The Secret to True Joy: Three Powerful Ways to Change Your Perspective

The healthy human soul naturally inclines toward joy. Joy expands the heart. It creates an inner sense of fullness and contentment, and from that inner spaciousness comes both the desire and the strength to move forward in every area of life. Sadness does the opposite. It constricts, pressures, and suffocates. It closes the heart and weakens the will to grow.

Because the soul longs for goodness and true serenity, and because goodness, joy, and trust are deeply bound together, while evil, sadness, and fear so often travel side by side, the soul yearns to live in joy. More than that, the soul carries within it a memory of a higher joy, a boundless joy it knew before descending into this world in order to build its character within a physical body. It is therefore drawn to joy and recoils from sadness, which closes and stifles.

Joy is not merely a psychological need. In Judaism, it is one of the great foundations of spiritual life. The Torah commands us to “serve God with joy.” At certain times, it even commands a heightened level of rejoicing, as in the verse regarding Sukkot: “You shall rejoice in your festival, you and your son and your daughter, your servant and your maidservant, the Levite, the stranger, the orphan, and the widow within your gates.”

The Torah also teaches that there is even accountability for serving God without joy, as it says: “Because you did not serve the Lord your God with joy and gladness of heart, despite having abundance of all things, you shall serve your enemies.”

This requires explanation. A person can be commanded to perform an action. But how can someone be commanded to feel joy? Is emotion entirely within one’s control? Every ordinary person would like to be joyful, yet disappointment, pain, and hardship so often rob a person of joy and replace it with sorrow. How, then, can the Torah command something that seems beyond a person’s reach?

Joy Depends on Perspective

The answer lies in the Torah’s own language. The word besimchah, “with joy,” contains the same letters as the word machshavah, “thought.” This teaches that joy is not determined mainly by what we do or do not possess, but by the way we think about what happens to us.

In other words, joy is deeply connected to perspective.

Through healthy thought, a person can come to joy. That is what the Torah asks of us: not to manufacture emotion artificially, but to guide the mind to look at life correctly. When thought learns to see clearly, joy begins to arise in the heart on its own.

There are three primary paths of thought that can lead a person to joy, especially in times of hardship, crisis, and even deep darkness.

The first is to focus on the abundance of good that already exists. The second is to reflect on the good that will ultimately emerge from what presently appears bad. And the third is to internalize that the material world, with all its pain and disappointments, is temporary and ultimately secondary to spiritual reality.

The First Path: Focus on the Good That Already Exists

In times of distress, it is helpful to take a pen and paper and make a list of the truly important things one has in life, especially those blessings that many others do not have.

A person can write down such essentials as a place to live, a bed to sleep in, legs to walk on, hands, fingers, working eyes, healthy teeth, and so on. He should also include the very thing whose absence is currently causing him pain, because clearly it matters to him deeply.

Then he can mark what he has and what he lacks and pause to consider the result honestly. Does he truly have reason to collapse into sadness? In most cases, more than ninety percent of what truly matters is already present in his life. Is it really worth allowing the small portion that is missing to lock the entire body and soul into sadness? Especially when, in many cases, what is missing is not even among the most essential human needs.

The Mishnah says, “Who is rich? One who rejoices in his portion.” This has been beautifully hinted through the Hebrew acronym ashir, which means rich, hinting to eyes, hands, teeth, and feet. If a person has these, he is already wealthy.

How many wealthy people would pay millions to restore a damaged eye, heart, or liver? A person living with a healthy body possesses treasures beyond measure. Should such a person sink into sadness over the loss of a few hundred dollars, a few thousand, or even far more? Over a plan that did not succeed? Over a careless word spoken against him?

When that person is a Jew, his reason for joy is even greater. He can rejoice in belonging to the people of whom the Creator of the universe said, “You shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” He can rejoice in the fact that God declared of Israel, “My firstborn son is Israel.” In other words: you are precious to Me, dearer than the kings and rulers of the nations.

A Jew can also reflect on the greatness of his soul, which stands at the highest level in the hierarchy of created spiritual beings. He can rejoice in the fact that he has the ability to attain the highest spiritual perfection available to a human being. While the nations of the world were given seven basic commandments, the Jew was given 613 mitzvot, each corresponding to the structure of his soul and its vast spiritual capacity. Through striving to meet the challenges placed before him by Divine providence, he can attain an eternal life of spiritual greatness unlike that of any other created being.

