Happiness the Jewish Way is a practical guide to happiness illustrated with examples from the rich wisdom, stories, history, humor, and traditions of the Jewish people. The first part of the book is dedicated to clarifying the definition of happiness. It is very difficult to cultivate happiness if we do not know exactly what it is (and what it is not). The second part briefly introduces Jewish thought on happiness and it’s influence on the western civilization. The third part discusses skills that people can cultivate to make themselves happier, followed by several easy and effective exercises.
This is one chapter from Part 3. Most of them are kept short just like this one. Enjoy!
The Big Picture
“This also is vanity and a striving after wind.”
—Ecclesiastes 2:26
We often let unimportant annoyances that do not play any major role in our lives mar our happiness. A broken car, a harsh word, a breakup, an approaching deadline—these and so many other things seem very significant at the time we experience them. We get emotionally invested in them: upset, angry, or depressed. We get so immersed in the daily hustle and bustle that often we forget how great our lives are overall, or as a Hebrew proverb succinctly summarizes it, we “can’t see the forest for the trees.”[i]
A rabbi once had many of his students over for a Shabbat dinner. At the end of the meal, he showed them a tray holding an assortment of different cups and invited everyone to pick one as their drink. When everybody had a cup in hand, the rabbi said, “Al tistakel baqanqan, ela bemah shebetokho—don’t look at the jar but at what’s inside it.[ii] What you really wanted was a drink, and yet you moved to pick the best-looking cup and got disappointed if you didn’t get the one you wanted. But the cup itself adds no quality to your drink. Now consider this: life is the drink; jobs, money, and position in society are the cups. The type of cup we have neither defines nor changes the quality of the life we live. Sometimes, by concentrating only on the cup, we fail to enjoy the drink.[iii]
There is another reason not to get too upset. As King David taught his son Solomon, everything is temporary. The story goes that shortly before his death King David presented his young son with a gold ring. He instructed Solomon to engrave it with the Hebrew letters gimmel, zayin, yod, which stood for the words gam zeh ya'avor—this too will pass—and to be sure to concentrate on this inscription during any trying circumstances.[iv]
We can think of our life as a large painting. From a very close proximity, all we can see are smears of color, individual strokes, and images or shades that may not make sense. But from a distance, we see how it all fits together, how every brushstroke or every charcoal line forms an integral part of a vast, magnificent picture. Often, things that seem very bad or very significant when they happen actually become something else as the big picture develops. We do not always know what is truly good or bad, as the prophet Elijah demonstrates in this fairy tale called “Elijah’s Wisdom”:
One day, the prophet Elijah paid a visit to Rabbi Joshua, who had prayed to learn why bad things happen to good people and vice versa. They set off to travel together and visit different people along their way.
The first night, they came across a rich man and asked him for a meal and a place to sleep. He refused to give them any food to them or invite them in, but allowed them to stay one night by a broken wall in his stable. The next morning, the rabbi observed with surprise as Elijah prayed for the wall to repair itself.
The next day, they knocked on the door of a poor old woman. She invited them in and was very hospitable. She only had one cow, and she shared her milk with the visitors and invited them to stay the night in her humble house. Rabbi Joshua expected the prophet to reward the woman for her kindness. But the next morning, Elijah said a prayer over the woman’s cow, and it died.
“How can you say such a prayer?” exclaimed Rabbi Joshua. “You’ve repaired the stable wall for the rich man who was rude and unkind, but you made the only cow of this poor woman die after the way she treated us!”
“My dear Joshua, things are not always as they appear,” said the prophet Elijah. “In the rich man’s stable, there was treasure buried under that wall, which the rich man did not deserve because he was so ungenerous. So I asked God to repair the wall to make sure that he would not find the treasure beneath it.
“In the second house, the old woman was meant to die on the very day we visited her. Because of her kindness to us, I prayed that God take the cow in her place.”
And now, suddenly Rabbi Joshua realized that life is not simple and that he hadn’t understood who was being rewarded and who was being punished.
With that, Elijah vanished back up into Heaven, and Rabbi Joshua was left to ponder over this precious bit of wisdom.[v]
Remembering the existence of the big picture will put many things in perspective. It will help us transcend and not have overly negative reactions, bringing us closer to contentment and happiness.
PUT IT INTO PRACTICE
Recognize that life is such a gift that anything else is trivial by comparison.
If you regard life in this way, everything else instantly becomes less stressful.
See the big picture.
How do you react to circumstances such as lost luggage? Do you let them spoil your day or maybe even the entire vacation? The way you handle such rather small hiccups can reflect the way you deal with your entire life.
Evaluate the things that upset you in terms of your life priorities.[vi] Are they truly important? Are they even on the list? Are they more important than your state of happiness? You do not have to ignore the problems, but deal with them without getting immersed in negative thinking.
Remember that troubles are temporary.
When upset, remember the inscription on King Solomon’s ring. Look past the here and now and consider how important the upsetting thing will still be to you in five or ten years.
Let the big picture develop.
Often things that seem crucial are in fact inconsequential. For example, Sigmund Freud was booed off of the podium when he first presented his ideas to the scientific community of Europe. It must have felt awful to have his theories rejected by his peers. But that does not seem as horrible now, when we realize he will be forever known as the father of psychoanalysis. Other times, such things may in fact be significant in the larger scheme of our lives, but not in the way we initially thought. Hilene Flanzbaum, a poet and English professor, describes having to deal with the diagnosis of breast cancer. This experience, which she says was “horrible” at the time, led her to change her world view, resulting in a much happier life.[vii]
You may have had the experience of getting upset over being late to an airport only to find out that the flight has been delayed or cancelled. If only we waited long enough to see how the situation would play out before making ourselves unhappy, stressing out, and getting high blood pressure.
Commit to letting things play out before letting them make you unhappy.
[i] Merov etzim lo ro'im eth ha'ya'ar. “Hebraic Proverbs,” Wikiquote, http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hebraic_proverbs/.
[ii] “Hebraic Proverbs,” Wikiquote, http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hebraic_proverbs/.
[iii] Adapted from the parable “Life Is Like a Cup of Coffee.”
[iv] S. Felix Mendelsohn, Here's a Good One: Stories of Jewish Wit and Wisdom, “Story of Solomon.”
[v] Adapted from “Elijah’s Wisdom,” Shoshana Boyd Gelfand, The Barefoot Book of Jewish Tales (Concord, MA: Barefoot Books, 2013).
[vi] See chapter “Get You Priorities Straight.”
[vii] Hilene Flanzbaum, “The Possibility of Joy: How Breast Cancer Changed My Life,” O, The Oprah Magazine, October 2007.
