Laughter and Tears: Living Across the Emotional Spectrum
Shanah Tovah.
One of the most astonishing sights I have ever witnessed was at the Las Vegas airport, on New Years Day, 2012. It’s as tightly packed as this sanctuary, but instead of Torah scrolls there are slot machines. It’s a zoo, but surprisingly quiet. Because everyone there is completely and utterly hung over.
I struck up a memorable conversation with one especially decrepit looking traveler.
He noticed my kippah asked me what Jews do on Jewish New Years. I skipped over the whole ‘hours in shul thing’ and went straight to apples and honey.
I’ll never forget his answer. “That’s beautiful,” he said, “on January 1st, I usually eat leftover pizza and Advil.”
We both had a good laugh.
This morning, on the Jewish New Years we sit in a shul, with Torahs, after a night of, hopefully, only moderate drinking.
Soon after kiddush on the last two nights we declared:
יהי רצון מלפניך ה' אלוקינו ואלוקי אבותינו שתחדש עלינו שנה טובה ומתוקה .
May it be your will O Lord Our God that you should make new for us a good and sweet year.
At the beginning of the new year we are explicit about our desire. We want a sweet year, a year of joy, happiness, laughter.
But, do we get one?
Recently, I have heard the phrase “all things considered” more than ever before. You have heard it. How many of you have used it?
‘How are you?’ ‘I’m pretty good, all things considered’. For everyone, each to a different degree, our wellness, our measure of how ‘good’ we are, has been notably diminished, because of all those things that are being considered, which is to say – Israel, Gaza, antisemitism, the United States, Ukraine, etc. etc. etc. We really do feel worse.
There is also though something else going on. To say, ‘I’m great’ without the qualifying, ‘all things considered’, feels uncomfortable, even embarrassing.
I get it. We don’t want to seem too happy when there’s so much to be unhappy about. We have internalized an upper limit to acceptable levels of joy. ‘There are still hostages in Gaza’, and we think, ‘I should have fun?’
Yes. The answer is yes. You should be having fun.
Why? Because happiness is a type of defiance. Because joy is a form of resistance. Because laughter is a bridge between the world as it is and the world that should be.
We ask for a sweet year and then – and here’s the difficult part – we must, we must force ourselves to laugh.
Of all things, in today’s difficult environment, on Rosh Hashanah why speak of laughter? Because Judaism has always taught that laughter is not the opposite of seriousness. Laughter rather is a serious business.
In the prelude to yesterday morning’s reading, Sarah laughs when told she’ll have a son at ninety. Her failure to conceive until now is taken by all to be a repudiation of God’s covenant. Without a child, there is no Jewish people. The chain will start and stop with Abraham.
But there is a child and Abraham names him Yitzchak – he will laugh, to which Sarah adds “God has brought me laughter; everyone who hears will laugh with me”. Our very first covenantal birth is accompanied by threefold laughter.
It is laughter that marks the moment when the plausible ends and the Jewish story begins. When the world says you’re done with, laughter comes along and says we’re just getting started.
If, on one end of the emotional spectrum, we have over these last two years conceded our right to laughter, to joy, on the other end we have numbed ourselves to tears, to pain. Relentless images of destruction will do that. So too will ideological intransigence.
While laughing was yesterday’s Torah reading, today, during the Binding of Isaac, it is crying.
What are the angels doing when Abraham’s knife is held high, when once again it appears that the Jewish story is about to end? The midrash tells us that they are crying. But why?
Was not the binding of Isaac, in its most basic sense, a mitzvah, a commandment from God? These are not, to be clear, tears of joy, celebrating the triumph of obedience over parental love. These are tears of sadness.
The angels understand that Abraham must bind Isaac, and yet, nevertheless, they are brought to tears.
And I see in the angels a useful paradigm for our own behaviour – because sometimes it seems we don’t know whether to show feelings or even whether we should have feelings at all.
“What about the Palestinian children?” It’s a question asked, not infrequently during kiddush, by you. “What about them?”, I deflect.
The answer I want to give, the answer I should give is “I weep for them too”.
But it’s not entirely truthful.
In Exodus, it was God who caused Pharaoh’s heart to harden. In 2025, the Divine need not intercede. The daily worsening news, the ongoing remembrance of October 7, the turning of the world against the Jews and Jewish state, the simple overwhelmingness of it all, has, I fear, hardened hearts and calloused emotions. That is certainly the case for me.
