According to the proverb, it is in times of misfortune that we recognize our true friends… This idea rocked our childhood and continues to accompany us as adults. But it may well be that life experience forces us to correct this preconceived idea.
Indeed, showing empathy towards your neighbor and lamenting alongside them is not a particularly difficult exercise; and all the more so since pity almost contains something immediate, instinctive, not to say mechanical. Poor Job – visited by his friends – knows something about it!
So if we had to correct this proverbial formula, it would be appropriate to rewrite it as follows: it is in times of happiness that we recognize our true friends… You will always find someone to lament with you. Friends, like enemies, like anonymous people.
“Imagine the joy of others and rejoice in it”
But who will rejoice at your side? Who loves you enough to be happy with your happiness? Who is strong enough not to blame you for being happy? Who is good enough to love your happiness, to the point of not being jealous of it, not of feeling deprived of something?
Perhaps this is why Jesus declares: “No one will take away your joy” (Jn 16:22); by not rejoicing with the other in their happiness, it’s a bit as if we were stealing it from them…
Far from being a simple moral question, it is almost a philosophical issue in which our humanity is questioned, and perhaps even redefined. Indeed, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: “Imagining the joy of others and rejoicing in it is the greatest privilege of the higher animals.” Knowing how to rejoice for others would, in this conception, not only be proof of humanity, but also a singularity that would distinguish us from other animals of nature.
The tradition of “taking”
At a time when artificial intelligence is encroaching on everything we thought we had a monopoly on, as human beings – creativity, memory, intelligence, etc. –, this reminder of Nietzsche is salutary. In other words, we will remain human beings as long as we still know how to rejoice for others.
This question of personal happiness and the happiness of others generates wonderful echoes between the Gospels and the Talmud, the main collection of commentaries on the Torah. Indeed, it is written in the latter that “when one attends a wedding, the merit is to speak pleasantly” (Berakhot 6b), and further: “He who enjoyed a wedding meal without celebrating the young bridegroom has ignored the five voices of this verse [4] : “The voice of rejoicing and gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the bride, the voice of those who say: Praise the Lord of Hosts”” (Jer 33, 11).
We then understand that the word that rejoices is almost part of the ritual tradition of taking: we take a little joy from ourselves to give it to the other, to add it to that of the other in this orchestra of voices to which we will bring the sound of our own.
This is exactly what Jesus means when he says: “He who has the bride is the bridegroom, but the bridegroom’s friend, who stands and hears it, has great joy because of the bridegroom’s voice. Therefore, this joy of mine is perfect” (Jn 3:29).
A civic act
However, it could well be that rejoicing for the other is not only a question of ethics of the relationship with the other, but also a social question. Indeed, further in the Talmud, Nahman Ben Isaac goes so far as to affirm that celebrating the young bridegroom is “righting one of the ruins of Jerusalem” (Jer 33, 11). Rejoicing for your neighbor is almost a social contract.
When the prophet Nehemiah returns from exile to Jerusalem, he understands that the spiritual reconstruction of the people through the Temple must be inextricably linked to their social reconstruction so that individuals are not juxtaposed next to each other, but that they are connected to each other… Like the stones of the walls.
It is also not insignificant that Pope Leo XIV constructed the encyclical Magnifica humanitas around the metaphor of the reconstruction of Jerusalem by the prophet Nehemiah, in opposition to the construction of the Tower of Babel. If there is no collective, if the cement used is not the sense of otherness, there is no reconstruction possible. It is not only a question of humanity to be preserved, it is a question of living together to be cultivated. Joy for others then becomes a civic act!
Are we capable, in France, of rejoicing for each other? A solid social contract is not only made up of laws, rights and standards, it must also be made up of our shared sorrows and joys. Learn to rejoice in the same things and lament the same things… Faced with French fractures, this is also the question that the candidates for the presidential election will have to answer!
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