This Qurban is not something Ioffer in place of myself.

I'm part of this too.

I bring a part of myself into this too.

And what do I have to bring for myself?

I'm not going to get on the altar, not going to sacrifice me.

But my inner world, right?

My joy, my praise, my song.

Ioffer that to you also as part of this, right?

I'm I'm part of this whole thing.

Welcome back to Tehillim Unveiled.

This is Ari Levison.

With I'm Jeremy.

Hey.

And we're going to talk about Miz more Littoda Tehillim 100.

Today's episode is sponsored in honor of my grandfather's birthday by his children and grandchildren.

Happy birthday OPA.

Happy birthday OPA.

Mismor la toda, the Psalm of Thanksgiving.

What a feel good Psalm, right?

Totally, totally.

Not just for Thanksgiving.

For all year.

Shoot.

We released it too early.

Just kidding.

But is it such a feel good song?

Let's quickly just read it.

It's a short mismor, just 5 verses long.

Mismorla Toda Harula Shim Cola Aritz a Psalm of Thanksgiving kala to Hashem all of the earth, if do it Hashem besimgra Bo lefanov dernana serve Hashem with gladness, come before him with joyous song de U Ki Hashem Who elohim, who asanu veloan asluamo vitson marito.

Know that Hashem, He is God, He made us, we are His, His people and the sheep of His pasture.

Bo sharab betoda chatsirotov bittila hodulo bar hushimo enter his gates with Thanksgiving, His courts with praise.

Give thanks to him, bless his name, Kitova do neither olamhastova adorvador munato, for Hashem is good.

His kindness endures forever, and from generation to generation is His faithfulness.

It's got this great line, you do ET Hashem basimka serve God with happiness.

But that's kind of a a tough idea.

I mean, especially, but the way we interpret it, right, the idea that the Torah would mandate happiness.

I mean, if you think about Rabi Nakhlan takes this to the extent of saying mitzvah godola Leo, this seems tamid.

It's a big mitzvah to always be happy.

But how can the Torah actually mandate our feelings?

How can it just force us to be happy?

What if I'm not feeling happy?

You know, just an example that comes to mind.

There was once that I was ready early for Shabbat, and I say once because it was.

The only time, yeah.

In my entire life, that was actually ready early for Shabbat.

I had cleaned the house, made all the food, called all my family I needed to call, and I had a chance to sit down a few minutes to learn a little.

Bit.

And getting ready to leave, to go to Seoul.

And just before I leave, I'm going to take the soup out of the oven.

I had made this delicious.

It was like a basil zucchini soup.

Maybe I'll link the recipe in the discovery.

Please do, yeah.

And I was all excited for it as the first time I had made it.

And so I take it out of the fridge to just to put on the stove so I can get it hot before Shabbat.

And as I'm taking it out of the fridge, no, the handle, no snaps off the bottom.

And it went everywhere, everywhere.

I mean, it went on my shoes, my socks, my pants, my shirt.

It was in my hair, it was on the ceiling, it was on the walls.

So Needless to say, I was very late to shawl.

Right.

And honestly, by the time I got to shawl, I was not in a good mood.

Of course not.

You know, I don't know if Judaism mandates you always be happy, right?

Certainly there are times to more and there's part of built into our practice.

It is morning.

But like, sometimes you're just not feeling it.

Sometimes you're just in a bad mood, not for any like deep existential reason, but because things happen, right?

You spill some soup.

And so there I am, right in insult, trying to dive and trying to serve God out of happiness, but I'm just not feeling it.

How?

How am I supposed to channel that?

Right, right.

And it's funny when we think about the spiritual journey that the year brings us, there are times, especially now as we're approaching, right, Rosh Hashanah, the time when everybody is judged.

It's a time when we might even think about not wanting to serve so much with joy, of wanting to be introspective, reflective, right?

Even to feel a little bit of that sort of fear or or awe, right?

It's funny you say that because to hillam #2 actually says Eve duet Hashem beira that you just serve God with fear.

I don't know which one is playing off of the other.

It's it's hard to tell interesting, but certainly fears or or awe is something that you can serve God with any day of the year, right, right.

