“When the month of Adar enters, we increase in happiness,” the Talmud teaches. This slogan appears across Jerusalem, where I live, at this time of year, as many of the city’s storefronts are converted into costume bazaars (pirates, cowboys, fairies, and butterflies—the standard fare) and the stands in the shuk that sold dried fruit for Tu b’shvat now feature mini candy bars and Gummy Everything for inclusion in mishloach manot packages, the baskets of food that are traditionally exchanged on Purim. Walk into any of these shops and you hear the same recording of happy voices singing “Mishenichnas Adar Marbim B’simchah,” (Once Adar begins, we increase in happiness) like the ubiquitous Jingle Bells of American Decembers. Happiness, you might conclude, is about plastic sunglasses and glitter and colorful wigs.

You wouldn’t be entirely wrong: Happiness is indeed about costumes and mishloach manot. Because if Purim is about being happy, then the mitzvot we are obliged to perform on the holiday help teach us how we might stumble upon happiness.

For one, happiness is about community. All the deeds we are commanded to perform on Purim involve other people; they must be done in a communal context. To give gifts to the poor you must put yourself in a situation where you have contact with poor people; to send mishloach manot you must have friends to whom you can send them; to enjoy the festive Seudah, the holiday meal, there must be others with whom to share it; and even the megillah reading is supposed to be read publicly, in synagogue. Sitting alone at home and reading books about happiness is not going to make you happy. But going to shul to hear the megillah just might. The Jewish conception of happiness, as we learn from the mitzvot of Purim, is about surrounding yourself with other people, and involving yourself in their lives.

This is a lesson I was reminded of not long after the start of Adar, when I returned to daf yomi, my daily morning Talmud class, after a two-month hiatus. My tendency is to wake up feeling sad and overwhelmed. I am not a depressed person, but the start of the day always seems to bring with it an awareness of all the tasks that lie ahead, and I wake with the weight of the world on my shoulders. As the day unfolds and I begin to get to work, I tend to get progressively happier, and sometimes in the evenings I am positively giddy—until the next day dawns and the demons are back. But I’ve noticed that returning to daf yomi has had the magical effect of jump-starting my happiness. I love waking up knowing that I have a place to go, and that if I don’t hop out of bed at that very moment, I won’t make it in time. I love arriving at the class and seeing a host of familiar faces who take note of my presence and will wonder if I don’t show up one day. In short, I like starting my day as part of a community. Perhaps this is why we are supposed to pray with a minyan every morning—to remind ourselves, first thing, that we are part of something larger than ourselves. And perhaps this is why all the major mitzvot of Purim, the happiness holiday, must be performed in the presence of others.

The customs of Purim, too, offer lessons in being happy. On Purim we dress in costume so that we do not look or feel like ourselves. Sometimes, part of being happy is forgetting who we are or tricking ourselves into thinking that we can be somebody or something else. This custom reflects the awareness that it is difficult to make ourselves happy unless we can, at least in part, forget ourselves. This is surely what lies behind the custom of drinking alcohol—it is a desire to shed some of our inhibitions and our painful self-awareness. Purim reminds us that happiness is just sadness dressed in borrowed robes. We wear painted clown masks over our furrowed brows and can’t help smiling as we see our friends in their own silly disguises. Perhaps this is why Keats invokes the image of the veil to describe the close kinship between happiness and melancholy: “Ay, in the very temple of Delight/ Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine.” Delight is just veiled melancholy, and Purim is the day we put on the veil and peer out at the world through it.

Purim, though, is not the only occasion for happiness in Judaism. The Torah also speaks of happiness in the context of the festival of Sukkot, where we are told V’samachta b’chagecha v’hayita ach sameach. And you shall be happy on your festivals, and you shall be surely happy (Deuteronomy 16:14-15). I read the words “surely happy” as suggesting that we have to be happy even in spite of ourselves. We must be happy on demand, like the bright yellow “Don’t worry be happy” bumper stickers. But as we know, emotions cannot be mandated—we cannot force ourselves to feel a certain way. And so it seems that in the Torah, happiness is not a feeling but rather a way of acting. “V’hayita ach sameach”—you must surely act happy! Because to act happy is to be happy, in spite of, ach, how you might otherwise feel.

