Joy Is the Supreme Religious Emotion: Just Ask Deuteronomy

In 1659, three years after Jews had been allowed to return to England, the famed diarist Samuel Pepys visited a London synagogue to attend a memorial service. He returned four years later and—not realizing it was the holiday of Simḥat Torah—was shocked by the wild celebration he encountered. While Pepys would not have witnessed such rejoicing on any other day of the year, Jonathan Sacks argues that Judaism ranks joy, when properly understood, as the most spiritually profound human feeling, and identifies this as a key message of the book of Deuteronomy: