A HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Berkowitz and Rabinowitz were business partners, and both were avid golfers.

"Rabinowitz, listen up, "exclaimed an excited Berkowitz. "Those buyers we have been schmoozing up called to say they got a reservation for us to meet them for golf at their exclusive country club this Saturday at 8 A.M."

"Sorry, replied Rabinowitz, I can't go. It's Shabbos and I will be in shul."

"Shul, shmool, what are you talking about?  This is a BIG deal!  And, anyway, YOU in shul?  Since when? As long as I've known you you've been an atheist.  When we were kids, you were a communist."

"That was all before Goldstein came to town. Do you remember when he came as a refugee without a penny in his pocket?  And now, he's a multi-millionaire. Some say he may be worth billions. Well, Goldstein tells me it's all because he goes to shul and talks to G-d."

"Rabinowitz, you expect me to believe that YOU are going to shul to talk to G-d?? You are a radical atheist. Common, stop selling me babbe masos…"

"No!" Says Rabinowitz. "Goldstein goes to shul to talk to G-d. I go to shul to talk to Goldstein."

The traditional greeting on Rosh Hashanah is, “L'shanah tovah tikatev,” – “May you be inscribed for a good year,” but on January 1st, we wish each other a “Happy New Year.”

Why do we wish each other a Shanah Tovah, a good year, rather than Shanah Smecha, a happy year? Don’t we want to be happy?

The brilliant Thomas Jefferson made a mistake over two hundred years ago and our society is paying the price. He wrote in the Declaration of Independence that “we are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and pursuit of Happiness.”

Bad idea. For two hundred years, we’ve been pursuing ‘happiness’ and increasingly becoming exasperated when we can’t achieve it. We chase it and perpetually come up short. We tried to find happiness by accumulating wealth and discovered it didn't work. Whatever we had never seemed enough.

We tried to find happiness in pursuit of pleasure and that didn't work either. We found diversion and entertainment, but not happiness.

We look in all the wrong places for happiness.

What G-d blessed us with life, liberty, and the pursuit of goodness. Happiness should not be our goal; it’s not an end. Happiness is always a side effect,  that flows into our lives while we are busy trying to live a meaningful life doing something else. We feel it along the way.

The Rosh Hashanah greeting reminds us that our real goal is not happiness, but goodness. If we go after goodness instead, happiness will follow, a naturally occurring outcome from goodness.

Happiness is a byproduct of a meaningful life.

People who make doing good and attaining good character more important than achieving happiness will achieve happiness. Pursuing happiness for its own sake, doing it devoid of meaning usually results in unhappiness.

If we confuse means and ends, we are likely to end up with neither purpose nor joy.

People don't become happy by satisfying their desires, just as they don’t become full by chewing bubble gum or popcorn or swallowing air. Instead, happiness emerges from doing good. It flows from fulfillment and slips in unnoticed.

That’s why people wake up the morning after New Year’s with a painful hangover. They were pursuing a Happy New Year and believed they could do that via some short-term enjoyment. But it was followed by pain. They stagger into the year painfully aware of how fleeting the previous night’s happiness has been.

May it be a year in the pursuit of goodness, and then indeed, we’ll have a happy New Year as well!

לְשָׁנָה טוֹבָה תִּכָּתֵב וְתֵחָתֵם

Shana Tova Umetukah

A sweet, good year.

Rabbi Yoseph Geisinsky