More than two thousand years ago, Aristotle taught that happiness is not something we stumble upon by chance. A fulfilling life is built through daily choices, good habits, and strong character.

Jewish tradition expresses a similar idea: true happiness does not come from wealth, honor, or comfort alone, but from living a life of purpose, gratitude, kindness, and closeness to God.

Modern psychology increasingly confirms what both Aristotle and our sages understood long ago: lasting happiness is rooted in character.

1. Courage

A happy person is not someone without fears, but someone who does the right thing despite fear—whether in family life, business, or matters of faith.

2. Self-control

Real freedom means mastering our impulses instead of becoming enslaved by them. Discipline in eating, speaking, spending, and technology creates inner peace.

3. Generosity

Happiness grows when we learn to give—through charity, hospitality, and helping others—while maintaining balance and responsibility.

4. Excellence

Whatever we do, whether raising children, studying Torah, or earning a living, we should strive to do it with dignity and integrity.

5. A sense of purpose

A fulfilled person focuses on what truly matters: family, Torah, community, and the values that endure beyond temporary pleasures.

6. Kindness

Strength is not measured by anger but by the ability to respond with patience, compassion, and respect.

7. Honesty

A happy person knows his strengths and weaknesses. He neither exaggerates his accomplishments nor hides from his shortcomings.

8. Justice and fairness

True character means seeking what is right, not merely what benefits us personally.

9. Forgiveness

People who hold on to resentment imprison themselves. The ability to forgive and to overlook small offenses brings emotional freedom.

10. Humility

Humility is not thinking less of ourselves; it is recognizing that our talents and blessings are gifts entrusted to us for a greater purpose.

Por Fernando Mongelos para Clarín 

STEP DOWN ONE RUNG

Young people all over the world are finding it harder and harder to get married. And in the face of that difficulty, all kinds of metaphysical help appear: segulot, amulets, Tehilim lists with a guarantee. But they don’t always work.

Today I want to share a segula that does work — and it comes guaranteed by more than two thousand years of wisdom. It is in the Gemara, Masekhet Yebamot 63, and it consists of four words: נחית דרגא ונסיב איתתא — nachit darga unsib iteta — “go down one rung and take a wife.”

What the Sages are saying is this: don’t look for someone who is above you. Look for someone who likes you.

I once asked a single young man, past thirty, why he was still single when B”H there were so many good candidates around him. He gave me the same answer they all give me: “Rabbi, I need to feel attracted to the girl. And the girls I’m attracted to pay no attention to me!”

What he is saying, without realizing it, is that he needs someone one rung above him. A level of beauty higher than his own; sweeter than he is, more charming, better sense of humor, better family. And it never occurs to him that the girl one rung above him may be doing exactly the same thing: looking at the young men who are above her, or on her own rung.

There is the vicious circle. And it is a destructive one. If everyone is looking for an upgraded version of themselves, then no one is looking at the good people who actually are available. There is no shortage of candidates; the problem is that everyone is looking in the same direction — too far up.

There is a paradoxical phrase that is unfortunately not rare, and it sums up the whole problem: “I lost interest in her the moment I realized she liked me.”

A person who is interested in you is not worth less for being interested. It makes no sense to follow the conqueror’s instinct and chase the impossible girl. That is exactly the mechanism this segula comes to break.

“Go down one rung” — not below your level, but below where you were looking! So if you truly want to get married, repeat these four words three times, every night — nachit darga unsib iteta — and start searching in the right direction: someone at your level, someone who already likes you.

Suddenly you will discover that the candidates are not few.

Our Sages understood beauty in exactly the opposite way from how the modern world understands it.

For Greek culture — and for contemporary culture, which in this respect is Greece’s heir — beauty is an objective fact, already there before anyone falls in love. You fall in love because you found beauty.

But for the Jewish mind it is precisely the reverse: the perception of beauty is the result of love, not its cause.

“I don’t love you because I find you beautiful. I find you beautiful because I love you.”

The best example is our own children. The neighbor’s four-year-old girl may be adorable. But for me, there is no creature in the universe more beautiful than my daughter. Or my granddaughter. Why? Because I love her. And loving her, she seems to me the most beautiful girl in the world. I cannot see her any other way.

If beauty comes afterward, then the right question on a first date is not “Am I attracted to her?” but “Is this someone I could come to love?”

Most of the couples I know felt neither immediate attraction nor automatic rejection on their first dates. They were emotionally parve. And since the head said yes, they invested time in the relationship. The emotions were nourished by time spent together, by knowing one another, by sharing some things and debating others. And that is when the attraction arrived.

