For my last response paper, I decided that I wanted to attend a Jewish service. Since I had missed the pre arranged field trip to go with the school, I decided that I would grab a friend, and make a day out of driving up to Park City to go to the Temple Har Shalom. We set off on our forty minute drive, and finally came upon the Temple. The temple itself was very intriguing to the eye, it was a mix of brick and what looked like maple wood, the architecture was interesting and had a very modern feel to it. The inside was beautiful, and very spacious. There were chairs set up and tables, and fire places, of course there were Israeli flags hanging from different locations. When we first got in, we first just walked around and marveled …show more content…

He talked about how he realized that happiness was actually found many places in Judaism, the first of which would be the Tanakh or Jewish bible, one of the sons of Jacob is named Asher, meaning happy. He talks about how the word happy is found most often in Psalms and Proverbs, and mentions that the very first word in the very first Psalms is happy, he then repeats the first Psalm, first in Hebrew and then in English. He explains the Psalms which basically says that a person is happy when he or she has a strong moral compass, and is not persuaded by liars and cheaters. He mentions Psalms 84 and mentions that the Psalms is so important that it is the first phrase in one of the most important prayers of the Shabbat, the prayer in English roughly means “The Happy Prayer”. The point to his message was that being close to God, and more so being religious and studying God and religion brings people happiness. He talks about a poll that was done with 600,000 Americans which showed that people who considered themselves religious or very religious said they were much happier than those who said they were moderately religious or not religious at all. My favorite part of the service was when the Torah was read. The reading of the Torah was done