Happiness is an explosive. It blows holes through every sort of barrier.
Happiness is the juice that powers life.
Bees buzz from flower to flower in total ecstasy until the night. They’re happy.
Birds fly from branch to branch, from forest to field, from one side of the world to the other twice a year. On happiness.
Human babies stand up and walk and fall down and get up and fall down and walk. Because they’re happy. Because life is happiness and happiness is life.
Because happiness means breaking out of your boundaries. And that’s what life is: A moment ago you were one being, the next you are another. Being alive means to be perpetually transcending yourself.
The Wall That Contains Us
The boundary of all boundaries is the barrier between Creator and created. Go transcend that. Then you are truly alive.
What is that boundary?
Imagine you’re writing a story. You create characters. The last thing you want to mix into the world of these characters is what-happens-next. That would really suck the air out of your drama. Let them know the plot and you just killed the story.
Let them know that this is just a story and there was never a story.
Now look at your world. You’re inside a bubble. Not a bubble in space, or even a bubble in time. Think of a bubble of reality. The hardcover binding of the story of your universe.
Somewhere, very deep down within you, your soul gropes at the outer edge of a membrane stretched over reality, a membrane that holds your world securely within its bounds, preventing it from merging and dissipating within the endless light beyond.
Your soul wants nothing more than to pierce that membrane. But it can’t. Only the Author of this story can do that.
Pierce the Wall
How does the Ultimate Author break through that wall and preserve the world He has created within it?
If He says, “Here I am! You’re a character in a story and I’m the author!”—the story is gone as though it never was. Because, retroactively, it wasn’t.
So instead, He issues a request. He says, “Excuse me, dear and beloved character in my story, there’s something I really want done inside there, and I need you to do it for me.”
He’s asking right now. How awake are you? You probably had a suspicion that your known universe was not the is-all of existence. Now you discover it’s a fiction novel.
But it’s not fiction. It’s fiction and nonfiction, because its author has made a request, and authors don’t need to make requests of fictional beings.
Wake up some more: You’ve just entered into conversation with a famous Author. He creates universes. His characters are widely diverse. They are innumerable. Literally. The vastness of His stage is beyond comprehension, the depth of His themes are beyond unfathomable and the overarching plot of His drama encompasses all and directs all.
And He’s talking to you. He’s making a request. He says He needs you.
In effect, you have just been rendered real.
That’s the power of a request. A request empowers. A request can lift you into the world of someone much greater than you, creating a relationship, a bond, and render you a significant partner in that bond.
The Embrace
This may be too much for the human mind to handle. So let’s take our meditation from another angle:
Think of someone you greatly love, respect and admire. Some great genius or hero before whom you feel hopelessly insignificant, or even asininely redundant.
Now imagine you’re down and out, all alone, stuck up in a derelict, one-room apartment on skid row.
There’s a knock on the door, you crack it open, and who trots in but this very special person, a sparkling smile on his face and a bottle of champagne in his hand, gives you a big hug and exclaims, “Let's celebrate that we are together!”
Take that, and now bump it up one: Imagine that this is not a person, but the Author of Heaven and Earth.
You've watched in fascination and awe all those Discovery Channel documentaries, google-eyed over His magnificent works, and attempted to fathom His unfathomable ingenuity in all those science courses you’ve taken. In your creative works, in music, art, prose and computerized simulations, you've feebly attempted to emulate some tiny iota of His ultimate masterfulness—and always come out feeling oh so inadequate.
And now, yes, He's standing there in front of you, smiling—and He grabs you, all of you, in a mega-bear-hug.
The Mitzvah Hug
Why would you want to imagine such a thing? Because this is the closest we can get to imagining what a mitzvah accomplishes—any mitzvah.
A mitzvah is the piercing of the wall of creation.
A mitzvah is the liberation of life from its confines.
A mitzvah is a request from beyond the final wall.
What are His requests?
He requests, from His very essence and being, that you engage every limb of your body in a dance of beautiful deeds together with Him. Each mitzvah is a full body embrace.
He asks that you speak to Him each of your innermost desires, in joy and in tears, in celebration and in sorrow. Every word is another kiss to your lips.
He asks that you engage your mind and soul in the joy and delight of the teachings He will share with you. You study His Torah, sing its song, swim in its ocean and wrestle with the flow of its rivers. You are in intimate communion of spirit with He who spoke and the universe came to be.
A mitzvah is nothing less than a celebration of Creator-meets-created-and-the-two-become-one. Each mitzvah is another love affair. An elopement from the clutches of mundanity into the arms of pure and infinite love.
Yes, but …
Okay, so half the time you're messing up. You keep slipping back into the dream, forgetting the whole love affair in the concerns and temptations of everyday life.
So there are rocks along Paradise Road. Get your priorities straight: Focus on the road and the paradise, not the rocks. Make up, say you're sorry, and get on with the celebration of life. Even for a moment. And then another moment. And there will be another moment.
Besides, those bumps along the road provide even greater reason to celebrate. Celebrate that your relationship with the Master of the Universe runs at such a core level that it cannot be broken; that even when you walk away from Him, He anxiously awaits your return.
No love could be deeper, no joy could be greater.
A Jew Must Be Happy
Perhaps the greatest challenge for Jews of our time is to re-associate being Jewish with being joyous.
We need to declare to ourselves, to our children and to the world that, no, being Jewish is not about persecution, or anti-semitism, or the Holocaust. Neither is it about the craving hunger and solemnity of a Yom Kippur service or bribing your kid to take his/her bar/bat mitzvah lessons.
That’s why we have celebrations like Purim, and an entire month called Adar in which we are told that it’s a mitzvah to increase our joy each day of the month. Joy over what? Over being a Jew.
Being Jewish is about celebrating who you are, celebrating what you are a part of, and celebrating every mitzvah you can pack in during a lifetime.
That’s why we celebrate year after year our liberation from bondage in Egypt—because that is what being a Jew is all about: Exodus; breaking chains, shattering the bounds of a limited being.
Being a Jew means to connect with the infinite that is beyond all things. Being a Jew means having the chutzpah to pummel through all barriers, even the ultimate wall at the edge of all existence.
With joy and celebration, we will demolish the final barriers that hold the Creator out of His world.
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