With Tisha B’Av just behind us and the rampant antisemitism around the globe, it would be easy to have a bleak outlook, one that would dampen our happiness and joy.
However, it is at times like these that I am reminded of Yonatan Perez, who was injured in Gaza on Oct. 7 and insisted on keeping his wedding date a few weeks later – despite his wounds and the devastating uncertainty about his brother Daniel’s fate.
By doing so, he gave us something precious: permission to live. In a very real sense, there was something deeply moving about watching this man limp down the aisle to marry the love of his life.
I’ll be honest – initially, like so many others, my instinct was to pause everything after Oct. 7. Push off the celebrations, dim the lights, and wait for better times. We postponed my daughter’s bat mitzvah, scheduled for right after the holidays in October 2023.
The family wasn’t coming from America, and everything felt impossibly heavy.
But then I watched that video of Yonatan’s wedding. The joy on their faces wasn’t forced or fake; it was authentic, radiant, and necessary. I realized we were witnessing something ancient and profound: the Jewish art of holding both sorrow and celebration in the same heart.
Throughout this prolonged conflict that Israel has found itself in, there have been countless examples of this style of resilience – of families who have lost loved ones or are stuck in limbo waiting for family members to return – but who have continued to find real joy in life.
This isn’t new wisdom. Our ancestors mastered this delicate balance thousands of years ago. The biblical character of Job, stripped of everything he held dear, still found reason to praise God. He still managed to rebuild his life and family at the end of the story.
The Israelites, fresh from slavery, after having everything taken from them, danced at the Red Sea in the joy of God’s salvation, even though they had lost so much as slaves.
Generation after generation, we’ve learned that joy isn’t the absence of sorrow; it’s the courage to celebrate in the face of it.
The stories from Oct. 7 and beyond have become our modern blueprints for resilience. Take Jen Airley, who lost her son Binyamin in Gaza. When her next son’s bar mitzvah approached, she sought rabbinic guidance, worried about celebrating amid such profound loss.
The rabbi’s response was stunning: don’t just have the bar mitzvah. Make it the biggest, most joyous celebration possible. Your son deserves all the joy in the world, and this is what you need to bring into the world.
As Jen told me, “We cry and we celebrate. We have a full heart and a broken heart. We just carry it all.” We can carry the pain and still embrace the joy. We can mourn our losses while celebrating our blessings. It’s not about forgetting or diminishing our sorrow; it’s about refusing to let darkness extinguish our light.
This lesson echoes through our history. My grandfather exemplified this wisdom. He lost his first wife and two children in the Holocaust – everything that made life meaningful. Yet he didn’t retreat into permanent mourning.
He married my grandmother, had more children, and built a new life. Not because he loved his first family less, but because he understood that love multiplies when we keep creating it.
I’ve watched this pattern repeat countless times since Oct. 7. Families who’ve lost everything are finding ways to celebrate. Soldiers are getting engaged on the front lines. Communities insist on having weddings and bar mitzvahs even as they bury their dead.
There’s Alon Mesika, who lost his son Adir, now gifting hundreds of engagement rings to soldiers because he believes the answer to Oct. 7 is rebuilding as many Jewish homes as possible.
The guilt of being happy
The guilt is real, though. How can we celebrate when our brothers and sisters are being held hostage? How can we rejoice when families are in mourning? How can we feel joy when so many live in arrested fear?
These questions haunted me until I realized: our joy isn’t selfish – it’s essential. It’s an act of resistance, a declaration that evil won’t win, and that life will continue. On a personal level, we are finding joy because those who are missing can’t, but they would want us to as an act of defiance. They, too, would rejoice if they could.
Our sages understood this. They didn’t view celebration and mourning as contradictory but as complementary. The same tradition that gave us elaborate mourning rituals also insisted we rejoice at weddings, that we sanctify life’s passages, and that we keep creating, nurturing, and building. The Jewish calendar also reflects this, often putting sad days immediately before joyous festivals.
This isn’t about toxic positivity or forcing smiles through tears. It’s about recognizing that authentic joy, the kind that acknowledges pain but chooses hope, is revolutionary. When we marry, when we have children, and when we celebrate milestones, we’re not ignoring suffering.
We’re answering it with the most powerful statement possible: we will not be defeated.
The families who’ve given us permission to celebrate again understand something crucial. They know that their loved ones died so that we could live more fully, love more deeply, and build more boldly. Our joy honors their memory; our silence would betray it.
So yes, we’ll keep sharing our joy. We’ll keep celebrating. We’ll keep building Jewish homes, and raising Jewish children, and finding reasons to rejoice. Not because we’re naive about the world’s darkness, but because we’re inheritors of an ancient wisdom that knows light is stronger than shadow, love more powerful than hate, and life more enduring than death.
The Jewish future depends not on our ability to avoid sorrow – which is impossible – but on our commitment to finding joy despite it. That’s how we’ve survived for thousands of years. That’s how we’ll continue to thrive.
In the end, Yonatan Perez limping down that aisle wasn’t just getting married. He was carrying forward a tradition as old as our people: the radical act of choosing life, again and again, no matter what tries to stop us.
And that, perhaps, is the most beautiful sign of resilience.
The writer is the chief communications officer and global spokesperson for Aish, following a career as an award-winning producer and marketing executive with HBO, CNN, and Food Network. She is also an eight-time bestselling author.