Rabbi's Musings

“It’s an old man dancing like a chicken and singing,” said the teenage girl, laughing uncontrollably as she watched a video in her bedroom. Her father, a professor named Arthur Brooks, poked his head into her room to see what was going on.

In a second, he figured it out. She was watching rock star Mick Jagger, who turned 81 this year, singing The Rolling Stones’ hit “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” The song has been a favorite of Baby Boomers and Gen Xers for decades. It hit the pop charts when Professor Brooks was 1 year old. Writing in The Atlantic, Brooks says that as we move through life, “satisfaction — the joy from fulfillment of our wishes or expectations — is evanescent. No matter what we achieve, see, acquire, or do, it seems to slip from our grasp. … Satisfaction, I told my daughter, is the greatest paradox of human life. We crave it, we believe we can get it, we glimpse it and maybe even experience it for a brief moment, and then it vanishes. But we never give up on our quest to get and hold on to it.”

Or, as Mick Jagger puts it, “I try, and I try, and I try, and I try.”

Brooks is right. Happiness so quickly slips from our grasp. We crave it, we find it, we feel it … and then it disappears. Poof! And we go right back to looking for it again. We are always on a search for satisfaction.

In the Talmud the ancient rabbis ask the question, “Who is happy?” and the answer is the one who is satisfied with what he/she already has.” So, there’s the secret sauce to satisfaction.

Be happy with whatever you have. Live on Gratitude Street. Don’t desire anything. Most of us cannot do this even in the best of times. We seem wired to want.

If we are destined to want, no matter what, then maybe the trick is to refine what makes us happy. The ancient prophet, Micah, put it like this: It has nothing to do with money or power or real estate holdings. The prophet says that God “has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God” (6:8). In other words, less about you, more about others.

Also not easy, but at least we are treated to a change in perspective. Maybe the universe was not created just to please us!

And yet, for those stubborn among us still seeking contentment (I am one) these words may help:

I am a lucky man and these are wonderful times and we are all fortunate to be living now, in September of 2021, and of course there is poverty and disease and suffering and ignorance and cruelty and crabby people and inferior food and lousy service and poor Wi-Fi and unruly children and robocalls trying to sell you aluminum siding and this cursed printer that says there’s a paper jam though there is not, but there are beautiful advantages that our elders didn’t enjoy, and let me be grateful for the anti-seizure medication and blood thinner that keep me chugging along and YouTube, which has just now, for my benefit, played Don and Phil Everly singing “Let It Be Me,” and all it took was googling a few words and there it is, tender brotherly harmony.

We didn’t have cellphones back in the day and now we do, and so, as the Everlys sing and the GPS lady guides my wife through a maze of colonial streets in small towns on the coast of Connecticut, I can text my daughter and tell her I love and miss her, all simultaneously, and wind up at a nearby café overlooking Long Island Sound.

The most wonderful thing I have today that wasn’t available to me before is old age. The TV offers us dozens of channels, each with hundreds of shows and movies that we could access at any time, and the phone in my hand offers every streaming music format known to man, any radio network, a choice of thousands of podcasts, puzzles, news headlines, books on Kindle — we could be thoroughly entertained for a thousand years, and I decline. There were a couple decades when I traveled more or less constantly and sometimes I’d go into a men’s room in some faraway airport and think, “I was here two or three years ago.” Now I’m happy to sit and look at the boats moored at the dock, a red light flashing at the end and Jay Gatsby on his nice lawn across the Sound looking over and envying us.
—Garrison Keillor, “The road to contentment is sitting right here,"