Happiness.

How how is that something that it can mandate and beyond just mandating happiness, specifically happiness in service, right, The the idea of Simcha and Avoda, happiness and service like Avoda, it's the same word be used in modern Hebrew for for work, right?

Those seem to be things that should not go together very easily.

And when you look at the commentators on how they explain this line 1 after another after another talks about how, yeah, you shouldn't serve God begrudgingly like a servant who has no other choice, but you should do it with happiness, right?

Sounds great.

But practically, how do you do that?

How are you supposed to serve God with happiness?

Right, we think about sometimes people say today the opposite of love is in hated apathy, right?

And I even think about not just that sort of feeling of awe, not just a feeling of begrudgingness, but also person clocks into work every day.

They don't expect to be happy every time.

They don't have to be unhappy or, you know, hesitant or reticence to be there.

But at a certain point, the routine of work erodes some of those feelings.

How do we reapproach our avodah with joy every time?

How do we keep that spark alive?

I want to suggest possibly a radical or alternative way of reading the Mizmar, my favorite.

When we say Yves duet Tashem, the Simchat serve God with happiness.

Perhaps what it means is not when you serve God, you should do it with happiness, but actually the happiness itself is the service.

Well, beautiful.

With happiness, yeah, You should serve God with that happiness.

In other words, we think about serving God with mitzvot.

We think about serving God with sacrifices, Right.

What if we're Miz?

Moore is suggesting that we can actually serve God with that emotion of happiness.

To channel it into sort of that higher purpose.

Yeah, yeah.

And if that's where you know, I don't grant it's a little bit of an alternative reading, but look how the Miz more continues if we follow that thread.

OK, right, EB do it Hashem Basimka right serve God right with that happiness.

The happiness is the service right bow the fun of what do you come before him with?

Do you come before him with sacrifices?

Do some before him with offerings.

We only have that language of coming before God with something only once else in Tanakh.

It's in Diva Yamim 1 chapter 16 verse 29 and there it talks about coming before God with a minsa with an offering.

But here, instead of an offering, what do you come before him with?

Right, right.

Joyous song, it says.

Exactly right.

You bring song like the outward expression of happiness, like look.

At verse 4 come.

Before him with Thanksgiving.

Now, maybe this is talking about actual Thanksgiving offerings.

Maybe it's talking about the expression or even just the feeling of Thanksgiving.

Either way, you're coming to his gates with this Thanksgiving, but his actual courtyard in the gates, what do you come with?

And again, we only see this One South since enough too.

It's actually just a few chapters earlier into Hill in 96 where it's talking about coming before him with offerings here.

What do you come to his courtyards with?

It's not offerings, but tila tila praise.

Wow.

Right, right.

Wow.

So perhaps this home is more right it it, it is offering us an alternative type of service when we're just those expressions of happiness, both internally and externally are itself the service that God is asking from us, right?

You're going to be thinking about the service in the temple that as the sacrifices were offered, it was accompanied by song, right?

The the Levine, the Levites, one of their main roles in the Benamine Dash was to sing the songs.

We watched a movie on Tisha Bhavagadash Forban, right?

The legend of destruction in it recreates sort of the story.

And one of the things that really struck me is like the music is amazing.

Music is no, it's totally amazing.

Like we're listening to the wrong music today that we, they, they had these sort of, you know, hits back then that were, that were using these songs.

And this may have been one of them.

Right in the to enough that I'm looking at it says it's actually to accompany the the Corbanto da, the Thanksgiving off, Yeah.

It's what a lot of the commentators say, right?

I think about this then and I think about what it was like to offer this then in your in your reading, to offer a Qurban before Hashem, to bring before Hashem something of material value up to bring life itself before Hashem.

But then to say for me as the person offering that for me, as the person who brings us to you out of thanks for what you've done for me in my life, right?

I say, don't get confused.

This Qurban is not something Ioffer in place of myself.

I'm part of this too.

I bring a part of myself into this too.

And what do I have to bring for myself?

I'm not going to get on the altar, not going to sacrifice me, but my inner world, right?

