Judaism has an ascetic tradition and it lost. There were Jewish fasters and hair-shirt penitents in every period, and the mainstream steadily ruled against them: a nazirite who abstains from wine must bring a sin offering, the Talmud says a person will have to answer for permissible pleasures they denied themselves, and the codes discourage private fasting beyond the fixed days on the grounds that a weakened person serves God worse. Against that, simcha is legislated: you shall rejoice in your festival, and the tradition specifies how — meat, wine, new clothes, and making sure the poor, the orphan and the widow are at the table, because there is no rejoicing in a household that eats alone. Hasidism made joy a spiritual technology. Nachman of Breslov, who suffered severe depression himself and wrote about it with unusual directness, taught that it is a great commandment to be always joyful and that a person should force themselves into gladness the way you would force a friend to dance. The result is a religion whose response to catastrophe has repeatedly been a wedding.