That is what’s normal. The other thing is what you see in the movies.

From here comes a very practical segula: if you are going out with someone of good middot and a good family, give the attraction time. Time, and getting to know the other person, do their work.

When someone asks me what matters most in a shidukh — beyond a decent family and compatible religious and moral values — for me, it is that the person be “easy going.” The opposite of “complicated.” Easy going is someone who knows how to let things go; in Hebrew, מעביר על מדותיו. Someone capable of saying yes to an idea that isn’t theirs. And capable of changing their mind intelligently.

Think about what might wear a marriage down. It isn’t the big decisions — those come along only once in a while. It’s the small arguments, which are endless: where do we spend the first night of Pesach, what do we name the baby, are we going to this wedding or not, and who is right about what was said at Shabbat dinner. A marriage can be fifty years of minor disagreements. With an easy going person, each of those disagreements is simply a conversation. With a “complicated” person, each of those conversations can turn into a trial! Evidence must be presented, witnesses called, and a verdict awaited — a verdict that never comes, because the appeal remains open forever.

Modern psychology has a name for easy going. Of the five great traits that define a personality,   Jordan Peterson insists on one he calls agreeableness: the disposition to cooperate, to yield, to put peace above being right. Its opposite, the disagreeable person, is the one who needs to win. And there you have the shortest definition I know of what to avoid:

Someone who cares more about winning the argument than arriving at the truth.

With that person, every disagreement becomes a battle that someone has to lose. And in a marriage there is no such thing as one person winning: when one of the two loses, both lose. You won the argument but lost the evening.

Our Sages said it first, and in four words. In Pirqe Abot they describe four temperaments, and the best of them all they call a chasid: kashe likh’os venoach lirtsot — slow to anger, easy to appease. It is the exact definition of “easy going.” This is not an American concept: it was in the Mishna eighteen hundred years ago. Notice that the Mishna does not ask us to never get angry. It doesn’t exist — and anyone who claims to never get angry is not telling the truth. It asks for two measurable things: that anger be slow to arrive, and quick to leave. The first protects your wife or your husband; the second protects the marriage.

One important clarification: easy going does not mean weak. It doesn’t mean having no opinions or convictions, or saying yes to everything to avoid conflict — that has another name, and it isn’t good for a marriage either, because the one who swallows everything for ten years explodes in year eleven. The easy going person has positions and defends them. The difference lies in the goal: they argue to understand, not to win. They can say “you’re right” without feeling they lost something. They can say “I was wrong” without their self-esteem collapsing. That is, perhaps, the simplest test of all: notice how hard it is for the person you are dating to pronounce those three words — “I was wrong.” There are charming, brilliant, successful people who have never said them in their lives.

And how do you detect this on three or four dates, when everyone is showing you their best version? Because easy going is not something you ask about — nobody answers “No. I’m complicated.” It is something you observe.

A practical test: Change your plans at the last minute and see what happens: the restaurant is closed, it’s raining, what you had planned fell through. The reaction to a ruined plan says more than three hours of conversation. Watch how they treat the waiter when the food is late, and how they talk about the driver who cut them off in traffic. And above all: disagree with them about something small. Not to provoke — to see. Can he or she hold a small disagreement without it turning into something big? Does he listen to you, or she is  just waiting for her turn to answer?

Whoever passes those tests without knowing they were tests — that’s the one you can start talking seriously with.

This Wednesday night, July 22, we will begin the fast of Tisha Be’av, the national day of mourning of the Jewish people. Why this date? Our rabbis (Mishna, Taanit 4:6) enumerate five tragedies that took place on the 9th of Av.

1. HET HAMERAGELIM (ca. 1450 BCE): When the Jewish people were in the desert, on their way to the Promised Land, the crisis of the spies took place. Upon their return from exploring the land of Canaan, the spies convinced the people that conquering the land would be impossible. In a terrible act of ingratitude, the people reproached God for having liberated them from Egypt, and implied that He would not be able to help them conquer the Land of Israel. God decreed that everyone over the age of twenty would not enter the Promised Land, but would wander in the desert for forty years until that generation died out. The night the people cried and complained to HaShem, showing their lack of trust in Him, was the night of the 9th of Av.

