Happiness in Tough Times
Living Theatre legend, Tom Walker, who died last week, performing a strike-support play with the company in Italy, 1976
Dear friends,
I always remembered my time in the Israeli army as depressing. Beyond the fact that soldiers are constantly counting backwards the days until they go home, and until their final release, I felt my time in the South of Lebanon as a moral compromise about which I was deeply conflicted. The idea of being a part of any army felt antithetical to who I am. And following the orders of the terrible and cruel man at the top of the pyramid – then first term Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu - didn’t help. Imagine holding a rifle that you have to shoot whenever the leader you hate most says shoot and you’ll understand the situation I was in.
Soldiers were dying around me, while rockets kept flying into northern Israel, the stated reason for our presence there. More depressing was the state of the local population, with which I had significant contact, since my base in Marj Ayoun served as the regional headquarters of both the IDF and the South Lebanon Army, a kind of puppet army of Israel. The locals had no prospects, between the allegiance they had to show the IDF to survive, and the knowledge that one day the Israelis will leave, and Hezbollah will take over and accuse them of collaboration with the enemy. I left in 1999, and indeed a year later that’s exactly what happened.
A few years after I was released, I visited my commanding officer, long out of the army, and like me pursuing a career in theater. Sitting in his apartment in Jerusalem, he showed me a photo from our service. Five of us were in his office in our uniforms, each of us with smiles on our faces. Mine was the biggest smile in the photo. The photo rattled me. It brought back the experience of the day to day there, the friends I hung out with, the exciting sense of moving around, hitchhiking up to the northern border, bussing down to see my girlfriend in her kibbutz near Haifa, reading Hemingway under the sole fig tree in the base, drinking Lebanese black coffee (rivaled only by Italian espresso in Italy) as I gaze out at the high mountains leading up to Syria in the east, and the Beaufort, a majestic Crusader fort above the Litani Valley to the west. That single photo shattered my conception of my time in the army. I saw it and knew that even within the painful circumstances, I had plenty of moments of happiness and contentment.
I find myself wandering back to that time in search of ways to be content during this period. The war rages on. The insanity of the death toll and the destruction of Gaza weighs heavy. The hostages that are still alive are not back. And that’s before I even go into my more mundane anxieties and painful events here in New York. Anyways this stage of winter has a way of getting me down.
And yet – this evening begins a new moon.
This moon of the Hebrew month of Adar brings with it a command:
משנכנס אדר מרבין בשמחה,
“Once Adar begins, we do lots of happy.”
More than that, this is a leap year in the Hebrew calendar, which means we get two months of Adar. Do you feel that kick in your ass to step out of your malaise? Those are your ancestors saying “snap out of it! Life is short.” It’s time for us to actively seek happiness, relaxation, peace. We deserve it.
Shortly after I came out of the army and engulfed myself in the New York downtown arts scene, I met a theater troupe that had just come back from a series of workshops in Lebanon. When they were down south, in what was by then Hezbollah territory, they created an anti-war play in the notorious Al Hayyam prison, where the IDF would imprison and often torture suspects. Led by the daughter of a rabbi, The Living Theatre is a pacifist-anarchist group that was in the business of taking the brokenness of the world and the pain in their souls and transforming it into borderless, theatrical love. My years with the company taught me a lesson about joy: it’s not about ignoring pain; it’s not about ignoring the world; it’s not about ignoring what you feel commanded to do. Be with it, and see through it into God, into humanity, into the dancing soul of the universe.
I hope you can all join us this evening for Shabbat, where we will follow the tradition of finding joy on the narrow bridge. John Murchison, a wonderful Qanun player will be joining Yonatan and Daphna in bringing the music, and rabbi and activist Miriam Grossman will join me in laying out the ideas that might lead us to finding happiness and peace.
Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha