Why Are We Convinced That a Good Life Must Be Filled with Sunshine?
Why Are We Convinced That a Good Life Must Be Filled with Sunshine?
Why Are We Convinced That a Good Life Must Be Filled with Sunshine?
Open the photographs from a family vacation and you will notice something interesting. Almost always, the pictures that remain are the sunset, the meal, and the smiling children. Almost no one photographs the argument in the car, the child who cried for an hour, the disappointing hotel, or the moment when everyone was already ready to go home. The same is true of weddings, work, and family life. We photograph the light and leave the shadow outside the frame. The problem begins when we look at other people's pictures and forget that someone cropped the shadows out of their pictures too.
The sukkah presents an entirely different relationship between light and shade. The Mishnah rules: “If its sunlight is greater than its shade, it is invalid” (Mishnah, Sukkah 1:1). A sukkah in which there is more sun than shade is not valid. The Gemara later explains how the relationship between sun and shade is assessed and distinguishes between what appears in the schach and what appears on the ground (Babylonian Talmud, Sukkah 22b). Halachically, of course, this is a rule concerning the amount of shade produced by the schach, not a statement that darkness is preferable to light. Yet it is difficult not to pause before the image the Torah places before us: specifically during the festival called “the season of our rejoicing,” we sit in a place where shade is a basic condition of its existence.
We are used to speaking of a “bright period” when everything is going well and a “dark period” when life is difficult. Real life, however, is almost never constructed so neatly. The Torah says of Sukkot: “You shall rejoice in your festival... and you shall be altogether joyful” (Deuteronomy 16:14-15), and during that very festival we sit beneath schach that creates shade. Perhaps this is at least an image worth considering: joy does not require a life without shaded areas. A person can be happy and still struggle with difficulty. A family can be good and still experience tension. A person can succeed professionally and still worry. One can thank the Holy One, blessed be He, for a great deal and at the same time ask Him for something that is deeply missing.
Ecclesiastes says: “On a good day, be in goodness, and on a bad day, reflect; God has made this opposite that” (Ecclesiastes 7:14). It does not promise a person an uninterrupted sequence of good days. It teaches the person to hold more than one kind of day within the story of life. King David goes further: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me” (Psalms 23:4). He does not say that faith erased the valley. Rather, within the valley, faith created a different meaning for the journey. The shadow remains a shadow, but it is no longer proof that life has gone wrong.
Our difficulty has grown because today we do not compare our lives only with those of neighbors and relatives. Every day we are exposed to hundreds of small windows into the lives of others, but those windows are not random. People choose what to publish. Professional success goes online. The night in which a person wondered whether he was suited for the job usually does not. A beautiful couple's photograph is posted. The silence on the drive home is not. Receiving a degree is posted. Three years of anxiety, doubt, and failures remain outside the screen.
Social psychology knows the mechanism of social comparison well. Leon Festinger proposed in the 1950s that people evaluate themselves partly through comparison with others. When the comparison is made upward, toward someone perceived as more successful, upward social comparison can sometimes inspire, but it can also generate feelings of inferiority and envy. The problem becomes sharper when the information on which the comparison rests is asymmetric: about myself I know everything, while about the other person I see mainly what that person chose to show.
It is a transaction that cannot be won. I compare my marriage, including the bills, exhaustion, disagreements, and the morning when no one spoke kindly, with one picture of another couple smiling beside the sea. I compare my child, whose difficulties at home and at school I know intimately, with someone else's child about whom I heard only that a prize was awarded. I compare my business, including the debts and mistakes, with a competitor's announcement about another success. I compare my full-length film with someone else's edited trailer.
The sages recognized the danger of constantly looking at what another person possesses. The Mishnah states: “Envy, desire, and honor remove a person from the world” (Pirkei Avot 4:21). Rabbi Elazar HaKappar teaches there that envy is not merely an unpleasant emotion. It can remove a person from his own world. Perhaps this is because once a person measures life with someone else's ruler, that person is no longer living life as it is. One can be surrounded by goodness and still feel like a failure merely because one's goodness appears less glittering than the goodness someone else displayed.
Ben Zoma offers an entirely different measure: “Who is rich? One who rejoices in his portion” (Pirkei Avot 4:1). This does not mean that a person should stop aspiring, developing, or improving circumstances. One who rejoices in his portion is not a person without goals. It is a person who does not need someone else's portion in order to decide whether his own is worthy of appreciation. Such a person can want to advance without turning another person's achievements into an indictment of his own life.
This matters especially inside the home. Sometimes a couple does not truly suffer from an unusual problem, but from comparison with couples they imagine have no problems. A parent is not disappointed by a child because of who the child is, but because of the neighbor's child. A person does not hate a job until learning what a friend earns. Things that were enough for us yesterday suddenly become small today even though nothing about them changed. The only thing that changed is the person beside whom we placed them.
The Torah warns in the Ten Commandments: “You shall not covet your neighbor's house... or anything that belongs to your neighbor” (Exodus 20:14). Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra asks how a person can be commanded concerning an emotion such as coveting, and explains that a person can educate his perception regarding what belongs to another and is not intended for him (Ibn Ezra, Exodus 20:14). Beyond the specific halachic parameters of the prohibition, there is a deep psychological point here: not every beautiful thing I see in someone else's life must immediately become a question about what is missing from mine.
Perhaps this is why the sukkah can correct our way of seeing, at least a little. It does not ask us to eliminate the shade in order to be joyful. On the contrary, the structure itself requires shade, and inside it the Torah tells us to rejoice. A good life is not a life from which every dark area has been edited out. A good life is one in which a person can see both what shines and what weighs heavily without allowing either one to erase the other.
When we sit in the sukkah this year and see patches of sunlight entering between the branches of the schach, it is worth remembering that we almost never see other people's lives that way. We see their rays of sunlight and imagine that there is no schach above them. Yet every home has areas that are not photographed, every family has struggles we do not know, and every person has nights that never become a status update.
The shadows in our lives are not proof that we were given a lesser life. Sometimes what is missing in order to feel again the goodness already present is simply to stop measuring the whole of our lives against the illuminated part that someone else chose to show.