Serving Hashem with Joy

“Serve Hashem with joy; come before Him with songs of gladness.” Where We Begin Your child is sitting there, watching you. He is not checking your arguments. He is checking your face. This is our starting point. But first we need to ask a simple question. We know that serving Hashem is mainly about the deed itself. It means accepting Hashem as King and obeying Him because we recognize how great He is. So what do the words “with joy” add? A servant who carries out his master’s order has done what he was told. What difference does it make whether he does it joyfully or not? But hidden here is a great new insight. What Your Child Reads in Your Face Ask yourself: when you come home from prayer, what does your child read in your face? When you get ready for the holy Sabbath, does he see someone entering the King’s palace? Or does he see someone going off, once again, to a job he is tired of? A child does not only hear what you believe. He “reads” you to learn whether it is worth believing. This is not a theory from psychology. It is a basic truth of raising children, rooted deep in the soul. Every child is looking for living proof: “Is this path worth it? Does it give life to the people who walk it?” So if a student says, “Why do I need to be happy? I am doing what I have to do,” the answer is in the Talmud. It teaches that Hashem’s Presence rests on a person only through joy. And when joy is missing, it is not only the person himself who feels it. The people around him feel it too, and so does the little child. Servant or King-Maker: The Key Difference Now we come to the heart of the matter. A servant can obey out of bitterness. He follows orders. He may even be loyal. But his face shows that he is being forced. “Serve Hashem,” by itself, can look like that. It can be a dry acceptance of duty, commandments and good deeds done out of habit and obligation, like a servant who is afraid of the whip. But Maimonides, the great codifier of Jewish law, writes something powerful: “The joy a person feels in doing a commandment... is a great form of serving Hashem.” Joy is not a by-product of serving Hashem. Joy is itself the very level of serving Hashem. And here is the new insight. “Serve Hashem with joy.” The word “serve” alone could describe a servant. But “with joy” means crowning a king. A king is not crowned by servants who follow orders. A king is crowned by people who chose him gladly. By the very act of choosing, they declare: “Not because I was forced, with a mountain held over my head, but because I chose You.” When you serve Hashem with joy, you are not only doing a commandment. You are crowning a King. With every movement of joy you tell the world: “I did not obey against my will. I chose.” The holy Baal Shem Tov, founder of the Hasidic movement, taught that joy is one of the highest tools for serving Hashem, and that heavy sadness is the greatest obstacle of all. But here we add one more layer. Joy is not only something between a person and his Creator. It reaches outward. It is the strongest proof there is that this path is true. A Kingdom That Draws People In No one wants to join a movement of bitter people. Not even if they are right in every argument. Not even if they keep every rule. The spies sent to scout the Land of Israel, as the Torah tells us, did not lie about the facts. The land really was full of giants and fortified cities. But they brought the true report in the wrong spirit: with fear, bitterness and despair. The result was a whole generation that wept for nothing. Nothing is more contagious than heavy sadness, and nothing paralyzes more than bitterness. Our children hear. They see. If our home is a joyful kingdom, where the Torah is a source of pride and not a burden, where the Sabbath is a palace and not a chain, they will want to be part of it. The Tanya, the classic book of Hasidic thought, writes that worry and sadness keep a person from reaching closeness to Hashem. For us, young parents carrying a whole household, there is another side to this. Sadness in serving Hashem does not only push us away from Him. It pushes our children away.