Practicing Joy with Rebbe Nachman

Nachman of Breslov was a 18th-century mystic, visionary, and religious provocateur. He lived a tortured life, but in spite of that—or maybe even because of it—he said it’s essential to find happiness. In fact he called it a spiritual obligation. But how could happiness be a requirement, let alone a religious one? Nachman’s point is that it happiness isn’t only good for the happy person; it’s good for the people around them, and for the world. After all, it’s much harder to have the emotional energy to help other people when you’re depressed. If you’re walking around with joy, you’re going to be much more capable of showing up for others.

But how does that make it a religious requirement? Here Nachman comes close to something from the Christian tradition: being sad about breakups and losses is fine, but being in despair is not, because it’s a kind of ingratitude toward God. You have to imagine God saying “look at all the wonderful things I set up for you: aren’t you grateful?!” Of course in that scenario God is also responsible a bunch of lousy things, like illness and death. So when those things strike, it seems appropriate to feel sadness and grief. Being in denial all the time, like the lotus eaters in Homer, or those soma-guzzlers in Brave New World, doesn’t seem like the correct response.

For what it’s worth, Nachman himself had a really tortured life. He lost his wife and four of his eight children, and he was vilified by his community, He said it’s totally appropriate to feel sadness; in fact he also taught that you should “break your heart” every day. Feel the deep pain of the world, but keep that personal devastation within limits. Be broken-hearted for, say, an hour a day.

It may seems odd to expect us to turn our sadness off and on, but Nachman spoke of mastering yourself. He had a kind of Aristotelian approach: you have to work at it, and commit to finding ways of bringing yourself to happiness. In his words, “Behave with happiness. Genuine joy will follow.” And he has all sorts of strategies for this. For example, he also says you should consider adopting unpredictable behaviors, like spontaneous singing and dancing, even if you don’t feel like it. You should be silly. He also talks about the power of forgetting and redirecting things.

But if I forget the bad things that happened to me, won’t I just keep making the same mistakes over and over again—won’t I end up a little foolish? Nachman thinks that’s not so bad. He says it’s “better to be a fool who believes everything than a skeptic who believes nothing.” Since the key is happiness, and the truth is sometimes painful, we should all be holy fools, loving God, the people who surround us, and the world.

This is all very different from Maimonides, the subject of the first episode in our series. Maimonides is all about how the power of logic and science, how everyone should study it, and how it can lead you to love the world and even get you closer to God. Not only is Nachman the opposite, he even has a great joke about medicine that Maimonides would hate. He says the Angel of Death didn’t have the bandwidth to kill all the old people, so he recruited an army of doctors.

And it gets worse: Nachman says that philosophy is the worst thing you can spend your life on. You shouldn’t read any of it—“even that of the great rabbis”—which feels like a direct dig at Maimonides. Of course a lot of what Nachman himself is doing—giving reasons for the practice of joy, talking at length about Providence, offering arguments for why people should live religious lives—seems pretty much like philosophy.

So how do we resolve these Nachmanic contradictions? We ask our guest, Ariel Burger, an author and teacher who’s written and taught extensively on the teaching and stories of Rebbe Nachman, including in his book Witness: Lessons from Elie Wiesel’s Classroom.