My joy, my praise, my song.

Ioffer that to you also as part of this right?

I'm I'm part of this whole thing.

Wow, it's really beautiful and you know the prophets, they criticize the sacrifices, mostly the the sacrifices that are done without Shuva, right?

When you bring a chata when you because you send, but you didn't accompany that with repentance and that's what they criticize.

But what would be the corresponding critique?

Not for the sin offerings, but for the Thanksgiving offerings?

That you did it without happiness, right?

Right.

Exactly.

Exactly.

And in fact, in the TOCA, the rebuke session in Deuteronomy chapter 28, it talks about the oldest destruction and punishments happening.

Taka tesharloa varata desharna kaha MI singha umi tuvleva.

It's actually the only other time in Tanakh that we have the the language of of Voda and service and Simcha together.

It says that all these things happen because it didn't serve God with happiness.

Well, well, and I think about what that means for us today in a world where Corbenote are not part of our day-to-day life, right, We're not giving sacrifices in that way.

What did what did the the saferty Lima offer us?

What did they leave us with?

They left us with working still with that inner world, with that world of joy, with that emotion, right, I'm going to be able to bring the animal that comes with it.

But this pathway still remains open for me.

So this is a really intriguing idea, but it still leaves open that question, what is that Simcha, that happiness that we're talking about?

And how is it that God can expect that and even mandate that from us?

No, I don't think there is necessarily one type of happiness.

But what is the one we're talking about here?

And I'll tell you what I'm sitting with is that perhaps it's the kind of happiness that Pircalvo talks about when it talks about being Miss Emmaus Bachelko, right?

Happy with your portion, right?

In other words, gratitude for the fact that you believe that you have everything like God wants you to have.

Do you have everything that you need?

And that's where a person can really start to find their joy because they stop looking at and counting the things themselves, right?

We sometimes measure richness in quantity, but we can shift, We can start to measure it a little bit in quality.

They bring their experience into it more, and that's a much deeper richness that quantity can never really fill or attain necessarily.

And it certainly goes along with the idea of a Thanksgiving off, right?

And saying I have enough.

I have, I've even more than enough.

I can even give some back to God.

And I think when you think about Simcha in the Torah, one of the main examples that comes to mind and one of the main uses of it was when it talks about the holidays.

And it actually it's interesting, if you look at them, it doesn't mention happiness on Passover.

On Shavuot, it mentions it one time and then the Sukkot, it actually manages it twice.

And I think part of the reason is that if you're following the agricultural season, right, Passover is at the beginning of the harvest.

Chevrolet, you've already started to harvest the grain.

And then by Sukkot you've finally gathered in everything in the field.

And that was just progression of feeling more and more secure in what you have, in what God has given you.

And by the time you get to Sukkot, you can say God has given me what I need.

And whether it's a Goodyear or whether it's a bad year, you know that you have what you need.

You know that you have enough to be happy.

And you come before God and Vahita Aksamaiah, you should be, you know, all the more so happy, right?

Well, I love that perspective of cultivating, like I'm looking for reasons to give thanks, right?

Meaning the longer the harvest goes on, the Torah assumes, the more reasons you'll have to be joyous and and with that to be thankful, right?

It's sort of a respective you can bring into your own life.

I love that.

You know, coming back to the soup story, one of the things I, I realized after, like, a lot of reflecting and like trying to channel some happiness there is that maybe God didn't want me to have soup.

And thank God we had lots of other food and nobody missed it and we had everything that we needed.

No one left hungry.

We had a great time that that Friday night, Right.

That's Simcha.

Yeah.

This sort of spiritual way of, of looking at things, right, of of being able to say things like, well, maybe God just didn't want me to have the soup that time, right?

It opens me up all of a sudden to gratitude because I recognize there is some meaning to this.

There is some purpose to this, right?

It's not for nothing, It's for something.

And if I can connect to that something, then maybe even though it wasn't packaged at all, the way I would package a gift, maybe there was a gift latent dinner hidden on there.

Wow.

In a way, the greatest gift that we can give to God is to see the gift that He gave us.

