Insecurity and Joy
On October 14, 1663, the famous diarist Samuel Pepys paid a visit to the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue in Creechurch Lane in the city of London. Jews had been exiled from England in 1290 but in 1656, following an intercession by Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel of Amsterdam, Oliver Cromwell concluded that there was in fact no legal barrier to Jews living there. So for the first time since the thirteenth century Jews were able to worship openly.
The first synagogue, the one Pepys visited, was simply a private house belonging to a successful Portuguese Jewish merchant, Antonio Fernandez Carvajal, that had been extended to house the congregation. Pepys had been in the synagogue once before, at the memorial service for Carvajal, who died in 1659. That occasion had been sombre and decorous. What he saw on his second visit was something else altogether, a scene of celebration that left him scandalised. This is what he wrote in his diary:
After dinner my wife and I, by Mr. Rawlinson’s conduct, to the Jewish Synagogue: where the men and boys in their vayles [i.e., tallitot], and the women behind a lattice out of sight; and some things stand up, which I believe is their Law, in a press [i.e., the ark] to which all coming in do bow; and at the putting on their vayles do say something, to which others that hear him do cry Amen, and the party do kiss his vayle. Their service all in a singing way, and in Hebrew. And anon their Laws that they take out of the press are carried by several men, four or five several burthens in all, and they do relieve one another; and whether it is that every one desires to have the carrying of it, I cannot tell, thus they carried it round about the room while such a service is singing.… But, Lord! to see the disorder, laughing, sporting, and no attention, but confusion in all their service, more like brutes than people knowing the true God, would make a man forswear ever seeing them more and indeed I never did see so much, or could have imagined there had been any religion in the whole world so absurdly performed as this.1Found in Robert Latham, ed., The Shorter Pepys (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985).
Poor Pepys. No one told him that the day he chose to come to the synagogue was Simḥat Torah, nor had he ever seen in a house of worship anything like the exuberant joy of the day when we dance with the Torah scroll as if the world were a wedding and the book a bride. Nor had he any reason to suppose that Jews had any reason to rejoice. I want in this essay to tell the story behind the story of Pepys’ incomprehension and surprise, because it is a moving, unexpected one.
There is a line in Ne’ila, the concluding service of Yom Kippur, that epitomises the situation of Jewry during the tragic centuries of exile and persecution. It was written by Rabbenu Gershom (c. 960–1040) in Metz, in what is today northwest France. The age of the Crusades had not yet begun. Europe had not yet descended into the mad frenzy of anti-Semitism that was to mark Jewish history for almost a thousand years until the Holocaust. Yet we already sense in the poem he wrote an anticipation of what was to come. The line reads simply: “There is nothing left but this Torah.”
Jews had lost almost everything. They had no land, no home, no power, no rights, and no security. They never knew when the local population would turn against them, massacring or expelling them. All they had was a book, the Torah. It was the record of their past and their promise of a future. God may have abandoned them but He would not do so forever: “When they are in the land of their enemies, I will not reject them or abhor them so as to destroy them completely, breaking My covenant with them. I am the Lord their God” (Lev. 26:44). Jews had “nothing left but this Torah.” It was their faint, flickering flame of hope.
And it was “this Torah” that inspired Jews in exile to create the one festival added to the calendar between the second century BCE, when Ḥanukka was introduced, and May 14, 1948, when Yom HaAtzma’ut, Israel’s Independence Day, was observed for the first time. That festival was Simḥat Torah, the Day of “Rejoicing in the Torah,” added around the time that Rabbenu Gershom was writing his poem. It celebrates the end of the annual reading of the Torah and the beginning of a new cycle.
Simḥat Torah is quintessentially a festival of the Diaspora, for two reasons. It is the second day of Shemini Atzeret, the festival immediately following the seventh day of Sukkot – and in Israel, there is no second day. The other reason is that, at that time, only in the Diaspora was the Torah read in an annual cycle. In Israel it was read in a three- or three-and-a-half-year cycle, so there was no annual celebration of ending and beginning anew. But note the name of the festival: not “concluding” or “beginning” the Torah, but rather “rejoicing” in it. That is what the Jews of the dark centuries chose to leave as their legacy to the calendar: not a day of tears, but one of joy.
That is what Samuel Pepys saw that October night that left him bewildered: the joy of Simḥat Torah. For how could anyone in those days associate Jews and Judaism with joy? They were, for Christians, the “wandering Jew,” condemned like Cain to be endless exiles on earth, pariahs among peoples. There was hardly a city in Europe from which they had not at some time been expelled. As Rabbenu Gershom had said, they had nothing left but a book, yet they danced with it and sang to it as though it were alive, their one true love.
