GENERATING JOY: THE ENERGY THAT HELPS THE WORLD BECOME

Rus Devorah (Darcy) Wallen, LCSW, CIMHP

Howard Washington Thurman, the twentieth-century African American Baptist theologian, philosopher, mystic, and mentor to leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, was not Jewish. Yet many of his reflections strike me as remarkably consonant with a Torah worldview. Obviously, Christian values have been sourced in the Torah. After all, Christianity is based on the works and life of a Jew! Truth, after all, is agnostic of the lips through which it is spoken. Wisdom can appear in familiar places; at other times, it arrives from somewhere else and quietly reverberates in us what we have known all along.

One of Thurman’s best-known observations has remained with me for years: “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” (Thurman & Thurman, 1999). At first glance, this might sound like permission to pursue whatever makes us happy. But I do not believe Thurman meant, “Do whatever feels good,” nor is that what Torah teaches. The deeper question is not simply, “What gives me pleasure?” It is: “What awakens the most genuine part of me? What gifts has the Ribbono Shel Olam – Master of the Universe - entrusted in me? Where might my particular vitality become a blessing to someone else?”

Chassidus makes this responsibility strikingly concrete. In the Rebbe’s HaYom Yom (daily inspirational calendar) teaches that each person’s avodah must correspond to his or her character and innate qualities. Someone capable of drilling pearls or polishing gems who instead occupies himself only with baking bread is considered to have incurred a deficiency, even though bread is necessary and honorable work. The problem is not the bread. It is the abandonment of the pearls. We are responsible not only for working hard, but for recognizing and cultivating the particular capacities Hashem has entrusted to us. “What makes you come alive may be the gift you were meant to place into circulation. The problem is not in baking the bread; it is in abandoning the pearls.”

The Talmud (Shabbos, 118) asks, “B’mai havei zahir tfei?” In which mitzvah was a person especially vigilant? The word zahir ordinarily means careful or scrupulous, but it also carries an echo of radiance (like the word Zohar – resplendence): Where do you shine? In which form of service do your gifts, devotion, and vitality meet? Perhaps one clue to our purpose is the place where disciplined responsibility and genuine aliveness begin to illuminate one another.

Another reflection attributed to Thurman develops this idea further: perhaps the deepest meaning of being alive is not merely to consume the world as it is, but to help generate the world as it may yet become. That single word captured my imagination: generate. We are not here merely to exist, survive, acquire, and consume. We are here to cultivate, contribute, repair, and create. We are energetic beings, and that energy itself is a gift. Purpose is the stewardship of that gift. G-d created us in His image. He is the Original Creator and Generator.

THE GIFT OF ENERGY

To call human beings energetic creatures is not merely poetic. Every heartbeat involves electrical activity. Every thought relies upon electrochemical communication among neurons. Every breath supports the cellular processes that allow us to move, think, repair, create, and connect. We are dynamic organisms, continually receiving, conserving, transforming, regulating, and directing energy.

Torah describes the human being in similarly dynamic language. Adam is formed from the dust of the earth, but dust alone is not alive. Hashem then breathes into him “nishmas chayim,” the breath of life, and the human becomes a living being (Bereishis 2:7). We are, in a sense, earth infused with Divine vitality. Energy is therefore not merely something we possess. It is something entrusted to us – a Godly force!

Raw energy, however, is morally neutral. Fire can warm a home or consume it. Passion can become generosity or jealousy, courage or cruelty, creativity or chaos. The gift is not simply that we are alive and energized, but that we can guide our vitality through judgment, restraint, conscience, imagination, and choice.

The first human assignment reflects this responsibility. Adam is placed in Gan Eden “l’avdah ul’shomrah,” to work it and guard it.” (Bereishis 2:15) The Garden is not presented as a finished masterpiece requiring only passive admiration. It is an unfolding project requiring cultivation and protection. Gardens do not flourish accidentally. Relationships do not deepen automatically. Communities do not become compassionate through neglect, and neither does the human soul. Gratitude grows, resentment grows, generosity grows, fear grows, and joy grows. Whatever we repeatedly cultivate gradually becomes part of our character

.JOY AS GENERATIVE ENERGY

Perhaps this is why Torah so often links joy with action. “Ivdu es Hashem b’simchah”: Serve Hashem with joy (Tehillim 100:2). The verse does not tell us to feel joyful because everything is easy. It connects simchah with avodah. Joy is not merely the emotional prize waiting at the end of meaningful work; it is part of the energy through which meaningful work is performed.

Barbara Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory offers a complementary psychological perspective. Positive emotions can broaden attention, thought, and behavioral possibilities while helping people build enduring intellectual, social, and psychological resources (Fredrickson, 2001, 2004). Fear is indispensable when danger requires immediate focus, but a nervous system that remains chronically narrowed by threat has difficulty imagining, experimenting, connecting, or recognizing new possibilities. Joy can widen the lens.

This resonates beautifully with the Chassidic teaching “simchah poretzes geder - joy breaks through barriers.” This need not mean that cheerfulness magically removes every obstacle. Joy may instead loosen the internal boundaries created by fear, shame, rigidity, and helplessness. It does not always make the barrier smaller; sometimes it helps the person become larger, more flexible, and more capable of moving through it.

Genuine joy should never be confused with forced positivity. Torah does not require us to deny grief, protest, disappointment, or pain. Jewish life makes room for tears and lamentation, but sorrow is not granted exclusive jurisdiction over the soul. We can grieve and remain grateful, feel pain and retain purpose, acknowledge what is broken and still participate in repair. Joy is not a refusal to see reality; it is a refusal to reduce reality to its most painful elements.

