Eve, Noah and Sarah - Three Who Sought Happiness

Drunkenness of Noah, etching by Marc Chagall

Edited from my response to Ben R. on the thread More Advice from the Sages

Eve was searching for happiness. Eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge promised to bring on a certain sensitivity to sensual experience that was until then totally foreign to man who was still utterly oblivious to such sophisticated notions as the potential for extracting personal pleasure from basic biologic functions. Her error was in thinking that this sensitivity to sensual experience would make mankind happy. Instead it brought misery. This sensitivity cursed him to be perpetually discontent, prone to the worst kind of degradation and enslaved to his appetite for pleasure stimulus.

Noah figured that if Eve failed to find happiness through sensuality, he would succeed in unlocking the secret to happiness through its opposite - numbness. When he left the ark, he deliberately intoxicated himself on wine so as to induce a state of insensitivity to sesnual experience. This failed however because, in his oblivion, he was abused and ashamed.

Finally, Sarah successfully discovered the key to happiness, not through sensual sensitivity and not through numbness. She rose above both extremes and found happiness in surrender. Through selflessness one is neither sensitive nor numb. One just is. One can feel without being overly-sensitive. One can remain above the fray without being numb. One is open to feeling the full range of life's experience without personalizing the stimuli. And that is true happiness.