January 26, 2012 · 7:00 pm

Give Your Brain a Rest

Generally, our minds have no problem with coming up with lots of ideas — it’s fairly easy for us to think about creating something new. And with perseverance, we can often turn our ideas into reality.

But too frequently, we don’t recognize which ideas should have just stayed in our minds until we’ve already expended our time, our energy and our resources — just think about New Coke, Qwikster or M. Night Shyamalan.

So is there way for us to better determine which ideas are worth pursuing in the first place, and which are not?

It turns out that there is. While hard work is the way ideas get actualized, rest is an effective way for us to evaluate our ideas.

In a recent article for Wired, Jonah Lehrer describes an experiment which shows the value of a mental break. In this study, 112 students were given two minutes to create as many solutions as possible to the problem of how to improve the experience of waiting on line for the cash register. Half the group was then told to go straight to work with no break, while the other half played a unrelated video game for two minutes, giving their brains a short respite.

While both groups came up with the same number of ideas, there was a huge difference in terms of how well they recognized good ideas. As Lehrer explains:

[G]iving the unconscious a few minutes…proved to be a big advantage, as those who had been distracted were much better at identifying their best ideas. (An independent panel of experts scored all of the ideas.) While those in the conscious condition only picked their most innovative concepts about 20 percent of the time — they confused their genius with their mediocrity — those who had been distracted located their best ideas about 55 percent of the time. In other words, they were twice as good at figuring out which concepts deserved more attention.

And yet it’s not simply taking a break that helps us evaluate our ideas — it’s also about using that rest to engender positive feelings. As Lehrer tells us, “Taking a break is important. But make sure you do something that makes you happy, as positive moods make us even better at diagnosing the value of our creative work.”

So rest and joy are two things that can help us assess our ideas before we try to transform them into reality. And those two aspects are what define one of Judaism’s signature contributions to the world — Shabbat.

Judaism recognizes that unbridled creativity isn’t all that constructive. And so Jewish tradition has even set up guidelines to help us deliberately stop creating.  According to the Mishnah, there are thirty-nine specific activities that are prohibited on Shabbat, which include lighting fires, writing, and cooking. The common theme among those thirty-nine items (called melakhot) is that they were the specific actions that the Israelites undertook when the were building the mishkan, the dwelling-place for God.

So even though building the mishkan was sacred work, the Torah reminds us that even sacred work needs to stop for one day a week. And to the Rabbis, that meant that no matter how important our work may be, on Shabbat, anything we want to make, anything we want to do, anything we want to design — it has to wait.

And yet taking a break is only part of Shabbat. While we are supposed to be intentionally non-creative on that day, the Rabbis also outline certain things we should do to help make Shabbat a day of joy and peace.  Not only are we supposed to shamor, “guard” Shabbat by avoiding certain tasks, we are also supposed to zachor, “remember” Shabbat by elevating our sense of holiness and delight.

So on Shabbat, we’re supposed to have a festive meal, with special food and a celebratory atmosphere. We’re supposed to be with friends and family — and to truly be with them. We’re supposed to read, to reflect, and to rediscover the blessings in our lives.

Ultimately, Shabbat is there to remind us that it’s far too easy for us to fall into the trap of constant business and constant busyness. And as Lehrer argues, constant creativity prevents us from distinguishing mediocrity from excellence.

So if we want to invest our precious resources in developing only our best ideas, then we need to structure our time so that we have an opportunity to stop creating, and give our brains a rest.

 

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December 28, 2011 · 10:29 pm

Getting our B’nei Mitzvah to Understand (and Love) Torah Study

Helping 13-year-olds understand a 3,000-year-old text is challenging, to say the least.

After all, trying to glean lessons from the Torah for 21st-century America is hard enough, even if you have some background in text study. So when you have only 13 years of life experience, go to religious school for only two hours twice per week, and are still learning the skills you need to write and speak effectively, it’s even harder.

Yet as our kids become b’nei mitzvah and create their d’var torah – the teaching they deliver about the weekly Torah portion on that Shabbat morning — we often miss a great opportunity. Not only can we help them understand the content of that particular Torah portion, we can also help them appreciate the process by which we can engage with serious Torah study.

In other words, we have a golden opportunity to use the “what” as a vehicle to develop excitement around the “how.”

