1.1 Happiness in the Hebrew Bible

The Hebrew Bible is the foundation of all Jewish reflections on happiness (Strawn 2012), but the Bible is not a book of systematic theology. Its religious worldview is expressed not propositionally but through various literary forms, including prose, poetry, law, history, and prudential advice, and biblical language is often metaphorical and allusive. The various sections of the Hebrew Bible – Torah, Prophets, and Writings – and their underlying literary strata articulate nuanced conceptions of happiness that reflect the historical development of the biblical text. And, if this is not enough, many Hebrew words pertain to what we call ‘happiness’ (osher; hatzlahah), including tov (good); tuv (goodness); simha (joy; gaiety); gil (rejoicing); oneg (pleasure; delight); nahat (contentment); no`am (pleasantness); tamim (perfect); shalem (whole); shalom (peace); shalvah (tranquility), and many more. This broad semantic field encompasses a web of terms that refer to feelings, attitudes, values, and aspirations that resist generalizations. Nonetheless, it is accurate to say that in the Hebrew Bible (and hence in Jewish thought) happiness is relational, because it is predicated on the relationship between Israel and God; happiness is experienced in mundane activities during one’s earthly life, and it involves individuals in communities. Often expressed through organic imagery (e.g. Psalm 1:1), the flourishing life emerges out of commitment to God as people trust in God, acts in accordance to God’s will, and feels the presence of God.

Three foundational beliefs – creation, revelation, and redemption – ground the biblical conception of happiness. Accordingly, the Creator of the world, YHVH, is the God of Israel who revealed His Will in the form of Law, the Torah, to the Chosen People of Israel. Israel’s wellbeing is predicated on its relationship with God and the Torah: when Israel observes God’s Torah as expressed in the commandments (mitzvot), Israel flourishes individually and collectively, but when Israel ignores or deviates from Torah, Israel suffers and does not flourish. According to Genesis, the Creator God is the source of all goodness: God declared each day to be ‘good’ (tov) and creation in its entirely to be ‘very good’ (tov me’od). In other words, God was happy with or delighted in the ‘final product’ (Fretheim 2012: 39). A divine gift, the created world is itself a source of joy, pleasure, and delight which Israel experience in the birth of children, good wine and oil, good word, sexual love, married life, and other daily activities that consist of ‘interrelationships with others’ (Fretheim 2012: 47). In Deuteronomy, the biblical text that articulates the ideology of Torah, ‘happiness is not so much described as demanded’ (MacDonald 2012: 69), and joy (simhah) is ‘found in the mundane realities of life – the food one has produced, family, communal life – enjoyed under the beneficent gaze of a deity whose generosity must be acknowledged’ (MacDonald 2012: 70). The divine command to be joyous, especially on specific occasions, such as the pilgrimage festivals, distinguishes the biblical approach.

In the prophetic books of the Bible, especially in the Book of Isaiah, happiness is directly linked to morality. Human beings model their happiness on God’s happiness by living the moral life and imitating God. Further, ‘Israel is judged for failing to delight in that which delights God. Choosing what is “good” means choosing what makes for happiness’ (Lapsley 2012: 81). Always communal, the happy life is manifested in three characteristics: justice, peace, and abundance. Isaiah also introduced a future-looking vision: happiness will be fully realized only in the ‘end of days’ (aharit ha-yamim) when wickedness, violence, and injustice will be no more (Isaiah 2:2–4). Yearning for such happiness is a source of hope in the mundane world where Israel experiences wars, destruction, and exile.

In the Writings, especially the Books of Psalms and Proverbs, happiness is recognized as an objective state that can be observed by others who exclaim: ‘How happy is…! (ashre…)’ in approval or even in jealousy of certain states or specific conduct (Tirosh-Samuelson 2003: 55–100). Etymologically related to the Akkadian roots ‘to be upright’ (wasaru) or ‘to be in order’ (eseru), the term ashre denotes the right path for one’s life and the activities that constitute a life well lived. The ashre-statements signify a ‘salutary state of being’ and commend ‘a certain aspect or example of human flourishing, whether individual or communal’ (Brown 2012: 97). Precisely because Israel expresses trust in God, Israel experiences ‘good things’ (e.g. Psalm 84:112), that is, the blessings of God, peace, and prosperity. In Proverbs, happiness is predicated on the acquisition of ‘wisdom’ (hochmah) and the practice of ‘righteousness’ (tzedakah). To seek wisdom, as the readers of Proverbs are enjoined to do, means ‘to root oneself in the creative forces, the orderly structures that give rise to the generativity of the world’ (Brown 2012: 127). The one who acquires wisdom can live rightly and enjoy peace, balance, and tranquility. Proverbs 3:18 makes clear that the Wisdom of God is ‘the tree of life and those who hold fast to it are happy’, and this wisdom is identified with the Torah that God revealed to Israel. The identification of Torah and Wisdom is essential to the Judaic discourse on happiness from antiquity to today. It is a discourse that has evolved over time as Jews interacted with their surrounding cultures, first and foremost, Greek culture.

1.2 Happiness in Greek philosophy

The ancient Greeks were the first to theorize about happiness. Aristotle (d. 322 BCE) was the first to state that happiness (eudaimonia) is the end (telos) that all human beings desire to attain. Although people pursue wealth, pleasure, or honour, these presumed goods cannot be considered the ultimate good of human life because they are desired for the sake of something else, whereas eudaimonia (literally, ‘having a good daimon [spirit]’) is the only thing that is desired for its own sake. Eudaimonia alone is self-sufficient and complete (teleion), and therefore it is the ultimate good that humans seek (Cooper 1986; Kraut 1989; Broadie 1991; Broadie and Rowe 2002; Annas 1993; Devettere 2002). Commonly translated as ‘happiness’, eudaimonia is better translated as ‘flourishing’ ‘living well’, or ‘doing well’, because eudaimonia is not a subjective feeling or a momentary mood but an objective state that human beings experience because they are good. For Aristotle, to be good means to possess a good character, that is, the character traits, or virtues, that enable people to act, feel, and think in the right way (Sherman 1989). Acquired through habitual practice, the virtues enable people to do the right thing, at the right time, in the right way, and for the right reason, following the ‘mean’ or intermediate point between two extremes. The acquisition of virtues is a rational, social process in which people choose virtuous acts for their own sake and find the actions themselves valuable. Practical reasoning (phronesis) is the mental faculty that allows people to make rational choices that contribute to the formation of good character (Hardie 1980). A virtuous life requires some external goods, such as friends and a measure of material comfort, and it is manifested in actions toward others.

