The Importance of Emotions
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Emotions were the subject of one of the best movies that I have seen in a long time, this summer’s Pixar movie "Inside Out." The movie is ostensibly about a relatively normal situation: A family moves across the country and they, especially their 11-year-old daughter Riley, deal with the transition. What makes the movie spectacular is that throughout the film we watch what is going on inside the daughter’s head, where we meet her five cardinal emotions: Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust, and Fear. Over half the movie actually takes place inside Riley’s head as we watch the interplay of these personified feelings. As Riley is a relatively fortunate and privileged child, the emotion that is mainly in charge for her is Joy. When the stress of the move throws her emotions into chaos, Sadness begins to play a more active role in the girl’s emotional life. But her parents ask her to be happy, and she wants to be happy for them, so Joy tries to get rid of Sadness with potentially disastrous consequences.
We can understand this main character’s desire for joy to be in charge all the time; we can also understand her parents’ desire for the same thing. Some emotions aren’t fun, especially the ones that don’t feel as good to have and are equally hard to watch someone else go through. Emotions are messy. They can blend together; it is not always easy to tell where one ends and another begins. For the last forty years, the consensus has been that there are six basic emotions: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. This theory is now being challenged by neuroscientists arguing that there are only four basic emotions. Even science can’t figure us out! The world of emotions is sticky; sometimes when I get upset, I don’t know if I am angry, jealous, embarrassed, scared, or just hungry. Emotions can be inconvenient, distracting, and often contradictory.
The contradictory nature of emotions is what led the rabbis of the 9th century to want to remove the book of Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) from the biblical canon. Their problem with it was that it contradicts itself about human emotions. In one place it says that “Anger is better than laughter” (7:2) but it also says “Laughter should be praised.” (2:2) The book says that “[God] praised joy” (8:15), but also “Happiness, what good is it?” (2:2) Kohelet is, like us and like the family from "Inside Out," confused about which emotions are good and which are bad, which are helpful and which are not. Their confusion leads the rabbis to wish to suppress this entire teaching. In the end they do not remove the book, but they also do not recognize humans as the multifaceted mass of varied emotions that we are. They solve Kohelet’s contradictions by saying that the apparently contradictory statements describe different things: the anger of God is better than the laughter of the wicked, but the laughter of the righteous doing good deeds is to be praised. These rabbis are trying so hard for a unified human personality that they cannot allow for the idea that perhaps – perhaps – anger is better than laughter at certain times while at others joy is better. They also join in the opinion of Pixar and the rest of us that joy is the optimal emotion. In the end, these rabbis actually say they believe that God’s presence can only be felt through happiness, not any other emotion. (Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 30b)
The 18th century Hasidic leader Rebbe Nachman of Breslav actually codified joy as a religious commandment. He said, מצווה גדולה להיות בשמחה תמיד, mitzvah gedolah l’hiyot b’simhah tamid, “it is a great mitzvah to be happy all the time.” He goes further to say that our job is to overcome the sadness and bitterness that comes upon all humans and to be joyful, because joy spreads, and when one person can be joyful, they will bring joy to others and heal them from their sadness and troubles. (Likutei Moharan, II:24) How can Rebbe Nachman ask this of us? Is constant happiness possible or even something worthwhile? If that is the goal, then why would we have holidays like Yom Kippur and not just 24-hour dance parties? We know from his writings that Rebbe Nachman clearly knew deep sadness in his life. Perhaps his mitzvah gedolah is aspirational: One should try to be happy all the time in the same way that a person should pray three times every single day and always love their neighbor. Or perhaps his mitzvah was written in the depths of his personal sadness, wishing that he and his followers could be spared the pain of being sad. Either way, to this day “be happy all of the time” is a rallying cry for the followers of Rebbe Nachman; his message struck home.
Rebbe Nachman’s mitzvah may appeal to us because, in our ideal state, we all want to be happy people. We want to let small mistakes roll off our back and even handle calamity in a calm and sitcom-family fashion. That is one of the draws of the sitcom. It’s not that mistakes are never made: Lucy will aggravate Ricky; Cory Matthews will make earnest mistakes that Mr. Feeney will correct; and SpongeBob and Squidward will get into trouble. What is so attractive about the Tanner family is that they don’t lose their patience, don’t snap out of anger, and ultimately (within thirty minutes) resolve everything with a hug and a moral. Their emotions are controlled, and even when they are not, we the audience know that eventually everyone will end up happy.
We are uncomfortable with unchecked emotion. That is why we always answer “fine” to the question “how are you?” and why we do our crying in private and try to hide the signs of our tears. It is also perhaps why Riley’s parents in the "Inside Out" movie put pressure on her to stay happy. They are dealing with their own emotional responses to their problems and feel that they cannot handle their daughter’s “negative” emotions on top of their own. The desire to restrain ourselves from negative emotions and from displaying our emotions to the rest of the world runs ancient and it runs deep. In the Torah, when Joseph finally reunites with his brothers, he is overcome with emotion and runs to find the closest private room in which to weep. (Genesis 43:30) We are also told that at a certain point he was “not able to restrain himself any longer” and he had everyone sent from the room and wept aloud (45:1).