Formulating Good Questions

At Temple Beth El, we wanted to help our students truly embrace the process of Torah study. So to prepare our b’nei mitzvah, we decided to experiment with the “Question Formulation Technique” (QFT), designed by Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana and outlined in their outstanding book Make Just One Change.

The purpose of the QFT is to shift how learning occurs: rather than having students respond to questions proposed by the teacher, the students themselves develop the questions that most effectively direct their own learning. After all, if the students are the ones posing the questions, then they will naturally develop a deeper level of ownership over their own learning.

The rules are simple — the teacher begins with a prompt that can lead to multiple lines of inquiry. For example, the teacher might write on the board something like, “Religion does more good than harm,” or “A synagogue should be a sacred and spiritual community.”

Then, in small groups, learners need to come up with as many questions about that prompt as they can. Their instructions are:

• Ask as many questions as you can.
• Do not stop to discuss, judge, or answer the questions.
• Write down every question exactly as it is stated.
• Change any statement into a question.

After creating their long list of questions, the learners then focus on the handful that speak to them the most — and so that’s the direction where the research, the discussion or the conversation goes. And so since the learners create their questions, and the learners then choose the ones that excite them the most, the paradigm shifts radically: instead of the teacher imparting information from the top down, the students are creating their learning from the bottom up.

Sacred Questions about Sacred Texts

In Judaism, questioning has always been a sacred activity. Throughout Jewish history, when we study Torah, we are asking questions like, “What might this verse mean? How can we read it in a new way? What other allusions does it have?” So applying the QFT was a natural way to help our b’nei mitzvah develop their divrei torah.

As part of our family education program, eight families came together about four months before their children become b’nei mitzvah. And we began by having them write a collective d’var torah, in order to help them understand the process. We focused on a passage from Deuteronomy 8: “You may say to yourself, ‘My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me.’ But remember Adonai your God, for it is God who gives you the ability to produce wealth…” (v. 17-18).

First, we unpacked what this meant — that we are not the sole producers of our success, but that we need to have a level of humility and gratitude if we have been blessed with wealth. The text doesn’t say, “wealth is bad,” but rather, “if you are wealthy, make sure you remember the true source of that wealth.”

I then wrote up four words on the board: “Gratitude for material things.” And then I told them to write down as many questions as they could about that idea, that they weren’t allowed to answer or discuss the questions, to write down every question exactly as it was stated, and to change any statement into a question. And then I simply walked around eavesdropping on the conversations.

Almost instantly, the families created a flood of questions. In less than five minutes, they had come up with over twenty different questions: “What’s the difference between what we want and what we need?” “How do we show gratitude?” “If we show gratitude, does it have to be towards God?” “What’s the difference between material and non-material things?” “What happens if you don’t show gratitude?” “If you lost all your material things, would you still show gratitude?”

The energy was palpable, as everyone was considering what it really meant to “show gratitude for material things.” After a short discussion, we decided to go in depth about how gratitude acts as a check on entitlement — an issue that is as relevant today as it was 3,000 years ago. We studied commentary, explored interpretations and shared our own opinions. And most crucially, the students now had a process to apply to the study of Torah, discovering ways to find meaning from the text.

So now, it was time to have them use this process on their own Torah portion.

They began by focusing on their specific verses that they would be reading, and came up with an eight-word description of the verses’ gist — “the special clothes Aaron wore,” “the detailed instructions for building the tabernacle,” “the laws of keeping kosher.” As two to three families joined together as a small group, each student’s summary acted as a prompt for creating a list of questions. After hearing and creating many, many possible questions, the bar or bat mitzvah student then chose the one question they would be most excited to research.

We then placed copies of Torah commentaries (The Torah: A Modern Commentary and The Torah: A Women’s Commentary) for all the families and said, “Take a look — see if you can find responses to your questions. What have other scholars had to say about what you’re wondering about?” For the next thirty minutes, families were poring over texts, excitedly yelling, “Oh! I found something!”, and began crafting their own thoughts. They proudly shared with me their ideas, and were so excited about what they themselves had created.

It was simply remarkable. Afterwards, the parents and the students shared how much they loved learning as a family, how much they enjoyed researching commentary on the Torah portion, and how smart and successful they felt as they drew lessons from the Torah. Not only did the quality of the divrei torah improve dramatically, but the students had clearly gained a new set of skills they could apply to study a whole range of texts, and perhaps most importantly, truly owned their learning process.

