Tirosh-Samuelson, Hava. 2026. 'Contemporary Jewish Theologies of Happiness', St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology. Edited by Brendan N. Wolfe et al. https://www.saet.ac.uk/Judaism/ContemporaryTheologiesofHappinessTirosh-Samuelson, Hava. "Contemporary Jewish Theologies of Happiness." In St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology, edited by Brendan N. Wolfe et al. University of St Andrews, 2022–. Article published October 23, 2026. https://www.saet.ac.uk/Judaism/ContemporaryTheologiesofHappiness.Tirosh-Samuelson, H. (2026) Contemporary Jewish Theologies of Happiness. In: B. N. Wolfe et al., eds. St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology. University of St Andrews. Available at: https://www.saet.ac.uk/Judaism/ContemporaryTheologiesofHappiness [Accessed ].Hava Tirosh-Samuelson , 'Contemporary Jewish Theologies of Happiness', in St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology, ed. by Brendan N. Wolfe et al. (University of St Andrews, 2026) <https://www.saet.ac.uk/Judaism/ContemporaryTheologiesofHappiness>
1 The Jewish discourse on happiness
Since antiquity, Jews have reflected on happiness by engaging the reflections on happiness of non-Jewish thinkers, especially Aristotle, the Stoics, and Immanuel Kant. Since Judaism posits that Israel received divine revelation in the form of law, namely, the Torah, all Jewish thinkers had to explain how observance of the Torah relates to or even yields happiness (Tirosh-Samuelson 2003; 2009; 2026a; 2026b; 2026c). Through their reflections on happiness and Torah, Jewish religious philosophers and theologians explored the relationship between God and humanity, especially between God and Israel; the purpose and meaning of human life; the relationship between body and soul, reason and emotions; the relationship between men and women, the individual and the community, Jews and non-Jews, and more. Thus, the discourse on happiness was a broadest context within which Jews could reflect about the meaning of being Jewish and the meaning of being human.
In the twentieth century, the Jewish discourse on happiness underwent a major transformation due to the processes of secularization and the rise of science as the arbiter of truth and the alternative to revealed religion (Taylor 2007). As scientists claimed to possess scientific knowledge not only about the physical world but also about the nature of human beings, happiness became the subject of scientific research. In the twentieth century, the new sciences of the human soul (i.e. psychoanalysis, psychology) and of human society (e.g. sociology, anthropology, political science, and economics) claimed to explain human interiority as well as human sociality, accounting for human flourishing or lack thereof. As a result, the pursuit of happiness had little to do with religious beliefs or practices; happiness could be attained if one possessed the relevant information about the ‘science of subjective wellbeing’.
While secularized Jews have played crucial role in the emergence of the science of happiness and its popularization into an industry of self-help books that teach people how to be happy (Tirosh-Samuelson 2026c), Jewish religious philosophers and theologians have not been oblivious to these developments. Concerned about the continuity and creativity of Jewish religious life, they had to explain what it means for Jews to seek happiness in a secular society in which Jewish identity exists in forms that do not demand that Jews observe Jewish law or affirm specific Jewish beliefs. Does loyalty to the Judaic way of life contribute to the pursuit of happiness? Does Judaism chart a distinctive way for a life well-lived? Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan (d. 1983), Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik (d. 1993), Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi (d. 2014), and Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (d. 2020) are religious philosophers, theologians, and communal leaders who addressed these questions, articulating Jewish theologies of happiness. Rabbi Kaplan, the founder of Young Israel movement and later of Reconstructionist Judaism, held that happiness means self-actualization in the world through social action, which is what Jews mean when they speak about ‘salvation’. Rabbi Soloveitchik, the leader of Modern Orthodoxy, predicated the Judaic pursuit of perfection exclusively, albeit dialectically, on the observance of Halakhah. Rabbi Schachter-Shalomi, the founder of the Jewish Renewal Movement, offered the most ecumenical path to human flourishing by adopting insights and techniques from various world mystical traditions. And Rabbi Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, positioned traditional Judaism as the response to the social ills of contemporary secular society because Judaism focuses on ‘joy’ rather than on ‘happiness’, on the ‘we’ rather than the ‘I’, on ‘being’ rather than ‘having’. Differences notwithstanding, these religious thinkers had much in common: they held that Judaism is compatible with contemporary philosophy and science, provided both are properly interpreted; they were committed to the survival and future flourishing of Judaism and the Jewish People; and they were convinced that Judaism can thrive in non-Jewish society without losing its distinct identity because Judaism has a deep message to all humanity. That message was articulated in the Bible, the foundational sacred text of Judaism that sacralizes Jewish life in the mundane world.
2 Mordecai M. Kaplan: happiness as self-actualization
In his long lifespan of 102 years (1881–1983), Mordecai Kaplan experienced the challenge of modernity most acutely, and he courageously sought to modernize Judaism to address these profound challenges. He was born into an Orthodox family in Lithuania that migrated to the US when his father, Rabbi Israel Kaplan, was invited to serve as Dayan in New York City in 1888. Arriving in the US in 1889, Mordecai Kaplan’s initial education was strictly Orthodox at the Etz Hayyim Yeshivah in Brooklyn. However, his broad-minded father, who was an adherent of the Musar movement, was also friendly with non-Orthodox scholars such as Arnold Ehrlich, the biblical scholar who challenged the historicity of biblical narratives and exposed the impressionable adolescent Mordecai to religious skepticism. To counter this, Israel Kaplan hired another tutor, Joseph Sossnitz, to introduce Kaplan to Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, which illustrated how loyalty to Rabbinic Judaism is compatible with philosophy and science. It was precisely the tension between naive religious belief on the one hand and contemporary philosophy and science on the other that continued to perplex Kaplan throughout his life, fuelling his determination to reconstruct Judaism in the light of modern philosophy and science.
