In EmunahSpeak: Serving Hashem B’Simcha, we ended by saying that Serving Hashem b’simcha, means actively harnessing our happiness, our sense of joy, and the essential goodness of our lives that we spoke about above, in relation to being samayach b’chelko, and making it the leitmotif of our mitzvah observance.
Although one son told me that he worked at the above prescription with success, I, for one, struggled a bit to transition from the talk of it to the walk.
What to do?
Rabbi Yehuda Litwen informs us in the name of the Sefer Chareidim (as cited in the Mishnah Brurah in Hilchos Simchas Torah) that the Arizal said that everything that he was zoche to in his avodas Hashem and in his learning came to him only in the z’chus of the endless simcha that he had in performing each mitzvah.
Reassuring to say the least, but how?
Not how, as in how did the Arizal do it? He was the Arizal, so there is nothing else to talk.
But what about the rest of us?
We understand well enough the what of the general game plan. It’s the how that’s somewhat of a slippery slope. By what route are we to come to even the faintest shadow of the Arizal’s simchas hamitzvos? And we’re talking basics here without the intrusion of the Zohar, Kabbalah, Sefiros, Shaimos, and Eliyahu HaNavi. How do we do it? How, as a practical measure, do we morph the simchas hachaim which comes to us by way of being samayach b’chelko into our simchas hamitzvos?
By what route? Maybe a seemingly circuitous one.
It could be that the route to our parody of the Arizal’s simchas hamitzvos passes the Chazon Ish along the way. Rabbi Litwen tells us that the Chazon Ish writes that the main joy that a person is supposed to experience in relation to his mitzvah observance is the fact that he merits to do the mitzvah in the first place.
The Chazon Ish has opened the door for us wide enough to break the hinges, and in the process he has fleshed out the words, asher borchar bonu meekol HaAmim (Who selected us from all the peoples) and infused them with added meaning because our joy in meriting to do a mitzvah, as of necessity, must be preceded by a clear understanding of the significance of being chosen by Hashem for this very purpose. But once that understanding has been achieved, being simchadik over the fact that we merit to do any given mitzvah is a natural step forward. It’s something we can wrap our heads around intuitively because our feelings have been given a source of focus.
And that joy, the joy that we experience by way of being zoche to perform the mitzvos, as opposed to merely being obligated to do them, will bring us in due time to a feeling of simcha in the actual performance in the mitzvah itself.
The simcha we feel in our mitzvah observance may fall a tad short of the endless simcha that the Arizal felt in his, but it will have a smile attached just the same.