Building Skills for Life-Long Learning

Too often, preparing students to become bar or bat mitzvah feels like “studying for the test.” And as anyone who has ever “studied for the test” knows, the day after the test, all the information goes in one ear and out the other.

Instead, becoming bar or bat mitzvah should truly be about making a transition — namely, from being a child in the Jewish community to becoming an adult. And so as our 13-year-olds grow and develop, and as we celebrate their entrance into the Jewish community, we have an opportunity and a responsibility to teach them skills for life-long learning.

What are those skills? To be able to connect the present to the past and to the future. To be able to add their voice to a Jewish conversation that is 3,000 years old. And most of all, to be able to formulate good questions, since after all, what we learn is simply defined by the questions we ask.

So let’s help our students learn how to ask good ones.

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November 15, 2011 · 11:13 pm

Does Religion Make Your Brain Happy? An Interview with Science Writer David DiSalvo

Quite often, what makes us happy and what is actually good for us are directly at odds with each other. What worked for us evolutionarily over the millenia frequently becomes counter-productive in our current world. For example, fat was a scarce and valuable resource when Homo sapiens evolved on the African savannah, but with vending machines, Starbucks Trentas and the KFC Double-Down, what made our bodies happy millions of years ago are now things we should be trying to avoid today.

But if those same issues arise with our bodies, what about our brains? What do we do with our evolutionary cognitive history?

David DiSalvo, who writes about science, technology and culture for Scientific American, Forbes and Psychology Today, has a new book coming out entitled What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite. I had the opportunity to interview Mr. DiSalvo, exploring questions about the cognitive aspects of religion and atheism, hope and faith, certainty and doubt, and the creation of meaning.

1. You recently wrote a piece asking, “Religion vs. Atheism: Which Fights Dirtier?” If we wanted to tone down the anger on both sides, what would help facilitate a more productive discussion?

DD: I think the major thing would be for all of us to realize that we’re operating with essentially the same cerebral hardware, with all the foibles and biases contained therein. We often begin difficult discussions about belief (religious or otherwise) as if we are somehow set apart from the biases that plague the other person. In truth, we are all swimming in murky water, and there is nothing flawless or absolute about the iterative process of learning to navigate the waters with more clarity.

GM Response: I think DiSalvo is right — recognizing that we are all “swimming in the same murky water” allows to focus the question differently. Rather than asking someone, “Why do you believe in God?” or “Why don’t you believe in God?”, we can ask, “What do I believe? What is leading someone else to believe something different? And what are the consequences of my beliefs?”

My rule of thumb whenever I talk with anyone (believer, atheist, or anything in between) is, “Will this be a productive conversation?” I have rarely had productive conversations with people who are totally certain that God has told them what to do, and I have rarely had productive conversations with people who are totally certain that there is no God (and there’s a big difference between “being certain there is no God” and “not being certain there is a God”). But I have had many wonderful conversations with people across the spectrum of belief about the question, “How can I create more fulfillment in my life and make a more positive impact on the world?”

So he’s right on — we all need to realize that we are not set apart from the biases others have. Accepting that none of us has absolute truth and that we all see the world through our own imperfect lens is what allows us to engage in fruitful dialogue, rather than vituperative attacks and counter-attacks.

2. You say in the introduction to your book, “If we could live our lives without bias, distortions and delusions involved, the world would truly be idyllic.” Yet hope and optimism — which certainly bias and distort the way we view the world — are crucial aspects for our drive to make ourselves and our world better. So when do we need to look at the world as it is, and when do we need to envision the world as it could be? How do we reconcile those two ways we look at the world?

DD: The “bias, distortions and delusions” I discuss in the book are outcomes of mismatches between several of our brains’ evolved tendencies and our social and cultural environments. My contention is that cultural evolution moves much faster than natural evolution; as a result, the built-in leanings of our brains are frequently as odds with the situations we face on a daily basis.

Hope and optimism are “biases” of a different sort – arguably, they are adaptive responses to the constant undercurrent of adversity we face as self-reflective, sentient beings living on this planet. Recently a solid body of research has emerged suggesting that optimism is actually an evolved trait (cognitive neuroscientist Tali Sharot’s work comes to mind).

