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Making Our Souls Sing — Yom Kippur 5786

Rabbi Toba Spitzer


Over the past year or so, I have been thinking about what it means to cultivate joy. We are not living in the most joyful of times, to say the least. There is more than enough in the world to be seriously depressed about, on top of the pains and challenges of our personal lives. But perhaps because there is so much that is difficult, I have become intrigued by joy as a spiritual practice. What does it mean to practice joy? Should we even be thinking about cultivating joy, when there is so much suffering in the world?

I decided to give this talk on Yom Kippur, because, strangely enough, this intense, introspective spiritual marathon is also considered a joyous day. In fact, in the Mishnah (Taanit 4:8), the early collection of rabbinic teachings, it says that Yom Kippur was one of the two most joyous days for the Jewish people (the other is Tu b'Av, a day dedicated to love and sexual delight, initiated by women — but that's a talk for another time!). So how do we reconcile this day of intense contemplation, of taking responsibility for our shortcomings, a 25-hour fast — how is this day a day of joy?

Rabbi Shlomo Riskin explores this question by looking at one of the Biblical instructions for Yom Kippur. In our reading this morning, at the end of chapter 16 of Leviticus, we read: "It shall be a Shabbat Shabbaton, a Sabbath of complete rest for you — v'initem et nafshoteichem" which is usually translated as "you shall afflict your souls/yourselves." The Torah doesn't specify what exactly it means to "afflict" one's soul, but this verse was later interpreted to mean that we refrain from eating, sexual relations, wearing leather shoes and bathing — things that bring us pleasure or comfort.

But Rabbi Riskin points out that the word translated as "you shall afflict" – v'initem – comes from a Hebrew root that actually has multiple meanings. Ayin-nun-hay does mean affliction or oppression; it is what the Egyptian taskmasters did to the Israelites in Egypt. It is this Hebrew root that gives matzah its name, "lechem oni," the "bread of affliction."

But this same Hebrew root can also mean "response," crying out or speaking. In the Passover Haggadah, "lechem oni" can also be translated as "the bread of response," the bread we use to tell the story of the Exodus.

And even more intriguingly, this same root can mean "to sing"! It is the word used when Miriam leads the women in song at the sea: "V'ta'an lahem Miriam" — "Miriam sang for them," the Israelites, after they had crossed to freedom.

So — it may be that we are meant to "afflict" our souls on Yom Kippur. But perhaps the goal is to get our souls to respond on Yom Kippur. Or, according to Rabbi Riskin, we are being told that we should "enable our souls to sing, to rejoice"!

If so, then Yom Kippur teaches us that joy and deep spiritual work are not in tension, but go hand in hand. It teaches us that sitting with what is difficult, contemplating our individual and collective transgressions, is not necessarily an affliction, but a cultivation of spiritual response. And this response might – or perhaps should – include the capacity to rejoice. And as the Biblical Yom Kippur was the day on which atonement was sought for the entire community of Israel, it suggests that there is some connection between the practice of joy – enabling our souls to rejoice – and communal transformation.

As I did a deep dive into the topic of joy this summer, exploring Jewish teachings and other writing by spiritual teachers, it became clear that the joyous nature of Yom Kippur is deeply connected to the relationship between joy and heartbreak — and the fact that we can't really have one without the other. In The Book of Joy, a record of a week of conversations on the topic of joy between the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa back in 2015, Archbishop Tutu says this: 

"Joy is much bigger than happiness. While happiness is often seen as being dependent on external circumstances, joy is not." He goes on to say: "We are fragile creatures, and it is from this weakness, not despite it, that we discover the possibility of true joy…Discovering more joy does not, I'm sorry to say, save us from the inevitability of hardship and heartbreak. In fact, we may cry more easily, but we will laugh more easily, too. Perhaps we are just more alive. Yet as we discover more joy, we can face suffering in a way that ennobles rather than embitters. We have hardship without becoming hard. We have heartbreak without being broken."