Nice.

You know, it reminds me of when I bring my wife flowers and obviously I'm not bringing her flowers because I'm expecting anything in return because I want anything from her.

But there is sort of one thing that I am hoping for, one thing that will make it worth my time and my effort and my money, right?

When I give her those flowers, I want to see her smile.

Totally right.

That's all I'm asking for.

I don't need anything else in return.

And I want to see that smile.

I think that's the way God feels too, right?

When He gives us all the gifts that He gives us, right?

He's not asking for much in return, but He wants to see us smile.

He wants us to come before Him and to literally serve Him with that smile.

Not a smile while we're serving him, but the smile itself is the surface.

I also wanted to actually add in my grandfather's own ideas about happiness, and I'm sure that he's going to tell me that I'm misquoting him, so I apologize ahead of time to him.

True, deep happiness, the ultimate happiness, is not just recognizing what God gives to us, but recognizing what we're giving to God, in other words, right?

Real happiness comes from knowing your mission, from knowing what your avoda is absolutely, what your service is, what your purpose is in the world.

When you can figure that out, right, and when you feel like you can devote all of your energies toward that, that's the greatest happiness of all.

That is the deepest, truest happiness that a person can experience.

Well, a great example of this is actually the only time in the Torah where someone is described as being happy.

And I know it's.

Surprising, right?

Because it talks about happiness as a concept a lot.

But the only time that Torah actually describes a person as actually being happy is when God and Moshe are going back and forth about how God wants him to go take the Jews out of Egypt.

And Moshe doesn't want to accept this mission.

And eventually he tells Moshe that Aaron, his brother, is going to come meet him and he is going to be the mouthpiece for him.

What it says is he nehu yoseli quetecha verasa vesamach bilibao.

And he tells Moshe, Aaron is coming out to greet you and he is going to see you and he is going to be happy in his heart.

And the reason that's such a big deal is because what we would have expected Aaron to feel when he just heard that his little brother was going to lead the Jewish people, you would have expected jealousy, right?

But no, Aaron wasn't jealous, and he was actually happy for Moshe.

This seems to have come out of some sort of security and confidence in his own purpose in life.

And what the Gamora actually says about this is because of that happiness he expressed there that Aaron merited to be the high priest, the Cohen Godal, the only actual example of someone being happy in the Torah.

And it all has to do with knowing your purpose, knowing your mission in life, being confident that God is setting you on the path that you need to be on.

I.

Love that.

A great example of this that my, my grandfather likes to quote is the the prayer on Shabbat of his Mass Moshe, right?

It's Ismat Moshe by Matnan Shalkao.

Moshe rejoiced in the gift of his portion.

He even met a man Karatella, because he was called a faithful servant, right?

And Moshe didn't have a lot in life physically.

And the one physical thing he wanted to go into the land of Israel, he didn't get to have, but he did have a mission.

He did have a purpose.

He had probably a clearer divine mandated purpose and mission than anyone who's ever lived.

And that was the source of his happiness.

Right.

Why is that sort of this culmination for Moshe or on our personal level, right?

Why when I bring gift to somebody, am I waiting for that gratitude?

Am I right when we do these things for other people, these acts of service, and they give us that gratitude.

Part of that gratitude is not just this made me feel this thing, right?

It's also the recognition that you as the giver, as the gift giver, have in you the capacity to know me, right?

To understand who I am, to know what I want and that you're motivated by good.

You gave this to me out of a good desire.

There's something fundamentally good about you and giving to me, right?

The the cycle sort of Mushfiyama Kabel give and receive is constantly shifting in the act of gift giving.

I give you something, but then your gratitude gives me something, right?

And it it opens up something in me.

It shows me that I'm I'm seen as somebody who you know who.

You trust and makes.

You feel good.

The gift makes the receiver feel good, and then it also makes the giver feel good.

And you know, when we're thinking about our purpose, right, our mission in life, it's not such a simple thing, right?

It is, unfortunately.

Not.

Probably the hardest thing that any of us have to figure out in life is like what?

What's our mission?

What's our purpose?

Right?

