ESSAY: Serving God With What Brings You Joy (Parashat Ki Tavo)

The Horror of the Torah’s Tocheichah (“Rebuke”)

This week’s parsha is dominated by the tocheichah, the lengthy description of terrible events and curses that will befall us if we do not keep the covenant with God (Deuteronomy 27:15-28:69): All our endeavors will fail, the skies will close up, our enemies will conquer us, and we will be afflicted with disease, persecution, anguish, insanity and despair.    

Many of the Torah’s descriptions here have a lot of resonance for us.  We do see these afflictions in the world.  We know that they have happened and continue to happen, to us as well as to others.  How do we face all that suffering?  What is our role in combating it?

Ray of Light: Serving God with Joy

There is a ray of light in the midst of the Torah’s terrible descriptions, a ray of light that perhaps offers us a way forward despite the suffering, a path through the darkness.  That ray of light is simchah, joy.  The Torah explains that the reason all this will befall you is: “because you didn’t serve God with joy and gladness of heart,” tahat asher lo avadeta et Hashem elokekha besimchah ubetuv levav (Deuteronomy 28:47).  In other words, the key to avoiding or counteracting this terrible outcome lies in this one thing – serving God with joy.  

What does it mean to serve God with joy and gladness of heart, besimchah uvetuv levav?   The usual understanding is that we should do the mitzvot (commandments) with joy.  I want to suggest an additional meaning that expands the notion of what avodat Hashem, what serving God might mean, that it doesn’t just refer to the official mitzvot which are the same for every person, but that it also refers to a person’s unique contribution, their particular way of serving God in the world.  

Follow the Joy

Our question often is – how do we know what our purpose is, what we should be devoting our time and energy to, what our particular avodah, our particular service or calling, is?  And the answer here is – simchah – follow the joy, follow the gladness, follow your heart.  They are clues and signals guiding us to our particular calling.  When you go in one direction, does your body sing or does it sink?   What about the other direction?  Follow the singing.  Go with the positive life energy in you.  If you do that, if you follow the joy and use that as your guide in serving God in the world, then slowly you begin to heal, to counteract, to erase, some of that tocheichah, some of that suffering and anguish in yourself and in the world.   

Where Your Gladness Meets The World’s Hunger

The theologian Frederich Buechner says that “the place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet” (Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC’s).  Amidst the terrible suffering described in the tocheichah, our response can be to be oved Hashem bisimchah, to serve God in this needy world from the place of our deepest gladness and joy.  It means finding that place, a unique place for each one of us, getting to know our true authentic self, what makes our hearts sing and our bodies feel alive, and continuously returning to that place as the source of our service and our way of being.  What God needs most from us is for us to bring into the world the joy of our truest selves.  

What Brings You Deep Joy?

What in your life gives you joy, makes you feel alive and energized?  It is not necessarily something that always goes well or where there isn’t some sadness or pain involved.   But when you think of doing this thing, you actually want to do it, your soul desires it in some inexplicable way, your body inclines towards it like a seedling towards the sun, rising and soaring to meet it.  And it doesn’t have to be a lofty thing.  Maybe it is baking a cake or sitting with a friend or telling a joke or knitting.  It is a place of gladness, a spark of energy, a positive life affirming force in you that desires forward movement and expression, that makes you smile and glad to be alive, like a wildfire inside that sets your whole body alight.   We may not have frequent access to this place, and that’s ok, but maybe we can start to notice and be curious about the little glimpses of that joy when it does arise. 

This is the secret sauce that heals us and heals the world.  One of the curses described in this tocheichah portion is: “In the morning, you will say – if only it were evening, and in the evening you will say, if only it were morning (Deuteronomy 28:67).”   This is the plague of purposelessness, the sense that we have no reason to get up in the morning, our only wish for time to pass. Maybe you have had a taste of this kind of despondency at times.  In that state, we feel that we are downtrodden victims with no power or agency to take control of our lives. But we do have power; we have the immense often untapped power of our heart’s deepest gladness, our soul’s deepest desire, and it is this spark which can fuel our days, making us want to get up in the morning with purpose and verve and zest, like a child awakens early to conquer the new day.   Maybe you can imagine yourself back in bed this morning and imagine getting up with excitement, as the Shulhan Arukh (Orach Chayim 1:1) says, rising like a lion to greet the day with purpose, the unique purpose for which you were put on this earth, the unique way you are meant to serve God in the world.  