In 1893, the next phase of Kaplan’s education fused the two cultural worlds when he enrolled in City College of New York (CCNY) in the morning and in the Rabbinic program of the Jewish Theological Seminary in the afternoon. After graduating from CCNY in 1900 he went on to do graduate level work at Columbia University in philosophy, sociology, and education, writing his MA thesis on Henry Sidgwick’s moral philosophy under the instruction of Felix Adler, the founder of the Society for Ethical Judaism, and the sociologist Franklin Giddings. Moral philosophy and sociology would remain Kaplan’s main inspiration for his reconstruction of Judaism while teaching at the Teachers Institute at the Jewish Theological Seminary from 1909 until his retirement from the institution in 1961. These were tumultuous years, during which not only did the Jewish People experience the Shoah (Holocaust) and the birth of the State of Israel, but Kaplan also experienced personal, professional, and public controversies as he reconstructed American Judaism (Goldsmith, Scult and Seltzer 1990). Training scores of Conservative rabbis, Kaplan sought to preserve traditional Judaism while Americanizing East-European and modernizing Jewish beliefs, practices, and communal institutions. His impact extended well beyond Conservative Judaism and the Jewish Theological Seminary to transform the way non-Orthodox American Jews live, think, and practice Judaism (Scult 1993).
Kaplan secularized Judaism, on the one hand, while insisting that Judaism sacralizes the mundane world, on the other. ‘Transnaturalism’ was the term he coined to capture this seemingly contradictory position, which is best understood as religious naturalism. Influenced by the philosophical Pragmatism of John Dewy and by the emerging social sciences, Kaplan reinterpreted Judaism as a civilization, namely a culture that emerged at a particular time and place evolving over time to address changing historical conditions (Kaplan 1934). Judaism is a religious civilization because its ‘sancta’ – objects, persons, places, events, days, customs, texts, and values – invest the life of Jews with sanctity. Denying supernaturalism, transcendence, miracles, and providence, Kaplan’s transnaturalism meant that God is not a thing but a power that manifests itself in human actions within the mundane world when human beings behave in a godly manner and experience self-transcendence. What traditional religions call ‘salvation’ is but a desire for ‘perfection or self-transcendence’ that is experienced in the mundane world when we experience ‘life’s worthwhileness’ (Kaplan 1958: 25). The human striving for salvation is always social because ‘the individual human being, however well intentioned, requires the support of his fellows to live up to his own better self’ (Kaplan 1958: 84). For Kaplan, this means that human sociality constitutes the group identity, or peoplehood, of Jews, and that Jewish personal and collective life has been framed by the sancta of the Jewish civilization.
Inspired by Process philosophers such as Alfred North Whitehead, Kaplan reinterpreted the concept of God. Although in English ‘God’ is a noun, God is not an object to which the noun refers, but the ‘organicity of the world’. As Alan Lazaroff explains:
Organicity, the mutual influence of the interaction between totality and its parts, was transferred by Kaplan from biological organisms to social units, such as communities, and eventually to the cosmos. This organicity—a fourth dimension besides beauty, truth and goodness—characterizes the holy, the transnatural, and hence God and indicates Kaplan’s pervasive teleological vitalism. (Lazaroff 1990: 183)
As a Process theologian, Kaplan thought about the world in terms of processes, events, and forces. He emphasized the processes of becoming and creativity. To believe in God is to have faith ‘in the existence of a power in the world that furthers man’s salvation’ (Kaufman 1990: 75). By ‘salvation’, Kaplan did not refer to the condition of the human soul in the afterlife but to the perfection of human beings who are seeking to improve the work by their own deliberate actions. Kaplan’s transnaturalism is evident in the way he understood the meaning of being human, which betrays the impact of Spinoza’s philosophy (Magid 2000). Human beings are indeed natural entities, members of the animal kingdom, but they are also beings that possess cognition, an ability to aspire to ideal ends, and capacity for perfectibility that transcends mere nature. In that sense, human beings are ‘transnatural’ because they have the potential for betterment, of themselves and of others, and the responsibility to meliorate social ills, respond to evil, and do good. Through their responsible actions in the world, natural humans ‘elevate’ the world, to use the apt term coined by the psychologist Jonathan Haidt (2003).
In 1956 Kaplan delivered a Rosh Ha-Shanah sermon titled ‘The Meaning of Happiness’, in which he attempted to clarify his notion of happiness as this-worldly salvation (Scult 2023). In the mid-1950s, as Americans, including Jews, were enjoying the economic prosperity in the years following the Second World War, Kaplan insisted that there was no conflict between remaining loyal to Judaism and devoting oneself to the pursuit of happiness, provided one did not equate happiness with material pleasures or economic success. Throughout his rabbinic career, Kaplan felt uncomfortable around wealthy Jewish capitalists who founded and funded Jewish institutions that Kaplan thought necessary for the future of American Judaism. To Jews, for whom the ‘good life’ meant economic prosperity and material pleasures, Kaplan reminded that the pursuit of happiness means the pursuit of ‘perfection’ (shleymut) which he defined as ‘the pursuit of completeness, wholeness and perfectibility’ (Scult 2023). Kaplan elaborates that ‘perfection’ means ‘to be a healthy, fulfilled, self-actualized person’. However, he made clear that perfection can only be attained after we overcome obstacles that stand in our way; or, in religious language, only after we have been tested, as, for example, the Patriarch Abraham was tested. ‘Perfection’ means neither pleasure nor power but ‘spiritual health’ that amounts to self-actualization or self-fulfillment our innermost potential.
