Is Life Good?
When I told my mom a”h that I was getting separated from my then wife, she surprised me with her response.
She said, “I’m proud of you, Jaiky.” (She used to call me “Jaiky,” pronounced like “Jakey.”)
This was not what I was expecting to hear from her. I had thought she might say something more to the effect of “I told you so...”
Divorce is an area of life that is so complex — so laden with guilt, remorse and self-doubt — that all I could think was, “what on earth could she have be proud of??”
So I asked her, “What are you proud of?”
“That you chose to be happy,” she explained. “And you know what?” she added, in her one-of-a-kind, buoyant way, smiling through the phone in her evergreen Venezuelan accent, “I’m proud of myself for raising my son with such a joy of life that he knows to choose happiness.”
Choosing happiness requires us to believe in happiness — to believe that it’s possible to be happy, and believe that we deserve not just being happy from time to time — but living a happy life.
One who doesn’t believe that it’s possible, or doesn’t believe that they deserve it, will not put in the work to pursue it.
I am grateful to both of my parents for raising me to believe this, and grateful to God for vindicating this belief the times that I’ve made choices that are aligned with it.
It is, however, pretty common to think of happiness as an external condition of life — something like the weather.
Some people have temperate emotional climates; others don’t.
That’s just their luck.
Some days, we wake up happy; on others, on the wrong side of the bed.
But what if happiness is a mindset? What if happiness is a choice?
Let’s define happiness as the psycho-emotional state of feeling good about:
who you are,
where you are presently,
where you’re heading, and
your confidence that from a holistic perspective, the events of your life that are out of your control — the opportunities that come your way, the people you will meet, the ideas you will encounter, the resources that will be made available to you, and the challenges you will face — will support you on your journey.
Said differently, your happiness is a function of:
what you believe about yourself
and
what you believe about the universe you live in.
Let’s start with what you believe about yourself:
If you don’t see yourself as fundamentally good or having a purpose to fulfill, you cannot be a happy person. Waking up with feelings of self-loathing or aimlessness cannot lead to anything good. Nothing great in life can be achieved without first believing in our own ability and worthiness to do so. This is a topic that deserves its own treatment in a future XL.
In this XL, we will focus on what you believe about the world you inhabit:
Even if you have great self-esteem and self-confidence in a theoretical vacuum, but you see the world you’ve been placed in as a ruthless jungle governed by Murphy’s Law, you will live in constant anxiety and frustration, and in their wake — sadness and hopelessness.
Murphy’s Law was coined in 1949 by a US Air Force engineer Edward Murphy, but has been around probably since the beginning of mankind under the generic term “pessimism”:
We normally think about pessimism as simply a kind of mental and emotional disposition, but it could actually be broken down into a set of beliefs about the universe — either that the universe is essentially random and couldn’t care less about your wellbeing, or worse, that it’s somehow out to “get you.”
People can formulate these beliefs as philosophical or religious doctrines, or just tacitly espouse them as instincts that shape their lives.
You can watch below my dear friend Moshe Gersht beautifully discuss how these beliefs can radically alter the course of your life one way or the other:
What do you believe?
Are you an optimist or a pessimist?
Do you believe that everything happens for a reason?
If you believe everything happens for a reason, do you see this reason that drives the events of your life the general good of the world (i.e. everyone but you in that moment)? Or do you believe that everything that happens to you is also for your own good personally?
Lastly, whatever it is you say you believe — do your emotional reactions on any given day reflect these beliefs? Do you get frustrated or annoyed or even angry sometimes? If so, what does this say about your beliefs?
Keep reading to drill down further into what these beliefs entails.
The Talmud quotes the practice of Rabbi Akiva of consistently saying, no matter what happened in his life,
"Everything that God does is for the best!”
This practice is codified as law for all Jews in the Code of Jewish Law (the “Shulchan Aruch”), which means that it isn’t a lofty level reserved only for the very righteous like Rabbi Akiva.
It is axiomatic in Judaism that if it is law, it is, in essence, attainable by everyone.
Perhaps the hard thing is not saying this as a slogan. Perhaps what’s hard is truly believing it.
Let’s unpack it to see what it would mean to actually believe that everything that God does is for the best.
We can more or less imagine a world in which everything is made perfect — a world in which all of the external conditions for human life have been calibrated to optimize for peace of mind and the pursuit of pleasure and happiness if we so choose. In the Torah, this state is called the “Garden of Eden - גן עדן,” which translates to "the “Garden of Exquisite Pleasure,” (which you can read more about here).
Last week, we began exploring the notion that God would not create the universe for His own sake because He has nothing to gain by making a universe, and nothing to lose by not making it. So, then, why would He make a universe?
It must be that He had nothing to get out of it — only to give through it.
If God didn’t have to make us in the first place, and only did so for our benefit, why wouldn’t He go all the way and put us in a Garden of Exquisite Pleasure?
This is precisely why He did just that. There’s no reason why God wouldn’t “go big or go home” (so to speak). He went big. He pulled all the stops for us, and put us in the perfect environment.
There’s only one thing that could then theoretically mess things up:
Bad decisions on our part.
People can believe that once upon a time God gave them everything that they could possibly want at birth — great parents, great family, health, wealth, education — but could still very easily feel that they “blew it” through their mistakes along the way.
If I am honest, this is what I believed about my own life at 27 years old. I believed that I my life was ruined.
Not by God — but by my own poor choices.
What would it mean, then, to believe that everything that God does is for the good even if He has granted us a capacity to make real choices that could mess things up?
If we put the condition “if I am perfect” before “everything that God does is for the best” renders it moot because I am not perfect.
No one is.
I’ve messed up a whole lot and so have the people who came before me.
Here’s a more complete and correct way to understand “everything that Hashem does is for the best”:
At every juncture — at every fork in the road of life in which I can make a consequential choice — and I can choose path A, which would be the “wise choice,” or the path B, which would be the “impetuous choice” — no matter which choice I make, Hashem will support me with consequences that are the best for me given my choice.
My kids sometimes make good choices and sometimes make bad choices, but my love for them doesn’t change as a function of their choices. The way I respond to them changes, but only to provide the appropriate response to the choice they’ve made. If they mess up, and I need to supply a negative consequence (aka a punishment), I should only do so if it is in their best interest. If they make good choices, my job is to reinforce them with positive consequences.
This exploration has no doubt opened up a pandora’s box of questions for you.
At least I hope it has.
Stay tuned as we continue our quest through the biggest of questions, starting with: