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Joy
How Is It Possible to Be Joyful?The more difficult it is for a person to be joyful, the greater the reward for achieving joy. A person must recognize that the privilege of serving God is like earning a great fortune, and he will thereby pay no attention to the minor troubles of life.
It is known that for each and every mitzva, the reward [one receives] corresponds to the pain [experienced in fulfilling the mitzva] (Avot 5:22). So too with regard to joy. A man who is bitter due to the travails of life, if when he is involved in Torah study, prayer, the recitation of blessings, the performance of mitzvot, or on Shabbat, he clears his mind, forgets his sadness and anger, and rejoices in what he is doing, he will receive more reward than someone who is [naturally] relaxed and serene. The joy of an Israelite man in the service of God, may His name be blessed, should be comparable to that of one who earned a million gold dinars and in his joy ignores the pain of one small peruta that he lost. The joy of serving God, may He be blessed, outweighs the travails of life in this world even more than [earning a million dinars outweighs losing a peruta]. Even with regard to distress of the soul, such as over the destruction of the Temple and over one’s sins, about which one is required to feel pain and to mourn, not all times are equal. Times of sadness should be separate from times of joy, and no foreign element should interfere with his joy.
The way to achieve constant joy is to identify one’s positive points and to be happy about them. Focusing on the positive is uplifting.
A person must search for and find his good points:
A person must be very careful to always be joyful and to keep himself very, very far away from sadness. Even when he begins to examine himself and sees that he has no goodness and he is full of sins, and the evil inclination wants to thereby cause him to fall into sadness or depression, God forbid, it is forbidden for him to fall in this way. Rather, he must seek and find within himself some good, for how is it possible that he has not performed any mitzva or good deed in his life? Even if he begins to examine that good point and finds that it too is flawed and incomplete, meaning that he sees that even the mitzva or the holy deed that he merited to perform was [performed when his mindset was] full of ulterior motives, extraneous thoughts, and [it therefore has] many defects, nonetheless, how is it possible that there was not a little good in that mitzva or holy deed? For despite it all, somehow, there was some good point in the mitzva or good deed that he performed. For a person must search and try to find in himself a little bit of good in order to revive himself and to achieve joy, as stated above.
Finding even a small amount of good in oneself can allow a person to overcome the bad:
By seeking and identifying a little bit of good within himself, a person actually tips the scales from being liable to being meritorious, and he is able to repent.
A person’s emotions are affected by his actions and behavior. Even when a person is experiencing sadness, he should behave as though he is happy, and this will help him actually become happy.
One should not, God forbid, speak about depressing matters. On the contrary, he should always act in a happy way, as though his heart is full of joy. Even if he does not actually feel that way at the time, he will eventually feel that way. This is because the actions and activities that a person does will eventually find a permanent place in his heart…. The principle that emerges is that one should be careful in his thought, speech, and actions, to avoid focusing on worry and fear. On the contrary, he should speak and act [joyfully], as mentioned above, and then he will internalize those character traits. In that way God will bestow upon him from above a spirit of joy and goodheartedness.
An elderly Jew who appeared stooped over and dejected came to the Gerer Rebbe, Rabbi Yisrael Alter, the author of Beit Yisrael.
To the degree that a person cultivates true inner joy and goodheartedness he will merit the upper light. If he does this constantly, he will undoubtedly experience divine inspiration.
It is a great mitzva to constantly be in a state of joy.
The joy of performing a mitzva and song negate all strict judgment and heavenly accusation, with regard to both the spiritual and the physical.
Joy is a natural inclination. A person who is healthy in spirit and body will always be cheerful and joyous. This is the natural state of a healthy spirit.
Further reading: For more on joy, see A Concise Guide to the Sages, p. 441.