Another way to describe the difference is by way of comparison. Would we be better off without, for example, restraint bias, which leads us to believe we can expose ourselves to more temptation than we can actually handle? Probably so. Would we be better off without the transformative power of hope that drives us to overcome obstacles and adversity in our lives? Certainly not.

GM Response: Actually, Tali Sharot’s book The Optimism Bias was one of the inspirations for this question. And I love the image on the cover of her book — a pair of glasses, with one lens clear and the other rose-colored.

And I think we need to look at the world through both of those lenses. The scientific lens can help us see the world as it is, since it strives to give us objectivity. The religious lens can help us see the world as it could be, since it strives to help us examine the subjective nature of our experiences.

It’s important to remember that hope and optimism are primarily subjective experiences — they cannot change reality, but they can change how we look at reality. They change how we feel about our lives, and they give us fuel to keep going when life becomes difficult. And in fact, I think that’s what draws people to religion — a desire to find a sense of purpose, meaning and hope, all in the context of a supportive community.

So as DiSalvo implies, even if hope and optimism aren’t rational, they are valuable. So yes, when it comes to objective truth, science needs to be the way we look at the world. But religion can help us enhance our subjective experiences, as it allows us to make moments powerful, to create deep connections with others, and to find hope and purpose.

3. You mention that one of the problematic things our brain does is to create meaning out of coincidence. But there’s a difference between believing that meaning is inherent (such as thinking that “clearly this was God’s plan”) and believing that we create meaning (such as asking, “How can I make sense of what’s going on?”). So do the same problems arise in creating meaning as they do when we believe meaning is inherent? What would it imply if “meaning” arose in different ways?

DD: Your question highlights one of the more frustrating aspects of being human. It is precisely because our brains evolved to “makes sense of what’s going on” that we stumble on pattern-based biases like the clustering illusion, and are prone to stringing together coincidences in search of an explanatory pattern. In a sense, we can’t escape this tendency no matter how aware of it we become, because pattern identification is so central to our brains’ reason for being.

What we can do, however, is short-circuit pattern detection on the verge of, or already going, haywire – as is the case, for example, with people who live their lives around certain sequences of numbers appearing as signs telling them how to think and act in given situations. Psychics and other hucksters exploit these sorts of tendencies, in effect making a living on peoples’ absorption in patterns.

Frequently, believing meaning is inherent goes hand-in-hand with searching out patterns to make sense of what’s going on. Once, for example, someone invests confidence in a psychic to tell him what the patterns in his life mean, it’s a short journey to believing that someone or something must be producing the patterns. Whether that thing is thought to be a personal God, or some impersonal force (“the universe” etc.) depends largely on the socio-cultural context that person lives within.

So, yes, I do think some of the same problems occur whether we are searching out or “creating” meaning as they do in believing meaning is inherent, because the underlying “meaning infrastructure” of our brains is prone to tendencies that we are all, in one way or another, subject to.

GM Response: I think we agree on what “meaning” is — it’s about how we place events and facts into a larger context, helping us make sense of the world. But for me, the most crucial question about meaning is how it arises — is it top-down, dictated and discovered, or is it bottom-up, self-owned and created? Since we all have a “meaning infrastructure,” who do we see as its builders?

Think about how we read a text. The author certainly has an intended meaning. But what the readers find in the text may be very different from what the author had in mind. Now, who owns the meaning of that text? While the answer is clearly both the author and the reader, it’s a major mistake for the reader to say, “I know what this author meant.” Instead, the reader needs to be able to say, “This is my own interpretation.”

So the problem with psychics, hucksters and religious fundamentalists is that they try to prevent the reader from creating their own interpretations. They encourage a top-down approach to meaning, and lead people to say, “This is what God / the universe / the Bible means.” But a bottom-up approach of creating meaning may be able to prevent that system from going haywire, since we can later edit or revise our interpretations.

We will always be looking for patterns and meaning — but I think there’s a big difference between thinking we “discover” meaning and realizing that we “create” meaning, since one implies an eternal, unchanging truth, and the other implies an ability to re-write as need be.