In Jewish tradition, one of the greatest proponents of joy was the 18th century Hasidic master, Nachman of Bratslav. Rebbe Nachman suffered from what we might characterize today as chronic depression. He lost four of his 8 children before they reached the age of two, and he lost his first wife to tuberculosis before contracting it himself. He died at the age of 38. But core to his teaching was an instruction to strive for a state of continual joy, simcha. It is a great mitzvah, he said, lihiyot b'simcha tamid — to be joyous always. For Rebbe Nachman, joy was the path to what we might call mindful awareness. He taught: 

"Deep, pervasive sorrow makes it impossible to direct the mind the way one wants. It is therefore difficult for a person to attain yishuv ha-daat, a settled mind. Only joy enables a person to direct the mind as they please and attain yishuv ha-daat. This is because joy is the realm of freedom. Through joy a person becomes free, and goes out of exile." 

It is likely that Rebbe Nachman struggled on a daily basis to free himself from deep depression, what he characterizes as a state of spiritual exile. But while he preached the importance of joy, he also made a distinction between deep sorrow or gloom, what he called "marah sh'chorah," a "dark bitterness," and what he called lev nishbar, a broken heart. While he counseled that we should cultivate joy in order to guard against depression, he also taught that a lev nishbar, broken-heartedness, was essential to our wellbeing, and something that we should also cultivate. From the practice of breaking our hearts open, we can then achieve joy.

For Rebbe Nachman, succumbing to deep sorrow and gloom is akin to being angry at God, angry at the universe — a rage that things are not as we desire them to be. Despair cuts us off from sources of spiritual nourishment, and keeps us from doing the holy work that each of us is put here to do.

But a broken heart, Rebbe Nachman taught, is like a child crying when they are separated from their parent. Broken-heartedness comes from a place of longing for connection to God, to life, to all that is holy and good. It is a wholesome, positive yearning. Rebbe Nachman seems to agree with Archbishop Tutu that we "discover the possibility of true joy" because of our frailties, because of our experiences of heartbreak and our longing for wholeness. Only with our hearts open can we then access the deepest kind of joy. Rebbe Nachman urged his followers to spend an hour a day actively breaking their hearts open by going into the forest and speaking to God, asking for what they needed, seeking to be close to their divine Parent. It was, and is, a practice of radical vulnerability, honoring our suffering even as we ask for protection and care. With such a practice, Rebbe Nachman taught, one could then spend the rest of the day actively cultivating joy.

Rebbe Nachman's notion that joy is the "realm of freedom" is echoed in a beautiful way by the great Vietnamese Zen master, Thich Nhat Hanh, who teaches that "a smile makes you master of yourself…Events carry us away and we lose ourselves. A smile can help us regain our sovereignty, our liberty as a human being."

As I survey our broken world, as I wonder how I can allow myself to feel joy when I am aware of so much pain — it is powerful to reflect on the message of joy of these spiritual masters. Rebbe Nachman, Archbishop Tutu and Thich Nhat Hanh were products of tumultuous, difficult times and places: a rabbi who experienced great personal loss in poverty-stricken, antisemitic Ukraine; a Black priest fighting for freedom and equality in apartheid South Africa; a Vietnamese Buddhist monk who lived through a war that devastated his country. Each brought a profound message of joy as a spiritual path, not despite the painful world around them, but in deep relationship to it.

When Archbishop Tutu was asked how it's possible to find joy in life, to even consider being joyful, when there are so many in the world who are suffering, he answered this way: 

"Start where you are, and realize that you are not meant on your own to resolve all of these massive problems…Remember you are not alone, and you do not need to finish the work. It takes time, but we are learning, we are growing, we are becoming the people we want to be. It helps no one if you sacrifice your joy because others are suffering. We people who care must be attractive, must be filled with joy, so that others recognize that caring, that helping and being generous are not a burden, they are a joy. Give the world your love, your service, your healing, but you can also give it your joy. This, too, is a great gift." 