In truth, sustained reflection on this alone can fill a person with deep and genuine joy.

The Second Path: See the Good That Will Emerge From the Hardship

Although a person cannot know the future, one who believes in the Creator knows that God, whose power is unlimited, loves His creations and desires their good. All the more so does He love the people of Israel, whom He calls “My firstborn son.”

A believing person can therefore say to himself: once I have done the reasonable effort required of me, events will unfold in the way that ultimately leads to what is best for me, whether soon or later. I may not understand why this current stage is so painful, but I trust the One who loves me. Surely, “Whatever the Merciful One does, He does for the good.”

A person can strengthen himself by remembering cases from his own life, or from the lives of others, in which something first appeared painful and only later revealed itself to be the doorway to lasting good. He should remember that even in the natural world, dawn always follows night, and the brightest light often appears only after the deepest darkness.

An old story illustrates this beautifully.

A king wished to award a great prize to the wisest person in his kingdom. He announced a difficult competition. Only forty-seven people from across the land dared to compete for the title and reward. They were seasoned, experienced, learned, and accomplished. Among them stood a Jewish boy with bright, intelligent eyes. He had come hoping that perhaps, if he won, he could help support his family.

The royal herald then announced the challenge. Before them stood a vast building with many floors, thousands of rooms, and countless corridors. Somewhere in one of those rooms, the king was hiding. The first person to find him and shake his hand would win. The time limit was thirty minutes.

After a moment of shock, all the scholars began calculating probabilities and debating where the king was most likely to be. Only the Jewish boy quietly stepped out of the courtyard, walked around the building, returned, climbed to the thirteenth floor, crossed one corridor, opened the fourth door, and shook the king’s hand. The king was indeed there.

At the celebration held in his honor, the child was asked how he knew where to look. He answered simply: “When I went outside, I looked at all the windows of the palace. Every room was lit except one. My father always tells me: where there is darkness, that is where the treasure lies. So I knew that where it was dark, that is where the king would be.”

This is one of the secrets of happiness in life: to understand, during periods of darkness, that not only will light yet come, but that the light is hidden in the darkness itself. The present difficulty may be precisely what prepares the way for the abundance that will follow.

Sometimes suffering removes arrogance, which had been blocking blessing. Sometimes it cleanses stains left on the soul by past wrongdoing. Sometimes it serves some other purpose too deep for human understanding. In nature, the seed must decay in the ground before it can produce the upright stalk and its multiplied fruit. So too in spiritual life, there are obstacles that block the flow of blessing, whether in marriage, children, livelihood, spiritual elevation, or closeness to God. Suffering can break down those barriers and open the way for goodness.

This is the depth of the Midrash on the verse, “Do not rejoice over me, my enemy, for though I have fallen, I will rise; though I sit in darkness, the Lord is a light to me.” The sages say: from anger comes favor, from darkness comes light, from distress comes relief, from distance comes closeness, from falling comes rising.

When a person truly internalizes this, he can even reach joy through suffering, because he understands that the hardship itself is serving his good.

The Third Path: The Illusion of Materiality

This third path is perhaps the deepest of all, yet it is both simple and profoundly true.

Very often, sadness is caused by material loss. A person did not get the position he wanted. He lost money. An expensive item broke. Property was damaged. A loan was not returned. Financial hopes and plans did not materialize.

Yet the physical world is, in a very real sense, only an appearance suited to the physical body. Everything in our world is made of atoms, and each atom is largely empty space. It contains a tiny nucleus with electrons moving around it at enormous speed. Because of this movement, the atom appears to have a solid outer form, much like the blades of a fast-spinning fan appear as a complete disk. When countless atoms stand together in dense arrangement, the appearance of physical matter emerges.

Thus, what seems so solid to the eye and touch is, in truth, mostly structure, movement, and appearance.

Science does not ultimately know what sustains the energy that keeps everything in motion. But Torah’s inner wisdom teaches that the material world is not the deepest reality. Materiality is only an outer layer. The true reality is spiritual. The inner spiritual force is what gives existence, motion, life, and coherence to all that appears physical.