4. Why is doubt so valuable? And since our minds seek certainty, how can we embrace doubt more easily?

DD: Doubt is an applied “checks and balances” mechanism that is not unique to humans. My speculation is that it’s an adaptive trait that began evolving very early (well before human ancestors arrived on the scene) as a means to differentiate beneficial from harmful things in the environment, particularly when the differences were slight. We see this trait evidenced by primates and monkeys in lab studies: when offered grapes under two different conditions, one slightly more cumbersome than the other, a capuchin monkey will quite observably make a doubtful evaluation about the grapes with more strings attached.

In humans, the only true existential animal on the planet, doubt is elevated to far more abstract levels of evaluation (“is there a God?” and similarly high-level questions), but is also useful at lower levels such as determining if another person’s intentions are sincere. In that practical application, among others, doubt can save our lives.

The interesting thing is that to exercise doubt about meaning-laden positions (those involving belief and value judgments), we have to face off against other tendencies of our brains like the desire for stability and certainty. That’s what makes those high-level evaluations so spirited, tense, and frequently explosive. If someone is “certain” that their belief position is correct, someone else introducing doubt about that position is likely to set off fireworks. But it’s important that we have those discussions because peoples’ lives are directly affected by the outcomes.

GM Response: That face-off between doubt and certainty is absolutely one of the biggest challenges we face when we are engaging in conversation about beliefs and values. The challenge is how we embrace stability without it lapsing into absolutism.

One of my teachers, Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, talks about the need to be able to be committed without being certain. The analogy that I like is to a marriage. You are never certain when you get married what the future will bring, and if you are always looking for surety, you will never be satisfied. But at some point, even though you will never be certain, you make a decision to commit to this other person, because that’s how you will build a life and a relationship.

It’s similar to how we need to look at our worldview. In order for us to make an impact on the world, we need to stake our claim somewhere — we need to hold certain beliefs and values, because if we always we go, “I’m not sure, it could be this way, or it could be that way,” we become paralyzed and cannot make decisions.

So the goal should be seeking stability without requiring certainty and clarity — indeed, we can’t ever find certainty in science, religion or life in general. Instead, we need to make a commitment despite the lack of certainty, and use that sense of doubt for (as he says) a mechanism of “checks and balances.”

Because while certainty shuts down conversation and fosters a sense of arrogance, doubt can open up the dialogue and encourage humility.

–

DiSalvo argues that many of the things that make our brains happy are now more harmful than helpful. And some people place religion in that category, as well. Religion is like fatty foods, they claim — something we should outgrow and move beyond. But I think the better question is, what aspects of religion should we try to outgrow?

Because religion is not one thing. Religion has so many varied parts to it that rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater, we can try to move beyond the elements that are so counter-productive, and at the same time, try to keep the ones that are valuable.

Clearly, when religion fosters absolutism, certainty and a lack of critical thinking, it is doing more harm than good.

But we need hope and purpose in our life when it seems dark and difficult. We need to find ways to strengthen our commitments when we feel adrift. And we need a sense of community when we feel isolated and alone. Those are the things we can and should never outgrow — and so those are the things religion can and should offer us for today.

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November 4, 2011 · 1:33 pm

The Beauty in Science and the Beauty in Judaism

Think about the most inspiring piece of art you have ever looked at. Or the most powerful book you have ever read. Or the most moving play or movie you’ve seen.

Now — why did you find it so beautiful?

There were probably any number of reasons — it may have changed the way you thought about things. It might have emotionally affected you. It almost certainly stuck with you afterwards.

But despite the fact that whatever you chose was personal and subjective, there seem to be certain facets of beauty that cut across all genres, times and places. Educator Howard Gardner argues in his book Truth, Beauty and Goodness Reframed that there are three main elements of beauty: we find something beautiful if it is interesting, if it is memorable, and if it is has a “pull” to it, leading us to continually come back to it.

In fact, it’s that third factor, what he calls the “invitation to revisit,” that is the sine qua non of beauty. The most beautiful objects are ones we can’t seem to leave alone — there always seems to be more to them than meets the eye on first glance, and the more we experience them, the more we appreciate them. And Gardner explains that this “invitation to revisit” could arise from several possible factors: “one likes the experience, one has curiosity to learn or to understand better, or one has a feeling of awe…” (53)

But what’s fascinating is that two of those elements — curiosity and awe — are two of the driving forces behind both science and Judaism. They are what lead us to see their inherent beauty.

