Joy Comes in the Morning (Rosh HaShanah 5787)

Joy Comes in the Morning
Rosh HaShanah 5787
Rabbi Lisa Rubin

Twenty-five years ago this morning, the world was on fire.

We gather today on Rosh Hashanah on what was, a quarter of a century ago, “the morning after.”

I remember being struck by how people gathered immediately. While downtown Manhattan still smoldered, religious sanctuaries that had been half-empty for years overflowed. Candlelight vigils filled sidewalks; makeshift shrines of flowers and photographs appeared on street corners and firehouse doors. Strangers who had ridden the same elevator for a decade without speaking finally learned each other’s names. On the street, people were drawn to interact. Baseball stadiums filled, and tens of thousands of people who had every reason to stay home stood shoulder to shoulder and sang together. Emotionally, those weeks were impossibly heavy. People rushed toward each other with urgency and compassion.

We know that terrorism does not only aim to destroy buildings and lives. It has a subtler target. It wants to make us afraid of living. To convince us to retreat inward, to grow suspicious, to disappear into our own dread. But in those weeks in 2001, New Yorkers and all Americans resisted. Not with grand strategy or official ceremony, but with something more powerful: They gathered. They showed up in public together. They mourned together. They reclaimed public space from fear.

They may not have known it, but they were reaching for something Judaism has understood for thousands of years. When we are afraid and isolate ourselves, we are stripped of the most powerful resource we have: community.

In the Psalms, it says: “Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes in the morning.”[i] It is a beautiful promise. And yet, the aftermath of September 11^th felt like an endless night even when morning continued to come. If joy only arrives once the darkness lifts on its own, I gather some of us are still waiting. Even though it was unknown how we’d move ahead after the tragedy of 9/11, people did inch forward. With every vigil, with every gathering, with every act of love, there was a refusal to be dominated by fear.

A bolder reading of this psalm, then, is: Joy will come again, yes, but not as a reward we receive when the crisis ends. In Judaism, joy is one of the ways we resist the crisis and help bring the morning—while we are still inside the night.

Let’s acknowledge where we are. Our community is saturated by outrage and exhaustion. Institutions feel fragile. Public discourse feels cruel. Jews are fearful; once again the scapegoat for society’s problems. Our own sanctuary-- invaded by a hateful lunatic! Communities are divided. Many of us feel alone and afraid. The idea of joy feels indulgent, even inappropriate, because the world is so full of sorrow.

And this year we gather in a moment layered with memory. Twenty-five years since September 11th, and an entire generation has now grown up in its long shadow of political and military consequences. And a few months ago, our country marked its two hundred and fiftieth birthday. Two and a half centuries into the great and fragile democratic experiment that is America.

All of which raises a question worth asking on a morning like this one: What sustains a people through its hardest years? What allows a community not merely to survive fear and anger, but to refuse to become organized around it?

Jewish tradition gives a counterintuitive answer: We are instructed to carry on and be Jewish. Live by the calendar cycle, embrace the life cycle. Cultivate joy. Because Judaism insists that joy is not simply a mood that arrives when life gets easy. Joy, in our community, is a spiritual discipline. It is a communal obligation. And in the hands of a people threatened again and again across the centuries, joy becomes something more. It becomes a form of resistance.

We usually picture resistance as something visible and dramatic. But Jewish resistance has more often been quiet. We have lit candles in the darkest of times. We have sung when it would have been easier to stay silent. And when the world fully expected us to retreat, we gathered instead. After October 7^th, Israelis survived through the stubborn continuation of life itself.

This is not sentimentality, my friends. It is Jewish law. The Talmud teaches that the Divine Presence rests upon a person not through sadness, and not through frivolity, but through the joy of doing a mitzvah.[ii] Think about how radical that is! Of all the doorways to God our tradition could have chosen (suffering, sacrifice, solemnity), the rabbis chose gladness. And Deuteronomy states the reverse just as starkly: Moses warns that catastrophe will come upon the people, and the reason he gives is not faithlessness but that ‘you did not serve God with joy and gladness...’[iii] Our tradition treats the absence of joy as a danger itself.

Why would joy mean so much? Look at the shape of Jewish life: almost nothing that matters happens alone. We pray together, we name our children together, we get married in the presence of community. We deliberately communalize grief, so no one vanishes into sorrow unseen. And every single week, no matter what is burning in the world outside, Shabbat arrives and commands us to come together: to light the candles, bless the wine, set a full table. Our sages did not leave the joy of Shabbat to inspiration. They legislated it, telling us to bathe and change our clothes, to prepare meat and have wine, to make sure there is enough food for a feast, to spend the day with people we love.[iv] Shabbat is not a reward for a peaceful week. It comes precisely because the world is not yet at peace. It is a weekly act of resistance against a reality that would otherwise consume us whole.

In a year when antisemitism is deafening—on our campuses, in our feeds, in so many conversations—there is a strong temptation to spend our energy defending ourselves. Explaining our worth. Proving we deserve to be here. I understand that impulse. But I have come to believe it is not our job to defend Judaism to the people who despise it.

