The Treasure
Joy two ways
A man once dreamed that there was a great treasure under a bridge in Vienna. He traveled to Vienna and stood near the bridge, trying to figure out what to do. He did not dare search for the treasure by day, because of the many people who were there.
An officer passed by and asked, “What are you doing, standing here and contemplating?” The man decided that it would be best to tell the whole story and ask for help, hoping that [the officer] would share the treasure with him. He told the officer the entire story.
The officer replied, “A Jew is concerned only with dreams! I also had a dream, and I also saw a treasure. It was in a small house, under the cellar.”
In relating his dream, the officer accurately described the man’s city and house. The man rushed home, dug under his cellar, and found the treasure. He said, “Now I know that I had the treasure all along. But in order to find it, I had to travel to Vienna”1
Rebbe Nahman’s tale here can be understood in a variety of ways. I’ve been thinking about it this week as we entered into a new year with all of the reflection it pushes us to do. In specific, I have been pondering joy, that ever elusive construct we find ourselves seeking. But not the joy that we try to find amid turmoil and strife or from a dopamine hit that comes from a delicious meal or big purchase.
As R’ Joey Rosenfeld talks about in his recent series on happiness, that type of joy is a legitimate part of life, to seek out physiological pleasure or to strive to find happiness after a period of bitterness. But its benefit is fleeting.
The joy we’re talking about here is internal, a product of a mindset shift. As the Ba’al Shem Tov points out, we’re commanded ivdu et hashem b’simha, serve God in happiness, but that last word for joy carries within it the same letters as the word macshavah-thought. Joy isn’t an extrinsic entity that we do to do something to gain; it is an internal treasure that we can activate ourselves to tap into with more regularity, by reflecting on its inherent closeness. If we can remind ourselves that there’s joy within us, we can wield its warmth almost immediately.
I need this lesson because I fall prey to wallowing. The world is painful. Life with two toddlers while full of belly laughs and moments of sanctity gives me plenty of points everyday where I want to pull my hair out. These last 6 weeks of the year from Thanksgiving until New Years force feeds us a diet of ‘buy more stuff to gain more happiness,’ and I found myself grasping for something that kept slipping through my fingers. So I wanted to shift within myself to learn to find joy within, like the man on the journey to Vienna who realizes that the treasure he seeks is at home, or more symbolically within himself.
It’s here I want to take some rabbinic license and take us back to last week’s portion. After all, the end of Jacob’s life signifies the ending of the stories of Genesis. So while we are in Vayehi this week, completing the first book of the Torah, a line from Vayiggash echoes still. When Jacob is introduced to Pharoah and is asked how old he is, here is his peculiar answer(47:9):
וַיֹּ֤אמֶר יַעֲקֹב֙ אֶל־פַּרְעֹ֔ה יְמֵי֙ שְׁנֵ֣י מְגוּרַ֔י שְׁלֹשִׁ֥ים וּמְאַ֖ת שָׁנָ֑ה מְעַ֣ט וְרָעִ֗ים הָיוּ֙ יְמֵי֙ שְׁנֵ֣י חַיַּ֔י וְלֹ֣א הִשִּׂ֗יגוּ אֶת־יְמֵי֙ שְׁנֵי֙ חַיֵּ֣י אֲבֹתַ֔י בִּימֵ֖י מְגוּרֵיהֶֽם׃
And Jacob answered Pharaoh, “The years of my sojourn [on earth] are one hundred and thirty. Few and hard have been the years of my life, nor do they come up to the life spans of my ancestors during their sojourns.”
Commentators are a bit all over the place here. Is Jacob really griping about how awful his life was? That doesn’t strike us as the proper posture for a patriarch! Others give him the benefit of the doubt. He’s just a man, nearing his end, who wants to exhale a bit. But one interpretation that resonates comes from Rabbi Samson Rafael Hirsch, the great luminary of German Judaism of the 19th century who says:
In his reply, Jacob differentiates between living and existing. You ask after the days of the years of my life. I have not lived much. I have sojourned on earth during one hundred and thirty years. The days of the years that I can really call my life (on which I really fully carried out all that I should) were in reality only few, and they were bad, were just the bitterest and those most full of worry. I had the mission of doing the duties of unhappiness in unhappiness. The contents of my life can in no way be compared to the contents of the lives of my fathers. They lived more, every day of their existence here below was living, and they had to carry out the mission of their lives under cheerful conditions. This was no complaint against the shortness of his life, but modesty in looking back at the moral worth of the life he had lived through.
Jacob is making a subtle distinction: he existed for 130 years, but the days he truly lived, days when he fulfilled his life's purpose, were few and happened to be his most difficult ones. Unlike his ancestors Abraham and Isaac who lived meaningfully in favorable conditions, Jacob's meaningful moments came through suffering. He's not lamenting a short life, but expressing modesty about the ethical significance of what he accomplished.
It’s not grumbling for the sake of wallowing in self-pity. It’s an admission that he didn’t live the way he wanted to. He didn’t achieve his expectations or fulfill the dreams he had for himself. He never found the happiness that he sought. He existed. But he never really lived. This teaching stopped me in my tracks for its personal and calendar-specific timeliness.
And it connects to that distinction between external and internal joy. When we’re constantly seeking the dopamine hit of external joy, we end up with a series of moments that while pleasing don’t necessarily fill up our soul cup. What we, and I really include myself in this, need more of, are opportunities to choose an internal joy that we can readily tap into whenever we’d like. Shifting to this mindset gives us more agency to live fully in this chaotic world.
When I think about Jacob in his final moments of his life, this message speaks to that. So much of Jacob’s life was toiling in his bitterness. To be fair, he did have a lot of rough stuff happen to him but it needn’t be the very lens through which he lived his life. There was more there and that’s what I feels like he’s telling us. There’s more there if we can notice it.
שמחה-joy, when flipped around can be understood as חש מה, a feeling of asking ‘what?’ That’s the right way to approach this new journey of joy. Instead of seeking out external manifestations of joy that are fleeting, can we ask ourselves, what joyousness do I actually have within myself to cultivate? When we can do that, I truly believe that we can uncover a treasure that’s been hiding under our noses this whole time, just like the man seeking out his treasure.
Shabbat Shalom, Happy New Year, and Happy Weekend
Rebbe Nachman’s Parables, “The Treasure”).