If so, then all material pleasures are not only temporary; they are also inherently superficial. The spiritual dimension of reality, by contrast, is eternal and real. Therefore spiritual delight is the only pleasure that is truly lasting.

This is the depth of the Ramchal’s words in Mesillat Yesharim, where he writes that man was created only to delight in God and to enjoy the radiance of His Presence. That is the true pleasure and the greatest delight that can exist. This world is only the corridor before the World to Come, and the means by which one reaches that ultimate good are the mitzvot. True perfection is closeness to God, and everything else that people think of as good, apart from this, is empty illusion.

A person who internalizes this truth understands immediately that there is no real reason to collapse into sadness over something material that was lost, damaged, or never attained. How can the eternal soul shut itself down in grief over a temporary illusion?

Such a person will also realize that the endless pursuit of wealth, possessions, and material excess is itself a form of illusion. He will then devote his main efforts to spiritual acquisition: character refinement, Torah study, and mitzvah observance. He will deal with material needs only as much as necessary for a healthy and balanced life in this world.

Then he becomes filled with joy, because he has discovered the truth the world tends to hide, and because he is using his precious time to acquire eternal spiritual wealth that draws him closer to his Creator. As the verse says, “The heart of those who seek the Lord shall rejoice.”

Even on a simpler level, a person disappointed by his financial situation and jealous of the wealthy can ask himself: does the rich man eat gold? Does he not eat and drink as I do? What really separates me from the millionaire besides a few external differences? Why, then, should I spend my precious life chasing fleeting possessions? Is the burden of the rich man’s worries worth it?

What does it truly mean that he owns many houses? Does he live in all of them? Does he gain anything in daily life from the paper that says he owns entire streets, apart from the pressure of managing them? And what of those once considered enormously wealthy who lost everything when markets collapsed? What exactly were they rich in before, other than numbers on paper? And all the wealthy people who lived a hundred and fifty years ago, where are they now? What of all the time they spent building fortunes they could not take with them?

A person should reflect on these things until the illusion begins to lose its grip. Then he will live with proper balance: reasonable effort to meet physical needs, but great caution not to be swept away by the temporary and the superficial. He will even come to despise the obsessive pursuit of excessive material accumulation and instead invest in spiritual wealth for eternal life.

At that point he discovers that a healthy view of life naturally leads to lasting joy and to accepting even difficult situations with a pleasant countenance. Then the Mishnah’s words become fully alive: “Who is rich? One who rejoices in his portion.” And one may add the reverse: who is joyful? One who is rich in his portion. That is the secret of true joy and true wealth, which walk together hand in hand.

Through reflecting on the fleeting nature of this world, any person in any condition can reach true joy, because he comes to know what is essential and what is secondary, and how even suffering and difficulty are for his good, even if he does not yet know exactly how.

At that point, the great businessmen of the world, anxiously absorbed in their affairs, begin to appear to him like children playing games of ownership and property. If one child loses his “assets,” he falls into deep sorrow. But the wise father playing alongside them smiles inwardly even when he “loses,” because he knows it is all temporary and has no real substance. He therefore continues living in joy.

Gratitude as a Daily Discipline of Joy

There is one more powerful path to lasting joy.

A person should train himself to thank his Creator for all the beauty in the world and for all the gifts he has received. This is the spirit of David HaMelech’s Psalms, especially Bless the Lord, O my soul and The Lord is my shepherd. One who becomes accustomed to gratitude comes to live with a healthy and truthful perspective. Such a person does not become locked in sadness over some loss that hides from him the great beauty around him and the immense good already present in his life.

It is also a great principle in prayer, to thank God for the past, and request of Him for the future. In doing so, a person becomes more worthy of receiving further blessing, and at the same time he lives in ongoing joy.

True joy, then, is not naïveté, denial, or emotional shallowness, but the fruit of clear thinking, deep faith, spiritual perspective, and gratitude. It grows when a person learns to see life as it truly is: full of existing goodness, full of hidden goodness still unfolding, and rooted in a spiritual reality far deeper than anything material can offer or take away.