Turbulent Times

At times like the current recession we need more than ever to reflect on the questions Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur pose to us. What do we live for? What are our values and how do we translate them into life? What will we give our children and those who will live on after us? For what do we wish to be remembered? What chapter will we write in the Book of Life?

It is easy to be lured by the siren song of a consumer society and come to believe that what matters is how much we earn and what we can afford. All around us are promises of happiness if we buy this, acquire that.

Yet the overwhelming consensus of psychological research is that, beyond the basic minimum we need, there is little correlation between wealth and happiness, between what we own and the way we feel. Even those who have won great sums in a lottery are, on average, no happier a year later than they were before they won. The excitement and delight of material things is very short-lived.

All the more so does this apply within the family. I once sat with one of Britain’s most successful businessmen while he told me how unfair it was that his marriage had failed. He had, he said, given his wife everything; yet it was clear that what he had given her was possessions. What he hadn’t given her was time. He was so obsessed with work that he failed to understand how neglected she felt.

I lose count of the number of parents who have told me a similar story about their children. “I gave them so much,” they say. “How could they be so ungrateful?” But you cannot buy a child’s affection. That needs something else altogether: care, attention, recognition, time spent talking together, doing things together, and yes, studying together.

Judaism is an extraordinary set of disciplines for living a meaningful life – and it is meaning, not fame or success, that lies at the heart of happiness. It invites us through the blessings we say every morning to give thanks for simply being alive in a universe full of beauty and wonder. It forces us, one day in seven, to rest and enjoy what we have rather than worry about the things we do not yet have. On Shabbat we renew the love within the family. We celebrate being part of a community – the place where our joys are doubled and our grief halved by being shared with others.

On the festivals we relive our people’s history, the most remarkable history of any nation on earth. Through kashrut we sanctify the act of eating. Through mikvah and the laws of family purity we etch our most intimate relationship with the charisma of holiness. Spending time studying the texts of our tradition, we endow with religious significance the life of the mind. In prayer we converse with God, aligning ourselves with the moral energy of the universe, becoming part of the four-thousand-year-old symphony of the Jewish soul. We can lose material possessions, but spiritual possessions – the good we do, the love we inspire – we never lose, and that is why they are the greatest investments we can make. May we, in this coming year, spend more time on the things that matter, the things Judaism teaches us to value, and may God write all of us in the Book of Life.