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Shanah
Tovah, dear friends.
Imagine the moment of the glass breaking
at a wedding.
Now see yourself removing ten drops of sweet
wine during a Passover Seder.
Next, hear the sound of the community reciting
the Mourner's Kaddish at every single worship service. What do these three rituals have in
common? Each brings a moment of sadness into an
otherwise joyful event.
In Judaism, joy and sadness go hand in
hand. We rarely experience one without the other. And, yet, so many of us seem to be wired
to focus on the positive, to keep our sorrow at bay, and to just be happy.
Last year, I spoke during the High Holy
Days about the importance of happiness, and the ways in which happiness
permeates the Jewish experience. This year, I hope you will indulge me as
I flip that coin over. This year, I want to talk about sadness, and the degree
to which we give it a place in our lives.
I started pondering this when I saw an
incredible movie: Inside Out. Inside
Out is Disney-Pixar's most recent
film, released just this year. I'm sure that many, if not most, of you saw this
movie this year. It was lauded by critics, kids, and adults, alike. The film
follows the story of a little girl named Riley, yet the main characters are the
emotions in her head. We first meet Riley at her birth, and we soon learn that
we will be viewing her life from somewhere inside her mind. We meet the various
emotions which steer her, guide her, and determine many of her responses and
reactions to life around her. When she's born, JOY is the only emotion present
in Riley's "headquarters." The baby is filled with pure joy at being
alive and being loved by her parents.
Joy, voiced by Amy Poehler, is depicted
as bright yellow. But, before you know it, the next emotion, SADNESS, pops up. Baby
Riley cries when Sadness is at the controls. Sadness, voiced by Phyllis Smith,
is blue, and shaped a bit like a teardrop. Then we meet the other three primary
emotions: FEAR, voiced by Bill Hader, who is purple, long and lanky; ANGER,
voiced brilliantly by Lewis Black, and bright red and prone to light on fire;
and DISGUST, voiced by Mindy Kaling, who is, as you'd guess, bright green.
Riley's most formative memories are
stored in headquarters with the emotions. There are five memories - shown as
colorful marbles - called "Core Memories," which shaped a significant
part of Riley's personality, and each leads to a "personality
island." Presumably, every person has different personality islands.
Riley's islands happen to be Honesty, Family, Hockey, Goofball (because she
loves being silly), and Friendship.
Joy is Riley's dominant emotion. Joy calls
the shots and decides which other emotion will function at which time. When
Riley is 11 years old, we watch as Riley's parents move the family from
Minnesota to San Francisco, and Joy tries to help Riley focus on the positives
of the move. However, when they arrive, the house is empty, and their moving
truck is delayed. This major life change is the catalyst for many other changes
in Riley's life. Up in headquarters, Sadness begins to touch memories, and when
she does, the happy memories turn sad. Thus, Joy tries to isolate Sadness, even
going so far as drawing a circle on the ground and telling Sadness not to leave
its confines.
On the first night in their new house, Riley has only a sleeping bag in
her room, and she's unable to sleep. Riley's emotions realize that the move was
a lot worse than Joy had said it would be. Mom comes into the room and thanks
Riley for keeping a happy face through the stressful situation. When Riley
finally falls asleep, Joy puts on a happy dream of Riley ice skating with her
parents.
The next day, Riley has her first day at her new school, and Joy gives
assignments to the team, telling Sadness that she should just stand still, and
not take the controls at all. When Riley arrives in class, the teacher asks her
to introduce herself, and tell everyone about her life in Minnesota. Riley
talks about playing on a hockey team, but once again the memory turns blue
after Sadness touches it. Joy tries to take the memory out, and sees Sadness
taking control of the console. Joy finally succeeds in removing the memory and
pulls Sadness away from the console, but not before a new sad core memory is
created. Joy tries to activate the memory dump, but Sadness stops her from
erasing the memory. In the struggle, all of the core memories fall out, and a
happy core memory starts to get sucked into the dump tube, and Joy grabs it and
finds herself, Sadness and the core memories getting sucked away.
Thus, Joy and Sadness are paired
together on an adventure as they try to find their way back to Headquarters.
Without them, Fear, Disgust, and Anger are in charge at the controls. Riley
starts snapping at her parents when they try to talk with her, she decides she
hates hockey, and soon wants to run away. Her personality islands start to turn
dark, and then begin to crumble.
As they look for a way home, Joy and Sadness find Bing Bong, Riley's
childhood imaginary friend, who is desperate
to reconnect with her. He tells them they can get to Headquarters by riding the "Train of Thought." After
exploring different areas of Riley's mind, the three eventually catch the
train, but it derails when another personality island falls.
As Riley prepares to board a bus bound for Minnesota, Joy attempts to
use a "recall tube" to return
to Headquarters, but the last personality island falls and breaks the tube,
sending Joy into the Memory Dump along with Bing Bong. While despairingly
looking through old memories, Joy discovers a sad memory in Riley's life that
becomes happy when her parents and friends come to comfort her over losing a
hockey game, causing Joy to realize Sadness's true importance: alerting others
when Riley needs help.
