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D'var Torah for Sukkot
2000
Rebuilding Our Jewish Joy?
Rabbi Solomon Schechter (1849-1915) was one of the founders of the American Conservative movement and the first president of the Jewish Theological Seminary. He was a scholar as well as a theologian, and helped to shape the 20th century American Jewish experience. This selection reflects an interesting turn-of-the-century Jewish perspective.
"The joy experienced by the rabbinic Jew in being commanded to fulfill the Law, and the enthusiasm which he felt at accomplishing that which he considered to be the will of God, is a point hardly touched upon by most theological writers, and if touched upon at all, is hardly ever understood. Yet this "joy of the Law" is so essential an element in the understanding of the Law, that it... can never be conceived by those who have experienced it neither from life nor from literature."
"This principle of joy in connection with the 'mitzvah' is maintained both in the Talmud and in the devotional literature of the Middle Ages. The general rule is: tremble with joy when you are about to fulfill a commandment... Rabbi Bahya ben Halawa declares that the joy accompanying the carrying out of a religious performance is even more acceptable to God than the 'mitzvah' itself. The righteous, he points out, feel this ineffable delight in performing God's will in the same way as the spheres and planets (whose various revolutions are a song to God) rejoice in their going forth and are glad in their returning; while Rabbi Joseph Askari of Safed makes joy one of the necessary conditions without which a law cannot be perfectly carried out. And I may perhaps remark that this joy of the 'mitzvah' was a living reality even in modern times. I myself had once the good fortune to observe one of these old type Jews, who, as the first morning of Sukkot drew near, used to wake and rise soon after the middle of the night. There he sat, with trembling joy, awaiting impatiently the break of dawn, when he would be able to fulfill the law of the palm branch and the willow!"
-Solomon Schechter, Some Aspects of Rabbinic Theology
(New York: Macmillan Co., 1909) pp. 148, 150-152.
Your Schechter Navigator
1. What is joy in a Jewish context as explained by Rabbi Schechter?
2. According to the sources cited by Rabbi Schechter, how does joy impact the fulfilling of a commandment?
3. What does Rabbi Schechter imply about the regularity of joy in modern Jewish observance?
A Word
One of the hardest struggles for us as campus professionals is to create a Jewish environment that gives students permission to celebrate their Judaism. We have become wonderfully proficient in empowering our students to feel good about being Jewish, but we also constantly struggle to connect many of them to the joy of Judaism. Our students come in to adulthood while they are in college but too many of them still leave campus Jewishly adolescent. Helping students to "unpack their religious baggage" is a vital, if still elusive, responsibility for Hillel professionals and it is made all the more difficult for us because we often have not fully done that for ourselves first. Even the more religiously connected of us know that it is a constant process to remind ourselves that we too have room for growth and the capacity for Jewish joy.
Today, Tuesday, October 10, I spent the day putting up our Hillel Sukkah with three students. One of them is a "regular," one the nominally-involved president of our AEPi chapter, and one a new student who has just discovered he has Jewish roots and is now studying for conversion. All three showed up separately and unexpectedly this morning as I was 'schlepping' the wood outside in response to an announcement at breakfast. We had a great time of "Jewish bonding" as we drilled, ratcheted and finagled the Sukkah together, and it was a real moment of joy for the three of us as we stepped back when we were done to admire our handiwork. The "regular" knew he had contributed yet again to the Hillel community and was pleased that he had the chance to do a mitzvah that he would have also done at home with his own family. The president, by his own admission, was unexpectedly satisfied that he had done "something religious," and the student studying for conversion was really happy that he had built his first Sukkah.
I, listening to all three of them, was thankful to them not only for their help but for reminding me why I work here. I witnessed three forms of Jewish joy today that vicariously filled me with my own sense of it as well. I, as well as all of us, work on campus because we find great joy in helping students to not only "do Jewish" but also to discover Jewish. We see it on their faces when we help them find a program that relates to them, when we experience Birthright Israel with them, and when we talk with them about their lives and life experiences. For me as a rabbi, that includes helping students to find the joy in doing a mitzvah and the meaningfulness of adulthood in Jewish practices. Rabbi Schechter saw Jewish joy as a endangered experience in his day. All of us who have built a Sukkah this week with our students, who will help a student to shake their first lulav, or who will just share a meal in one with them know that Jewish joy is alive and well on our campuses and in the American Jewish future.
Prepared by Rabbi Scott Aaron, Hillel at The Ohio State University
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