Rabbi Dr. Ari Berman (left) discusses happiness with Tal Ben-Shahar.

Tal Ben-Shahar is an internationally renowned teacher and author in the fields of happiness and leadership and recently published his eighth book, Happier, No Matter What: Cultivating Hope, Resilience, and Purpose in Hard Times. On Monday, Feb. 21, 2022, he engaged in an hour-long conversation with Rabbi Dr. Ari Berman, President of Yeshiva University, titled “Mapping the Road to Redemption: Defining the Field of Happiness Studies,” to a capacity audience in the Koch Auditorium at Stern College for Women. The event was organized by Dr. Cynthia Wachtell, research professor of American studies and director of the S. Daniel Abraham Honors Program at Stern College, and presented as part of the annual Dr. Marcia Robbins-Wilf Scholar-in-Residence Program. Their conversation ranged across many topics, from intellectual linkages among Viktor Frankl, Albert Camus and Friedrich Nietzsche to the relationship of material success, self-care and gratitude to how failure and regret are important factors in creating happiness for ourselves and for others. An important element of finding happiness in life is in the proper balance between being self-full and selfless, between self-care and caring for others. Using Hillel’s words as a reference point—“If I am only for myself, what am I?”—Ben-Shahar noted that what Hillel meant was “of course help others, be for others, but also be for yourself, an important distinction that he emphasized: rather than being selfish or selfless, be self-full, which is where the integration between helping the self and helping others resides—and it turns out, no big surprise, is where happiness resides.” Dr. Berman noted that our ability to find this kind of balance was especially tested by COVID and wondered what insights Ben-Shahar might share with the YU community about meeting that challenge. “There are many things to suggest from the science of happiness,” said Ben-Shahar, “and the one that I always mention when I talk about happiness is giving yourself the permission to be human, to feel the full range of human emotion.” He pointed out, in a reference that made the audience laugh, the important insight from “the great psychologist Demi Lovato” that “it’s okay not to be okay.” But just letting the emotions in and feeling them are not enough because it is easy for us to be assaulted by what we feel and thus not in control. “Ultimately, it is behavior that matters a lot more than our emotion—what we do with our anxiety, what do we do with our joy—that matters more than just how we feel.”

A student asks a question of Dr. Berman and Ben-Shahar.

After we’ve accepted the painful emotions, Ben-Shahar continued, there are many other things that can be done, such as daily exercise, which has “the same effect on our psychological well-being as our most powerful psychiatric medications.” This prompted Dr. Berman to ask Ben-Shahar about the mind/body connection and which is more prominent “as we move towards our goal of happiness.” Ben-Shahar emphasized that both are important because they work in a system where behavior affects attitude and vice versa. Where the working of this system becomes especially important is when the back-and-forth has to do with moral behavior and attitudes. “I may be feeling down,” he noted, “but if I engage in helping other people, that will help me feel better, and if we want this kind of change to last, to quote from the Ethics of the Fathers, our good deeds need to exceed our wisdom so that our wisdom will endure. We want to be wise—to learn, to study, and then to practice what we learn to reinforce our learning so that it endures.” Dr. Berman noted that one of the results of living through COVID that he noticed in YU students “is a real sense of hakarat hatov, of gratitude—that when so much was taken away, there was a real appreciation for what we have, especially during the last year as we struggled together.” Dr. Berman went on to describe how the core Torah values, displayed on signage throughout the auditorium as well as on the campuses, came about in part because of a pre-COVID discussion he had had with Ben-Shahar about gratitude and how it is the “secret and foundation to happiness.” Ben-Shahar, nodding in agreement, explained how the research today shows “just how important living a grateful life is, especially during difficult times, because it contributes to our resilience and our ability to deal with hardships and difficulties.” As one concrete example of grateful living in action: people who keep a “gratitude journal,” for instance, are rated as more optimistic, more likely to achieve their goals, kinder, more generous and physically healthier. He explained how one of his favorite words is “appreciate” because it means, at the same time, “thank you” and “to grow in value,”  and because the two meanings of the word are connected, “when you appreciate the good in your life, the good appreciates.” What matters most to Ben-Shahar in the work that he does is to help trigger real change, a change in behavior rather than ideas, “so here is what I urge you to do: take one, or at most two, ideas you’d like to implement in your life to bring about change—it could be to exercise for 30 minutes, 3 times a week; create a gratitude practice; commit to five acts of kindness a week—and then do them. Ritualize them. Do them day in and day out because you’re not just helping yourself. Because happiness is contagious, you’re also indirectly helping others. You are, by virtue of cultivating happiness, being self-full.” This kind of commitment to building happiness and purpose on an individual level is, according to Ben-Shahar, what Yeshiva University is doing on an institutional and societal level. “Yeshiva University has a very important role, and not an easy role because it has to be a beacon of light in a world that is quite possibly heading toward some dark places,” Ben-Shahar observed. “Ultimately, the clash of ideas in the world today is simple: between thinking, compassion, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and values that may be present for people with good intentions, who want to do good, but are the opposite of these values,” citing postmodernism and cancel culture as two examples of these negative values. At Yeshiva University, said Ben-Shahar, people are learning the core value of “how to cultivate a wise heart.”

The core Torah values as a source of happiness