You Shall Rejoice
by Andrew Evans
One of the repeated refrains of Parashat Re'eh is surprisingly simple:
"You shall rejoice before the Lord your God."
The command appears again and again as Moses describes the pilgrimage festivals. Joy is not presented as a reward after everything goes well. It’s a mitzvah. Israel is commanded to rejoice together before God.
At first glance, this command assumes a great deal. It assumes people can travel to the place God chooses. It assumes they can gather with family and neighbors. It assumes they can participate in communal celebration.
For many disabled people, those assumptions don't always hold.
Some of us cannot make the trip. Some cannot tolerate the noise or crowds. Some are homebound by illness or pain. Some cannot afford the travel. Some communities remain physically or socially inaccessible despite their best intentions.
So what happens to the commandment to rejoice when the celebration itself is inaccessible?
I don't think the answer is that the command disappears. Nor do I think the answer is simply, "Try harder to be joyful."
The Torah never commands toxic positivity. Joy is not the denial of grief, pain, or limitation. The same Torah that commands rejoicing also gives us words for lament, protest, and mourning. We are not asked to pretend our suffering isn't real.
Instead, I hear two complementary obligations in Re'eh.
The first belongs to the community.
If rejoicing is a mitzvah, then communities have a responsibility to make participation possible. Accessibility is not simply a matter of hospitality or kindness. It is part of enabling one another to fulfill a commandment. A festival where disabled people cannot fully participate is missing something essential, not because disabled people have failed to show up, but because the community has not yet made room for everyone's joy.
The second obligation belongs to each of us.
When circumstances prevent us from joining the celebration we imagined, we are still invited to seek moments of joy wherever we are. That isn't settling for less. It’s trusting that God can meet us there, too.
Some of the deepest joy I've experienced during seasons of disability hasn't happened in crowded sanctuaries or around bustling holiday tables. It has happened from my bed, laughing with friends over Animal Crossing or Mario Party, connected through a screen to people hundreds of miles away. It has happened in quiet conversations, in a puppy curled up beside me, in watching rain fall outside my window, in the small reminders that I still belong to people who love me.
Those moments don't replace communal celebration. They remind me that joy isn't confined to a particular location or a particular kind of body.
Perhaps that is part of what Re'eh teaches us.
The mitzvah is not simply to attend the festival. The mitzvah is to cultivate joy before God. Sometimes that happens in a sanctuary. Sometimes it happens in a hospital room. Sometimes it happens from bed with a Nintendo Switch in our hands and dear friends on the other side of the internet.
The community's responsibility is to make joy as accessible as possible.
Our responsibility is to remain open to finding joy where we are.
Neither responsibility excuses the other. We should never use personal resilience to justify inaccessible communities, nor should inaccessible communities convince us that joy is no longer available to us.
Re'eh reminds us that joy is both shared work and sacred practice. We help create it for one another, and we keep searching for it ourselves, trusting that God's presence is not limited to the places we once expected to find it.
Andrew Evans is a writer and educator whose work explores questions of meaning, community, and lived experience. Drawing on spiritual tradition, personal reflection, and social analysis, Andrew’s writing attends to the ways people make sense of their lives and responsibilities to one another.