2. HURBAN HABAYIT HARISHON (586 BCE): In the days of Tsidkiyahu, the last king of Yehuda, the Babylonians laid siege to Yerushalayim on the 10th of Tebet. The siege lasted two and a half years. The people had no provisions, food, or wood; thousands died of starvation and epidemics. On the 9th of Tammuz the Babylonians breached the wall and entered the city, pillaging, killing, and destroying. Still, the Bet HaMikdash kept functioning, and sacrifices were offered. On the 17th of Tammuz, for the first time since the days of the Exodus, the daily sacrifice (korban haTamid) was discontinued. On the 7th of Av, the Babylonians entered the Bet HaMikdash and profaned it. On the 9th of Av, close to sunset, they ignited the fire that burned our Bet HaMikdash through that night and the entire following day. Thousands of Jews were slaughtered, enslaved, or exiled to Babylonia. The story of the destruction of Yerushalayim and its desolation is told in Megilat Ekha.

3. HURBAN HABAYIT HASHENI (68 CE): On the 17th of Tammuz the Romans broke through the walls protecting Yerushalayim. During the following three weeks they pillaged the city, destroyed everything in their path, and killed tens of thousands of Jews. On the 9th of Av, after desecrating the Sanctuary, Titus destroyed our second Bet HaMikdash. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed, sold into slavery, or exiled. Our rabbis explained that the Jews of that generation were divided and fighting among themselves (sinat hinam) — and that the Romans destroyed a Bet HaMikdash that “was already destroyed,” because when the Jews are not united, HaShem’s presence does not rest among them.

4. NILKEDA BETAR (135 CE): The Jews revolted again against the Roman empire, this time with the approval of great rabbis and leaders, among them Rabbi Akiba. The Bar Kokhba revolt was crushed by the emperor Hadrian. The city of Betar, the Jews’ last stand against the Romans, fell on Tisha Be’av. Hundreds of thousands of Jews — according to the Gemara, even more — were slaughtered, and their bodies were left unburied.

5. NEHERASH HAHEKHAL: Around the same period, also on a 9th of Av, the Temple’s holiest area and its surroundings were plowed over by the Roman general Turnus Rufus. Yerushalayim was turned into a pagan city, renamed Aelia Capitolina, and Jews were forbidden to enter it.

OTHER TRAGEDIES THAT HAPPENED ON THE 9TH OF AV

1096: The First Crusade began on the 9th of Av, destroying the Jewish communities of France and the Rhineland and killing thousands of Jews in its first months.

1290: The Jews were expelled from England on the 9th of Av (July 18, 1290).

1492: The Jews were expelled from Spain, after living there for more than six centuries. The Edict of Expulsion forced the Jews to leave the country by the end of July; Tisha Be’av fell on August 1st. Estimates of the Jewish population of Spain before the expulsion vary: some sources mention 250,000; the historian Juan de Mariana speaks of 800,000; others estimate 600,000. Roughly a third remained as “conversos”; a third were killed or died while fleeing Spain and Portugal (from which the Jews were expelled in 1497); and a third managed to escape and establish themselves in Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, Turkey — the largest colony of Spanish refugees — Greece, Egypt, Syria, and Erets Israel (Safed and Yerushalayim).

IN MODERN TIMES

Germany entered World War I on August 1–2, 1914 — the 9th of Av — setting in motion the upheaval of European Jewry whose aftermath led to the Holocaust.

On August 2, 1941 — the 9th of Av — SS commander Heinrich Himmler received the formal approval of the Nazi Party for the “Final Solution,” the plan that led to the murder of a third of the world’s Jewish population.

On July 23, 1942 — the 9th of Av — the mass deportation of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka began.

And on the 10th of Av: the AMIA bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires killed 85 people and injured 300 (July 18, 1994). And Israel’s unilateral disengagement from Gush Katif — haHitnatkut — began on the 10th of Av, August 15, 2005.

THE PROBLEM

On the Shabbat before Tisha Be’av we read a special Haftara from the book of Yeshayahu (1:1–27). It is known as “Hazon,” from its first word, and it gives this Shabbat its name: Shabbat Hazon. In this prophetic vision, Yeshayahu rebukes the inhabitants of Yerushalayim and describes the sins that would eventually lead to the destruction of the first Bet HaMikdash.

But what exactly was their sin? At first glance, it seems strange. These were not people who had abandoned the Temple. On the contrary: they came to the Bet HaMikdash constantly. They offered sacrifices. They celebrated the festivals. They prayed. And yet God, through His prophet, tells them something devastating (1:15): “When you stretch out your hands in prayer, I will turn My eyes away from you. Even if you multiply your prayers, I will not listen. Your hands are full of blood.”

How can we understand this? These people practiced every ritual in the Temple — but outside the Temple they stole, exploited the weak, bribed judges, and corrupted justice. And they saw no contradiction between these behaviors. In their minds, everything was in order. They fulfilled their obligations toward God in God’s house, and what they did in their businesses, in their courts, in the marketplace, was not something that should concern God.