I have tried, over the years, to internalize this Jewish concept of happiness. No matter how sad I am feeling, I always dance up a storm on Simchat Torah. I am convinced that if I circle just a bit faster, I’ll be so dizzy that I’ll manage to lose my bearings entirely. On Purim, too, I force myself to come up with ridiculously obscure costumes to delight my fellow Talmud-learning friends, even if the last thing I want to do on that day is dress up (or even get dressed at all). I regularly smile and act cheerful and try to greet everyone I meet with a sunny disposition, regardless of how I am feeling inside. It is, to some extent, an act, but I don’t think it’s disingenuous. I am aware that I stand the best chance for being happy if I act like a happy person.

On Purim we are commanded to take this to an extreme. We act a certain way and, in so doing, we transform our emotional state. This process of acting as a means to feeling reminds me of the Talmudic midrash about how God held Mount Sinai over the heads of the Israelites like a bucket until they accepted Torah.

“And they stood at the foot of the mountain” (Exodus 19:17). In the Tractate Shabbat, Rav Avdimi bar Chama bar Chasa says: This teaches that God forced the mountain over them like a bucket, and said to them: If you accept the Torah, very well; and if not, this mountain will be your grave. … Rava said: Even so, they upheld accepted it upon themselves in the days of Achashverosh. That is, when the Jews were standing at the foot of Mount Sinai poised to receive the Torah, God threatened them by holding the mountain over their heads, so that the Jews had no choice but to receive it. It was only on Purim that they accepted Torah out of their own free will.

Torah, like happiness, was not easy to take on. The Jews accepted happiness under coercion, much as we “force” ourselves, through our observance of the mitzvot of Purim, to act happy. But the end result was that by Purim, the Jews found themselves accepting Torah out of their own volition. So too may we find ourselves, on Purim, surprised by joy—dancing to a rhythm we didn’t know we had, joking with people we wouldn’t have presumed to claim as friends. For those whose natural tendency is to go about the world somber and heavy with the weight of the world, Purim looms overhead like a very scary mountain indeed. For this one day alone, let us wear that mountain on our heads like a clown hat, casting our lots with those who are off making merry.

Ilana Kurshan works in book publishing and teaches Torah in Jerusalem.

Life During Wartime is as full of Jewish signifiers as any film I have ever seen. Superficially, it bears an uncanny resemblance to the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man—bar mitzvah rehearsals in the foreground, cantorial music in the background, and, overhead, the thunder of a seriously twisted God of the Old Testament. But, while A Serious Man is a profound meditation on suffering that references Jewish philosophy from the Bible to Kafka, the Jewishness of Life During Wartime is just kind of … there. At its best, it provides the basis for cutting social satire of the provincial Jewish middle class. (Here’s Trish and Harvey on their first date: “Harvey?” “Yes?” “Have you ever been to Israel?” “No. But it’s where I want to be buried.” “Me too.”) But for a film centered around a Jewish family struggling with the concept of forgiveness, it seems there ought to be some kind of animating Jewish idea beneath the surface. Solondz—a one-time yeshiva student—seems to think so, too. “If you grow up in the shadow of the Holocaust, it’s not hard to see those limits of what one can accept, forgive, and so forth,” he told the Forward in a recent interview.

But in Life During Wartime, he frames this question of limits—through the earnest Timmy—in cringingly literal terms. Can you forgive a pedophile? If you forgive a pedophile, can you forgive a terrorist? If you can forgive a terrorist, can you forgive a terrorist who blew up your own office building on 9/11? There is something Talmudic about this attempt to outwit suffering through the creation of neat moral categories, but at a level of parody that seems almost too obvious, like calling your sad movie Happiness or opening the scene of a failed romance with the notes of “Matchmaker, Matchmaker.” We’ve known at least since Philip Roth left Newark that a thicket of mazel tovs and chai necklaces (Trish wears one) can’t save messed-up suburban Jews from themselves, and instead only throws their foibles into relief. After all these years, I’m still waiting for Solondz to make another masterpiece like Welcome to the Dollhouse, which shows the anatomy of cruelty and suffering in clinical detail rather than commenting on them from an ironic distance.

Earlier: The Jews’ Oscar Nominee
Related: Slapping the Other Cheek [Forward]

Variety, which claims Solondz “may have made his best film” yet, praises the bar mitzvah boy, Timmy (played by Dylan Riley Snyder), as “the most compelling character this time around”; like Dawn Weiner, the relentlessly bullied middle school heroine of Solondz’s Welcome to the Dollhouse, he’s tormented at school after discovering that his pedophile father, whom he’d thought dead, is alive and has been released from prison. Timmy’s mom Trish, meanwhile, has taken up with an older man “after discovering that he, too, loves Israel,” says the Hollywood Reporter, in a review that heralds Solondz as “the true heir to Woody Allen.” The film premiered yesterday at the Venice Film Festival, where Solondz apparently couldn’t resist making a public comment about the “wonderful fascist building” his press conference was held in.

