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Here I go again about that Hebrew word firgun. It's one of those words you can’t unsee once you know it. It means the joy we feel when we see others happy—not for anything they’ve done for us, not because it benefits us in any way, but just because they’re happy.
My eyes filled with tears last night for someone else’s happiness. Not someone I knew. Not even someone in the same country.
My
wife and I were watching YouTube together, and, as algorithms do, it fed me
something it knew I’d like: a video of 200 people in a field singing Bruce
Springsteen’s Waitin’ on a Sunny Day.
Bruce Springsteen "Waitin' on a sunny day" - Over 200 Belgian musicians play for Bruce Springsteen
There they were, ordinary people singing with unbridled joy, their voices rising into the summer sky like birds that had forgotten what cages were. Something in that moment loosened something in me. When my wife stirred from her dream-slumber, began singing the chorus as sunbeams burst through the blinds. Scotland’s rare sunshine had found us.
But something deeper was happening.
Richard Dawkins, the renowned atheist and evolutionary biologist wrote:
“The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”
This made me pause.
Because if that were true; if the core of reality is truly indifferent, how do we explain firgun?
Why would we be wired to feel joy for someone else’s joy? Why would 200 strangers in another country move me to tears? Why would a wife, half-dreaming, wake up singing a song that connects her heart to mine?
Why do love, empathy, kindness, virtue, and sacrificial acts even exist in such a universe? Why does someone throw themselves in front of a train to save a child they don’t know? Why do we applaud goodness, even when it costs us?
You see, if we are merely the product of mindless evolution, if life is nothing more than survival and replication, then firgun is a liability. Altruism is wasteful. Empathy is inefficient. Kindness is, frankly, irrational.
But we know better. Our souls testify otherwise.
The world may sometimes appear indifferent, even cruel. But these moments—these little sunlit mercies—speak of something deeper. A moral inheritance. A spiritual dimension that no algorithm or formula can quite grasp.
We are not merely atoms and appetites. We are image-bearers of something greater. Something that smiles when we smile, that weeps when we weep. Something, someone, who planted the seeds of firgun in our hearts as evidence that love, not indifference, has the final word.
1 John 4:8 tells us who God is:
“God is love.”