Mel Scult (2023) has shown that Kaplan’s notion of self-actualization as spiritual health was indebted to the psychologist Abraham Maslow. Quoting from Maslow’s Motivation and Personality (1954), Kaplan states that happy, ‘self-actualized’ people, are
more apt to perceive what is ‘there’ rather than their own wishes, hopes, fears, anxieties, their own theories and beliefs, or those of their cultural groups […] these people lack defensiveness, protective coloration, or pose, and have a distaste for such artificialities in others for cant, guile, hypocrisy, affront and playing a game. (Cited in Scult 2023)
The self-actualized person is self-directed and authentic, and their striving toward perfection is predicated entirely on their own effort. Self-actualization is by no means easy, because it demands that we overcome despair, self-pity, or doubt that test those who seek perfection – but in the process of transcending their own limitations, authentic people grasp the true meaning of the divine in their lives. For Kaplan, this is how modern Jews experience godliness, and this is what modern Jews should mean when they speak about ‘salvation’. Perfection is a process of self-transcendence in which people actualize their human potential and flourish. All people aspire to perfection but experience it in the specific context of their civilization, and one civilization is no better than another. Hence, Kaplan rejected the doctrine of chosenness while affirming the distinctiveness of the Jewish People as an ‘ethical nationality’ to enable Judaism to thrive in a democratic society (Pianko 2010: 95–133).
Kaplan ended his moving sermon saying this:
Given a sense of reality, a sense of self-direction, a sense of vocation and a sense of mental and spiritual growth, we may be certain we are well on the say to fulfillment or salvation. This is sufficient ground for being perfectly happy. Ashrei ha’am shekacha lo, ashrei ha’am she-Adonai elohav [Ps. 144:15]. May such happiness mark the coming year for all mankind. Ken Yehi Ratzon. (Cited in Scult 2023)
Kaplan made it clear that Jews, qua Jews, can be happy in the modern world so long as they live within the sancta of their religious civilization and aspire to self-transcendence. Since Eretz Israel (the Land) takes central place in the sancta of Judaism, Kaplan was an early Zionist, unlike the President of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Cyrus Adler, with whom Kaplan repeatedly clashed. Inspired by the cultural Zionism of Ahad Ha-Am (d. 1927), Aharon David Gordon (d. 1922), and Martin Buber (d. 1965), Kaplan held that Jewish ‘self-actualization’ can best take place in the Land of Israel. His efforts to reorganize American Jewry through synagogue centres sought to revive the fullness of Jewish life for diaspora Jews, but Jewish diasporic life was not the ideal state of the Jewish civilization. As he envisioned it, the synagogue centres would encompass and express all aspects of Jewish life, religious, social, intellectual, cultural, and ethical, enabling Jews to flourish as modern people in a pluralistic, democratic society.
Kaplan’s modernist, democratic vision was realized only partially: it could not stem the seductive power of secularism, on the one hand, nor did it anticipate the growing strength of Orthodoxy, on the other. But the Jews who aspired for acculturation in America, whether they were affiliated with Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, or Humanist forms of Judaism, were all inspired by Kaplan’s transnaturalism. Kaplan’s opponents, who went as far as excommunicating him, were Orthodox Jews who rejected the secularization of Jewish religious life, insisting on the separation between the religious and the secular domains of life, between the holy and the profane, between Jews and the non-Jews. Joseph Soloveitchik was the most sophisticated expression of Modern Orthodoxy that rejected Kaplan’s vision.
3 Joseph Soloveitchik: happiness and the dialectical human condition
Born in 1903, Joseph Soloveitchik was a scion of a dynasty of Rabbinic scholars and leaders, whose father Rabbi Moshe Soloveitchik was the founder of the ‘Brisker’ method of Talmud study which was famed for its ‘rigorous intellectualism, self-discipline, and ideological extremism’ (Ziegler 2017: 25). In 1920, the family moved from the small town of Pruzhan to Warsaw, and Soloveitchik moved beyond the exclusive study on Torah and Talmud studies to be tutored privately in Greek, Latin, mathematics, and philosophy. After passing the equivalency entrance examination of the Polish Gymnasium, Soloveitchik secured admission to the University of Berlin in 1925, a university that attracted other traditional Jews interested in secular culture. Focusing on philosophy and mathematics, Soloveitchik wrote his doctoral dissertation on Hermann Cohen, the Neo-Kantian Jewish philosopher whose view of science as an ideal system offered Soloveitchik a model for Halakhah. Witnessing the growing power of Nazism in Germany led Soloveitchik and his wife, Tonya (who earned a doctoral degree from the University of Jenna), to migrate to the US in 1932, where Soloveitchik’s father was already settled and teaching at Rabbi Isaac Elhanan Theological Seminary of Yeshivah University. Invited to serve as the Chief Rabbi of the Orthodox community in Boston, Soloveitchik became a communal leader and educator, founding the Maimonides School that integrated Torah and science. After his father’s death in 1941, Joseph Soloveitchik succeeded his father as the senior Talmudist at Rabbi Isaac Elhana Rabbinic Seminary of Yeshivah University, while continuing to reside in Boston, and in that capacity he emerged as the intellectual and spiritual leader of Modern Orthodoxy worldwide.
Well trained in Western philosophy and science, Soloveitchik’s writings are replete with references to Western philosophers, scientists, and theologians as well as contemporary scientific theories. He admired modern science and was deeply influenced by Hermann Cohen’s argument that mathematics and the physical sciences were the apotheosis of objective knowledge. For this reason, Soloveitchik rejected any attempt to translate the life of a faith community into cultural categories produced by the social sciences, even though he did not consider cultural categories to be irrelevant to a religious community. Rooted in medieval Jewish rationalism, most notably the philosophy of Maimonides, Soloveitchik pondered how the knowledge of science is relevant to the knowledge of God, which, according to Maimonides, is the goal of human life. Like Samson Raphael Hirsch before him, Soloveitchik took issue with Maimonides and attempted to overcome what he regarded as problematic in Maimonides’ identification of Aristotelian science and Judaism, but Maimonides’ intellectualism informed Soloveichik’s religiosity.
