Last night I had the good fortune to offer a book reading of Shechinah at the Art Institute at San Francisco’s Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, and was invited to share words at the Shabbat evening service. Much gratitude to Rabbi Mychal Copeland and the whole congregation for inviting me and receiving me so warmly.
It is wonderful to be here, and it was wonderful having the opportunity to read from my book earlier; to get to hug so many beloveds that I have barely seen since moving up to Sonoma County 19 years ago (because apparently the Golden Gate Bridge only runs south) – ACTUP comrades, lawyer colleagues, Queer Minyan friends. It’s good to be back at Sha’ar Zahav. Here tonight also is my friend and teacher, Cantor Cory Winter. Cory. with whom I remember singing for a service at the old Shaar Zahav building on Danvers St. As I think about it, it was at a service in the old building in 1994 that my parents met Oren for the first time.
It is a joy to be here. A deep, almost aching joy.
And joy is what I want to talk about tonight. Not just because it’s Shabbat, in which we are meant to experience special delight. But because today was Purim, and tomorrow is Shushan Purim, the extra day for folks living in walled cities.
I have been having a little difficulty with Purim this year. In a year in which we are all feeling frightened and vulnerable, I am not enthusiastic about the very challenging Book of Esther and its story of near destruction, and its happy ending that comes with a significant body count. The story is likely fiction; the fantasy of a powerless Diaspora people. But even so, this year I didn’t have a taste for it.
But because of this holiday, this entire Hebrew month is meant to be one of joy. In Talmud, Masekhet Ta’anit, it famously says:
מִשֶּׁנִּכְנַס אֲדָר מַרְבִּין בְּשִׂמְחָה
“From the moment the month of Adar begins, we expand our rejoicing, we grow in joy.” We don’t even wait for this holiday; we are meant to get at the joy as soon as we tear the month of Shevat off the calendar.
I hear your objection, or maybe my own. We are living in a challenging time, a frightening and upsetting time. We are feeling threatened in old ways and in new ways we hadn’t even dreamed up yet. This is hardly the time for joy. In fact, doesn’t joyfulness feel like a little bit of a betrayal? The struggle we’re in requires seriousness and joy feels disloyal.
But Talmud doesn’t tell us to be joyful in Adar only in the good years, because if it did, we would probably never do it. No year would qualify. We are instead somehow commanded to joy even when we are depleted and discouraged. Joy now.
But I want to suggest that joy is not the same as happiness, which can’t be commanded. Happiness is an emotion, and quick to change. Joy is a stance, a practice, a way of moving through the world with presence and connection and love.
My beloved friend Rabbi Diane Elliot describes it poetically:
joy as a by-product,
not a goal
not a feeling,
which is fleeting
but a way of being
whole
an inner state
to cultivate,
which radiates
and emanates,
elevates and situates,
without reflection,
in kind connection
within the heart
of one and all—
mercy’s start,
compassion’s call
Joy. Not happiness but joy. Some of my own greatest experiences of joy have been at keenly sad times. Sitting shivah for my parents, for instance, when people came together, sharing memories and kugel. Just showing up and being present. There was joy there.
And I’ve experienced joy doing civil disobedience, alongside some of you here tonight. Being shoulder to shoulder in protest, chanting or in silence, feeling a kind of shared determination and mutual care that could only be called joy.
This is a kind of joy that is available to us now, even now. Joy, not instead of the hard work, but suffused into it.
The story is told that someone once asked the Baal Shem Tov, “How can we live in this world with all the suffering we are forced to bear?” The Baal Shem Tov answered, “Accept everything that happens to you in this world in the spirit of love, and then both this world and the next will be yours.”
The Baal Shem Tov, who was the dreamer-upper of Chasidism, lived in the wake of a series of national disasters for the Jewish people; he lived in a time of deep despair among the Jews of Eastern Europe. His insistence on love and on joy was radical in its way. The evils of the world do not require you to feel desolate, he seemed to say; you can bring love, bring joy into it. For the Baal Shem Tov, joy was a kind of radical resistance. He saw the importance of not letting those who would have you despair have the last word.
Right now, in this moment, we are meant to feel afraid, isolated, powerless. But those people are forgetting about the simple power of joy. How it can lift our sights, and help us remember what we are fighting for. Our ultimate goal is not the flipping of a house seat or the unseating of a president. Our ultimate goal is a world that cares and loves and embraces. A world where joy has taken root.
The Baal Shem Tov said that if we bring love, if we bring joy, “both this world and the next” will be ours. Our joy has rewards in the now and in the future. The joy we muster together today is a model of the joy we want at the end of the journey; the joy we imagine at the end of the journey can guide and invigorate us now.
Queer columnist Dan Savage wrote this a few weeks ago: “During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis, we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night. The dance kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for.” [Dan Savage, Instagram, Feb. 5, 2025]
We dance now to remember what we are fighting for. Dancing in joy today is a kind of resistance. Suppressors of joy fear our joy. And holding a vision of the joy we want for the future, a vision of a healed, loving world, and letting those goodies pour back into this moment is a kind of insistence. Insistence that joy, love, presence, will be part of every step, every decision, every moment, private and public. That joyful world will not be forgotten by us because it will be us.
The psalm tells us, hazor’im b’dim’ah b’rinah yik’tzoru. “Those who sow in tears will reap in joy.” But I live in the country now and I can tell you the land doesn’t so much like the saltwater. So I hereby emend the text: hazor’im b’rinah b’rinah yik’tzoru. Let us sow the field with seeds of joy, so joy can blossom and fruit in its time.
So on this awkward Purim in a difficult time, may the walled cities of our hearts break open. May we receive joy, cultivate joy, and emanate joy. With resistance, with insistence. May we experience the blessings in this world and the next.
I am grateful to Rabbi Diane Elliot for her thoughts on joy and for introducing me to the Ba’al Shem Tov text, taken from B’er haChasidut, originally translated by Rabbi Burt Jacobson.