I love this idea of giving the world our joy as a gift, as part of the work of healing and repair. When we cultivate joy, we can consider it an offering to the world, not just something that we do for ourselves. And in these times, when there are those who want us beaten down, broken and passive, joy can, in and of itself, be an act of resistance. In the words of the Christian theologian, Jurgen Moltmann:

"Joy in life's happiness motivates us to revolt against the life that is destroyed and against those who destroy life. And grief over life that is destroyed is nothing other than an ardent longing for life's liberation to happiness and joy. Otherwise we would accept innocent suffering and destroyed life as our fate and destiny. Compassion is the other side of the living joy." 

So – if joy is an act of compassion and liberation, of resistance, a gift to the world – how do we cultivate it?

Rebbe Nachman had a whole menu of practices that he encouraged his students to engage in, including what he called "miley deshtuta" – "foolish things" – being silly, telling jokes, being goofy. 

One of my personal practices of miley deshtuta is elephant jokes. I invite you to join me in this holy practice:

Q: Why are elephants large, grey and wrinkled? 
A. Because, if they were small, white and round, they would be aspirin.

Something else I've tried recently is skipping in public. It is sort of silly, and it has the very real effect of making me smile. Do it on your own, or hold hands with someone and try it!

Other joy practices that Rebbe Nachman encouraged are related to music — including clapping, singing, and dancing. There is a reason that what many people find most nourishing about Shabbat and holiday services is the music. The words we're singing don't matter so much, whether or not you understand Hebrew doesn't matter that much, it doesn't even matter whether you think you can sing or not — participating in song, in clapping along, in dancing, elevates our spirits in real and beneficial ways. 

Singing was a central spiritual practice for Rebbe Nachman, and one of his most famous teachings is based on a verse from Psalm 146: "Azamra l'Elohai b'odi" — "I sing to God with my od." Rebbe Nachman connects this verse to a verse in a different psalm where we also find the word "od." In Psalm 37 it says: "v'od me'at v'ain rasha" — "and in a little bit, there will be no wickedness" (Ps. 37:10). And what is this "little bit," this od me'at, Nachman asks? It is the "little bit" of good that is found in everyone. And it is with this od me'at, this bit of good within us, that we can overcome despair, we can sing to God, we can experience joy. 

Rebbe Nachman was very sensitive to the ways in which our tendency to judge ourselves and others harshly is a counter-weight to joy. He taught:

"You need to seek out and to find within yourself some small bit of good. For how is it possible that you have never done some mitzvah or good thing? But then you find that good thing, and you see that it too is full of defects; all the ways that you tried to act in good ways were for the wrong reasons, ulterior motives, motivated by negative thoughts. But even with all that, how is it possible that within that mitzvah there isn't some bit of good? That's all you need to find: just the smallest bit, a small point of goodness within your actions. That should be enough to give you life, to bring you back to joy." (Likkutei Moharan 282)

Rebbe Nachman's words echo that of Thich Nhat Hanh, who taught that "we have to learn to practice touching what is not wrong, inside us and around us." For both the rebbe and the Buddhist monk, this is a practice of active noticing, of seeking out and paying attention to the goodness within us and around us. Thich Nhat Hanh emphasized that "knowing how to create moments of joy and happiness is crucial for our healing. It is important to be able to see the wonders of life around us, to recognize the conditions of happiness that already exist." He offers simple ways to do this — taking notice of beautiful things in nature, or the smile on a baby's face. He also suggests that we can note what is not happening — for example, I don't have a toothache in this moment. Noticing this is a way of "touching what is not wrong" in my experience.

In modern psychological parlance, this is the practice of "savoring" — consciously noticing when something pleasant is happening to us. In the words of psychologist Fred Bryant: 

"We tend to spend more time counting our troubles than our blessings…The troubles are unavoidable; they kick our door in and come and find us. We're forced, then, to deal with them. But the pleasures, the joys, they don't hunt us down and force us to enjoy them. They wait, and they sometimes hide. They require us to go hunting for them and then spend time with them." 