A science-engaged theologian, Soloveitchik wrote as a phenomenologist who explores human consciousness, attitudes, and postures. Like other trainees in German university of the 1920s (for example, Erich Fromm), Soloveichik used Max Weber’s rhetoric of ideal types to capture various human orientations. Thus, in Halakhic Man (1944; see 1986a), The Halakhic Mind (1986b), ‘The Lonely Man of Faith’ (1965), ‘Majesty and Humility’ (1978), And From There You Shall Seek (1978; see 2021), and the posthumously published The Emergence of the Ethical Man (2005), Soloveitchik analysed the types of ‘religious man’, ‘cognitive/scientific man’, ‘halakhic man’, ‘cosmic man’, ‘covenantal man’, ‘Adam the First’, and ‘Adam the Second’ as his way to explore the dialectic of the human condition and the complexity of human consciousness. In so doing he displayed his mastery of Western philosophy, science, and theology, but his goal was to position Modern Orthodoxy against (1) Liberal Judaism, which he held denied the depth and intellectual rigor of Halakhic life; (2) Ultra-Orthodoxy, which rejected the inherent worth and relevance of secular culture, including science; (3) modern secularism, which venerated science while dismissing the existential need for religion; and (4) religious naturalism, which explained human religiosity by appeal to cultural forces explained by the social sciences. The rhetoric of ideal types is easy to grasp, but its conceptual clarity glosses over historical particularities and development over time and it can be variously interpreted. Like Maimonides, Soloveitchik’s views on the interplay of Judaism and science have generated conflicting interpretations by his adherents.
A phenomenological thinker, Soloveitchik sought to express the complexity and vitality of human life, nourished by the creative tension between science and religion, immanence and transcendence, necessity and freedom, nature and God. In his And From There You Shall Seek, a text drafted in the mid-1940s but published only in 1978, Soloveitchik presented the tension between natural consciousness and revelational consciousness: scientific knowledge (along with other cultural endeavours) is an aspect of natural consciousness, but science is only the first phase in the religious road toward the higher attainment – the imitation of God and even cleaving to God (devekut). So, although science does play a role in religious life, science alone is not enough. Revelational consciousness is needed, and it emerges only within the covenantal relationship with God. The two types of consciousness generate two distinct orientations toward the world. In his most influential essay ‘The Lonely Man of Faith’ (1965), Soloveitchik derived the two orientations from the two creation narratives in Genesis.
The orientation of the first creation narrative, or ‘Adam the First’, expresses the dignity and power of the human that is derived from the mastery and control of nature; this dignity yields technoscience but lacks awareness of God. By contrast, the posture of the human in the second creation narrative, or ‘Adam the Second’, relates to the world ‘as a reality to be experienced with a sense of wonderment, puzzlement and surprise’ (Hartman 2001: 107). Unlike ‘Adam the First’, whose mastery and control of nature culminates in technoscience, ‘Adam the Second’ expresses the ‘the quest for purpose, meaning, and relationship’ which the human being finds in the encounters with another Thou, through friendship, passion, and love (2001: 107). The dignity of ‘Adam the Second’ arises from personal relationship with God and with other humans – precisely as Buber, Fromm, and Frankl have taught. Since ‘Adam the First’ represents the collective power and achievements of technoscience for all people, Jews and non-Jews, there is no impediment to Jewish engagement in science, but scientific pursuit alone does not address the fullness of the human condition, or the meaning of being Jewish. That fulfillment happens only to those who live the life of faith in a religious community governed not by science but by the divine covenant.
Because the human condition is dialectical, human flourishing is also dialectical. This insight is best expressed in the short essay ‘Majesty and Humility’, originally delivered at Bnai Brith Hillel Foundation on 14 April 1973. The essay opens with this statement:
Man is a dialectical being: an inner schism runs through his personality at every level […]. The schism is willed by God as the source of man’s greatness and his election as a singular charismatic being. Man is a great and creative being because he is torn by conflict and is always in a state of ontological tenseness and perplexity. The fact that the creative gesture is associated with agony is a result of this contradiction, which pervades the whole personality of man. (Soloveitchik 1978: 25)
The human being, so Soloveitchik stated, is always ‘captive of two enchanting visions, summoning him to move in opposite directions’, and as such the human is perpetually perplexed (1978: 27). Created in the image of God, the human being mirrors two conflicting divine attributes – ‘majesty’ and ‘humility’. Both are sources of human dignity but in opposing ways: whereas the majesty of God leads humans ‘to rule, to be king, to be victorious’, resulting in scientific knowledge, the domination of nature, and the curing of diseases, humility is the divine attributed of ‘withdrawal and retreat’ that facilitates love relations and the creation of faith communities. In the modern era, human beings mistakenly reduced human dignity solely to that realm of human activity, forgetting the other divine attribute – humility. Taking his inspiration from the Lurianic notion of self-withdrawal (tzimtzum), Soloveitchik holds that God is not only a victorious ruler but also the creator who was able to impose a limit on Himself to make room for non-divine reality. God’s self-withdrawal ‘requires man in certain situations to withdraw’ (1978: 36). As Soloveitchik saw it, the problem of the modern world is not the existence of a tension between majesty and humility, or between ‘Adam the First’ and ‘Adam the Second’, but the refusal to accept that both constitute the meaning of being human. This denial renders modern person ‘incapable of retreating humbly’ so as to constitute personal relationship with God and with other humans, the relationship that can only flourish within faith community (1978: 36).
Human flourishing is dynamic, riddled with tensions, requiring the depth of emotions and the clarity of thought. Soloveitchik did not want to resolve the tension philosophically, because that would be too superficial and untrue to the reality of being human. Instead, he argues that Halakhah, the divinely revealed law, best expresses the complexities of being human. The human being is part of the natural world, but also a unique biological entity that transcends the natural order because the human can make ethical choice and receive divine command. Within the Halakhic life one experiences joy and grief, reason and emotion, positive and negative emotions, love and fear of God without ambivalence or existential confusion (Sztuden 2010; 2011). In his posthumous publication, The Emergence of Ethical Man (2005), Soloveitchik drew on many non-Jewish philosophers (e.g. Kant, Bergson, C. D. Broad, Santayana) and Christian theologians (e.g. Karol Wojtyla, Paul Tillich, Dietrich von Hilderbrand, Edith Stein), and above all from the German philosopher Max Scheler. In this work, Soloveitchik sought to prove how the biblical view coheres with modern scientific understanding of the human: the human being is an organism in essential ontological continuity with the natural, biological world, and the biblical narrative of creation is the biography of nature in which God is not a transcendent deity but a Creator immanently and intimately involved with His creation. Humans are indeed organic beings, or ‘man-nature’ as Soloveitchik put it, but humans can also say ‘no’ to their biological drives because they are capable of abstract ideation. It is that capacity which enables the emergence of the ethical personality who can respond to the need of the human other and enter covenantal relations with the divine Other, in which context the human, who is a ‘natural being’, can experience ‘relatedness to eternity and infinity’ (Soloveitchik 2005: 5). Contrary to Christianity, which reserved spirituality and transcendence to the afterlife, Judaism insists that they can be experienced in this world within the covenantal relationship. Soloveitchik’s position in this book is not so different from Kaplan’s, and perhaps that is why he did not publish the text during his lifetime.
In short, for Soloveitchik, only within the Halakhic life can Jews flourish as complex human beings – not because they self-actualize their innate potential, as Kaplan and promoters of Positive Psychology maintained, but because Halakhah establishes a way of life that expresses the fullness of the human being with all its complexity and inherent tensions. In Soloveitchik’s view, then, human flourishing is dialectical; it is neither unidirectional, nor is it merely emotional, merely embodied, or merely intellectual. Within the structure and strictures of the Halakhic way of life, the dialectical human stands in the presence of God, not as an actualized Self but as a self-less being who can fully rejoice on the Sabbath and the festivals yet who can also experience the depth of grief when mourning loss of life, or despair when facing their own mortality or experiencing loneliness. To flourish as a human means expressing all the aspects of the human condition and integrate them despite their inevitable tension. Soloveitchik’s religious phenomenology is emotionally rich, intellectually honest, and socially realistic – and for that reason it is not surprising that he became the towering figure of Modern Orthodoxy.
4 Zalman Schachter-Shalomi: happiness as ecological spirituality
A third major effort to reconstruct Judaism in America to address the modern condition and the survival of Judaism was articulated by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi. Born in 1924 in Zholkiev, Poland (now in Ukraine), he grew up in Vienna, where the family settled in 1925. Schachter-Shalomi’s father was a Hasid who followed the dynasty of Belz, but the family was rather liberal. Schachter-Shalomi was educated in a Zionist high school, where he learned Latin alongside modern Hebrew, as well as in a traditional Orthodox yeshivah (Rose and Miles-Yépez 2020: 4). After Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938, the family began its long flight from persecution, moving first to Antwerp, Belgium. There Schachter-Shalomi encountered a circle of Habad Hasidim who made a living as diamond cutters, and he committed himself to the Hasidic way of life. Escaping the German occupation of Belgium, the family found its way to Southern France; but because they were foreigners and Jewish, the family was interned by the Vichy Government in two separate internment camps near Marseille, first Chateau Fremont and later Riversaltes (Schachter-Shalomi 2012: 35-48). In September 1941, Schachter-Shalomi met the university-educated Rabbi Menachem Shneerson who would later become the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe, the man who made Chabad-Lubavitch into a global movement. After a long circuitous road from Marseille, through Spain, Algeria, Morocco, Senegal, the Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico, Schachter-Shalomi finally landed in New York in 1943. There he joined the growing Habad community of the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Yosef Yitzhak Shneerson, in New York. Under his tutelage, Schachter-Shalomi received rabbinic ordination from the Habad Yeshivah, Tomhei Temimim in 1947, and in 1949 he was designated to become the Lubavitch emissary in the Northeast. Together with Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, the two launched the Habad outreach to young American secular Jews especially on college campuses.
As a practitioner of the Habad way of life during the 1950s, Schachter-Shalomi’s goal was to familiarize acculturated American Jews with the spiritual richness of Judaism, especially as interpreted by Habad. However, since Habad-Lubavitch did not pay a salary to its emissaries, making a living was a challenge. Schachter-Shalomi realized that he needed to expand his worldly skills and enrolled in the graduate degree program at Boston University in pastoral counselling while ‘serving three small congregations in Massachusetts and New York (as well as working as a kosher slaughterer)’ (Rose and Miles-Yépez 2020: 8). The academic training at Boston University introduced him to the academic study of religion, the theories of religious studies, and to non-Jewish intellectuals, especially Reverend Howard Thurman (d. 1981) whose pedagogy, mystical practices, and commitment to interracial and interreligious dialogue would inspire Schachter-Shalomi’s ecumenism for the rest of his life.
With an academic degree, Schachter-Shalomi would gain employment as a Bnai Brith Hillel Director at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada where he began to hone his unique reinterpretation of Judaism that combined Hasidism, pastoral counselling, and comparative religious studies with the counterculture of the 1960s which dominated higher education in North America. Rebelling against the prevailing ideals of post-Second World War society (e.g. economic success, rampant consumerism, and social conformism), American college students, including many Jews, sought a more spiritual and psychologically attuned way of life. Many would be attracted to Eastern spirituality, practicing yoga and other forms of meditation and contemplation, and some were experimented with psychedelic drugs to expand human consciousness. In the early 1960s Schachter-Shalomi met the leaders of the counterculture movement, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass), experimented with hallucinogenic drugs, and endorsed the New Age worldview according to which humanity has entered a new phase in its history, the Age of Aquarius, in which humans will seek spirituality as a replacement of prevailing values. The 1960s were also the decade when two countercultural movements came to the fore: feminism and environmentalism. The former demanded equality and justice for women, and the latter recognized the pending threat to the continued existence of the planet.