It is our job to live it. And to live Jewishly is to live joyfully. The most powerful answer to those who wish we would disappear is not a better argument. It is a fuller life: a crowded table, a sing-along, a sanctuary that overflows, a wedding hora. Hatred wants us frightened and alone because fear isolates. So we answer it the only way that actually works: we live joyfully. When our services were interrupted on a Friday night a month ago, my colleagues gave us a master class in the essence of Judaism. They continued with Shabbat. Relit the candles and carried on. Bitterness and fear is exactly the response our enemies would choose for us. Joy is the one they cannot tolerate. Our joy is the refutation.

And here is where our American story belongs. Because this insistence on joyful, public Jewish life did not only shape our history in the old world. It shaped our history in this country, too.

In 1790, George Washington promised the Hebrew Congregation of Newport that this new nation would give “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”[v] He was writing to a Jewish community that was already living openly in America. For centuries our people had survived by concealment. Here, at last, was a place where Jewish life would be not merely tolerated but celebrated, out loud and without apology.

Generations of Jewish immigrants carried that forward. They arrived in crowds, exhausted, and unsure of the future. And still, before they had any security at all, they lived Jewishly and joyfully. They filled wedding halls. They built synagogues and summer camps. They taught their children Yiddish songs. They gathered first, and in the gathering, joy became possible. And look what it produced. Who taught this country how to sing? Irving Berlin, the cantor’s son, who gave us both “God Bless America” and of course, “White Christmas.” Gershwin. Bernstein. So many of the architects of American music and comedy and public delight were Jews whose families carried living memories of exclusion, and who still refused to let bitterness have the final word.

Even in danger, our people have answered not only with vigilance but with observance. In the wars of the last century, Jewish soldiers held Passover seders and lit menorahs wherever they could. In tents, on bases, within earshot of the front. The danger did not lift; they simply refused to let it define them. Because without joy, fear becomes total—and a frightened people is an easy people to divide, and a joyless people forgets what it was fighting to protect. And I think we can feel that danger in our own moment. We are so tired. Cynicism has started to pass for sophistication. Outrage has hardened into a kind of identity. Many of us spend far more of our hours reacting than connecting. And slowly, almost without noticing, fear and anger begin to shrink our lives. We stop inviting people over, stop having difficult conversations, stop trusting, stop gathering. Judaism pushes against that at every turn. It tells us: Show up anyway. Come to the table anyway.

We are not asked to seek shallow happiness. Or practice avoidance. Or refuse to see what is real. But simultaneously we can aim for communal joy.

There is a teaching I love for a year like this one. During Sukkot, which is also called z’man simchateinu, the time of our joy, we wave the lulav, a collection of four species of plant. Even in a hard year, when a withered lulav—dried out and past its prime—is all that can be found, our tradition finds a way to let us fulfill the mitzvah. But it forbids us from storing it for the next year.[vi] I hear a charge in that. We will not pass down a withered Judaism. We will not raise our children to plan for fear. We will hand them a living, green, joyful tradition. One that expects to flourish.

So as we enter this new year, maybe the question is not only “How do we survive these difficult times?” but “How do we refuse to be defined by them?”

Well, we can first resist the temptation to withdraw from one another. We can process the news, debate and complain about what is wrong here and in Israel, but we can in equal measure celebrate being in each other’s company.

We can also fill our homes with warmth and hospitality and set tables with extra room. There is always someone worse off than us, more worried than us, more alone than we are. In embracing others, we enrich ourselves and honor our tradition.

As the granddaughter of someone who narrowly escaped Hitler, I’m aware that Judaism has made it all the way down to me, against all odds. I hope the miracle of our lasting civilization will never be wasted. Last year, 118 people converted through our Center for Exploring Judaism. They chose us, and they chose joy. We can, too.

Joy is not what arrives after redemption. Joy is one of the ways we bring redemption closer.

~~~

I began with the world on fire. Let me end with the aftermath of an older fire.

A generation after the Temple was destroyed, the great Rabbi Akiva and his colleagues climbed Mount Scopus and looked out over the ruins of Jerusalem. What they saw broke their hearts: the holiest place in the world was so desolate that a fox went trotting out of the very spot where the High Priest had once stood on Yom Kippur. His colleagues wept. But Akiva laughed. “Akiva,” they demanded, “how can you laugh?” And he told them: “Now that I have seen the prophecy of destruction come true with my own eyes, I know the prophecy of rebuilding will come true as well.”[vii] He was not denying the tragedy. He saw exactly what they saw. What he refused to surrender was hope and joy—and he would not wait for the restoration to feel it. His colleagues wept in the night of the ruins. Akiva had already turned toward the morning.

This year, when everyone around us has good reason to worry, may we find in ourselves a little of Akiva’s laughter—the defiant laughter of a people who have stood in the ruins before and who know, in their bones, that we will outlast the night together.

Shana Tova.

Notes

[i] Psalms 30:6.

[ii] Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 30b.

[iii] Deuteronomy 28:47.

[iv] Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 118a–b.

[v] George Washington, Letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, August 18, 1790, replying to an address by the congregation’s warden, Moses Seixas.

[vi] Mishnah Sukkah 3:1 rules that a stolen or dried-out lulav is invalid. The Babylonian Talmud (Sukkah 29b–31a) explains that a withered lulav fails the requirement of beauty. That stringency applies in full on the first day of Sukkot; on the remaining days, where nothing else is available, later authorities permit a withered lulav but it cannot be saved (Orach Chayim 649:6).

[vii] Babylonian Talmud, Makkot 24b.