Aristotle’s systematic analysis of happiness, however, was ambiguous: whereas for most of the Nicomachean Ethics he taught that happiness consists of the acquisition and cultivation of virtue through social interaction in the political sphere, at the end of the book he argued that the happiest life for humans consists of contemplation of truths that are necessary, unchanging, eternal, self-contained, and noble. Since the activity of contemplation (theoria) makes human beings most like gods, Aristotle concluded that we should make ourselves immortal by cultivating that ‘which is divine in us’. It is contemplation of eternal truths that enables the philosopher, the lover of wisdom (sophia), to transcend the natural order and participate in the divine order. If so, the practical life of moral virtue is an inferior type of happiness, a ‘second-best’ form of happiness. Did Aristotle plainly contradict himself? Is happiness ‘a teleological principle by which to evaluate human life’ while happiness itself ‘lies being beyond the teleological principle’ (Lear 2002: 60)? Or did Aristotle articulate a coherent vision of human life that posits a hierarchy of intrinsically good lives? To this day, the Western and Jewish discourses on happiness have been carried out through conversation with and interpretation of Aristotle’s legacy.

The legacy of Aristotle framed the discourse on happiness in the Hellenistic world. The Cynics, the Epicureans, the Stoics, and later the Neo-Platonists perpetuated many insights of Aristotle while debating specific aspects of his analysis of human flourishing, especially concerning pleasure and friendship (Annas 1993; Nussbaum 2013; Striker 1996; Striker and Schofield 2007). Unlike Aristotle, who held that human happiness requires a well-functioning society, the Hellenistic philosophical schools focused on the wellbeing of individuals with little regard to politics and civic activity. For the Cynics, moral virtue was sufficient for eudaimonia which was equated with the disposition of independence or freedom from earthly needs and passions. For the Epicureans, the ultimate end of human life was the life of untroubledness (ataraxia) or tranquility, a state of mind of the happy person which was a part of happiness but not happiness itself. Happiness is private contentment expressed in negative forms. The Stoics maintained that happiness resides in virtue, which reason alone provides, and eudaemonia can be achieved when one grasps the ordering principle of all entities, namely, universal, cosmic Nature (Striker 1996). Finally, the Neoplatonists articulated the most spiritual interpretation of happiness according to which the happiness consists of the unification of the soul of the sage with the eternal One, or God. In the Neoplatonic view, happiness requires liberation from human embodied life and its sociopolitical institutions. With the conquests of Alexander of Macedonia (d. 323 BCE), Hellenic culture was brought into contact with the culture of ancient Israel, compelling Jews to interpret their Scriptures in the light of Greek philosophy. The biblical view that Ellen Charry (2010) calls ‘Asherism’ would now be interpreted through the prism of Greek philosophy. Expressing biblical faith in philosophical language began with the Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexanderia (d. c. 50 CE).

1.3 Philo: the fusion of Israelite and Greek conceptions of happiness

Steeped in Greek philosophy, literature, and rhetoric, Philo was the first Jew to argue for the congruity of Hebrew Scriptures and Greek philosophy (Niehoff 2018). Philo identified the biblical God, the Creator of the universe and the Revealer of the Law, with the God of the Greek philosophers, the perfect being who is utterly self-sufficient (Tirosh-Samuelson 2003: 81–100; Wilson 2010). Precisely because God is incorporeal, God’s perfection is complete. As Pure Being, God is ‘the first and most perfect of all things, from whom, as from a foundation, all particular blessings are showered upon the world’ (Philo, The Decalogue XVI. 81; Yonge 1993: 525). According to Philo, God ‘alone is happy and blessed, having no participation in any evil whatever, but being full of all perfect blessings’ (Philo, The Special Laws II, XIV. 53; Yonge 1993: 573). Indeed, ‘God is Himself the perfection, and completion, and boundary of happiness, partaking of nothing else by which he can be rendered better, but giving to every individual thing a portion of what is suited to every to it, from the fountain of good, namely from himself’ (Philo, On the Cherubim XXV. 86; Yonge 1993: 89). As the source of all existents, the Creator is both the origin of human happiness as well as the ultimate end that human beings seek. For that reason, the happy life must be a life that seeks to imitate God. Such a life is what the Bible calls ‘holy’ (kadosh), a life that Israel is called to lead by observing God’s law. Philo explicitly states that the divine Law of Moses leads its adherents to the attainment of the ultimate end of human life: the ‘seeing’ of God (Birnbaum 1996). This is what Scripture means when it speaks about the creation of the human in the ‘image of God’ or when Scripture names Jacob as ‘Israel’. Philo exhorts his readers to overcome the temptations of embodied passions and direct their souls to become God-like, culminating in the mystical experience of ‘seeing God’. In his treatise On Virtues (which was part of his so-called Exposition of the Law), Philo showed how the Law of Moses embodies the moral virtues of courage, humanity, repentance, and nobility, explaining how Mosaic laws relate to areas of life in which virtues are developed, and why obeying the laws leads to grasping the value of the way of life encouraged by living in accordance with them (Wilson 2010). Combining elements from Aristotelian and Stoic discourses on happiness, Philo concluded that ‘happiness is the employment of perfect virtue in the perfect life’ (Philo, That The Worse Is Wont to Attack the Better XVII. 60; Yonge 1993: 118). His innovative and creative interpretation of the Bible laid the foundation for the discourse on happiness among Christians, Jews, and even Muslims in the Middle Ages (Runia 1993; 2015; Wolfson 1947).

1.4 Rabbinic Judaism: happiness as the joy of Torah

Philo’s original fusion of Judaic and Greek conceptions of happiness did not become normative Judaism, but it would be picked up by medieval Jewish philosophy. Two decades after Philo’s death, the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE, and Jewish political sovereignty came to an end. Emerging as the spiritual leaders of the Jews after the destruction of the Temple, the rabbis framed what became to be regarded as normative Judaism. In Rabbinic Judaism, happiness means living the life of Torah as interpreted by the rabbis rather than as by the philosophically oriented Philo. The rabbis had some exposure to Graeco-Roman philosophical schools, but Rabbinic reflections on happiness emerged through biblical exegesis rather than through systematic engagement with Greek moral philosophies (Tirosh-Samuelson 2003: 101–142). The rabbis agreed that human happiness requires the acquisition of virtue, but virtue begins with God rather than with humans, since humans are believed to be created by God in the ‘image of God’ (Neusner 1999; 2001). In Rabbinic virtue ethics, God’s traits such as justice, mercy, love, and compassion function as a model of emulation for humans (see Jewish Ethics). Assuring the quality of the covenantal relationship between God and Israel depends on Israel’s conduct: the good character traits (middot) emerges through the observance of the commandments, which enhances the relationship between God and Israel; by contrast, vice consists of dispositions and conduct that are sinful and that disrupt the relationship with God. The primary virtue in Rabbinic Judaism is humility (tzni‛ut; shiflut ruah), whereas arrogance (ga’avah) is a sinful vice (Frank 1989). The rabbis also taught that although human beings inevitably sin, God encourages them to repent, and God responds to their repentance with forgiveness that leads to a change in attitude and reconciliation of with God. In Rabbinic Judaism, the ethics of virtue and the ethics of duty are fused: the good deed is the one commanded by God, and the good character trait is that makes possible relationship with God.

The relationship between Israel and God is predicated on will as much as on reason. The virtues begin with righteousness whose mark is the love of God expressed through acts of charity (tzedakah); the righteous ones always direct their hearts to God. Not coincidentally, both ‘charity’ and ‘righteousness’ are called tzedakah, and the rabbis even stated that charity and righteous deeds outweigh all other commandments in the Torah. Acts of charity are conducted with dignity and respect for the poor, but what God really admires are acts of selflessness. The highest virtue of all is the act that God cannot coerce but very much yearns for, namely, the act of love that transcends the self. While virtue requires obedience to the revealed Law, the Torah, virtue reaches its pinnacle through deeds that go beyond the strict requirement of the Torah and even beyond the limits of the law altogether (lifnim mi-shurat ha-din). In Rabbinic Judaism, supererogation transforms the righteous person into a holy person; Rabbinic literature depicts the sages as holy men who are marked by their knowledge of Torah, by their perfect character, and by their ability to perform miracles (Schofer 2005; Visotzky 2014). The sages created the culture that venerates Torah study and observance of commandments, the life of righteous people who flourish in this world (ha-olam ha-zeh) and who are rewarded by immortality in the afterlife (ha-olam ha-ba). The Rabbinic conception of human flourishing is thus both temporal and eschatological, this worldly and other worldly.

Attentive to all aspects of human life, Rabbinic Judaism acknowledged that the happy life of Torah consists not only of joy but also of suffering, anguish, and pain – namely unhappiness. Suffering fulfills an important didactic function because it is a kind of chastisement from God that leads the believer to self-correction. Through suffering one embarks on a path of self-examination, remorse, renunciation of one’s sinful past, and finally repentance the return to God and the renewal of the proper divine-human relationship. Such a positive view of suffering suggests that God does not act capriciously or abusively. Rather, like a loving parent who cares for erring offspring, God leads His children of Israel back to the ‘right path’ by allowing them to experience the negative consequences of their errors. These are called ‘chastisement of love’ (yissurin shel ahavah) and their goal is repentance. Suffering, however, does not diminish the internal merit of the life of Torah. With the cessation of the sacrificial cult, a central commandment of the Torah – to rejoice three times a year in seasonal festivals (Deut 16:15) – could not be fulfilled. The rabbis responded to the trauma of 70 CE by substituting prayer for the sacrificial cult and by developing new ways to be joyous during festivals that could no longer be celebrated at the Temple. The very study of Torah was equated with the obligation to rejoice before God, and the life of Torah itself was promoted as the most joyful. The joy of Torah study in this world is an inkling of the bliss to be enjoyed in the world to come, since God is the author of the words and phrases over which the Rabbinic scholars pored.

2.1 Jewish philosophy in the orbit of Islam

Rabbinic Judaism continued to evolve during the Middle Ages when most Jews lived in the orbit of Islam. The philosophic-scientific legacy of ancient Graeco-Hellenistic world was now translated into Arabic, giving rise to Islamic systematic theology (kalām) and to Islamic philosophy (falsafa); the former explicated Islamic religious beliefs through rational arguments, whereas the latter creatively integrated elements from Platonism, Stoicism, Neoplatonism, and Aristotelianism into comprehensive religious philosophy that reflected systematically about human happiness (Leaman 1999). Recognized as a legally protected religious minority, Jews in the orbit of Islam enjoyed relative security and ambitious individuals could even reach positions of power in the administration of the Muslim state, especially in Muslim Spain (Lewis 1987). In Iraq, North Africa, and Muslim Spain, Jewish intellectuals took their cues from Muslim philosophers – especially Alfarabi (d. 950), Avicenna (d. 1037), Alghazali (d. 1111), ibn Bajja (d. 1138), ibn Tufail (d. 1185), and ibn Rushd (d. 1198) – rendering Rabbinic Judaism in a philosophical idiom. Happiness (in Arabic, sa‛adah) became an important theme in medieval Jewish philosophy, although the relationship of happiness to the life of Torah was variously interpreted and hotly debated. For medieval Jewish philosophers, happiness pertained to the wellbeing of the individual soul; it required the cultivation of moral and intellectual virtues, and the acquisition of philosophic knowledge that ensures the immortality of the intellect, the essential core of the human person.

Saadia Gaon (d. 942) launched the philosophic discourse on happiness as part of his rationalist defence of Rabbinic Judaism against the critique of Karaism. Analysing several psychological theories about the relationship of body and soul, Saadia highlighted their interdependence and defended both the doctrine of immortality and the doctrine of bodily resurrection (Tirosh-Samuelson 2009: 723–724). In the following two centuries, Jewish philosophers in the Islamic orbit articulated a rationalist piety that regarded the cultivation of inner virtues as a religious duty no less than the external performance of embodied commandments. The ‘duties of the heart’, as Bahya ibn Pakuda (d. 1120) called them, consists of ‘the duty to love, trust and be devoted to God’ which is manifested in a range of actions, attitudes, beliefs, and motivations’ (Lobel 2023: 67). The inward virtues are included in the 613 commandments of Rabbinic Judaism, and they are rational and foundational to all other duties. The central duty of the heart is to purify one’s conception of God, namely, to focus on the oneness of God which in turn leads to ‘singularity of devotion’ (Lobel 2023: 68). For ibn Pakuda, the revealed Torah itself promotes an inward spirituality and those who cultivate the inward virtues become ‘companions of God’. In a similar vein, Solomon ibn Gabirol (d. c. 1058), a philosopher-poet, composed Islah al Akhlaq (Improvement of the Moral Qualities) in which he explained how the human being is a miniature version, a microcosm, of the universe, the macrocosm, and how each of the twenty virtues he lists is associated with one the five human senses (Pessin 2023: 81–95). The ideal virtues include meekness, modesty, capacity to love, compassion and mercy, cheerfulness and good disposition, good will and contentment, alertness, generosity and valour. By contrast, the vices include pride, impudence, capacity to hate, cruelty, wrath, envy, sloth, niggardliness, and cowardice. By cultivating the virtues, the wise person ‘conditions’, or purifies, the soul from its association with the body, enabling the soul to survive the death of the body and enjoy immortality. ‘Enduring happiness’, as ibn Gabirol called it, is experienced not in the temporal world but only after death when the purified soul unites with supernal entities and even with God. The Jewish Neoplatonic conception of happiness had mystical and even ascetic overtones that echo the influence of Islamic asceticism (zuhd) and mysticism (Sufism).

Jewish philosophy in the Islamic orbit reached its zenith with Moses Maimonides (d. 1204), the philosopher-physician-jurist who integrated Platonic political philosophy, Aristotelean rationalism, and Neoplatonic cosmology with Rabbinic Judaism (Lobel 2017: 163–185; Tirosh-Samuelson 2003: 192–245; 2009: 731–737). Maimonides made the Jewish discourse on happiness explicitly Aristotelian, albeit one laced with Neoplatonic themes. He not only analysed the Rabbinic teachings with the help of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics but also explicitly referred to the Nicomachean Ethics in his Halakhic works, the Commentary on the Mishnah and the Mishneh Torah (Code of Jewish Law). In so doing, Maimonides suggested that Aristotle’s philosophy, to the extent that it is true, is identical with the revealed Torah and that as such authoritative to Jews. Moreover, Maimonides claimed that the Torah itself should be approached as an esoteric text whose inner meaning is philosophic, identical with Aristotle’s physics and metaphysics. The Torah teaches philosophic truths whose contemplation constitutes the ultimate end of human life (i.e. happiness) but couches them in figurative speech (i.e. ‘the language of human beings’). Taking his cue from Alfarabi’s treatises on happiness – The Political Regime, The Principles and Opinions of the People of the Virtuous City, and the Attainment of Happiness (see Lobel 2011: 151–158) – Maimonides claimed that the Torah of Moses establishes the ideal political regime in which people experience happiness in this life, provided one knows how to interpret the Torah correctly and understand its philosophical meaning. In the Mishneh Torah Maimonides provided the empirical evidence, so to speak, for the claim that the Torah of Moses constitutes the ideal political regime in which one can attain happiness, and in the Guide of the Perplexed he articulated the hermeneutical principles that enable the Jewish practitioner to interpret the Torah correctly, that is, philosophically.

Although Maimonides recognized the importance and complexity of human emotions, Maimonides’ conception of happiness privileged human intellect: the ability to reason is the essence of being human and reason must govern the emotions in the pursuit of human perfection (Green 2026). Like Aristotle, Maimonides held that the highest perfection for human beings is not moral perfection but rather intellectual perfection, that is, ‘the conception of the intelligibles [eternal truths], which teach true opinion concerning divine things’ (Guide 3:54). Moral virtues are not part of the ultimate perfection but only preparation for the acquisition of intellectual virtues. Maimonides recognized only the theoretical intellect as intellect and, although he acknowledged a practical function of the rational faculty, Maimonides never used the phrase ‘practical intellect’ or ‘practical rational faculty’ (Kreisel 1999). In his Eight Chapters, Maimonides explained how ‘the improvement of moral habits is the same as the cure of the soul and the powers’; his analysis correlates Rabbinic teachings with Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean, albeit with a few notable exceptions, for example, humility, in which deviation from the mean is required (Frank 1989; Weiss 1991). In the Guide of the Perplexed (Dalalat al Hairin), however, Maimonides offered a different approach to moral philosophy. There, as David Shatz (2005) showed, Maimonides presented ‘consequent morality’, according to which the right moral behaviour flows not from psychological dispositions, as he explored in Eight Chapters, but from theoretical perfection, that is, from contemplation of eternal truths. At the end of the Guide, Maimonides discusses the intellectually perfect individual who imitates God and behaves toward people as God acts toward the world, with ‘loving kindness, righteousness, and justice’ (Guide of the Perplexed III: 53; Pines 1963: 638). The perfect way of life, life in imitation of God, is the consequence of intellectual perfection – the highest perfection available to humans.

2.2 The debate on happiness in the late Middle Ages

Given the complex literary structure of the Guide of the Perplexed and Maimonides’ commitment to esotericism, the Guide could be interpreted in various and conflicting ways: did Maimonides envision happiness inclusively (that is, consisting of both practical life and contemplative life) or exclusively (that is, consisting only of contemplation of eternal truths)? If happiness consists in perfection of the intellect, what kind of knowledge should Jews seek to attain such perfection? More problematically, how does intellectual perfection as envisioned by Maimonides relate to embodied performance of the commandments? What role does social interaction play in the pursuit of happiness? And finally, how does perfection of the intellect relate to subjects of traditional Jewish eschatology such as the immortality of the soul, the coming of the messiah, and the resurrection of the dead? These and other related questions ignited a fierce debate that fragmented world Jewry throughout the thirteenth century (Tirosh-Samuelson 2003: 246–290). The so-called Maimonidean Controversy was a debate about the meaning of happiness for Jews: the supporters of Maimonides advocated intellectual perfection through the study of philosophy as the ultimate end of human life, whereas the critics of Maimonides regarded perfection of the intellect as arrogant, self-serving preoccupation that undermined collective Jewish life and negated the relational ethics of Rabbinic Judaism. In the context of this debate Jews reflected on the cultural boundary of Jewish society, the content of Jewish education, and the validity of intellectual spirituality within a law-bound society.

While the Maimonidean Controversy was still raging, a fraternity of Jewish mystics in Castile articulated an alternative to the philosophic conception of happiness. This alternative was presented in Sefer ha-Zohar (Book of Radiance), an anthology of Kabbalistic texts attributed to Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai, the second-century rabbi who is the main protagonist of Zoharic literature. The Zohar, though, was not written in the second century CE but in the last quarter of the thirteenth century when the text was (at least partially) composed and edited by Moses de Leon (d. 1305). Written in artificial Aramaic, the Zohar was obsessed with the meaning of happiness, as evidenced by the ubiquity of the phrase zakah ihu/zakkain inon (i.e. ‘happy is/happy are’) that appears throughout the Zoharic corpus to encourage the readers to behave and think in the way that leads to happiness, or to imitate the conduct of its main characters, especially Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai – who is depicted as a human being who reached the ultimate end of human life: communion with God (devekut) (Fishbane 2023). Conversely, the expression vei leih (‘woe to’) is used to lament a bad spiritual condition or warn against certain undesirable ideas, postures, or deeds that the Zohar finds antithetical to holy life.

For the Zohar, true happiness consists of the holy life of Torah which may be accomplished only if one adopts the principles of Kabbalistic hermeneutics. According to the Kabbalists, the esoteric meaning of the Torah is not Aristotelian physics and metaphysics, as Maimonides taught, but the inner life of God whose character is manifested through the ten Sefirot that emanated from the Ein Sof (i.e. the Infinite). Since God is revealed to Israel in the Torah, the knowledge of God cannot be philosophical but mut be hermeneutical; through the symbolic interpretation of Torah, Israel can come to know God and relate to God. For the Kabbalists, then, the ultimate end of the life of Torah is cleaving to God (devekut) – or more specifically to the Shekhinah, the tenth Sefirah that expresses the feminine dimension of God. In cleaving to God, the Kabbalist participates in the rhythm of divine life and can even impact God, in other words, engage in theurgy. An elaborate Torah commentary, the Zohar thus dramatized how one is to live the life of Torah symbolically, mystically, and theurgically, and what happens when this is done properly (Fishbane 2018; Hellner-Eshed 2009). A messianic composition par excellence, the Zohar articulated a program for the redemption of the individual, the society, the cosmos, and God.

Committed to esotericism, medieval Kabbalah was available to the initiated few. Thus, Jewish theology in the late Middle Ages was dominated by the Maimonidean-Aristotelian tradition and its intellectualist understanding of happiness. In Spain, Provence, and Italy, Jewish philosophers became ever more familiar with Aristotle’s philosophy by translating the commentaries of ibn Rushd (Averroes) into Hebrew and writing super-commentaries on them. Read through the lens of Averroes’ philosophy, happiness was understood strictly in cognitive categories, consisting exclusively in the perfection of intellect through the study of philosophy. Since truth is one, no matter who utters it, perfection of an intellect is universal and independent of the individuality of the knower. The doctrine of philosophic happiness appeared to undermine the religious belief in the immortality of the individual soul after death of the body. Averroes’ interpretation of Aristotle generated intense debates, first among Christian scholastics and later also among Jewish scholars.

Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), who held Maimonides’ philosophy in great esteem, rejected the views of the Latin Averroists about the unicity of the intellect. Instead, he attempted to reconcile Aristotelian philosophy and Christianity by differentiating between two orders of happiness: natural happiness and supernatural happiness. The former is attainable in this life through human natural efforts and the acquisition of the moral and intellectual virtues as Aristotle taught, whereas the latter can only be attained by Christians who acquire the theological virtues: charity, hope, and faith by divine grace (Charry 2010: 86–110). If there were no higher measure than human reason, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics would have been a fine guide to moral life, but because Aristotle was ignorant of supernatural happiness and God-given virtues, his account is seriously flawed (Kent 1995). While Jewish scholars did not take part in the Scholastic debates, they were aware of them. For example, Hillel ben Samuel of Verona (d. 1295), a major participant in the Maimonidean Controversy, composed Tagmulei ha-Nefesh (Rewards of the Soul) in which he explicated various positions about the immortality of the individual soul while adopting Aquinas’ position: eternal happiness does not involve just the perfected intellect, but also lower functions of the human soul – the sensitive power, the appetitive power, and even the imagination. For this Jewish intellectual, the virtuous life charted by the life of mitzvot leads to survival of the individual soul.

Two outstanding Jewish philosophers – Levi ben Gershom (Gersonides) (d. 1344) in Provence and Hasdai Crescas in Spain (d. c. 1410) – illustrate divergent approaches to happiness among late medieval Jewish philosophers (Tirosh-Samuelson 2009: 739–748). Gersonides, a philosopher-scientist who communicated with Christian scholars in the Papal court of Avignon, argued in favour of the intellectualist conception of happiness (Green 2023: 152). According to Gersonides, perfection of human intellect does not entail loss of individuality and is compatible with the religious belief in personal immortality. The more one comprehends the structure and operation of the physical world (or Nature), the more one is aware that God ‘beneficently constructed the heavens for human benefit’ which leads to ‘ethics of altruism’ (Green 2023: 152). Gersonides broke new grounds in Jewish reflections on happiness and virtues by exploring the virtues of ‘physical preservation’ whose purpose is ‘to preserve the body from the negative determinants of the stars and promote worldly thriving’ (Green 2023: 152). Gersonides highlighted virtues such as endeavour (hishtadlut), diligence (haritzut), and cunning (tahbulot) in crafting stratagems that lead to human survival. These virtues are most evident in the life of the ancient Israelites as depicted in the Bible. In his biblical commentaries, Gersonides showed that the ancient Israelites succeeded when they strove to cultivate virtues that protected them from the decrees of the constellation (Green 2016: 19–61; 2023: 155–159). In retrospect, Gersonides’ original ideas anticipated those of Spinoza.

In contrast, Crescas, the leader of Castilian Jewry at the turn of the fifteenth century, sought to liberate Jewish philosophy from the clutches of Aristotelianism because he regarded Jewish rationalism as the cause of the mass conversion of Jews in 1391. A superbly trained philosopher who was familiar with Scholastic philosophy, Crescas sought to restore the nexus between performance of mitzvot and eternal happiness. To do so, he critiqued the theory of the Acquired Intellect which undergirded the philosophic conception of happiness. For Crescas, that theory was philosophically untenable and theologically problematic (Harvey 1999). God was not an intellect that thinks itself, as all Aristotelian thinkers assumed, but an infinite, dynamic, and free being ‘whose Will is his essence’. The infinite goodness of God is expressed when God willingly decides to emanate existences and sustain them as a ‘divine gift of love’. Joy and love are to be attributed to God who is an active Will, and love is ‘nothing but the pleasure of the will’ (Light of the Lord, III.5). As Creator, God is not the most perfect knower (or intellect) but the most perfect lover. Yet God’s love of the universe is not the love of a subject for an object but an essential property of God’s own perfection. In positing love as a cosmic principle Crescas offered a different conception of human happiness: if God is the lover par excellence, imitatio Dei involves not the contemplation of eternal truths but the love of God. The ultimate end of human life is based on the willingness of the individual to be committed to God, the ability of the will to freely choose the good. Human perfection is manifested in ‘the love and pleasure that one feel in serving God’ (Weiss 2023: 168). The virtues, which Crescas classified into ‘virtues of conduct’ and ‘virtues of character’ prepare one for the ultimate end, but securing eternal life can only come from the performance of the commandments. By reinterpreting the meaning of happiness and associating it with love, Crescas undermined the allegorizing of the mitzvot. The road to immortality of the individual soul lies in the deeds that Israel is commanded to observe. Those who observe the divine commandments and exhibit true love and service of God attain the ultimate felicity. Despite Crescas’ critique, Jewish philosophers in fifteenth-century Spain continued to reflect on happiness within the Maimonidean-Aristotelian framework. Meir Alguades (d. 1405), the Rabbi of Castile, produced a new Hebrew translation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and rationalist theologians, such as Joseph Ibn Shem Tov (d. 1455), showed the compatibility of Judaism with Aristotelianism (Tirosh-Samuelson 2003: 397–410).

3.1 Renaissance humanism

Happiness was a major concern of Renaissance humanists (Kircher 2012; Trinkaus 1983; 1995) who devoted ‘themselves to the recovery of classical antiquity, reviving its literary and philosophical traditions, setting up new schools of literature with new goals and establishing new opportunities for public oratory’ (Hankins 2019: 20). Correlating the art of living well with education and learning, the humanists sought to persuade others to study the ancients to learn about living well. From reflecting on the ‘highest good’ (summum bonum) for the human species, Renaissance humanists shifted their focus to wellbeing in earthly, civic life. By opening Christan culture anew to the civilizations of the ancient world, the humanists ‘articulated an entirely new lay view of Christian society that fused traditional Christian values with the civic values of the ancient pagan world’ (Hankins 2011: 127). The new ‘paideuma’, as James Hankins named it, spelled out ‘a way of forming the mind, oriented above all to the acquisition of virtue, wisdom and eloquence’ (Hankins 2019: 20). In schools, princely courts, chanceries of republics, ecclesiastical offices, papal Curia, and even in universities, Renaissance humanists promoted moral and intellectual reforms among political elites. The humanists continued to study Aristotle’s moral philosophy, but they did it not only in Latin but also in vernacular languages generating new texts through translations, paraphrases, and commentaries intended for the learned laity (Lines and Kraye 2013). The humanists also took a closer look at the intricacies of human emotions, attitudes, moods, and sensibilities and they were more honest about human passions such as avarice, fear, list, envy, pride, and ambition. With attention to the richness of human emotional life, the humanists explored how people behave and feel rather than merely speculating about the telos of humanity as a species. Recovering classical texts, the humanists revisited the Epicurean identification of happiness with pleasure and the Stoic reflections on the vicissitudes of life. The Stoics’ emphasis on virtue as the only good, their rejection of external goods, and the counsel of apathy were easily combined with Christian values and postures. Stoic texts were translated anew and published in printed editions through the sixteenth century. The humanist discourse on happiness was secular not because it opposed religion (which it did not) but because it focused on ‘the present age’ (saeculum) before the ‘end of times’. And at the centre of the present age stood the human being whose dignity and freedom the humanists extolled.

3.2 Jews integrate scholasticism and humanism

Jews were fully aware of the cultural changes in Christian Europe and even contributed to them in their own way. Command of Hebrew was especially valued in the Renaissance since it gave Christians direct access to the Word of God, and the study of Hebrew gave rise to Christian Hebraism and eventually to Christian Kabbalah. In Spain, Jewish converts to Christianity helped the making of the polyglot Bible known as the Complutensian Polyglot (Hamilton 2011: 107), and in Italy Jewish scholars tutored leading humanists, introducing them to Kabbalah. For example, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (d. 1494), who authored the Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486) had two Jewish teachers – Elija del Medigo (d. 1493) and Johanan Alemanno (d. 1504) – who taught him Hebrew and introduced him to Rabbinic, philosophic, and Kabbalistic texts. For Pico, human beings do not have a fixed nature; rather, their capacity for free choice determines whether they are controlled by their animal desires or aspire to be like the angels by cultivating the intellect for the study of philosophy and theology and thereby drawing closer to God. Human dignity resides in the human capacity to use one’s intelligence and act freely.

Alemanno exemplifies the impact of humanism on the Jewish discourse on happiness. In his Song of Solomon’s Ascents (Shir Ha-Ma‛alot asher Li-Shelomo), the Introduction to his commentary on the Song of Songs entitled Hesheq Shelomo (The Desire of Solomon), Alemanno rejected the traditional allegorical interpretation of the biblical text and instead presented the ancient text as a biography of King Solomon, thus illustrating how an historical figure can acquire the virtues and reach intellectual perfection by following a prescribed curriculum (Lesley 1976; 1982). Combining Aristotle’s moral philosophy, Ciceronian rhetoric, Jewish Aristotelianism, and Kabbalah, Alemanno depicted King Solomon as the wise man who ascended ‘the ladder of perfections’, culminating in the conjunction of his soul with God, or more precisely, the attribute of God that the Kabbalists called Tife‛eret (Beauty). The morally and intellectually perfect person who possesses all virtues and all forms of knowledge can receive overflow from the Ein Sof and unite with Tif‛eret, the symbolic manifestation of YHVH. Other Jewish scholars in Italy, such as David Messer Leon (d. 1526), creatively fused medieval scholasticism and Renaissance humanism, a trend that continued in the Ottoman Empire during the sixteenth century (Tirosh-Rothschild 1991).

The suffering brought about by the traumatic expulsions from Iberia intensified the Jewish preoccupation with happiness during the sixteenth century. Settling in the Ottoman Empire, away from Christian persecution and constant surveillance, Iberian Jewish exiles and ex-conversos witnessed an outburst of literary and spiritual creativity. Rabbi Moses Almosnino (d. 1581), a philosopher, scientist, communal leader, judge, and educator, exemplifies the creativity of the Iberian community in the Ottoman Empire in Halakhah, homiletics, hermeneutics, philosophy, and Kabbalah (Tirosh-Samuelson 2003: 394–438). Familiar with scholastic and humanist translations and commentaries of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Almosnino composed his own commentary on Aristotle’s Ethics, Peney Mosheh (The Countenance of Moses), in which he determined the correct text of the Ethics through textual comparison of variants at his disposal. Even more innovatively, Almosnino anchored Aristotle’s conception of happiness by adducing examples from the Bible and Rabbinic literature. In a syncretistic manner, Almosnino explored the dignity and worth of the human person, the primacy of the human will, and the striving for personal immortality through cultivation of moral and intellectual virtues. For a communal leader and educator, happiness was not merely a matter of theory but a highly practical matter: understanding happiness correctly had an educational purpose. In Ladino, Almosnino composed the Regimiento de la vida: Tratados De Los Suenyos (Sefer Hanhagat Hahayyim) that offered a practical guide for the attainment of wellbeing in this world which assures the immortality of the soul in the afterlife (Zemke 2004). For the Iberian exile in the Ottoman Empire, Jewish moral education should be carried out by fusing Aristotelian ethics with biblical narratives and Rabbinic Midrashim.

3.3 Human perfection in Kabbalah

After the expulsions from Iberia the public status of Kabbalah changed dramatically, impacting the history of Jewish thought – including the discourse on happiness. If previously Kabbalah was regarded as esoteric lore transmitted only to the select few, after the expulsions Kabbalah presented itself as salvific knowledge that had to be made public and exoteric. The Zohar, a text suffused with messianism, was printed in Italy in two editions (1558–1559) and Kabbalists commented on the Zohar with the intent of explicating its messianic import to the public. In the hilly town of Safed in the Land of Israel, a community of Iberian exiles was engaged in the study of the Zohar and the articulation of ascetic and mystical practices whose goal was to redeem the world from imperfection. Moses Cordovero (d. 1570) played a key role in the transformation of Kabbalah from esoteric to exoteric practice (Robinson 1994; Sack 1995): his Pardes Rimonim (The Garden of Pomegranate) systematized Kabbalistic theology; his Or Yaqqar (Sublime Light) was an extensive commentary on the Zohar, and his Tomer Devorah (The Palm Tree of Deborah) was the first Kabbalistic ethical treatise that linked certain virtues to God’s character traits as manifested in the Sefirot. According to Cordovero,

ethical behavior should be adopted and followed not only because God says so, but because is so; one should conform not only to the divine laws, but to the divine nature. The righteous is not only an obedient servant of God but an imitator of His essence, and therefore a part of the divine system as a whole. (Dan 1986: 94, original emphasis)

Cordovero’s disciples Elijah de Vidas (d. 1586) and Isaiah Horowitz (d. 1630) explicated Kabbalistic ethics, teaching Jews how to cultivate the virtues of compassion, love, humility, peace, kindness, and hospitality (Fishbane 2026). Although early-modern Kabbalists did not speak about ‘happiness’ or ‘wellbeing’, they probed their own emotional and mental life and in so doing contributed to the emergence of individual self-awareness. No less than the humanists of their day, the Kabbalists were engaged in self-fashioning, expressing their individuality in mystical reports, confessions, autobiographies, and diaries in which they reported their religious experiences, dreams, emotions, desires, fears, anxieties, and aspirations (Fishbane 2023). The Kabbalistic self, however, is relational because it emerges through relationship with God and with other humans. Through the observance of religious rituals, Torah study, and acquisition of virtues, the Self ‘becomes’ or ‘instantiates’ the ‘image of God’. Personal identity emerges not only through the mirroring of God but also through the interaction with God, a process that empowers the earthly human person as much as it empowers God (Garb 2005; 2015). When the Kabbalist’s soul unites with the Shekhinah, the feminine aspect of God, the mystic empowers God and unifies the feminine and masculine dimensions of the Godhead. This results in the overflow of divine energy (shefa) to the earthly world, redeeming it from imperfection.

The idea that human power and divine empower work in tandem to bring about redemption was the crux of the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria (d. 1572). His intricate theosophy, cosmogony, cosmology, and psychology claimed to fathom the unfolding mysteries of God, the cosmos, the human soul, and social relations. Revolving around three main key events – tzimtzum (i.e. the ‘contraction’ of God), shevirah (the ‘breaking’ of the divine ‘vessels’), and tikkun (the ‘mending’ of the world) – Lurianic Kabbalah spelled out the processes by which social, cosmic, and divine reality came to be what it is and the practices that enable humans to heal the broken reality by healing themselves (Fine 2003). The empowerment of humans was not limited to religious virtuosi; all Jews who live the life of Torah are tasked with the ‘repair’ of the world and the ‘repair’ of the Godhead that promises redemption, namely, everlasting immortality. The messianic import of Lurianic Kabbalah inspired acute messianism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in the movements of Sabbateanism, Frankism, and Hasidism. Offering alternative visions of the ideal Jewish person and ideal Jewish life, these movements challenged Rabbinic authority and undermined traditional communal institutions. The acute messianism of early-modern religious movements would ultimately corrode Jewish traditional institutions from within – but their exuberance, especially in Hasidism, also promoted renewed emphasis on the emotion of joy (simhah) as the goal of Jewish religious life (Loewenthal 2001). The centrality of joy, rather than intellectual perfection, gave the Hasidic communities their distinctive ambiance and popular appeal, to the chagrin of their opponents (Mitnagedim), who upheld the intellectualism of traditional Torah and Talmud studies, or the Jewish advocates of the Enlightenment, who disdained the ecstatic exuberance and anti-intellectualism of Hasidism.

3.4 Spinoza: happiness and human subjectivity

In the seventeenth century, the most profound challenge to Jewish traditionalism was articulated by Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza (d. 1677), whose original reflections on happiness bridged the premodern and modern phases of the discourses on happiness. Spinoza’s earliest work, The Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, is a treatise on happiness that opens with a personal description about Spinoza’s own transformation from one way of life to another:

After experience had taught me that all things which regularly occur in ordinary life are empty and futile, and I saw that all things which were the case or object of my fear had nothing of good or bad in themselves, except insofar as [my] mind was moved by them, I resolved at last to try to find out whether there was anything that would be the true good, capable of communicating itself which alone would affect the mind, all others being rejected—whether there was something which, once found and acquired, would continuously give me the greatest joy, to eternity. (Cited in Carlisle 2021: 22)

Searching for whatever is the ‘true good’ that could lead him to achieve the ‘supreme good’ (summum bonum), Spinoza (like Aristotle) dismisses the hollowness and futility of sensual pleasure, wealth, and honour as candidates for the highest good. Anything that helps the individual to attain the goal stated in the opening of the treatise is ‘true good’ but the highest good is ‘to arrive – together with other individuals if possible – at the enjoyment of [this goal]’. Spinoza then was seeking wisdom that would change his life and give him lasting joy, and to achieve this goal he had to reorder his desire and love: he had to turn away ‘from what is transient, perishable and destructive to what is eternal, infinite sustaining’ (Carlisle 2021: 28). The lasting enjoyment he was seeking was ‘the knowledge of the union that the mind has with the whole of nature’ (Carlisle 2021: 29). For Spinoza, ‘God’ was the synonym for the ‘whole of nature’. God is not a transcendent, supernatural being who is the Creator of nature; rather, God is nature and nature is all there is. Spinoza’s worldview is radically monistic: there is only one substance – God or Nature – and all things that exist follow necessarily from God; they are no more than ‘modes’ of God. All things are in God rather than created by God (Nadler 2020).

Whether Spinoza’s philosophy is pantheistic or panentheistic is still debated, but it is indisputable that Spinoza’s view of God was non-theistic. For Spinoza, God is not a person; one cannot pray to the God of Spinoza nor ask for divine intervention. Rather, ‘God’ is the name we give to the deterministic, necessary, intelligible structure of the universe. If this is so, what does happiness mean? In the Ethics, Spinoza’s posthumously published mature work, Spinoza answers the question by stating that ‘happiness consists in a man’s being able to preserve his own being’ (Ethics IVP18Sch). Desire (conatus) is the human striving for self-preservation, the striving to maintain and increase itself, or put differently, the striving to flourish. Spinoza states that ‘[n]o one can desire to be happy, to do well, and to live well without at the same time desiring to be, to do, and to live, that is, actually to exist’ (Ethics IVP18). The striving to live happily, that is, to flourish is ‘the very essence of man’, and in it lies human freedom – the freedom from the bondage of passions, emotions, and above all, ignorance. For Spinoza, when we know the entire universal causal system, mental and physical – namely, when we engage in science – we are free. That knowledge, however, is but self-knowledge, since we are but a mode of God. In self-knowledge human beings find joy, peace, and freedom. In it lies our ‘salvation or blessedness or freedom’ that consists ‘in the constant and eternal love towards God’ (Miller 2015: 178).

Human flourishing, Spinoza insists, consists of self-knowledge of our emotions. Spinoza not only identified negative emotions – passions such as fear, anger, jealousy, and sadness – as factors that undermine human flourishing, he also figured out, as Antonio Damasio explains, ‘how to trigger positive, nourishing emotions’ (Damasio 2003: 275). For Spinoza, the ‘feeling brain’ can be trained through habitual practice to achieve joy (Youpa 2020). He defined ‘joy’ (laetitia) as ‘that passion by which the mind passes to a greater perfection’, and its opposite, ‘sadness’ (tristitia), as ‘that passion by which [the mind] passes to a lesser perfection’ (Nadler 2020: 26). Something is good when it is a cause of joy, and so brings about an increase in one’s condition. To achieve joy, Spinoza ‘recommends the mental rehearsing of negative emotional stimuli as a way to build a tolerance for negative emotions and gradually acquire a knack for generating positive ones’ (Damasio 2003: 275). Thus, Spinoza maintained that human flourishing consists of a feeling of wellbeing signifying psychological health, and that feeling can be analysed by scientific knowledge. He replaced the premodern understanding of virtue and principle of right action with an internal standard of optimal functioning for those who understand how our emotions and feelings work.

In Spinoza’s worldview, the belief in the immortality of the individual soul – a belief that Spinoza’s contemporaries, Jews and Christians, continued to affirm – was no more than a superstition (Nadler 2001). Not surprisingly, the leaders of the Amsterdam Jewish community ex-communicated Spinoza in 1656 for his ‘abominable heresies’, and the philosophers in the community, such Rabbi Menasseh ben Yisrael (d. 1657) and Rabbi Saul Morteira (d. 1660), continued to defend the doctrine of personal immortality (Nadler 2018). Rejecting the confessional structure of his society, Spinoza refused to convert to Christianity after his ex-communication. Living without any religious affiliation, he derived his livelihood from grinding lenses for scientific experiments and communicated with scholars and scientists in England and throughout Europe. In 1670, Spinoza anonymously published the Theologico-Political Treatise in which he critiqued the divine election of Israel and the divinity of Mosaic Law: Israel was not the Chosen People but a people like all others, and Mosaic Law was but a temporal constitution designed to ensure the material wellbeing and prosperity of ancient Israel. When the ancient Israelites lost their political sovereignty, the Torah lost its normativity and sacrality. Spinoza’s critique undermined the biblical understanding of happiness, and the philosophic tradition based on it. For the following three centuries, Jewish and non-Jewish philosophers grappled with Spinoza’s ideas that paved the way to modernity.