The beauty of science was eloquently described by Nobel-Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman, who talked about what he saw when looked at a flower:

As he says, while he could appreciate the surface beauty of a flower as well as anyone else, knowing about the science broadened and deepened his experience: “I see much more about the flower… I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty…It adds…[a]ll kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower.” So a fuller understanding of science gave him a richer sense of beauty. And notice what specifically what enriched it: curiosity and awe.

So how do these two elements give us a sense of beauty both in science and in Judaism?

Curiosity

As Feynman tells us, the more questions we can ask about something, and the more ways we can look it, the deeper our appreciation of it will be. Indeed, curiosity in science almost demands an “invitation to revisit,” asking how we can look at the same set of facts in a new way, and looking to see how an answer to one question leads to a whole host of new ones.

But that same process also guides the study of Jewish texts.

Study in Judaism begins with the Torah. But when we study Torah, we are not supposed to stop at the p’shat, the simple, literal level of the text. Instead, we are primarily seeking to create drashot, inerpretations of the text. We are asking, “What are the unspoken assumptions here? What other questions do we need to ask? What are the different ideas that this text is trying to teach, and how many different ways can we read it?”

We do this because while the text is static, we are dynamic. While we read the same words each day, each week, and each year in our prayerbook and in our Torah, what we take away from them changes. We revisit the same texts because when we repeatedly come back to the same words, we find new meaning in them and new ways to discover values that guide our actions. The text is the always the same — but we are not.

And so curiosity, asking new questions, always wondering “What else could this mean?”, leads us to revisit both scientific data and Jewish texts, and elevates our sense of beauty in both realms.

Awe

Science easily gives us a deep sense of wonder, whether we are looking out onto the vast reaches of space, or are examining how our mind works, or are wondering how the variegated species on this earth arose. But even as we intellectually explore those ideas, there will always be an emotional aspect to that experience that we cannot describe in words.

After all, when we feel a moment of awe, we are not seeking to analyze or describe it. Our most powerful experiences, our most wondrous moments, our most significant encounters simply cannot be put into words, let alone dissected and scrutinized. Indeed, it is that very inability to describe those experiences that makes them so beautiful.

And as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel explains in his landmark book God in Search of Man, that sense of ineffability is the root of religion, as well:

[I]n religious and artistic thinking, the disparity between that which we encounter and that which is expressed in words and symbols, no words and symbols can adequately convey. In our religious situation we do not comprehend the transcendent; we are present at it, we witness it. Whatever we know is inadequate; whatever we say is an understatement. We have an awareness that is deeper than our concepts; we possess insights that are not accessible to the power of expression…

The roots of ultimate insights are found…not on the level of discursive thinking, but on the level of wonder and radical amazement, in the depth of awe, in our sensitivity to the mystery, in our awareness of the ineffable. It is the level on which the great things happen to the soul, where the unique insights of art, religion and philosophy come into being.

[Our experience of God] is the result of wonder and radical amazement, of awe before the mystery and meaning of the totality of life beyond our rational discerning. Faith is the response to the mystery, shot through with meaning; the response to a challenge which no one can forever ignore. (116-117)

So no matter how often we look at a sunset, we will never cease to be amazed by it. No matter how accurately we understand the way babies develop in the womb, when we hold our child for the first time, we will never stop calling it “the miracle of birth.” We are simply overwhelmed by those experiences.

And so religion, as Heschel argues, is how we respond to that sense of awe. Religion doesn’t begin with trying to prove the existence of God. It doesn’t even begin with asking whether we “believe in God” or not. It begins with a moment of mystery. And even if we can scientifically explain that mystery, it will never lose its emotional impact.

Indeed, while curiosity broadens our minds, awe deepens our souls.

Turn it and turn it

Ultimately, it’s that combination of curiosity and awe, that mixture of breadth and depth, that joining of head and heart that allows us to see the beauty not only in science, but in Judaism, as well.

In Pirkei Avot, Ben Bag Bag taught that there is always more to Torah than meets the eye. And so we are to “turn it and turn it, because everything is in it.” (Avot 5:21) But it’s not that the Torah has all the answers — it’s that the more we turn it and turn it, the more we learn about ourselves and our place in the world.

Because there is beauty when we see connections that we had not made before. There is beauty when we discover things we never knew. And there is beauty when we realize just how much we don’t know.