The only appropriate response to the death of children should be sadness, should be torrents of tears. That their deaths may have been unavoidable, that they were justifiable, that they were legal, or that they may even have been moral, cannot matter, should we, as the Jews, want to remain God’s people.
Tears are not political. They are a test of our humanity, an assessment of our Jewishly mandated compassion.
Let the angels guide our behaviour.
We must never cease being able to cry in the presence of dead and dying children.
When the angels cry though, they are not just expressing anguish. Their tears also serve as a warning.
Falling from the sky, they drop onto Isaac’s eyes, later damaging his power of sight. When violence is so rampant that even the angels cry, the midrash suggests, we ultimately lose our ability to see it. Our vision of the world is distorted. We fail to register right from wrong. Even justifiable violence ultimately poisons us.
In a different midrash, we learn not of the angels’ pain, but of Sarah’s. After the Akedah, the story from which we get the shofar, Isaac returns home and Sarah asks, “Where were you, my son?” Isaac recounts all that has happened causing Sarah to cry out, “Had it not been for the angel, you would have been slaughtered.” When Isaac replies, “Yes,” the midrash says: בְּאוֹתָהּ שָׁעָה צָוְחָה שִׁשָּׁה קוֹלוֹת כְּנֶגֶד שִׁשָּׁה תְּקִיעוֹת, “At that moment she cried out six cries corresponding to six shofar blasts,” not quite completing them before she died.
Yesterday, I asked you to hear in the sound of the shofar – the shevarim, teruah, tekiah – various calls to action. Today, I want you to hear one more thing. I pray that the cry of the shofar gives us the power of empathy. May we hear in it the cry of a mother for her child and may that cry bring us to tears.
Kohelet famously teachesעֵת לִבְכּוֹת וְעֵת לִשְׂחוֹק , there is a time for weeping and a time for laughing.
Laughter can be sacred, so too can its counterpart, weeping. Only by holding joy and grief together can we present an honest heart during these High Holidays before the King of Kings. Only through the expression of both do we escape from the emotional deadening brought on by two years of war, of Jew-hatred, of worsening social and political isolation.
Two weeks ago, my oldest celebrated becoming Bar Mitzvah, and my brother had to remind me to have a good time, to enjoy, to laugh. That is where I find myself. That emotional stupor is what tells me that Sarah’s laugh and Isaac’s naming are not quaint narrative details. They are a command.
As noted to me by one of Adath Israel’s own Isaacs, Yitzchak is the only patriarchal name that doesn’t change. Avram becomes Avraham and Ya’akov becomes Yisrael. But Yitzchak, He Will Laugh, is eternal – and we should treat it as such.
So, think about the next time you hear ‘I’m great, all things considered.’ With all our pain, how dare we not also cultivate moments of happiness? At a time when humour is under fire, how dare we not laugh? In a world when we Jews are told what is acceptable for us to feel, feel joy.
Laughter doesn’t betray our grief; it prevents our grief from devouring us. Laughter is the decision to behave as if a better future will arrive – and thereby help it arrive.
Laugh with your family, your friends. Laugh all by yourself. Let that sound into your bones. It’s not disrespect. It is training, training we get from Sarah. Because when we laugh at the edge of the impossible, we are planting the first seeds of a future world that should not plausibly be – and will be anyway. A world that is still to come.
There is a story in the Talmud about a different world to come, a different Olam Habbah. In a busy marketplace, Elijah points out two brothers to Rabbi Beroka and says to him that they have a share in the heavenly world to come. Surprised, the rabbi approaches the brothers, asking them מַאי עוֹבָדַיְיכוּ, what is your occupation? אִינָשֵׁי בָּדוֹחֵי אֲנַן, we are jesters they say. We bring joy to those who need it.
Whether it is a yet to be perfected earthly world or the heavenly life of the future, the key to the gates of olam habbah is laughter.
When couples create their own new world by getting married, tradition dictates that we smash a glass in remembrance of the destroyed temples. That shattering sound is meant to be a reminder that even during our happiest of moments, we recall that the world is not yet perfect.
And yet, we don’t experience that breaking as painful. It is a rite of joy, a ritual transversing the emotional spectrum.
When Psalms declares הַזֹּרְעִים בְּדִמְעָה בְּרִנָּה יִקְצֹרוּ – those who sow with tears will reap with song – we are not merely promised a future harvest. We are called to plant laughter even as we water the earth with tears.
Because every giggle at the kiddush table, every burst of song in this sanctuary, every child’s shriek of delight is a quiet act of גאולה, of redemption.
May 5786 be a year in which we open our hearts to pain and our mouths to laughter