Life During Wartime [Screen Daily]
Life During Wartime [Variety]
Life During Wartime—Film Review [Hollywood Reporter]
Previously: Today I Am an Actor

At 7, Josie has a more complex image of God. “I believe in God except for when I’m angry,” She recently told me. Then she reconsidered. “Well, actually I do believe in God when I’m angry, but I want to be all, ‘I’m ignoring you!’” She’s interested in the idea of the yetzer hatov and the yetzer harah, the good and evil impulses that duel within us. “I think God is a force that tries to persuade us to do something good and tells us not to do something bad, but sometimes we don’t listen,” she said.

I thought about my kids’ different views about God when I read about research into the correlation between spirituality and happiness in children. The study, conducted by Mark Holder and his colleagues at the University of British Columbia, looked at 320 children aged 8 to12 in both public and parochial schools. It used a standard measure called the Spiritual Well-Being Questionnaire to assess kids’ spirituality in four components: Personal (finding meaning and value in one’s life); communal (the quality of interpersonal relationships); environmental (the sense of awe in nature); and transcendental (the relationship one has with something beyond the human level).

The researchers found that children who felt that their lives had meaning and value and who had strong relationships with others (the personal and communal aspects of spirituality) were happier than children who did not feel that way or have those connections.

But religious practices—defined as attending services, praying and meditating—didn’t have a statistically significant impact on the happiness levels.

I’m not so sure you can tease apart spirituality and religion. To Jews, at least, religious practices aren’t limited to prayer and being droned at in shul. A lot of what we do is home-based, tied to food (challah back!), costumes (Purim, anyone?), even camping (building and hanging out in a sukkah). For us, and for people of other faiths, religion is social. Through day schools, synagogue schools, and camps, we build connections and support systems. Holder and his colleagues view such social networks as spirituality-building, not religion-enhancing, but that clean division doesn’t work for me. Judaism emphasizes tikkun olam, healing the world— wouldn’t that fall under the researchers’ definition of the personal and communal aspects of spirituality?

Furthermore, I’m not convinced that spirituality without religion is good for happiness. I used to live in San Francisco, surrounded by nebulous woo-woo performance-art spirituality, which frequently existed in the absence of real community (other than Burning Man) and without any social-justice aspect. Spirituality, for a lot of folks I used to know, consisted of trying to “manifest” what they personally wanted, a la The Secret, a book that makes me want to hurl. (Not that I’m judgy.) And when you’re manifesting doesn’t work, don’t you then feel powerless as well as unmoored to something bigger than yourself?

I’m no researcher, and I’m no rabbi. But one thing is clear to me: Maxine’s view of religion isn’t very nuanced. (Most things are not when you’re a preschooler.) If she were an adult, I could see how her version of God—the celestial big meanie— would have zero correlation with happiness. (And it could drive anyone to God-free no-pressure Bay Area hippie spirituality.) Indeed, in The How of Happiness, an overview of positive psychology and happiness research by Sonja Lyubomirsky, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside, the downside of seeing God as a punitive, controlling force seems clear: several studies have found that people who believe that negative events are God’s punishment for their sins have more depression and poorer health than those without such beliefs.

I hope Maxie will grow into a sense of faith, spirituality, and religion that’s more like her big sister’s. Last year on the Fourth of July, Josie watched the fireworks over the East River while alternately screaming with joy and watching silently with her mouth hanging open. “Your mind is bigger than your head, because your mind can go anywhere,” she told me afterward. Transcendental. And Josie, like all self-righteous seven-year-olds, loves the notion of assisting the downtrodden and saving the planet. That’s communal, environmental, and personal. In short, she gets, and I hope Maxine is starting to get, the notion that helping other people and searching for meaning are both essential parts of our religious tradition.

There’s a project called The Happiness Study, funded by the Steinhardt foundation, that explores how Jewish institutions contribute to four “quality of life outcomes.” These are connectedness to others, having problem-solving skills, having social and emotional competence, and having a sense of meaning and purpose. The theory is that these qualities are malleable in childhood and can increase one’s happiness as an adult. The hope, of course, is that they will make Jews feel more connected to the Jewish community.

Jeffrey Kress, a member of the project team for The Happiness Study and a professor of education at the Jewish Theological Seminary, agrees that religion as well as spirituality can contribute to happiness. “When you have a sense of connection and feelings of belonging, and a sense of purpose and meaning in your life, you have both social support and perhaps the strength to persevere when there are bumps in the road of life,” he says.