THE SOURCE OF THE PROBLEM

To understand this mentality, we have to remember the world they lived in. In the ancient pagan world, every god had an address. Ba’al had his temple, Kemosh had his, Marduk had his sanctuary. Each god “lived” in his sanctuary — exclusively. There the gods received their offerings, and there — and only there — they had power and jurisdiction. Outside his temple, the god had no eyes, no presence. What his worshipers did in their homes or their business dealings was of no interest to the gods — and perhaps even beyond their reach. Religion was a transaction conducted at the god’s residence: you brought gifts, and if the god was satisfied, he would spare you from his wrath.

The Jews of Yeshayahu’s generation had absorbed this mentality from the pagans around them — and applied it to the God of Israel. They treated the Bet HaMikdash as if it were a pagan temple: the place where HaShem lives. Inside, they were scrupulously religious. Outside, they acted as if God could not see them — as if His presence ended at the Temple gates.

MELO KOL HAARETZ KEBODO

Jewish monotheism is not reduced to believing in ONE God. First of all, it is the belief that this God is the only power — to the exclusion of every other god. Second, the God of Israel is invisible: He has no body. He is pure “existence” (or “consciousness,” if you want to use a modern word). And third, the God of Israel is omnipresent. He is everywhere. He sees what we do and knows what we think (consciousness is indeed a good word).

This was the great mistake of that generation, and it is the mistake Yeshayahu came to denounce: they ignored the omnipresence of God. HaShem is not a local deity who resides in a building in Yerushalayim. He is the Creator of heaven and earth. The Bet HaMikdash was never His exclusive residence, but our meeting point with Him — the place where we come to His presence, not the place where His presence is confined. As Shelomo HaMelekh said when he inaugurated that very Temple, recognizing God’s omnipresence: “The heavens and the heavens of the heavens cannot contain You — how much less this house that I have built” (Melakhim I, 8:27).

GOD’S EYES

A God who is everywhere sees everything. He is present in the courtroom when the judge takes a bribe. He is present in the marketplace when the scale is rigged. He is present when the widow and the orphan are turned away. And therefore, for the God of Israel, there is no such thing as religion inside the Temple and “private life” outside it. A person who is pious in the sanctuary and corrupt in his business has not understood who God is. He is worshiping HaShem as if He were Ba’al.

This is why God rejects their sacrifices and their prayers. Not because He does not want them — but because they are addressed, so to speak, to the wrong god: to a small, local, bribable deity who does not exist.

And this is also why the door remains open. Yeshayahu tells them that they are not condemned. Since their sin was moral, the remedy is moral (1:16–17): “Wash yourselves, purify yourselves. Remove your evil deeds from before My eyes. Stop doing evil. Learn to do good. Seek justice, defend the oppressed, take up the cause of the orphan, plead for the widow.” Not one word about more sacrifices. The way back to the Temple runs through everything we do outside it.

The first Bet HaMikdash was destroyed, our Sages say, when it had already been emptied of its meaning — when it had been turned into the private residence of a local god, by people who forgot that the God of Israel fills all the earth. Remembering their mistake is our task on this Tisha Be’av: to live, inside and outside, before the same God.

From the 17th of Tammuz until the end of the 9th of Av we observe certain restrictions as an expression of mourning for the destruction of the Bet HaMikdash.

Weddings: No weddings are celebrated during these three weeks.

Shehecheyanu: We avoid eating a new fruit or wearing a new garment, which would require the beracha of Shehecheyanu.

Music: We refrain from listening to instrumental music or attending events with music.

From Rosh Hodesh Av

From the beginning of the month of Av we do not eat meat or drink wine, with the exception of Shabbat.

The Week of Tisha Be’av (שבוע שחל בו)

Our mourning reaches a higher level during the “week of Tisha Be’av,” which extends from the end of Shabbat Hazon — the Shabbat before Tisha Be’av — until the fast. This year, that week began on Saturday night, July 18, and extends until the fast ends.

In addition to the practices already mentioned, during this week we refrain from:

Laundry and Freshly Laundered Clothes: Doing laundry or taking clothes to the dry cleaners during this week is prohibited until after the fast. We also refrain from wearing freshly laundered clothing (except undergarments) until after the fast.

Haircuts and Shaving: It is prohibited to get a haircut or shave during this week until after the fast.

Bathing: We do not bathe or shower with hot water until after the fast. One may, however, wash for hygiene, washing the body in parts with a hand-held shower and warm water.

The Fast

Tisha Be’av begins Wednesday night, July 22 (8:20 pm in NY) and ends Thursday night, July 23 (8:49 pm).