Attuned to the spiritual quest of young people and the larger cultural challenges, Schachter-Shalomi began to articulate what would become the Jewish Renewal movement. It started with a small spiritual fellowship, under the name of Bnei Or (Children of Light) that he established in Winnipeg. The movement continued in 1975 with the founding of Havurat Shalom in Sommerville, MA, as Schachter-Shalomi was pursuing postgraduate studies at Boston University, and it blossomed in Philadelphia, where Schachter-Shalomi was hired by the Department of Religious Studies at Temple University. Attentive to feminism and egalitarianism, Bnei Or changed its name to Pnei Or (Faces of Light), which in 1993 was institutionalized as Aleph: Alliance of Jewish Renewal. The movement Schachter-Shalomi created was decentralized, experimental, open to non-Jewish religious and mystical traditions, artistic, egalitarian, spiritually oriented, and ecologically minded. Through ritual experimentation, meditation and yoga, liturgical innovation, feminist and ecological hermeneutics, and artistic sensibility, Schachter-Shalomi generated a distinct variant of contemporary Judaism which he believed could best address the challenges of Jewish existence in the post-Shoah and post-Hiroshima era. Like Kaplan, Schachter-Shalomi aspired to create a ‘organistic Judaism’. However, moving beyond Kaplan, Schachter-Shalomi did not focus on the cultivation of Jewish Peoplehood in the Land of Israel but rather on the cultivation of a new consciousness that could address the challenging of living under the threat of global extinction, whether by nuclear war or by ecological collapse (Magid 2006a; 2006b; 2013: 74–110). Planetary existential challenges demanded that Jews would reach out to one another and to non-Jews, overcoming fear and mistrust and cultivating acceptance and compassion. This was the ‘paradigm shift’ for Age of Aquarius that Schachter-Shalomi preached and practiced (Singer 1993).
Schachter-Shalomi was not a systematic theologian but a spiritual man with a generous heart who taught orally, inspiring and transforming those who met him. His books came out of his public teachings and life experience, and they were often co-written with one of his disciples. Schachter-Shalomi did not theorize about happiness, but he left for posterity a vision that meant to guide people, including Jews, in how to flourish in the future by moving beyond stodgy ideologies. Schachter-Shalomi characterized his kind of Judaism as ‘organistic’, and the term indicates that his vision of human flourishing was inherently ecological. Like all organisms, the human being is part of an ecosystem, so that the wellbeing of the individual depends on the wellbeing of the entire ecosystem. Already in 1968, ahead of other Jewish thinkers, Schachter-Shalomi was attuned to and concerned about the pending ecological crisis and was convinced that Judaism should not only address it, but that Judaism also has the spiritual resources to do so. He coined the term ‘eco-kosher’ to signify a distinctive approach to environmental challenges that combines observance of kashrut with attentiveness to justice.
Schachter-Shalomi also incorporated the Gaia Hypothesis (articulated by James Lovelock and developed by the biologist Lynn Margulis) into his interpretation of Judaism. For Schachter-Shalomi, Gaia, ‘the Greek goddess of the Earth’, is ‘the face of our living planet; [representing] a newly emerging parzuf or face of the ultimate core reality of the universe’ (Rose and Miles-Yépez 2020: 34). Based on Kabbalistic and Hasidic sources, which Schachter-Shalomi translated and explicated for the contemporary reader, Schachter-Shalomi unapologetically articulated a pantheistic worldview in which God emerges and evolves ‘hand in hand with humanity and creation’ (Rose and Miles-Yépez 2020: 37). Inspired by Process philosophers and theologians, Schachter-Shalomi urged Jews to think about God not as an object but rather as a very that refers to the ‘process of Be-ing, or is-ing, of infinite existing’; in so doing, we open ourselves to ‘new ways of relating’, and we begin ‘to imagine a “godding”, a process that the universe is doing, has been doing, and will have to do […] forever’ (Rose and Miles-Yépez 2020: 39).
All human beings are ‘spiritually hungry’ in the sense that they seek meaning, and the various religious and wisdom schools offer conceptual maps to direct people’s spiritual journeys or spiritual searches. For Jews, the ‘spiritual map’ is made from the sources of Judaism and its distinctive metaphors, symbols, and tropes that shape the Jewish journey toward Shleimut, namely, toward ‘fullness’, wholeness’, ‘completeness’, and ‘perfections’ (Rose and Miles-Yépez 2020: 53). Other religious and spiritual traditions have their own symbolic maps that guide their adherents toward the same goal and, for Schachter-Shalomi, these are no less true. As an observant Jew, Schachter-Shalomi deeply respected non-Jewish traditions and practices (be they Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and Native American) and encouraged learning from them, and even incorporating certain elements from them into Jewish religious life. As plants can flourish only through interacting with their environment, so can Judaism flourish only if Jews interact with their cultural environment. The result of this ecological approach to human spirituality, Schachter-Shalomi’s vision is post-ethnic (i.e. it accepts ethnic plurality within the Jewish community); it is postmodern (in the sense that it is non-dogmatic and non-foundational, and open to multiple, textual interpretations); and post-triumphalist (i.e. it does not think that only one perspective or one ideology is exclusively correct).
Schachter-Shalomi’s understanding of human flourishing is thus ecological, egalitarian, pluralistic, dialogical, emotional, and all-embracing. Precisely because he came out of the Habad variant of Hasidism, was trained in pastoral psychology, and was active in the New Age movement, Schachter-Shalomi could resist the secularization of happiness and its commodification. Showing sage wisdom, he did not equate happiness with material pleasures, or with consumerist culture that identifies happiness with ‘having’, or with the superficial youth culture that venerates embodiment. Spiritual happiness does not depend on being young, wealthy, or even healthy; it can be experienced by older, frail people who accept the reality of life, which includes death, and know how to live with joy in old age. Schachter-Shalomi named that way of life as ‘sage-ing’ and inspired the movement of ‘elder-aging’ or ‘sacred elderhood’. We can flourish to the day we die if we learn how to live rightly, how to accept the reality of death, and how to face death with dignity (Schachter-Shalomi and Miller 2014).
