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StumbleuponIn many ways, happiness is a choice, rabbi says
Author, Rabbi Irwin Kula, kicks of Dayton Jewish Cultural Arts and Book Festival
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
Happiness, insists Rabbi Irwin Kula, takes practice.
And for many of us, he adds, it's within reach.
Kula, a nationally known speaker and author, comes to town Thursday, Nov. 6, as the kickoff speaker in the five-week Dayton Jewish Cultural Arts and Book Festival. The schedule includes lectures, book signings, theater and music.
Kula, a New Yorker who's hosted a radio show and public television specials, is co-teaching a course at the United Theological Seminary in Trotwood. He's the author of "Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life" (Hyperion, $13.95).
For his Dayton audience, he'll offer suggestions on how to be happy in difficult times.
"It turns out happiness comes in a variety of levels and forms," he explains. "We have made all of this stuff far too complicated."
Kula says it's normal to yearn for happiness on all four levels of our lives: physical, emotional/psychological, intellectual and spiritual. The challenge, he adds, is to figure out what will make us happy on each of the levels.
It's generally hard to be happy, he adds, without first meeting basic physical needs such as food, shelter, health.
"It's hard to be happy if you're living in the street, but not impossible."
But when it comes to shelter, a 35,000-square-foot home won't necessarily make us happier than a 1,500-square-foot home.
"It turns out you can't get enough of what you really don't need," quips Kula. "It's not that the 35,000 doesn't make you happy, but it doesn't make you that much happier — no matter what you might think."
On the emotional side, he says it's hard to be happy if you aren't in loving relationships, accepting and expressing love.
"That doesn't necessarily mean marriage; it means being connected to other human beings," Kula explains. "Love is to the emotional world like oxygen is to the physical world."
For that reason, he says, it's important that we're always developing our capacity to love. Someone who is "very rich in emotional capital" may as a result require less of the "physical or material capital."
The folks who suddenly realize they were happier when they had a lot less, Kula says, find they didn't actually need everything they wound up wanting.
"The material pleasures of life are very seductive and can end up crowding out the other forms of happiness," Kula says. "It's pleasurable to have that big house, but it may turn out that the pursuit of it has crowded out other forms of happiness that are just as important, so you have to work around the clock to acquire those material pleasures — and you wind up having very little emotional capital as a result."
A crisis, says Kula, forces us to focus on our priorities and values.
"Fear can either constrict and make people crazy and paralyzed, or it can be transformed into understanding ourselves and the meaning of our lives," he says. "Ask yourself what difference this is really going to make in your life. How is it going to affect my capacity to love and be connected, to nurture, my capacity for compassion?"
It's also important, he says, to ask what you've done to contribute to the problem.
"For many people, it's more than they realize," he says. "Maybe they allowed themselves to be attracted and seduced by the celebrity culture out there, or to live beyond their means."
Kula says it's especially important for parents to "create a portfolio of happiness and satisfaction" for their children that includes more than material things.
"It's very cheap to read a book with your child at night, kiss your child good night, he says, adding that not more than a few weeks should go by without engaging children in some "wow" experience: "Isn't the rain amazing?" "Aren't we grateful for the flowers?"
Kula says it's never too late to begin practicing happiness.
The goal is to always want more in our lives, but at the same time experience and appreciate every single day.
"Capitalism is generally about always wanting more, while religious tradition is about finding enough in the present," he explains. "Wanting more generates creativity, but keeps us perpetually unsatisfied. Living in the present and finding it enough lacks creativity and allows us to sell ourselves short instead of maximizing who we can be and what we can accomplish."
"The only way you can be happy is to hold those two things together," he concludes. "Even though I want more things, I got to say goodbye to my child before she went to school, and that would have been enough."
Contact this writer at (937) 225-2440 or at mmoss@DaytonDaily News.com.
How to go
What: "Our Yearning for Happiness," with author Rabbi Irwin Kula
When: 7 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 6
Where: Boonshoft Center for Jewish Culture and Education, 525 Versailles Drive, Centerville
Admission: Free
For information on the Jewish Cultural Arts and Book Fair: www.jccdayton.org or call (937) 853-0372.