As we watch the movie, we viewers also realize
Sadness’s importance. We might sense the way that we fight against sadness, or
how we put on a brave face, but the movie reminds us of the importance of a
good cry. Through the eyes and mind of an eleven-year-old girl, we learn
something about ourselves, no matter our age.
My colleague, Rabbi Geoff Mitelman, noticed something
interesting about how each emotion is depicted. He writes:
Fear is
tall, thin, looks like a frayed nerve and is purple. Not only that,
his eyes are purple, too.
Anger, which looks like a brick and is red (and sometimes flaming), has
red eyes. Disgust, who is
green, has green eyes. Sadness, not surprisingly, is completely blue, and even looks like a
teardrop. But Joy,
who is mainly yellow, has more than one color in her. She has blue
eyes and blue hair. Why? Well, if
blue represents sadness, then the message is clear: there is no such thing as “pure joy.” Instead, even in our most
joyous times, there is often sadness mixed in.
Pete Docter, the film’s director and
co-writer, explains that he always felt awkwardness and shyness during his childhood.
He says that this led to his gravitation toward animation, as it allowed him to
draw something that expressed how he felt, rather than having to say it out
loud. A New York Times profile of Docter explains,
“That was the most difficult time of my life,” he said.
“Suddenly, bam, your idyllic boyhood
bubble is popped, and you’re aware that everything you do and everything you wear and everything you say is being judged by everyone
else.”
Flash forward to late 2009, when Mr. Docter noticed his
pre-teenage daughter, Elie, experiencing
a similar transition. “She started getting more quiet and reserved, and that, frankly, triggered a lot of my own
insecurities and fears,” he said. “And it also made
me wonder what was going on. What happens in our heads during these moments?”
Mr. Docter and his “Inside Out” team started to research
how the mind operates.They
spent time with the psychologist Paul
Ekman, who is renowned for his research on emotions, and Dacher
Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.
Dr. Ekman,
in his work, identified six distinct emotions. Pete Docter felt that sounded like
a nice, manageable number of characters to design and write for. Dr. Ekman
identified anger, fear, sadness, disgust, joy and surprise. Docter decided that
Surprise and fear were fairly similar, so he cut it down to the movie’s five.
Initial drafts of
the movie had Joy and Fear getting lost together. “It seemed like the funniest choice,” Docter said.
But as work progressed, the pairing felt wrong. Mr.
Docter said he went for a walk one
Sunday and began catastrophizing: His firing was imminent. He knew it. While on
his stroll, Mr. Docter started to
think about his friends at Pixar and what he would miss about them. “I love them,” he said. “They make me happy.
But these are people I have also
been angry at. I’ve gone through sadness with these
people, especially when we lost Steve [Jobs
(who had been a founding supporter of Pixar)].”
He continued: “At that moment, I realized that Sadness
was the key. We were trying to push
her to the side. But she needed to be the one going on the journey. Joy needed to understand that it’s O.K. for
Sadness to be included at the controls once in a while. It’s only the interaction and complexity
of all of these emotions that brings a real connection
between people.”
In an interview
with Fresh Air's Terry Gross, Pete Docter discussed what he learned from Dacher
Keltner. Keltner wrote about
sadness as a form of community bonding. If you're sad, it's a way of connecting
with other people and a lot of times, we sort of feel embarrassed about being
sad and we go off by ourselves to hide and cry by ourselves, but really it's a
way of re-establishing relationship.”
Keltner is emphatic that
emotions serve a key evolutionary function; having them tussling inside our
heads might not be reassuring, but they are nonetheless there to protect us.
“In our culture, we’re tough on sadness,” he says, “but it’s a powerful trigger
for seeking comfort and bonding,” while “anger is often about the sense of
being treated unfairly, and can be a motivator for social change.”
Keltner explains that we know
scientifically that a girl Riley's age is going to lose a lot of joy. They're going to feel sad, and they're
going to really lose a sense of self confidence; they have this drop in self-esteem. Parents, when they see it, are
absolutely shell shocked. And then
sometimes people are saying, "Maybe you should put her on
medication." But what the
film says is this is just part of growing and it's OK. I feel that is the most important message in the movie.
"One
of the things I really resonated with is that we have a naive view in the West
that happiness is all about the
positive stuff. But happiness in a meaningful life is really about the full array of emotions, and finding them
in the right place. I think that is a subtext of the movie: The parents want Riley to just be their happy
little girl. And she can't. She has to
have this full complement of emotions to develop. I think we all need
to remember that."
Even our most joyous events have sadness
mixed in. Think back now to the moment of breaking a glass at a Jewish wedding.