After all, the most beautiful things are ones we keep coming back to — not because the objects themselves have changed, but because we ourselves are constantly discovering new levels of meaning within them.

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October 11, 2011 · 6:05 pm

Religion Can’t Be an End Unto Itself

These were the words I shared on Yom Kippur at Temple Beth El of Northern Westchester on Saturday, October 8. Enjoy!

As some of you may know, my wife Heather is a fiber artist. She creates quilts, wall-hangings and even three-dimensional structures based on Jewish texts and social justice themes. And for the last two years, she has been going to homeless shelters through New York City to talk to men, women and children, in order to turn their stories into a piece she is calling “Temporary Shelter.” It’s based on a sukkah, the temporary hut we build each fall on Sukkot, and evokes the Israelites’ wandering in the desert, the time when our ancestors were homeless.

“Temporary Shelter” will be traveling to different churches and synagogues throughout the City in November and December, but there was one church that had a rather unique idea. The Church of St. Francis Xavier in Chelsea wanted to host it, but they weren’t sure they’d be able to because of logistical reasons. “At first there was some concern that your piece would be too big with all the Christmas decorations and such,” said Cassandra Agredo, who directs Xavier Mission.  “Then someone suggested that instead of a stable, we could use your piece as the crèche for Jesus.  After all, Jesus was born a homeless baby.”

Heather didn’t  quite know how to respond to that offer. Her piece — which was based on a sukkah — as a creche? Would that be OK? How would she feel about it? So we talked about it. And the more we talked about it, the more we realized that this idea was a pretty cool idea — this Christian church wanted to sanctify the stories of predominantly Christian homeless New Yorkers by linking their stories to Christianity’s most sacred story, the birth of their Savior. But they would be doing it through a Jewish symbol made by a Jewish woman, who was making this piece because of her commitment to her Jewish values. And so we realized that this was a story about religion at its most nuanced and at its most complex in 21st century America.

Because for far too long, and even today, far too frequently, religion is far too simplistic. Often, religion is about trying to convince people that “my way is the only way.” But here, the church wasn’t looking to convert Heather to Christianity, and Heather wasn’t looking to have the church become Jewish. And yet at the same time, no one was moving in the other direction and simply proclaiming that “we all believe the same thing.” No, Heather was using very specifically Jewish language with her sukkah, and the church was using very specifically Christian language with its crèche. So it’s equally important to recognize that the church wasn’t watering down its Christianity, and Heather wasn’t watering down her Judaism. Miraculously, both the church and Heather were able to demonstrate both openness to the other and deep devotion to themselves. How did that happen? I think it’s because everyone realized that in 21st century America, for religion to work, religion cannot be an end unto itself. Instead, religion has to be a means to an end.

We don’t need to look far to see the problems of viewing religion as an end unto itself. At its very worst, religion tells people that if others don’t share our belief system, then they don’t deserve the most basic human rights, including their own lives. Nearly a thousand years ago, that is the ideology that fueled the Crusades. Ten years ago, it led 19 people to hijack four airplanes. And even earlier this week, it caused a group of people to burn down a mosque in Northern Israel. But even when religion doesn’t lead to violence, we still find stories here in the United States about the problems it creates. We hear about how religion leads people to reject the science of evolution and climate change, how it excludes and denigrates gays and lesbians, and how it fosters hubris and arrogance when people say “I know what God wants.” So as we hear so much about the worst of religion, we naturally ask, why would anyone want to become religious?

And the answer is, we wouldn’t. We deeply prize openness and acceptance, so we understandably and legitimately recoil against someone trying to convince us to change our belief system. We fight against the sense of superiority of “my way is the best way,” let alone “my way is the only way.” And we decry the violence that religion so easily fuels. So when we see all the evil that is done in the name of religion, we naturally want no part of it. But the truth is, the problem isn’t with religion per se. The problem is with seeing religion as an end unto itself.

And in fact, that’s what creates such tension for those of us who identify as a “religiously liberal Jew.” On the one hand, we know that the goal of Judaism is to make our world more just and our selves more whole. But at the same time, we want our children to have a strong sense of Jewish identity and strong Jewish values. And so in a world with more choices than ever before and more diversity than ever before, it’s hard to hold both of those ideas at the same time – how do we act as both a universalist and a particularist? That’s why so many people in the under-40 demographic are asking the very hard and yet very important question, “Why should I be Jewish?” They see all the evil that has been done in the name of religion, and so religion – including Judaism – is simply not compelling to them. But it’s because they are seeing Judaism presented as end unto itself.