Why It’s Hard

Why is it that we often don’t feel this way in our daily lives, that we do often suffer from a sense of downtroddenness and purposelessness?   The Torah names it at the end of that verse – merov kol –  the reason you don’t serve God with gladness is merov kol – “from an abundance of everything,” from an abundance, I want to suggest, of external and internal pressures to do otherwise than what makes you glad. The reason we don’t serve God with joy, the reason we don’t jump up in the morning like a lion, is because we have been weighed down by obligation, expectation and performance, by shoulds and norms, and by the need to prove something – our value, our worth – with our work.  That’s a lot of weight.  Merov kol, from the sheer muchness of it, of course we can’t get up in the morning to serve God in gladness.  We are so constrained by all those pressures and voices and judgments, second-guessing our natural inclination, that we lose access to our authentic truth and joy; we lose the trail and are sapped of that life-giving energy.   

Shedding Some of The Weight

I invite you to imagine shedding some of that weight, just letting it fall off your shoulders or perhaps casting it into the river as we do in tashlich, casting away all the things that prevent you from accessing that place of joy in yourself, shedding them and returning to your own precious spark of joy, what you have to offer the world that only you can offer.    Maybe you can sit in that place of gladness inside your heart and smile at yourself, at your own spectacularness, delighting in yourself as surely God delights in you. 

No Comparisons With Others

There’s more.  From this place of gladness, we are also more gracious towards others.  When we know what it is that makes us glad and we pursue that in the world, there is no competition with others because comparisons no longer make sense.  We each have a unique life adventure, with our own special contribution to make.   It’s like comparing apples and grapefruits.  We are each our own type of fruit or flower, beautiful and tasty and essential in our own way.  There is a spaciousness to this gladness, a spaciousness that allows you to shine and everyone else to shine in their own way, too, a vast field of flowers, each one different, plenty of room for us all to blossom.    

Aharon and the Capacity to Rejoice For Others

And from our own seat as a beautiful flower, we can also begin to admire all the other flowers; we can learn to admire and rejoice in the skills and talents of those around us without envy or feeling threatened or insecure.  The first time the word simchah is used in the Torah, it is used to describe such rejoicing for another person’s blossoming.  After the burning bush scene, Moshe is tasked by God to become the redeemer, and God tells him that on his way back to Egypt, he will meet up with his brother Aharon, and Aharon will see him and rejoice in his heart – vera’aha vesamach belibo (Exodus 4:14).  What is this simchah, this joy, that Aharon feels at the sight of Moshe having been chosen to be the redeemer?  It is the joy and delight we feel at another person’s fulfilling their destiny, becoming who they are supposed to be in the world.   When we feel full and confident in knowing that we have our own divine destiny, we have only joy in our hearts to see another succeed in theirs.  And this is true even when our own special purpose is still murky, as Aharon’s was at the time.  We can still rejoice, secure in our knowledge that we each have a sacred part to play.  

How That Perspective Heals The Tocheichah

I believe that this non-competitive perspective changes everything in our environment.   Many of the Torah’s curses are based on a competitive aggressive society, where there is one up and one down, always a winner and a loser, where people can take away each other’s joy and fulfillment by stealing their wives, their vineyards and their produce.   The thing is, though, that from the perspective of serving God from our place of gladness, the essential thing – our unique contribution – can never be stolen from us. What we each offer to the world from our place of deepest gladness is one of a kind and fills us as it also fills the world, so that there is no scarcity and no competition, no one low or high, and we all smile with gladness at one another’s gifts.  

Still In The Curses But  – Serve With Joy

This is a messianic view.  We are not there yet.  We are in many ways still in the throes of those curses.   Maybe all those curses, too, are part of the rov kol, the muchness of everything that tends to overwhelm us and prevent us from serving with joy.   We look at the world’s crises and become overwhelmed and despairing.  Merov kol, out of all of that darkness, we find it difficult to serve in joy because we think we have to take care of kol, of everything, of all of that suffering.  But we don’t.  We have only to serve God and the world from our special place of joy.  That is how we know what is ours to do.  What is ours to do is what brings us joy, the place where our deepest gladness meets the deepest needs of the world.  When we serve in that way, bisimchah, then we play our part and do not get overwhelmed by the muchness of all the problems and the suffering.   Our gladness to get up in the morning to serve our particular purpose paves a path through the difficulties and sows seeds of joy and optimism around us.  And slowly, slowly, each one doing her joyous part, the world turns towards mutual celebration, the world turns towards blessing.

Photo by Andre Furtado at Pexels