Live and Laugh

A teaching of the holy Baal Shem Tov

For some reason known only to my Creator, the Sukkah always puts me in mind of the holy Baal Shem Tov and his teachings. Over the years, I have written several essays tackling his teachings on this sacred holiday. Here’s another.

Two brothers came to the marketplace. Elijah said to Rabbi Beroka: These two also have a share in the World-to-Come.

Rabbi Beroka went over to the men and said to them: What is your occupation?

They said to him: We are jesters, and we cheer up the depressed.

Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Taanis 22a

The Baal Shem Tov was perplexed by this story and asked for an explanation. This is what he was told:

These two jesters were able to connect every matter they saw in a person to its origin in the higher world. By doing this, any harsh heavenly decrees upon this person were automatically annulled.

But if someone was depressed, they could not make this connection. So they would cheer him up with some humorous words, until they were able to make all the connections necessary.

Keser Shem Tov 272, as translated by Rabbi Tzvi Freeman

Life and joy are terms used constantly in Chassidic teaching, but neither ever seems to receive a formal definition. There’s a good reason—these definitions are both inappropriate and impossible.

Think back to that first discourse of the Rebbe Rayatz, Reishis Goyim Amalek, and its treatment of klippah, whose existence conceals G-d. We are taught that just as holiness (which reveals G-d) has Ten Sefiros, or aspects, so does the other side possess Eleven Crowns. Why “crowns”? Because unholiness by nature stands “haughtily” apart from the source of its own vitality. The vitality of the ten is thus their eleventh member and their pride makes them “crowns.” By contrast, in the Ten holy Sefiros, vitality is the vitality within each, the vitality of Kindness and the vitality of Understanding, etc. Vitality isn’t meant to have its own shape. Its principle is to vivify every corner and speck, that every aspect of the living thing should be alive.

Perhaps this is related to the Holy Baal Shem Tov’s teaching on the Talmud’s story about the jesters. Jokes and japes are not inherently holy, naturally, and often cover over great lies and wrongdoing. But these jesters, the BeSh”T was taught, made others laugh with particular intent. The average Jew walking in the shuk lives with their vitality somewhere apart from them, does not have everything “together,” and this leaves room for some foul accuser to argue that misfortune ought to befall them. When they laugh, however, they can be reconciled with their source, which is nothing other than the very principle of their being, what they are. To be alive is that you should be alive and entirely alive. There is no other definition, but we need not worry because one who is alive cannot be pursued by death.

To put it a little differently, what makes you alive is not a particular technical arrangement of body parts. That is a prerequisite for life, a condition, but one that is still in place the moment someone (we shouldn’t know of it) passes away. Nor do you possess a battery. Things powered by electricity are not alive because they possess many corners and specks that have nothing to do with the energy coursing through them. To be alive in every aspect, as an amoeba, chimp, or man is alive, is to possess an inner unified galvanizing intention, a spiritual will. Because it is spiritual, not physical, it is everywhere in the body equally. Because it is spiritual, it is not defined by the forms it vivifies; the toe and the brain equally live.

There is nothing to life except this unity itself, this ability for all parts to live simultaneously and equally, illumined from within rather than on their differing, finite, separate terms from without. The term “life” must always appear in its own recursive definition because life is always self-referential; it never, when reflecting the source of life, appears as the separate addressable eleventh, but within the ten. If a jest from a joker pulls forth the audience for a moment to live within their life, to stand in their own shoes and look forth from their own eyes, as we so often forget to do, then it has called forth the illumination. When the passerby is made to forget their usual absentmindedness and remember themselves, all their corners and specks are, in that moment, merely subordinate to the laugher. Their toe is not a toe; their brain is not a brain; their mitochondria are simply there to drape a frame over the Divine being laughing at a fool. Divine beings do not fall, and so the jesters merit the world to come.

And perhaps all the teachings of Chassidus are nothing else except to live. Love of one’s fellow Jew is a demand to find the inner fire that warms us both equally, which is the unity of the Living G-d that embraces all things (Tanya ch. 32), which is the inner illumination of recontextualizing all apparent disparateness which is the joy that cannot be denied (Tanya ch. 33). A sip of mashke opens the heart to others. The warmth of the farbrengen is the warmth of the unknowable Holy of Holies. This is what it means to be Jewish; it is all precious beyond measure.

What does the Baal Shem Tov teach beyond (1) it is Good to be Jewish, (2) every Jew is vitalized by that Goodness equally, and (3) every part of the Jew must know it? L’chaim.