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Your Happiness Journal

The Happiness Seminar Harvard Business Review: January 2012

Will all this research ultimately make us happier? We are learning and will continue to learn how to maximize our happiness. So yes, there is no doubt that the research has helped and will continue to help us increase our happiness. But that still leaves the big question: What kind of happiness should we want? For example, do we want the average happiness of our moments to be as large as possible, or do we want the sum of our happy moments to be as large as possible? Those are different things. Do we want lives free of pain and heartache, or is there value in those experiences? Science will soon be able to tell us how to live the lives we want, but it will never tell us what kinds of lives we should want to live. That will be for us to decide.

2 Choose the top three contributors to happiness from the following list - as a group. There are NO right answers.

Wealth Health Fame Exercise Sex Children Career Education Marriage Respect Fun Friends Travel Freedom Youth

3 Happiness is peace of mind

• Peace with self

• Not torn or conflicted by inner turmoil

• To be content and enjoy one’s blessings without feeling unfulfilled by them

Ein simcha k’hatoras hasefeikos.

4 5 By : The Baal Shemtov’s Principles of Joy If you live with something long enough, you begin to believe it’s a member of your family. Such was the case with misery: had begun to see depression as a mark of piety and a Jewish duty. To fight it was not just futile but outright heresy, for any trace of joyousness was suspect as sin. In sermons, ladles of despair stirred in a pot of self-pity made up the soup du jour, often without a trace of consolation:

At all times and at all hours, the gentiles come and fall upon us…often we say, “Death is preferable to life”…Behold, G-d is testing us to determine whether we truly cling to Him, and He abandons us to the gentiles, for in these times we are abandoned, and anyone who wishes may lay claim to us…

It wasn’t as though the Tov introduced joy to . Much to the perturbation of the preachers mentioned above, the declares only one fast day and 16 days of joy- 25, if we add and Chanukah. The Book of Psalms, alongside its bitter laments, gushes with explosive, often euphoric songs enjoining us to “serve G-d with happiness!” The lauds those who perform mitzvahs joyously, informing us that prayer and study are meant to be joyous activities. Rabbi Yehudah Halevi, , Bachya ben Asher all discuss joy as a divine service, even a vital one.

But for the , joy was more than a detail of Jewish life; it was a path of its own-the key and central path.

Yet further: The Baal Shem Tov didn’t limit joy to prayer, study and performance of mitzvahs. Consistent with his guiding principle that G-d is everywhere and can be found in all things, he taught that every event that befalls a person, everything a person sees or hears, all presents an opportunity to know the Creator and to serve Him. There can be no time, no circumstance and no place in which you cannot connect with the infinite. And if so, there is no excuse at any time to not be happy-since joy is the key to all divine service.

And perhaps most fascinating: the Baal Shem Tov understood joy as a device to repair the world, as a key to redemption.

6 Living a Joyous Life: by From the Oy to the Joy

The word religion has a stigma. For some people, it’s a dirty work. In some way, the notion of a religious person conjures up an image of someone who is a loser, who needs a crutch and therefore runs away from the real world seeking the protective womb of religion and shelter from life’s challenges. Happy confident people who are powerful and successful in the real world don’t need religion.

This stereotyping has historical roots. Most people remember what Karl Marx said, “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” Some may also be familiar with Nietzsche’s theory. He described two types of people in the world, strong and weak. Strong people do what they want, and where they want. Weak people don’t; generally they are subjugated by the strong. To outsmart the strong, the weak people invented “morality” in order to make the strong feel guilty about doing whatever they wanted to whomever they wanted. These “smart weak people,” Nietzsche said, were the Jews, and the Christians who adopted their ideas and foisted them onto the rest of humankind. Nietzsche’s ideas have permeated much of the Western thinking, and today many of us believe that religion is a plot make people feel guilty about what they want to do and enjoy doing. Religion robs us of our confidence and strength to assert ourselves. Religion forbids everything that is fun and pleasurable in life. Religion has turned humanity into a bunch of wimps servile to some almighty, supernatural dictator.

For those who look at Judaism this way their answer to the question “What is in it for me?” is “Nothing but trouble.”