When I become consumed either with my own distress or the world's suffering, I try to remind myself that my brain is designed to cling to the negative. Once upon a time, this was a helpful survival mechanism. It made early humans alert for lions and tigers and bears. Unfortunately, eons of human evolution have led to our brains clinging to the negative like Velcro, while the pleasant and joyful slide off like Teflon. 

It is here that the practice of savoring, a kind of gratitude practice, is so essential. We need to train our brains to recognize and dwell in the positive. In a moment of pain or difficulty, or as a counterweight to absorbing the latest horrifying news, we can stop and notice what is pleasant. Perhaps my body is free of pain in this moment. Or perhaps I have some pain, but the sun is shining in my window and casting a beautiful shadow on the wall. Maybe I am speaking with a dear friend, or I am tasting something delicious. What is there to savor here, in this moment?

It also means paying attention to our own positive actions, taking a moment to appreciate when we do an act of kindness for another, or when we take care of ourselves. Rebbe Nachman taught that we can gather up our "good points" as if we were picking flowers, and turn these bundles into song and prayer. What might it be like to go through the day gathering up pleasant moments into a bouquet that can gladden our hearts and bring us, and those around us, a bit of joy?

I want to come back to Rebbe Nachman's teaching that a lev nishbar, a broken heart, and simcha, joy, go hand in hand. In cultivating joy, we are not ignoring the suffering within us and around us. Quite the opposite. All of the teachings about joy that I explored this summer come to the same conclusion: that there is a profound link between joy and our capacity to experience and respond to suffering in helpful and potentially transformative ways. The wonderful poet and essayist, Ross Gay, has this to say in his book Inciting Joy:

"What happens if joy is not separate from pain? What if joy and pain are fundamentally tangled up with one another? Or even more to the point, what if joy is not only entangled with pain, or suffering, or sorrow, but is also what emerges from how we care for each other through those things? What if joy, instead of refuge or relief from heartbreak, is what effloresces from us as we help each other carry our heartbreaks?" 

And as Thich Nhat Hanh teaches: 

"If we can recognize and accept our pain without running away from it, we will discover that although pain is there, joy can also be there at the same time…Being able to enjoy happiness doesn't require that we have no suffering. In fact, the art of happiness is also the art of suffering well. When we learn to acknowledge, embrace, and understand our suffering, we suffer much less. We can learn from our suffering, and we can transform it into understanding, compassion, and joy for ourselves and for others."

And so, on this Yom Kippur, this Shabbat Shabbaton:

Va-initem et nafshoteichem — in your affliction, you shall acknowledge, embrace and understand the suffering you encounter. You shall allow your heart to break. 

Va-initem et nafshoteichem — and your soul will respond, transforming suffering into understanding, compassion and joy for self and others. 

Va-initem et nafshoteichem — and your soul will learn to sing, your joy flowering as you join with others in holding and responding to our collective heartbreak. 

I hope some of you will join me, beginning on October 30, in a class where we will explore how we can foster joy and other qualities of spiritual resilience in a very challenging time (you can find out more in the adult learning flyer available on the literature table, or on our website). But whether or not you take the class, I hope, in this new year, that we will all find opportunities to practice joy:

To savor the sweet moments. 

To do something silly on a regular basis.

To break our hearts open in yearning and prayer. 

To actively seek out our own good points, and the good points of others — including those with whom we struggle. 

To engage in acts of care with resolve and a smile, acts of resistance against those who seek to batter our spirits in to submission. 

G'mar chatima tovah — may we all be sealed for a year of healing and joy, of wellbeing and peace.


Rabbi Toba Spitzer
Yom Kippur 5786

Fri, October 17 2025 25 Tishrei 5786