Aristotle wrote, in the Nicomachean Ethics, that happiness is the ultimate purpose of human existence. People seek many things: pleasure, wealth, honour, fame. But if we ask why they seek them, the answer will always in the end turn out to be because they yield happiness. We seek everything else as a means to an end. Only happiness is an end in itself, something we desire for its own sake alone.2Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1097a30–34.
Judaism sees things differently. To be sure, happiness – osher, or as it generally appears in Tanakh, ashrei – is a value in Judaism. It is the first word of the book of Psalms, and appears thirty-two times in that book. However, it appears only twice in the Torah: when Leah says, “Happy am I [be’ashri], for the daughters will call me blessed” (Gen. 30:13), and when Moses, in his final blessing, says, “Happy are you [ashrekha] Israel” (Deut. 33:29). The Torah’s key word for positive emotion is not happiness but simḥa, joy. As we saw in an earlier essay, “Collective Joy,” it is this of which Moses speaks no less than seven times in Parashat Re’eh, twelve times in Deuteronomy as a whole.
There are fundamental differences between happiness and joy. Happiness is a calm feeling, joy an exuberant one. One can feel happiness alone, but joy in the Torah is always something shared with others. Happiness – in Aristotle’s sense – is a judgement on life as a whole, while joy lives in the moment. Happiness depends on things going well, but one can experience joy even in the midst of adversity. King David, in Psalms, speaks of danger, fear, dejection, sometimes even despair, but his songs usually end in the major key:
Weeping may stay for the night,
but rejoicing comes in the morning…
You turned my wailing into dancing;
You removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy,
that my heart may sing Your praises and not be silent.
Lord my God, I will praise You forever. (Ps. 30:6–13)
There remains, though, a fundamental question about the joy of Simḥat Torah. As we saw in that earlier essay, Moses speaks of joy as the key emotion of the people of the covenant in the Promised Land. Simḥa is what you feel when you have finally arrived at the land that is yours. How then could the Jews of the Diaspora discover, celebrate, and sanctify joy when they were exiled from home? The answer, it seems to me, is implicit in what Re’eh tells us about Sukkot, the festival to which Simḥat Torah is joined. The verb “to rejoice” appears three times in the parasha in connection with a festival: not at all in connection with Passover, once in relation to Shavuot, but twice in connection with Sukkot: “Be joyful at your festival…and your joy will be complete” (Deut. 16:14–15). It is for this reason that Sukkot (and Shemini Atzeret) are called zeman simḥatenu, “the time of our joy.”
This is starkly counter-intuitive. We could understand why Passover should be a festival of joy: it recalls our ancestors’ liberation from slavery. Similarly with Shavuot: it celebrates the giving of the Torah, God’s great gift to us as a people. But why Sukkot? It represents not a positive event, but forty years of wandering in the wilderness without a permanent home. A sukka is, by halakhic definition, a temporary dwelling. Sukkot, when we live for seven days in a hut with only leaves for a roof, exposed to the wind, cold, and rain, is the festival of insecurity. Why then is it, supremely, the “time of our joy”?
That is what makes simḥa the supreme religious emotion. You do not have to be religious to be happy. But there is something profoundly spiritual about our capacity to live in a state of total insecurity and yet feel the joy of simply being, under the shelter of the Divine Presence. Yes, there is danger, risk, uncertainty, vulnerability. But we are here, with a world to live in, family and friends to love and be loved by, and we are not alone, for with us is the Torah, God’s unbreakable word, and though we walk through the valley of the shadow, we walk towards the redemptive light.
In the Diaspora, even the greatest mansion is, for Jews, only a sukka, a temporary dwelling. Yet we can still rejoice, remembering what our ancestors knew, that the wilderness is simply a series of way stations on the road to home. Kierkegaard once wrote: “It takes moral courage to grieve. It takes religious courage to rejoice.”3Søren Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna Hong (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1970), 2:2179.
Life is full of problems and pains, but beyond them is the sense of wonder that we are alive in a universe filled with beauty, and so long as we have the Torah, we still have hope. Pepys may not have understood what he was seeing in the synagogue, but Robert Louis Stevenson would have done, for it was he who said what Jews have always known: “Find out where joy resides and give it a voice far beyond singing. For to miss the joy is to miss all.”4Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Lantern Bearers,” in Across the Plains (Carlisle, MA: Applewood Books, 1892), 247.