How to be Happy?

( Lectionary for February 12, 2017)

Many religious people in the 21^st century focus much of their hope for their faith on the desire to be happy. In a depressing and despairing world, they say, I just want to be happy. Is that really too much to ask? The religion I grew up with, goes the common cry, was so much a downer, so much talk of sin, especially sex and booze, and what I ought not be doing. But since I was doing some of those rejected behaviors, I had two choices: stop doing those things or stop listening to those who espoused their rejection. Regularly, I chose the latter and went on “sinning” with sex and booze until I decided that maybe sex and booze were not such bad sins after all. (Please note: I am not speaking out of my own experience here. I was not raised in any religious tradition and do not like any sort of booze. I do have sex with my wife only. Still, I am recording what I have heard many say to me.)

Some years ago Robert Schuller of Crystal Cathedral fame wrote a book called The Be Happy Attitudes (1985). The title, I suppose, was a sordid rip off of the rather better known, and far richer, Beatitudes of Jesus in the New Testament. Schuller, a purveyor of positive religion based on right attitudes, (see his successors Joyce Meyer, Joel Osteen, among a host of others), apparently took the beatitudes and gave them a happy spin whereby those who read them aright can find pure joy and bliss in a life rife with happiness. Exactly how he managed to tease out a happy message from the one that goes “Happy are you when people hate you, exclude you, revile you, and defame you” (Luke 6:22) I dare not hazard a guess. But knowing Schuller, I imagine he managed the magic quite well.

The poet of Ps. 119, the longest psalm in the collection, had his/her own definition of happiness, and it had very little to do with right attitudes. Here is how it begins:

Happy are those of the upright way,

who walk in YHWH’s Torah.

The psalm begins with talk of movement, action. Being happy is not a matter of getting your head straight; it is far more a matter of getting your actions right. One may seek happiness, says this poet, when the path chosen is tam, a Hebrew word meaning basically “sound” or “complete.” In a moral sense it means something like “integrity” or “wholeness.” The exemplary character Job is twice described in the first chapter of his book as a “man of integrity,” an “upright man” using this word. Though his so-called friends attempt to impugn his basic character, suggesting that his stay on the ash heap is the result of his evil, the reader knows that Job to the contrary is a man of unblemished integrity. As the psalmist claims, anyone who chooses the “upright way” may claim a genuine happiness.

And the poet expands the idea in the second line of verse 1 by stating that a truly happy one walks in the Torah of YHWH. As I have stated many times in past reflections on the Hebrew Bible, the word “torah” does not essentially mean law, as it is traditionally translated (still in the NRSV). The word means “teaching” or “instruction,” and thus moves well beyond the iteration of a legal code. The Torah of YHWH includes all of the teachings that one may discover in a careful reading and reflection on the fullness of the material in the Hebrew Bible, its poems, its stories, its proverbs, and, yes, even its laws. Whether the poet of Ps. 119 means here some collection of traditions already formulated in a post-exilic collection of books, or refers more generally to materials not yet written down in full or collected in anything resembling a scroll or book is not important. What the author means is that happiness is the result of serious engagement with YHWH’s Torah, its richness from the distant past to its most recent pronouncement. Just as in the modern world where the rabbi’s sermon on a Friday night adds to the Torah of YHWH, so did any commentary or discussion of the ways of YHWH offered during the time of the composition of Ps. 119 comprise Torah, and must therefore be taken with great seriousness.

Of what Torah consists more specifically is suggested in the succeeding lines of the psalm. Because Ps. 119 is a vast acrostic, that is succeeding blocks of verses begin with each letter of the Hebrew alphabet, all 22 (sin and shin are collapsed into one letter), the better for memorization and easy reflection, the commentary is necessarily quite generalized and opens the reader and reciter up to wide thought and imaginative pondering. Most especially one finds synonyms for the central ideas of Torah, namely “precepts,” “decrees,” “utterances,” “word,” “statute,” and “law” (in this latter case the translation of the Hebrew mishpat). Each of these words has a lengthy history in Israel, but each of them announces something quite important about the Torah of YHWH and how anyone who chooses them to follow can find a real happiness not available to those who refuse to pay attention to them.

It is quite easy to see, when that list of words is enumerated, how one could decide that Torah means what we mean by law or laws. Indeed, the Protestant Reformation, it could be said, albeit far too simply, revolves around the conviction that Jewish religion was one based squarely on law, while the Christian religion was based solely on grace. Martin Luther staked his very life on that distinction, and it has come down to us over 500 years later as a distinctive difference between Roman Catholics and us Protestants. Further reflection on this central matter has lead many to decide that the so-called “law/gospel” split was far over done in the accounts of theology through the dangerous and blood-soaked years that followed the Reformation. Each of those words in the previous paragraph include within them much more than lists of laws that must be followed or precepts that must be adhered to if one was to be considered as a follower of YHWH.

For example, was Koheleth, author of the book we call Ecclesiastes, a follower of YHWH? If he was, he surely was a very different follower than the author of Deuteronomy who claimed nearly the exact opposite idea of YHWH’s work in the world. Yet, both would claim Torah as the center of their faith journeys. For the former, life has proven empty and happiness can only be found in enjoyment of the moment, not in eternal verities from YHWH. But for the latter, long life may only be secured by following closely the commands and ordinances of a sovereign YHWH, many of which are decidedly problematic (For example, what to make of the command that an ox should never be muzzled while treading grain right after we are commanded to flog a person found to be in the wrong by a judge no more than forty lashes? If more than forty are given, the one in the right is said to be “degraded” [Deut. 25:1-4]. Are these both equally significant, and if so, precisely how? Such conundrums can be multiplied.)

So, happiness, says Ps. 119, is found by those who choose to follow the Torah. But surely not always! What about Job, a Torah follower if ever there was one, who spent a life of anguish and pain? What about far too many of our fellow earthlings who try to be followers of one Torah or another, of one religion or another, but live difficult lives of poverty and hard labor? Can all we do upon reading such language as provided by Ps. 119 shrug our religious shoulders and mutter, “Well, sometimes”? Does all the poet finally say is, “It is better to follow YHWH’s Torah than to not follow it?” I tend to think that that is what the author is saying. There is finally no inevitable happiness in acting in one way or another, but the chances of genuine happiness are much greater when one follows the Torah of YHWH in all of its wonderful meanings and hopes and dreams and justice than if one does not. That may sound empty for some, but for others it is the power of God leading to righteousness, as a later Jewish thinker once said.