowering to be somewhere secular and to have only kosher food available, with sukkot set up nearby to eat it in!
Monday, our whole school felt the joy of marking a Jewish holiday among a Jewish majority. Even if we were a different Jewish community than ones at HersheyPark who came from ultra-Orthodox enclaves, we were part of a larger community doing the same thing, each in our own way. That’s what Sukkot is supposed to help us achieve theologically, too.
The draw of our full attention to joy comes from shifting our focus away from the material and instead toward the divine. We notice nature, we feel the fall season, we make extra blessings, and we focus on hope. We hope for rain in its season, we hope for redemption, and we hope for joy. What commands our joy is drawing our full attention to the fact that we are a purposeful part of Creation. Autumn will turn to winter, AND spring will come.
To remind us the fullness of Creation, Sukkot ends with two holidays. Shemini Atzeret is understood as one-on-one time for God and Israel. It allows for us to enter Simchat Torah with a sense of completion and at-one-ness. So it is, that on Simchat Torah we finish reading the Torah and immediately start again at the beginning. Our words mirror nature. Our souls aligned to cycle through another year of living. Done right, there is much to celebrate!
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On this coming Monday, the will unroll a new paper Torah, donated by the graduating class of 2013. Our students will see the fullness of the text. We open it in a circle to emphasize the cyclical nature of the reading and of life. It is a joy to see the students’ wide eyes as they see it all at once. We also sweeten the experience with a sugary treat! May Torah always be sweet on our tongues, may this season give us hope, and may the fullness of our experiences command joy from each of us.
Chag Sameach!
חי-er ed 