At times, we all might wish to limit our emotional expression, or try to tamp down unwanted feelings. I cannot speak for us all, but perhaps the most common reason for this is to try and maintain our relationships. If I tell you I am sad, you may not want to be around me; if I admit that I am angry, it could push you away. Everyone wants to be around happiness, interact with happiness, and connect with a happy person. Emotions can seem contagious, and so it is natural to assume that we would rather be around happy people. Rebbe Nachman is right that the act of cheering up someone in need of it is truly a good deed. However, as anyone who has ever had a bad day and then had to go to a party that night can attest, the joy of others can be alienating just as much as it can be uplifting. If we are worried about our relationships, then unbridled joy may not be the only or the best way to go.
Rebbe Nachman, like Kohelet, like Pixar, like all of us, contradicts himself when it comes to emotions. He does say it is a great mitzvah to always be happy but he also says that the only way a person can connect to the soul of the world is through sadness, because the soul of the world is sadness. (Likutei Mohoran I:20) Essentially he is saying that while it may be an ideal to be happy, the best way to make connections to the world around us is through sadness. There is a scene in the movie "Inside Out" where Joy and Sadness are each trying to console a crying character. Joy jumps around, making jokes, singing songs, and trying to cheer the character up, all to no avail. It is only when sadness sits down on the ledge and commiserates with the character that he begins to feel better. Emotions, all of our emotions, can be a way of connecting to other people. They are ways of connecting because they are basic and universal. I may not know why you are angry, I may not understand how something made you angry, but I do understand what it feels like to be angry. The worst thing we can do is to limit our emotions, because in restricting them we are also restricting our ability to connect.
Anger is perhaps the hardest emotion to connect with, but it may be one of the more prevalent ones on Yom Kippur as we reflect on the wrongs we have done to others and that others have done to us. Tonight at Kol Nidrei we ask for forgiveness from all our fellow humans, and we are in turn asked to forgive them. Thinking about these past wrongs can bring back a lot of anger, the anger that went with the bad action in the first place and also anger at how the problem was handled afterward. Forgiveness may entail letting go of that anger, but not before we note it and benefit from it. Anger is good. In the Midrash when talking about God’s anger (towards us) Resh Lakish said: “If there is rejection there is no hope; but if there is anger there is hope, because whoever is angry may in the end be appeased.” (Lamentations Rabbah 5:22) Anger is good because it lets us know we are invested in what is going on. When I don’t care, when I walk away, that is a problem. It means I am breaking connection. Anger and sadness, while possibly unpleasant, mean that we still want to be connected, and as Resh Lakish notes, that connection can be made positive once again.
At tashlich this year I told the story of a man who was so angry at God that he couldn’t pray. His prayers were stopped up because he had many negative feelings towards God but felt that he should only pray with praise and joy. How could he pretend to have emotions he wasn’t feeling? The man went to Jerusalem to visit Rabbi Dovid Din to ask for his help. The rabbi led him to the Kotel, the Western Wall, and told the man to hit the wall. The man blanched but the rabbi insisted, saying that the wall, and God, can handle your anger. The man began to pound away at the wall, striking it over and over; then the strikes slowly turned into sobs, and the sobs slowly turned into prayers. Having acknowledged his anger and shared it with God,, he was ready to heal the relationship.
Sometimes we need to be the man in this story, hitting the wall, owning the emotions we feel, not tamping them down. If we are angry, we must be okay being angry or sad or scared; those too must be fully heard before we can move forward. We cannot be afraid of our own emotions. The better we understand what we are feeling, the better we will be at connecting with the people around us. There are other times when it is actually our job to be the Kotel, the wall. Not allowing ourselves to be hit literally of course, but being able to witness someone else’s negative emotions, even ones we have caused, and take them in without running away. If you are sad, you can be sad, I will not be scared by your sadness, not try to pull you out of it, but get into it with you till we both understand it. If you are angry, even at me, I can hear your anger and hope that our connection will not break but be made stronger in the end.
Yom Kippur is in many ways a day about connections: connections we have damaged through our actions and connections we want to repair. The connection between ourselves and our family and friends; the connection between ourselves and God; and also the connection between us and who we want to be. The language of Kol Nidrei sounds like dispassionate legalese but we harm ourselves if we forget that whatever it is we are asking forgiveness for, all those misdeeds, most likely had emotions that went along with them. We cannot simply be transactional in our approach to forgiveness; actions caused emotions, and emotions need to be heard. Emotions are how we will ultimately stay connected. It is okay tonight to feel a wide range of feelings. When we reflect on the year that we have had, we may feel sad, happy, or angry. We may feel scared about what will happen in the year to come. When we think about the people in our lives whom we have wronged or who have wronged us, a myriad of emotions may fill our hearts. All of these emotions are okay to feel; in fact we must feel them and give them some air to breathe. Emotions mean that we care and are connected. Rejection means there is no hope, no hope for further connection or further growth; apathy is the real problem. We may have a hard road ahead of us tonight and tomorrow as we repair the relationships we have damaged this year, but the only way we can move forward is to remember that there is no single emotion we are meant to feel tonight, nor is there one single emotion we are meant to feel at any given time. We may seem contradictory but we are meant to be whole, inside and out.