MOVEMENT GENERATES MOTIVATION

Thurman also observed that a genuine decision to act can release energy within the personality. The order is important. We often assume that energy and motivation must arrive first and action will naturally follow. Yet human beings frequently experience the reverse: decision organizes scattered energy, and action awakens motivation.

This fits perfectly with an expression I have often used in my own teaching and clinical work: “It’s not the motivation that gets you moving; it’s the moving that gets you motivated.”

Motivational Interviewing helps people discover and articulate their own desires, abilities, reasons, needs, and commitments regarding change rather than being pressured into someone else’s agenda (Miller & Rollnick, 2013). Behavioral approaches similarly recognize that people cannot always wait to feel better before beginning to act differently. Sometimes one small, purposeful behavior creates the first shift in mood, confidence, and momentum.

One walk around the block, one phone call, one apology, one nourishing meal, one neglected task begun, or one small act of generosity may alter the internal climate. Movement sends a message to the nervous system: We are no longer only waiting, worrying, or wandering. We are going somewhere.

Not all movement is generative, of course. Modern life produces a great deal of jittery energy. We rush, scroll, compare, consume, react, and exhaust ourselves. The nervous system can be highly activated while the person remains poorly directed. This is motion without meaning and energy leaking through a hundred open tabs in the brain.

Purposeful energy is different. It is gathered rather than scattered and guided rather than merely discharged. It joins vitality to values. It may be lively without becoming chaotic and enthusiastic without becoming shallow. Healthy joy remains grounded enough to be generous.

THE ENERGY WE TRANSMIT

Our inner states do not remain enclosed within us. Human nervous systems communicate through facial expression, tone of voice, pacing, breathing, gesture, and presence. A regulated person can help another person settle. An agitated person can generate alarm before saying a word. A parent’s steadiness affects a child, a therapist’s presence affects a client, a teacher’s enthusiasm affects a classroom, and a leader’s fear or courage may spread through an entire group.

Our inner work is therefore never entirely private. When we regulate ourselves, cultivate gratitude, recover joy, and reconnect with meaning, we change what we transmit. We become less likely to generate agitation, grievance, and helplessness and more capable of generating safety, curiosity, courage, and connection. Becoming fully alive is not merely a private quest for personal fulfillment. A person who becomes more genuinely alive can help animate others.

THE SOUND OF THE GENUINE

In his 1980 Spelman College address, Thurman spoke of “the sound of the genuine” within each person—the quiet inner signal that can be obscured by cultural noise, ambition, conformity, and other people’s expectations. Psychology and Torah provide their own languages for this inner depth. Winnicott wrote of the True Self. Internal Family Systems describes qualities of Self-energy. Torah speaks of the neshamah and of the “kol d’mamah dakah,” the subtle, quiet voice encountered by Eliyahu HaNavi – Eijah the Prophet (Kings I - 19:12).

These concepts are not interchangeable, but they share an important intuition: the loudest voice within us is not necessarily the deepest or wisest. Fear, shame, comparison, and the desire for approval can become deafening. Beneath them may be a quieter orientation toward truth, responsibility, connection, and purpose.

Listening inward does not mean declaring every impulse sacred. The genuine must be tested through Torah, values, wisdom, responsibility, and its effect upon others. The essential question is not merely, “What do I want?” but “What awakens my most grounded, generous, and Godly capacities? What kind of activity makes me more alive while allowing more life to enter the world through me?”

GENERATING THE WORLD AS IT MAY BECOME

Each person carries a particular form of vitality. One generates ideas, another safety, laughter, insight, order, hospitality, music, courage, beauty, or belonging. These qualities may be more than pleasant features of a personality; they may be part of the person’s unique contribution.

The purpose of discovering what makes us alive is not simply to enjoy feeling alive. It is to place that vitality into circulation. A gift reaches its fullest purpose when it becomes a contribution. The teacher must teach, the singer must sing, the listener must listen, the builder must build, and the comforter must comfort. This need not happen on a grand stage. A person may transform the emotional climate of a family, classroom, waiting room, neighborhood, or single conversation.

Perhaps that is our calling: to lift what tends to fall, gather what tends to scatter, join what tends to fragment, and cultivate what is still waiting to grow. We have been given life not merely to possess it, spend it, or protect it, but to guide its energy toward good. The world is not finished. Goodness is still growing, and each of us has been given some particular form of life with which to help it live

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REFERENCES

Fredrickson, B. L. (2001). The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. American Psychologist, 56(3), 218–226. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.56.3.218

Fredrickson, B. L. (2004). The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 359(1449), 1367–1377. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2004.1512

Miller, W. R., & Rollnick, S. (2013). Motivational interviewing: Helping people change (3rd ed.). Guilford Press.

Thurman, H. (1980, May 4). The sound of the genuine [Baccalaureate address]. Spelman College.

Thurman, H., & Thurman, A. S. (Eds.). (1999). The living wisdom of Howard Thurman: A visionary for our time. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Winnicott, D. W. (1965). Ego distortion in terms of true and false self. In The maturational processes and the facilitating environment: Studies in the theory of emotional development (pp. 140–152). International Universities Press. (Original work published 1960)

TORAH SOURCES

Bereishis 2:7, 2:15; I Melachim 19:11–12; Tehillim 100:2.