Why do we do that? What does it represent? There are a number of
interpretations, and each carries with it an aspect of sadness.
The most common explanation for why we
break the glass commemorates the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Two
Temples stood on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The first was destroyed in 586
BCE, and the second was destroyed in 70 CE. With this second destruction,
Judaism was thrown into chaos. Our entire religious practice was centered
around sacrifices offered at this one location. We’d bring grain, fruits, oils,
and animals, and this was the way in which we communicated with God. What would
we do without the Temple? Judaism survived in a few ways – we created
synagogues, which allowed us to worship in other locations outside of
Jerusalem, we invented rabbis as the new leaders to replace the priests who ran
the sacrificial rituals, and we formalized prayer as the new method of
communication with God.
Jews, now in exile from Jerusalem,
adapted and coped with these changes. As a Reform Jew, I take comfort in the
fact that Judaism is thriving in the Diaspora, and that the past two thousand
years have enabled incredible creativity and growth within Judaism. Yet
Orthodox and other traditional forms of Judaism still mourn the destruction of
the Temple, and they feel an innate brokenness in their daily lives due to its
loss.
A moving description of this grief is
found on the Chabad website:
The Temple
was not merely a building; it was the meeting place of heaven and earth, the ideal and the real, G‑d and creation. When
the Temple was lost, so was the open relationship
between G‑d and the world. Our souls were ripped away from our Soulmate. One day soon, when the
Temple is rebuilt, our souls will reunite with G‑d, our Soulmate, in a true relationship that we built together. We
will no longer mourn the destruction,
but looking back we will finally understand its purpose, and we will celebrate.
Even in our greatest moments of joys –
celebrating a wedding – we remember brokenness in our lives, in our past, and
in our world. Our tradition groups these two feelings together rather than
running away from sadness or sorrow.
Likewise, we also include moments of
happiness in our saddest times. As Rabbi Mitelman points out:
Think about
how you feel after a good cry. When you cry, your body is releasing endorphins, chemicals that often
make you feel good. And that’s why a funeral and a shiva minyan — some of the saddest
moments we can experience — are often filled laughter
and love. Friends and family members are sharing stories of their loved one, and so are bringing a little bit of joy
into these moments that seem so low.
In other
words, Inside Out shows us that the goal of life isn’t
“to be happy.” We will feel sad,
angry or frightened. But we need our whole range of emotions for developing
our sense of self and our relationship
with others.
So in
many ways, the fact that Joy has some Sadness in her helps her character become more fully human. If even
the representation of Joy can be sad at times, so can we. And if we strive to be “happy” all the time, then
we aren’t truly living our lives.
Ultimately,
as psychologist Steven Hayes once said, we shouldn’t skirt over difficult emotions in order to “feel better.”
Instead,
we need to fully experience our lives, and learn how to “feel better.”
I was incredibly moved by Mayim Bialik’s response to the
movie. She writes frequent articles for Kveller.org,
a Jewish parenting website. She, like many of us, wept when she saw the
movie.
She points out:
We can
have more than one feeling at a time. As a child, I don’t know that that option
was open to me. I didn’t
understand conflicted feelings; it just felt wrong to have them. I thought I was bad if I felt jealousy
or anxiety, and the solution was to try to not feel those things. When I could not achieve that, I felt like a
failure. Conversely, I often felt melancholy
at happy times and that made me feel like I was malcontent or didn’t “know how” to be happy. I’m not quite sure where
those ideas came from, but they are hard to shake.She continues:
I took my
almost 7 and almost 10-year-old sons to this movie because I don’t want them to feel that they have to feel only one thing.
Their dad and I got divorced about three years ago. They had to move into a new
house to live with their dad half the week and stay
with me half the week. There were so many emotions for them then, and there are
even more now. Our house is
under construction, I work a
lot…it’s always something.
Even if
you aren’t divorced, think about your life and your dreams and the life you try and build for your kids and take them
to see this movie. “Inside Out” started so many conversations for our family. We talked about how each of
the characters in her brain could run
her life into the ground without all of the others—even
Joy needs to be tempered with the other
emotions. We talked about the kinds of memories we make, and how to hold onto them and understand them
in their entirety. We talked about how
looking at things only one way isn’t the whole story. But mostly we talked
about how it’s OK to have all
kinds of feelings.
This Rosh Hashanah, as we enter a new year, I am here to
remind you that it is OK to have all kinds of feelings. We can feel happy and
sad at the same time, we can be nostalgic and proud, we can be angry and
excited. We can feel broken yet grateful to be alive. I just wonder what we'd
accomplish or experience if we took all that energy that we use to push away
sadness, and instead used it elsewhere. If we just feel the sadness that life
brings, would we return to joy faster? And doesn't the sadness or the
bitterness just make the joy sweeter? Joy's eyes are blue because joy does not
exist in a vacuum - we experience true happiness when we know sadness and we
can appreciate the good things of life in a new way.
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