In the future, Kress says, he and his colleagues hope to offer insight into the very different takes on spirituality and meaning that people find within Judaism. Is spirituality something that’s really self-directed? Is it more externally related, like tikkun olam? Is it a peak experience—a sort of religious runner’s high we experience only rarely—or a habit, part of the daily fabric of our lives? To me, these are more interesting questions than wondering whether it’s spirituality or religion that makes children—and adults—happy.

If Publishers Clearing House ever knocks on my door with an oversized check, it’ll make the worst Super Bowl commercial ever:

THEMMr. S. Auslander? 

MEYes. 

THEMYou’ve just won a million dollars! 

Hold on ME as I look at the check and think I’m undeserving. Others need it more than I. Like my mother. Oh, her endless suffering! And what about my sister and her congregation of children? You know how much they could use the money? Then there’s Darfur, and the Holocaust, of course. Didn’t the liberators find survivors eating worms? And here I am getting a million dollars while porno downloads upstairs and my wife and son are in the den watching Thomas the Tank Engine?

THEY hand ME the check.

I take a gun and blow my head off.

CUT TO: LOGO, TAGLINE:

VOICE-OVER:It’s all about winning! 

Then, back to the game.

No news is good news, but good news is bad news; my psychiatrist has always been far more concerned about my successes than he has been about my failures. I sat down in his office a few weeks ago, just after an unfortunate string of fortunate events. I had completed my manuscript, my editors, here and abroad, were pleased with the results, I had read essays on a number of national radio programs, I had a story published in a prominent magazine. I was a wreck.

“We’ve been through this before,” said my shrink.

“I know,” I said.

“Every time you’re happy…” he said, waiting for me to finish.

“I’m unhappy,” I said.

He nodded. I stared at my shoes.

“You could try failing more,” he said.

“Nah,” I said. “I went for pot instead.”

I haven’t smoked pot in a long time. My shrink pursed his lips, fought back a frown, took out his pen and wrote something on his chart.

Damn right, I thought.

If you’re going to go off the rails, you might as well go far enough off to warrant a troubled notation on your psychiatric chart.

* * * 

One Purim, a rabbi of mine got so drunk that another student and I had to help him stumble back home.

“Hashem created a beautiful world,” he said to us.

We nodded, trying to steer him away from the cliff at the edge of the road.

“But He made one mistake,” he continued. “One very, very bad mistake.”

I could name 20 without having to think too hard, so I wondered which one the rabbi had in mind.

“It’s not right,” he said, “that you can’t have a cigarette after cholent on Saturday afternoon.”

He shook his head sadly.

“It’s a real kasha,” he said.

A kasha is a difficult question.

I feel the same way about pot. It grows from the ground, it’s cheap, it makes me laugh and, when I watch Telemundo stoned, I’m pretty sure I understand what they’re saying. But it’s not right that everything I write while stoned isn’t, the following morning, as brilliant as it seemed to be the night before. And it isn’t right that the following afternoon I can’t write at all.

It’s a real fucking kasha.

* * * 

I’ve been setting off alarms. Everywhere I go lately, I set off security alarms—pharmacies, bookstores, groceries. It doesn’t matter what I’m carrying—it happened again this morning and I wasn’t even carrying my wallet. Maybe it was something I ate. Maybe it’s some sort of bio-magnetic something or other inside me. Maybe I’m just bad.

* * * 

“I’m being self-destructive,” I told my wife. She’s not a smoker, but sometimes we like to get a little happy and go for long hikes. She knew I hadn’t been writing, and she knew I had been smoking, she just didn’t know why.

“I had some success,” I explained. “It hasn’t been easy.”

We spoke about it for a while. For me, I explained, it’s not so much why bad things happen to good people, but why good things happen to me at all. I feel guilty when they do, and do whatever I can to make sure that they stop. I wondered if this had to do with my parents or a larger narrative—the single narrative I spent my life learning, that of a people on the outside, suffering adversity after adversity, meeting enemy after enemy. “Why me?” I wonder when joy fills my heart. “Why not them?” Maybe three generations from now, if the killing in Darfur ever comes to end, the grandchildren of those who died today will similarly feel uncomfortable with their comfort. Someone heads over to the Best Buy in downtown Geneina, gets himself a 40-inch flat-screen and spends the rest of the week feeling like crap.

“Why me?” he’ll wonder.

“Why not them?”

“And why does my shrink always wait until just after I’ve bought an eighth to convince me I need to stop?”

It’s a kasha.