Despite attempts to discredit the stature of religious believers in general, Judaism is really about gaining the wisdom and empowerment to maximize the quality of your life and fully celebrate each day, specifically by reclaiming your inner g-dly self and connecting with the source of all life-G-d.

Judaism clarifies the essential beliefs that inspire and enable us to live a purposeful, passionate, and pleasurable life soaring to the greatest heights of vitality, meaning and joy.

7 Chapter 31

And this shall be his service all his life in great joy, the joy of the soul in her release from the lowly body and “Returning to her Father’s house as in her youth,” … For there is no greater joy than the escape from exile and imprisonment, as in the example of the king’s child who was kept in captivity, grinding [corn], in prison and becoming covered with filth; then they are liberated and return to its father’s royal house.

And although the body is still in its contemptible and abominable state— it is referred to in the as “The skin of the serpent”— inasmuch as the essence and substance of the animal soul have not converted to good, so as to merge into holiness, nevertheless his soul will become more precious in his eyes than the despised body, and he will rejoice in her joy, and not confound and confuse the joy of the soul with the misery of the body.

Chapter 32

For, whereas one despises and loathes one’s body, while as for the soul and spirit, who can know their greatness and excellence in their root and source in the living G-d? Being, moreover, all of a kind and all having one Father— therefore, all are called real brothers by virtue of the source of their souls in the One G-d; only the bodies are separated. Hence in the case of those who give major consideration to their bodies while regarding their souls as of secondary importance, there can be no true love and brotherhood among them, but only [a love] which is dependent on a [transitory] thing…

Chapter 33

…When one will deeply contemplate this, his heart will be gladdened and his soul will rejoice even with joy and singing, with all heart and soul and might, in [the intensity of] this faith which is tremendous, since this is the [experience of the] very proximity of G-d, and it is the whole [purpose] of man and the goal of his creation, as well as of the creation of all the worlds, both upper and lower, that He may have an abode here below, as will later be explained at length.

Behold, how great is the joy of a common and lowly man when he is brought near to a king of flesh and blood, who accepts his hospitality and lodges under his roof! How infinitely more so is the [joy in the] abiding nearness of the Supreme King of kings, the Holy One, blessed be He. And so it is written, “For who is this that engaged his heart to approach unto Me? saith the Lord.”

For this reason it was instituted to offer praise and thanks to His blessed Name each morning, and to say: “Happy are we! How goodly is our portion, and how pleasant is our lot, and how beautiful our heritage!” In other words, just as a person rejoices and is happy when an inheritance of an immense fortune, for which he had not toiled, falls to him, how infinitely more should we rejoice over our heritage that our fathers have bequeathed to us, namely, the true Unity of G-d: that even down here on earth there is naught else beside Him alone, and this is His abode in the lower worlds.

This is the meaning of the words “Shall live by his faith,” with the emphasis on shall live, .. so will his soul revive with this great joy. This is a doubled and re-doubled joy, for apart from the joy of the soul apprehending the nearness of G-d and His dwelling with him, he will doubly rejoice with the joy of the Lord and the tremendous gratification rendered to Him by virtue of his faith, .. For there is no joy before Him, blessed be He, like the light and joy of the particular excellence of light that comes out of darkness. This is the meaning of the verse, “Let rejoice in his Maker,” that is to say, that everyone who is of the seed of Israel should rejoice and be happy in the joy of the Lord Who is pleased and glad to dwell in the lower spheres … 8 Letter from Rebbe , 5721 (November 20, 1960)

… Most of us find ourselves, of course, not in paradise, but also not in Mathausen. We are situated somewhere in between the two extremes. It is up to each individual to decide whether we will be happy or miserable, upbeat or dejected, filled with life or with despair.. Adaptation of letter in Hebrew

9 5 Workout Tools

1. Gratitude: Modeh Ani You are grateful for what you have. • Jot down three things they were grateful for. 2. Attitude: Focus on mind: Tracht gutvet zeingut • “What am I going to do with my mind today?”

3. Community: Be involved with others Create positive feelings in other peoples lives. • Write a positive message to someone in their social support network. 4. Be happy: Develop new habits Engaging in one of the brief positive exercise every day for as little as three weeks • Exercise for 10 minutes. • Take two minutes to describe in a journal the most meaningful experience of the past 24 hours. 5. Believe in Yourself! G-d does.

10 Thank You!

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