שמחה · Joy as an obligation, and melancholy as an enemy

Hasidism makes simcha a duty and atzvut — sadness, and specifically the sadness that comes from taking stock of your own failures — an adversary to be fought. The Tanya is explicit: bitterness at a fault is permitted and useful; the heavy, flat despair that follows it is the animal soul's most effective weapon, because a person in it does nothing.

⭐⭐ Read as psychology it is startlingly modern, and read as doctrine it is a direct attack on the ascetic tradition it replaced. The generation before the Besht fasted and afflicted itself. Hasidism said that a body ground down cannot serve, and that the depression which follows self-scrutiny is not humility but a trap. ⚠ It is not an instruction to feel cheerful. It is an instruction about what to do when you do not.