Other popularizing interpreters of Kabbalah and Hasidism for the American public did not resist the commercialization and commodification of happiness or of the spiritual treasures of Judaism. For example, Rabbi Michael and Rabbi Yehuda Berg, the children of Rabbi Philip Berg and leaders of the Kabbalah Centre in Los Angeles, have turned Kabbalah and Hasidism into a major business operation that profits from the commodification of happiness (e.g. Berg 2001; 2004). By the same token, some Habad practitioners have utilized the research of Positive Psychology to teach Jewish professionals ‘How to Win in Happiness’ (Dinerman 2022). The spiritual hunger for happiness that Schachter-Shalomi correctly identified in the 1960s has succumbed to the logic of capitalism: everything can be marketed, including Kabbalah, Hasidism, and happiness.
5 Jonathan Sacks: joy as the ultimate good in human life
Reconstructing Judaism for the twentieth century was especially strong in the United States, but the theologian who was most familiar with the science of happiness was the British-born Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, a moral philosopher, social theorist, and public intellectual. Sacks was born into a traditional family committed to the integration of Judaism and secular knowledge. He attended Saint Mary’s Primary School and Christ’s College High School in London and thereafter, at Cambridge University, Sacks read philosophy under the tutorship of the moral philosopher Bernard Williams (d. 2003). During the tumultuous year of 1968, the young philosophy student travelled to the US to see the countercultural movement in person, and during that year he met with Rabbi Soloveitchik and Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe, and these two encounters that transformed his life. As he recounted in retrospect, ‘the former inspired me to think and the latter inspired me to lead’ (Sacks 2013: 95). After his return to England, he left Cambridge to continue his graduate studies at Oxford with Philippa Foot, a virtue ethicist. However, in 1972 he launched his rabbinic studies and would be ordained by two rabbinic academies, after which he completed his doctoral studies with a PhD in Philosophy from the University College London in 1982. For several decades, Sacks combined his academic and rabbinic commitments, serving as a congregational rabbi as well as the Principal of Jews College. Sacks exemplified the ideal of Torah im Derekh Eretz, articulated by Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch in the nineteenth century.
Trained as a moral philosopher with the best minds of British academe, Sacks was fully aware of the recovery of Aristotelian virtue ethics in the second half of the twentieth century. In his last book, Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times (2020), Sacks agreed that
Aristotle gave the West its most influential analysis of happiness […] We undertake all activities for the sake of some good, but there is only one good that we seek as an end in itself and for no other reason: namely eudaimonia, his term for happiness. (Sacks 2020: 100)
In other words, in Western thought all reflections on happiness are indebted to Aristotle, even when criticizing Aristotle as Sacks would do. But as a traditional Jew, an ordained rabbi, and a scholar of Judaism, Sacks had to ask: does Aristotle’s analysis of happiness accord with the values of Judaism, or does Judaism offer an alternative understanding of happiness? More explicitly than the American theologians discussed above, Sacks positioned ‘happiness’ at the centre of the perceived tension between ‘science’ and ‘religion’, ‘Athens’ and ‘Jerusalem’, ‘Torah’ and ‘Wisdom’.
In his essay, ‘Happiness: A Jewish Perspective’ (2014), Sacks succinctly summarized his view on Judaism and happiness:
Happiness is not central to the Judaic value system. It is not the telos of human activity. Judaism is the pursuit of holiness, not the pursuit of happiness. Happiness may be the result, but it is not the aim. (Sacks 2014: 32)
Sacks, of course, was fully aware of the Ashrei verses in the Bible, which he explains as follows:
Ashrei is a state of one who has lived in accordance with the will of God, a person who is good and does good, who honors God and his or her fellow creatures, who has been blessed in life and who, living among the righteous is held in high regard. This is the happiness of balance and virtue, of justice and compassion, of living well and faring well. (Sacks 2014: 34)
As a traditional Jew, Rabbi Sacks recites the Ashrei prayer (Psalm 145 with additional verses from other psalms) three times a day, and yet, he insists that ‘ashrei is not the central value of the Hebrew Bible’ (Sacks 2015: 311; cf. Sacks 2014: 32; 2021). If so, what is the central value of the Judaic life of holiness? Sacks answers that joy (simcha) is the key value of Judaism. He explains: ‘The noun simhah and the verb s-m-h […] [means] joy, rejoicing, elation, celebration. It is a mood, but it is also mode of being, of living in a state of thankfulness’ (Sacks 2014: 38). The life of religious Jews, then, is not governed by the pursuit of happiness, as Aristotle and Western philosophers have maintained and contemporary psychologists studied, but by the ‘pursuit of joy’, as Sacks explicated in his biblical commentaries on the Torah portions Ki Tavo and Re’eh. Sacks differentiated between ‘happiness’ and ‘joy’, explaining the difference as follows: ‘unlike osher/ashrei, which is predicated on the individual as individual, simha is essentially collective. It only exists in virtue of being shared. It is a form of social happiness’ (Sacks 2014: 38). The importance of joy in the Bible is well attested by the fact that Deuteronomy alone, the root s-m-h appears twelve times, capturing what is distinctive about the Judaic conception of joy. Joy, Sacks teaches, is communal rather than individual; it is relational rather than self-centred; it is rooted in memory and history, and it is ‘the way a culture is geared to sense gratitude’ (Sacks 2014: 39).
In contrast to the philosophic view of happiness, Deuteronomy articulated what Sacks names ‘covenantal happiness’ or ‘social happiness’, a vision of a good society in which all members, and not just the elite, celebrate together before God (Sacks 2019). The biblical ‘covenantal happiness’ differs from philosophic happiness for these reasons. First, covenantal happiness is experienced in the here and now rather than in the afterlife. Second, covenantal happiness eschews asceticism, involving embodied activities and physical pleasure derived from food, drink, and sexual relations. Third, covenantal happiness is linked to justice, addressing the needs of the poor and the social marginal, rather than the interest of the rich and the mighty. Fourth, covenantal happiness privileges the social order over the civic or political order; the virtues of righteousness (tzedek), justice (mishpat), lovingkindness (hesed), and compassion (rahamim) are practiced in the extended family and the local community rather than in the civic arena of the state as it was for the Greeks. Fifth, covenantal happiness is egalitarian and nonhierarchical since everyone shares a ‘sense of human dignity and inclusion, especially when it comes to the festivals, the moment of collective celebration’ (Sacks 2014: 42). Seventh, memory of God’s intervention in history and gratitude for God’s benevolence are central elements of joy because they focus ‘our attention on what we have not on what we lack; on what we possess, not what others possess’ (Sacks 2014: 43).
In Judaism, social happiness is experienced every Shabbat. As Sacks explains the ritual, the Sabbath enables Jews to have ‘a forestate of the ideal society which is the opposite of Egypt in which there is a hierarchy of power and in which strangers are enslaved’ (Sacks 2014: 43). The Sabbath and its openness toward the underdetermined future establishes what Sacks calls a ‘culture of hope’, a culture that is based on ‘strong emotional bonds of love and loyalty’ because it does not regard the universe as ‘fundamentally hostile or indifferent’ (Sacks 2014: 44). To wit, Sacks positions Judaism’s vision of covenantal or social happiness as an alternative to the Aristotelian conception of happiness (as he interprets it). In contrast to the Aristotelian, individual, passive, cerebral, and contemplative conception of happiness, Judaism offers a vision of happiness that is communal, relational, affective, value-laden, and action-oriented. Elsewhere I have argued that Sacks has not done justice to the Jewish philosophic discourse on happiness, especially to Maimonides and his Aristotelian sources (Tirosh-Samuelson 2023). In truth, Sacks did not analyse Aristotle’s views and did not engage Maimonides, the leading Jewish Aristotelian philosopher, with sufficient depth, or survey the reception of Maimonides by subsequent Jewish philosophers. Why not? Because Sacks saw himself as a teacher for all people, philosophers and non-philosophers, academics and non-academic, Jews and non-Jews. As a public intellectual with international appeal and global reach, Sacks sought to make Judaism as accessible as possible to all people, rather than just to intellectuals, and for that reason he a used a literary style that interwove personal narratives, anecdotes, and encounters to illustrate Judaism’s ethics of freedom and responsibility.
In the early twenty-first century, Sacks wished to resolve the tension between universalism and particularism, by universalizing Jewish particularity (Tirosh-Samuelson and Hughes 2013). While Sacks was extremely well-read in a wide range of academic disciplines (e.g. philosophy, sociology, psychology, and literature), he saw himself as a Jewish spiritual leader (much like Kaplan, Soloveitchik, and Schachter-Shalomi) rather than an academic writing for a small cadre of academics. Sacks presented the beliefs, practices, and values of Judaism as a universal vision for humanity, offering a radical notion of freedom and responsibility to address the social ills of modern society, including rampant hedonism, selfishness, loneliness, greed, violence, suicide, and more. In his view, the Judaic worldview and way of life offers much-needed correction to the prevailing ethos in the West that privileges the ‘I’ over the ‘we’, ‘having’ over ‘being’, arrogance over humility, greed over modesty. Although Sacks did not say so explicitly, it is not too far to suggest that he believed that Judaism could bring about the ‘happiness revolution’ that Positive Psychologists and scientists of happiness have envisioned. For that reason, it is not surprising that Tal Ben-Shahar wrote a forward to the edited volume Ode to Joy: Judaism and Happiness in the Thought of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks and Beyond, that Martin Seligman contributed an essay to the volume along with two of his disciples, and that an entire section in the volume was devoted to ‘Joy and Psychology in Human Agency’ (Brown and Weiss 2023: 287-325; cf. Tirosh-Samuelson 2026c). More than any other contemporary Jewish theologian, Sacks engaged the contemporary multidisciplinary discourse on happiness from the perspective of traditional Judaism, enabling Jews to fuse Jewish religious life with secular knowledge and full involvement in the society. As insightful, comprehensive, and relevant as Sacks’ reflections on happiness are, they will not satiate the human striving for happiness, nor will they end reflections on happiness.
6 Conclusion: happiness and future Jewish theology
Since happiness is a construct that frames the pursuit of meaning for human life, it stands to reason that Jewish thinkers will continue to reflect about it for decades to come. Although it is impossible to predict what shape those reflections will take, it is reasonable to assume that the future Jewish discourse on happiness will have to concern itself with three pressing issues: the ecological crisis, sexuality and gender, and the technologization of life. The ecological crisis is relevant to human flourishing because humans cannot flourish as a particular species without the presence of certain physical conditions necessary for life, and yet, unfortunately, humans have done much to destroy the ecological conditions necessary for the thriving of life. Future reflections about human flourishing requires a stand on the ecological crisis, and Judaism has deep insights about how preserve and protect the physical world created by God (Tirosh-Samuelson 2020).
All reflections about happiness discuss the nature of humans and posit a link between rationality and flourishing. Yet, that link is gendered, because in many societies women have been deemed to be less rational than men, and hence inherently unable to flourish as human beings (Tirosh-Samuelson 2004). All thinking about human flourishing demands consideration of the dialectics of equality and difference affirming diversity, inclusion, and justice, and that means that future reflections on human happiness must consider gender and sexuality which are aspects of biological life. The physical and biological foundations of life are now under duress due to the technologization of all aspects of life. The veneration of technology is justified by transhumanism, a secularist faith that predicts the emergence of a posthuman species that will transcend the limits of biological humanity and eventually make biological humans obsolete (Tirosh-Samuelson 2012; 2015; 2022). Transhumanism has greatly impacted contemporary culture because it is endorsed by technological entrepreneurs who are currently engaged in intentional destruction of social and political institutions and ways of life to enrich themselves. Contrary to techno-utopianism, Jewish theologians have affirmed and must continue to affirm the preciousness of being human and the meaning of humaneness. For that reason, thinking about human happiness will continue to engage Jewish theology in the future.
