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[ELI talks - Inspired Jewish Ideas] [elitalks.org] [#ELItalks]
[Dr. David Pelcovitz - Jewish Perspectives on Happiness]
[applause]
[Dr. David Pelcovitz] A few years ago I was at a retreat for families of children with cancer.
We were sitting around in a circle in a formal kind of a meeting,
and a young chassid said that that previous year his son was diagnosed with leukemia.
Ten days later he's sitting in synagogue, sitting in shul on Yom Kippur,
and he said a wave of happiness washes over him like he's never experienced in his entire life.
I was puzzled. What does that all mean?
And then I was even more puzzled when I look around the room
and I see everybody, all the other parents, nodding in agreement, with tears glistening in their eyes.
And it got me to thinking, how does the secular view of happiness,
which is tied etymologically to words like hapless, happenstance, haphazard,
kind of hinting that if you're lucky enough to have money,
if you're fortunate enough to be living a life where everything falls your way, you'll be happy,
but otherwise maybe not,
and how does that differ from the Jewish view, the Jewish word for happiness, simchah?
And what we have to understand is that happiness really matters.
Research in positive psychology, especially over the last decade,
has shown that happy people are more loving, more forgiving, more creative.
It turns out that this positive psychology research has roots that are very deeply set in Jewish wisdom,
and they inform some of the problems facing the Jewish community today.
What we're going to do together now is look at 3 issues facing the community
and talk about how some of the insights in positive psychology, informed by millennia-old Jewish wisdom,
can help us come up with some ideas on how to address those problems.
The first issue I wanted to talk about is the issue of goals.
Life writ large. The big picture.
We're living lives that are often extremely pressured.
We have pressures in terms of family pressures, pressures in terms of work,
in terms of community obligations, and often that doesn't leave us enough time
for a step-back response to think about the big picture.
If I told everybody here to spend 20 minutes—don't worry about spelling, don't worry about grammar—
and write about the best possible self that you could imagine over the next 10 years—
where do you want to be professionally in the next 10 years,
what are your dreams in terms of your family progress in the next 10 years—
and then I had you do that over a 4-day period, 4 sequential days,
the research shows 2 things will happen.
Your happiness levels will shoot up. Actually, your simchah levels will shoot up.
Also, it will make it more likely that you will realize those goals.
Again, this is rooted in ancient Jewish wisdom.
It says in Proverbs in Mishlei, "Where there is no vision, the people lose themselves."
Without that vision thing, you're going to lose it.
You're just not going to be able to think about the big picture.
My favorite way of thinking about this was something I saw that was written by Michael Josephson,
an attorney who is the head of the Center for Ethics in California.
He said, "Here's how you have to live your life."
"Imagine you're a fly on the wall at your own funeral,
and you could feel and you could think and you could see."
"What are the 3 ways that you most want to be remembered?"
What are the 3 ways that you want to be remembered by your family,
by your grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and so on?
And he says, "Hold those in your mind and then live life backwards."
But the goals have to be intrinsic.
They have to tie in to the essential inner spark of our uniqueness,
because if they don't, they're not going to be tied to simchah.
They have to come from inside.
If they are coming from extrinsic pressures, what you think other people think, it's not going to work.
Rabbi Kook has a brilliant way of discussing this. He says the following:
"There is a free man who has the spirit of a slave."
"And there is a slave who has the spirit filled with freedom."
"Whoever is faithful to himself, he is a free man."
If you're faithful to your inner self, you're a free person.
The second issue I want to talk about is more the moment, not the broad screen, the broad canvas of goals.
But what about living in the minute? What about mindfulness?
Research in positive psychology shows that savoring,
stopping to enjoy the really precious moments in our life,
makes an enormous, enormous difference in terms of happiness.
When I go to different parts of the world and talk to children attending Jewish high schools
and I talk to them about their lives and about their spirituality, they almost all say the same thing.
They almost all say, "There's not enough stillness in our day."
And they describe days that go from constant texting
and constantly being connected in one way or another to their devices
and running from subject to subject during their school day.
It's interesting.
Almost 1000 years ago Rabbeinu Bachya talked about a 4-word prayer
that informs our times and informs this issue.
He said, "God save me from fragmentation of my soul."
The Jewish world has an antidote to this. It's called Shabbos.
