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 because of it—he said it’s essential to find joy. In fact he called it a spiritual obligation: “it is a great mitzvah,” he wrote, “to be in joy always.” (“Mitzvah” is the Hebrew word meaning “commandment.”) 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.

As for it being 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?!”

Here, of course, the worry would be that God doesn’t only send us wonderful things; he also sends things like illness, persecution, and death. (At one point Nachman indirectly admits this when he says, delightfully, that our job is to distract God from hurting us: “You must call God away from all his other tasks. We [must] draw him away from sending evil decrees to the world.”) And Nachman himself had more than his share of suffering: he lost his wife and four of his eight children, and was vilified by many in surrounding communities for his non-standard approach to religion. So what should we do when tragedy strikes? Should we bury our heads in the sand, just so we can stay happy? Should we be like the lotus-eaters in Homer, or those soma-guzzlers in Brave New World?

Not according to Nachman. As he saw it, it’s totally appropriate to feel sadness; in fact he said you should “break your heart” every day, feeling the deep pain of the world. But the trick is to keep that personal devastation within limits. Be broken-hearted for, say, an hour a day; and then return to joy. That may sound like a surprising—not to say impossible—thing to demand of human beings, but Nachman had what we might call an Aristotelian approach: if you just practice enough, you’ll get good at it. Work from the outside in. “Behave with happiness. Genuine joy will follow.” 

Nachman also had a variety of specific suggestions for what to do when you’re tempted to lose your cheerfulness and hope. Sing and dance, even if you don’t feel like it. Do silly things. (“If the only way to make yourself happy is by doing something silly, do it.”) Appreciate everyday miracles. (“Seek the sacred within the ordinary. Seek the remarkable within the commonplace.”) And learn to forget: “as soon as an event is over with, forget it completely and never think about it again.”

You might worry that a life of forgetting is a life of repeating the same mistakes over and over again. Won’t we end up a little foolish? Even if we do, Nachman thinks, that might not be 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 the power of logic, science, and philosophy: everyone should study those things; the knowledge they provide can lead us to love the world; it can even bring us closer to God. Nachman is the exact opposite. Philosophy, he says, is the worst thing you could possibly spend your time on. You shouldn’t read any of it, and “this even includes philosophical works of the great Rabbis.” Surely a direct dig at Maimonides!

Another clear dig at Maimonides is a joke Nachman once told about medicine, Maimonides’s area of specialization outside of theology. The Angel of Death, said Maimonides, didn’t have the bandwidth to kill all the old people, so he recruited an army of doctors. Zing!

But if Nachman feels this way—make yourself foolish, refrain from logic, avoid philosophy like the plague—what is he doing offering his own thoughts about life? Why does he give all these reasons for the practice of joy, talk at length about Providence, and offer arguments for why people should live religious lives? We’ll 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. It should be a joyful conversation.