We Jews Know How to Do Joy

13 Adar II

So I’m just getting back from my first Purim party and a couple of thoughts keep slow-rolling around my head like so many loose marbles. A quick sampling: cosmopolitans on a Saturday night will be an awesome match until the end of time; I never want to live in an era when dancing to Michael Jackson grows old; Temple Israel rabbis have this great sense of humor and rhythm; and finally, Jews know how to do joy.

I've been thinking a lot about that last item. Between Simchot Torah and Purim, there is some awesome delight going on in the Jewish calendar. And that’s not even considering Shabbat itself, that weekly release of the profane so we can embrace the spiritual. This so moved the mystics that it inspired them to pen odes to its arrival every Friday night at sunset and run into the fields to greet her.  

There is also elation underlining so many of the prayers and songs, IMO. For instance, Mi Chamochah, giving thanks to crossing a parted Red Sea, has always struck me as being jubilant. The same with “Am Yisrael Chai”, which sings about the tenacity (if not the audacity) of the people Israel. It’s hard not to dance a little in my space whenever this is played.

Here’s the thing I realized while walking home last night: I myself do not do joy very well. I tend to hold it awkwardly, in fingers too stiff from disuse, with no sense of its innate delicacy. That’s a hard thing to fess up to, can I tell you? Oh, I can publicly do some many other emotions well , have the whole righteous indignation/anger thing down pat for rallies and protests, can weep with empathy over the cruelties of the world, have enough pointed sarcasm to fence with the best of cynics. But I have trouble expressing this whole unfettered happiness thing.

There are many reasons for that. Some are trust issues that are rooted in past events that I will not detail here. Suffice it to say that exist and I acknowledge their presence and influence on me. I think however large my reservoir for joy was when I was a child has shrunk considerably. I picture that capacity as a glass that now has so many cracks in it. It may be a large but tends to leak out a lot. It cannot hold water for a very long time. Actually I’ve gotten much better over the years. There was a time when I would isolate because that glass was just so many shards on the floor. I’ve managed to glue most of the larger pieces and still work at the smaller slivers (thank G-d for therapy) but you know, it’s never quite the same. Realizing that, I am acutely aware when that glass is running dry. So if I end up leaving your party early it is not because I don’t know how to play Pictionary, the music’s bad or because of the guacamole dip. (Well, honestly, it might be because of the guacamole dip.)

As this is a spiritual blog I think about how different my experience has been celebrating joy inside a church or a Wiccan circle. Of the former I can remember these songs in Latin that voluminous enough to fill the pews with reverence and some serious awe yet never seemed to lift me up. Christmas was either a birthday I always felt self-conscious in celebrating (um, I’m singing happy birthday and blowing out candles for whom? Reaalllly???) or an overwhelming  and stringently enforced gift-laden month long commercial. Easter also capitalized on sensationalism while jettisoning its pagan roots. No one could explain how coloring eggs or bunnies related to resurrection or even how being raised from the dead wasn’t in fact an act of magick (or just flat-out zombie-ism). You were just supposed to be happy. Be happy, dammit. Don’t make me come over there to make you happy!!!

I always thought that given its liberal leanings and underground culture, Paganism made a lot more space for potential happiness but somehow never capitalized on it (at least in the literal and figurative circles I broomsticked through). There seemed to be this undue seriousness interwoven through all endeavors whether it was lighting the Winter Solstice candles, going into deep meditation or making sure to dance widdershins (and how annoyed people would get if you accidentally headed in the wrong direction). While some rituals led to ecstasy (which I think is true of any religion) very few ever seemed to result in joyous laughter. Perhaps that’s just what happens when you’re dealing with such heavy metaphysics, those large concepts of life and death and cosmic energies. Maybe it’s hard to hold a smile when The Crone looks you in the eye.

Like with so many other aspects of this Judaic path I still feel a little unprepared, finding so little in my experiential backpack applies. Is that typical of converts? I would think so (and hope so) to some extent. Who gets it all correctly or feels completely at peace their first time around any non-secular calendar? More power to those folk but personally I can’t relate to that dynamic. I need to acknowledge holding the leaky glass to ever learn just how to keep the water in it.