More, when God completed his work he saw all that he had done “and behold it was very good.”
#Happy new year in hebrew series
The first time we find it used is in the series of sentences where God, after each day of creation, views his handiwork and proclaims it “good”. The word “good” has special meaning in the Torah. To hope for a happy new year is to give primacy to the ideal of a hedonistic culture whose greatest goal is “to have a good time.” To seek a good year however is to recognize the superiority of meaning over the joy of the moment. Long before all of these studies, Jews somehow understood this intuitively. She quotes Kathleen Vohs, one of the authors of a new study to be published this year in The Journal of Positive Psychology: "Happy people get joy from receiving benefits from others while people leading meaningful lives get a lot of joy from giving to others." In other words, meaning transcends the self while happiness is all about giving the self what it wants.Īccording to Roy Baumeister, the lead researcher of the study, “What sets human beings apart from animals is not the pursuit of happiness, which occurs all across the natural world, but the pursuit of meaning, which is unique to humans.” Happy people get joy from receiving while people leading meaningful lives get joy from giving to others. "Happiness without meaning characterizes a relatively shallow, self-absorbed or even selfish life, in which things go well, needs and desire are easily satisfied and difficult or taxing entanglements are avoided," the author writes. Leading a happy life, the psychologists found, is associated with being a "taker" while leading a meaningful life corresponds with being a "giver." They found that a meaningful life and a happy life overlap in certain ways, but are ultimately very different. The author, Emily Esfahani Smith, points out how researchers are beginning to caution against the pursuit of mere happiness. This past January, the Atlantic Monthly had a fascinating article titled There’s More to Life than Being Happy. And the reason for that distinction contains great significance. Shanah tovah conveys the hope for a good year rather than a happy one. Instead we say the Hebrew phrase “ shanah tovah” which - in spite of the mistaken translation that appears on almost all greeting cards - has no connection at all to the expression “have a happy new year.”
Ever notice that Jews don’t traditionally wish each other “happy new year”?
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