Shabbos is about being, not doing. It's about the ability to step back and savor what's most important in our lives.
Let's go revisit the story of that young chassid at the cancer retreat.
What was going on there?
How could he describe 10 days after what must be one of the most traumatic challenges of life
as being infused with happiness and have all the other parents agree with him?
The answer was that at that moment he was tied to what matters.
It was the opposite of fragmentation.
He was tied and surrounded by family, friends, and faith.
Simchah, according to some, is tied to putting 2 Hebrew words together—
sham moach, where your head is at.
If your head is in a place of meaning, happiness will ensue.
Author Robert Brault says, "Enjoy the little things,
for one day you may look back and realize they were big things."
The third and final issue I wanted to talk to you about is gratitude.
There's a series of studies done by Dr. Luthar at Columbia University, a psychologist there.
She looked at groups of very wealthy adolescents in a New York suburb
and she compared them to kids from a lower socioeconomic background
and found, much to her surprise, a higher rate of depression, anxiety, and alcoholism.
Then she worked to deconstruct what's that all about.
And one of the core ingredients she found behind what she termed affluenza
is that these adolescents often had a sense of entitlement,
a sense that, "I have what's coming to me," total lack of gratitude for the incredible kindness
and gifts that their life was about.
The very word to be Jewish, Yehudi, is rooted in the word for gratitude.
It's a core Jewish value.
And again, the research in positive psychology tells us that it's not only tied to happiness,
it's tied to health.
A number of years ago I was in Hawaii at a conference.
I had to give a paper. I volunteered to go there.
I'm sitting outside alone in between sessions,
and I'm seeing this unbelievable beauty.
The sun is setting over the water. It was a scene of unimaginable beauty.
The only other person there was the hotel worker.
And I look at him and I say, "Sir, I can't even imagine how lucky you are
to be living and working in a place surrounded by such beauty."
And he looks at me, truly puzzled, and he says, "Sir, I don't see what you're seeing."
"I dread coming to work Monday morning as much as the next guy."
What does positive psychology tell us about how to overcome this habituation?
It's that you have to develop a habit of attention to what matters most in life.
How do you do that?
One of the positive psychology exercises that's been documented to really teach gratitude
is the regular count your blessing exercises.
Very often we recommend at a Friday night meal or a meal where the whole family is together
you go around the table and do a count your blessing exercises.
When you ritualize it and build it into the fabric of your life, it starts to happen.
Let me end with a story.
A number of years ago was the height of the second intifada in Israel,
and I was there working with some of the survivors of terror bombings
and mostly with the therapists working with them.
It was a very intense and draining 2 weeks.
I had to rush to catch a plane to England, where I was going to be at a conference.
And as I'm about to leave Jerusalem, I figured I'd take a chance even though I had tight connections,
and I told the cab driver, "I'll pay you for your waiting time. Please just drop me off."
There was a wedding of a friend's daughter taking place.
I figured I'd rush in and give a quick mazel tov.
I run in, the wedding ceremony is outside, and it was an unbelievably beautiful ceremony.
The weather was perfect; sun is setting over the ancient walls of Jerusalem.
It was probably the happiest bride and groom I ever saw in my life.
And it felt like an uncommonly spiritual moment.
I was extremely happy I went.
I rush into the cab, catch the plane to Heathrow, come back to JFK just in time for Shabbos.
And I'm jet lagged, I'm emotionally drained, and I'm sitting around the table Friday night and my wife says,
"Okay, let's go around the table and talk about something from the week we're grateful for."
And I think to myself, "This is for other families, not for me. I don't want to do this."
But she persisted and went around to all my kids.
And I was going to pass, but then the wedding popped in my mind. I had forgotten about it.
And as I share my memories of that wedding, I literally feel it going from short-term memory
into long-term memory as a memory that I could draw on at any time,
a memory I could be grateful for.
And that's the way I want to leave you is with the image and the importance of just simple things—
being able to think about our goals as we live life backwards,
think about developing mindfulness as we savor the most precious moments of our life,
and develop a sense of true gratitude as we develop a habit of attention
to everything we need to be grateful for.
And as we do that, I'm confident that our lives as individuals and as members of our family
and as members of our community will be infused with simchah.
[applause]
[ELI talks - Inspired Jewish Ideas]