But we're not without any guidance at all.

But we, we do have the Torah and the mitzvot to guide us in maybe not our specific purpose, but at least our kind of general purpose as Jews and as human beings.

And rehearsed actually in his commentary on this, Miss Moore says exactly this.

He says that, right, true happiness comes from a life dedicated to Tora and mitzvah, a life dedicated towards Avodah service.

And at the time we're going to release this, it's right before the High Holidays.

That's what the High Holidays are about, right?

Their time of introspection and trying to figure out who we're meant to be, right?

And it's not supposed to be easy.

No, right?

Not alone.

But when we do figure out who we're meant to be, the more, at least I should say, that we figure out who we're meant to be, right, the more opportunity there is for true happiness.

And it's interesting, thinking about Sukkots not just as the culmination of the agricultural season, right, but the culmination of the high holidays, of that process of introspection and of working on ourselves and figuring out who we are.

Then we can come in to Sukkot with a real sense of Simsa.

Right, right, right.

It's funny, You were talking about Ravi Nachman before.

I think about it.

Ravi Nachman, like you were saying for him, the system of the Torah and its votes, all these acts, that's the floor.

It's not the ceiling.

Sometimes we start to think, well, I could just keep this, I could just add this part to my life, then I'd really be doing for me.

Not when it's different, because when a person goes on that general path, eventually they'll start to find their own path.

And that's what's laid out in the Tanak really, how different characters, how different verses psalms, all of that pave a path where individuals showed this is how I figured out who I was, what my mission is in life.

And this is one of the lines, right?

This this line, where does it say that right?

This is one of the places exactly this, this parrot of TLM.

If you do it, the shambles in cloud, we're not going to say that is what takes a person from I'm doing what everybody else is doing to my happiness.

My joy becomes part of it, right?

I'm finding my unique path and my unique mission.

Therefore, in the whole thing, that's a piece of our self that we bring in Thanksgiving and joy.

I I love that idea of not just bringing the sacrifices, but bringing ourselves with the sacrifices when we think about even do it to Chamba Simcha, when we talk about like, jeez, that sounds horrible.

Maybe that's the point.

Maybe, maybe service is supposed to be service.

It's supposed to be work, right, right.

You come before God and it's, it's like real work that you have to do to try to find that happiness, to try to figure out who you are, to try to select and understand how God has given you everything that you need, right?

That's why it's called work.

Absolutely.

And like all the, the service that we do for God, like if it, if it was so easy, it would not be worth anything.

Coming back to that, the story with the soup, you know, God doesn't take your happiness for granted, right?

It is something that that you have to work on.

And perhaps part of that work is the work to recognize that indeed, God has given us what we need, right?

That we actually didn't need the soup, that we were actually fine without it, right.

And part of it's also that work to recognize that we actually have a service and a purpose.

And I'm just thinking about this as I'm saying yet, but I don't know.

I did a lot of introspection during Dopening.

And by the time I came to the Shabbat table sand soup, I actually learned a really powerful lesson about like kind of just like trusting in God and and understanding that we have what we need and that it really it all comes from him.

And I was able to share some really what I felt like were really meaningful thoughts at the table.

How much more meaningful and powerful was that service then the soup could ever have been?

I want to bring us home with one final thought.

The Torah in Numbers chapter 10, verse 10 talks about the different days in which the trumpets are sounded in the Temple.

And it talks about the holidays and Rosh Kodesh, the new month.

And it also talks about Yom Semakhtham, the day of your happiness.

Of course.

What days were those, right?

I didn't see any happy day on the calendar, right?

Which day is the day of happiness?

And so the Midrash halacha, the Sifre, gives two different answers.

The first answer is maybe that is Shabbat right?

Makes sense.

It's a pretty happy day.

It's a great time for acknowledging our purpose and what God created us for.

Right know that He created us.

But the second opinion is that the Yom smacked fam, the day of happiness, is every single day.

There is nothing stopping any day from being a Yom smacked fam.

Any day can be a day of happiness and so on that I wish you all a happy day.

May that happiness itself be a service to God, and we'll see you next time.