{"id":50399,"date":"2019-02-27T13:09:27","date_gmt":"2019-02-27T11:09:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/?p=50399"},"modified":"2022-09-21T13:30:42","modified_gmt":"2022-09-21T10:30:42","slug":"joy-the-supreme-religious-emotion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/joy-the-supreme-religious-emotion\/","title":{"rendered":"Joy: The Supreme Religious Emotion"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Joy is not the first word that naturally comes to mind when we think of the severity of Judaism as a moral code or the tear-stained pages of Jewish history. As Jews we have degrees in misery, postgraduate qualifications in guilt, and gold-medal performances in wailing and lamentation. Someone once summed up the Jewish festivals in three sentences: \u201cThey tried to kill us. We survived. Let\u2019s eat.\u201d Yet in truth what shines through so many of the psalms is pure, radiant joy. And joy is one of the keywords of the book of Deuteronomy. The root s-m-kh appears once each in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers, but twelve times in Deuteronomy, seven of them in our parsha.<\/span><\/p>\n

What Moses says again and again is that joy is what we should feel in the land of Israel, the land given to us by God, the place to which the whole of Jewish life since the days of Abraham and Sarah has been a journey. The vast universe with its myriad galaxies and stars is God\u2019s work of art, but within it planet earth, and within that the land of Israel, and the sacred city of Jerusalem, is where He is closest, where His presence lingers in the air, where the sky is the blue of heaven and the stones are a golden throne. There, said Moses, in \u201cthe place the Lord your God will choose \u2026 to place His Name there for His dwelling\u201d (Deut. 12:5), you will celebrate the love between a small and otherwise insignificant people and the God who, taking them as His own, lifted them to greatness.<\/span><\/p>\n

It will be there, said Moses, that the entire tangled narrative of Jewish history would become lucid, where a whole people \u2013 \u201cyou, your sons and daughters, your male and female servants, and the Levites from your towns, who have no hereditary portion with you\u201d \u2013 will sing together, worship together and celebrate the festivals together, knowing that history is not about empire or conquest, nor society about hierarchy and power, that commoner and king, Israelite and priest are all equal in the sight of God, all voices in his holy choir, all dancers in the circle at whose centre is the radiance of the Divine. This is what the covenant is about: the transformation of the human condition through what Wordsworth called \u201cthe deep power of joy.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In Judaism joy is the supreme religious emotion. Here we are, in a world filled with beauty. Every breath we breathe is the spirit of God within us. Around us is the love that moves the sun and all the stars. We are here because someone wanted us to be. The soul that celebrates, sings.<\/span><\/p>\n

From:<\/span>The Deep Power of Joy (Covenant & Conversation, Re\u2019eh 5776)<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

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