So what it would look like if we didn’t focus on what it means to “be Jewish” or to “be religious”? After all, how do we even determine what it means to “be Jewish” or to “be religious”? Who decides the answers to those questions? What’s the metric we use to gauge if we’re being successful or not? The question isn’t “how Jewish are we?” or “how religious are we?” The real question is, “How can Judaism help us to become better people and to create a better world?” In short, we need to see Judaism not as an end unto itself, but as a means to an end.

And there are two analogies that I like. First, we can think of Judaism as a language to articulate our values, and second, we can view it as a lens through which we perceive the world.

Let’s start with language. Language is obviously designed to help us communicate, and there are certain similarities across all languages – there are nouns and verbs, certain ways that words can and can’t be put together into sentences, and even a limited number of sounds that the human larynx can produce. But no one speaks “language” – people speak English, or Hebrew, or Chinese, or French, or Swahili. Each of these languages has its own structure, its own grammar, its own way of talking about the world. And so while there are certain universal rules that undergird every human language, how those rules transform themselves into particular languages can vary quite widely.

Similarly, there are certain universal values that undergird human society. Our most basic values – respect, empathy, fairness – aren’t really “religious” values at all. They are human values. That’s why some formulation of the Golden Rule has been expressed in almost every time and every place in human history. So what Judaism gives is us a particular language to talk about those values.

Harvard professor Howard Gardner talks about the difference between “neighborly morality,” which every society is based on, and “the ethics of roles,” which talks about the specific responsibilities we have as family members, as friends, and as citizens. (Truth, Beauty and Goodness Reframed, 82-87) “Love your neighbor as yourself” is great, but it’s far too broad to apply to the all the complex ethical dilemmas we face. When we need to ask how we respond when someone wrongs us, or are wondering what the financial and legal responsibilities employers have to their employees, we need more than just “be fair” or “think about others.” We need to go in depth on those questions, to explore a variety of sources and responses, and then to create an answer that works for us. Judaism gives us particular ways to try to address those questions. Because in the same way no one speaks “language,” no one can live “morality.” We need specific approaches to talk about these ethical questions in order to try to answer them.

The second analogy for Judaism as a means is to give us is a way to look at the world through a particular lens. After all, what we see, and how we interpret what we see, are what we respond to in this world. There’s a story about a four-year-old boy who was obsessed with cement mixers, fire engines and all kinds of construction equipment. And one day, his uncle took him to a homecoming parade. There were football players, cheerleaders, the school band, even fireworks. But all the boy saw were the floats, led by big 4x4s. Afterwards, his uncle asked him what he thought about the parade. “I loved it!” the boy exclaimed. “That was the best truck parade I’ve been to!” (based on Stone, et al., Difficult Conversations, 31). So yes, there are facts in this world that we cannot change. But we determine what facts we pay attention to, and we determine how we interpret them.

And so Judaism leads us to see the world in particular ways. We are commanded to seek out blessings to celebrate. We are taught that our world is in need of repair and that we can do something about fixing it. We are told that every human being is to be viewed as having been created in the Divine Image, and is therefore worthy of infinite dignity. And we live our Jewish communal experiences the twin lenses of the Exodus from Egypt and the revelation at Sinai, which as Rabbi Elliot Dorff notes, “permeate Jewish liturgy and holidays.” (Dorff, To Do the Right and the Good, 4) And as inheritors of not only biblical but rabbinic tradition, we are to challenge, to question, to ask “how do we know this?” So there is a particularly Jewish lens through which we see the world.

But what’s so powerful about viewing Judaism in this way – as a language and as a worldview – is that it doesn’t preclude someone else from having a different language and a different worldview. When religion is a end unto itself, it’s a zero-sum game: “I’m right, you’re wrong.” But when religion is a means and not an end, we can honor the fact that many different methods can lead us to the same end – to a world of justice, compassion and peace. Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Baha’i, none of the above – they can all help us find meaning in our lives and help us build a better world.

And yet as we keep that vision in our mind’s eye, we also need to remember that we need a specific language and a particular worldview in order to help us get there. Writer Cynthia Ozick once taught that “a shofar has a broad end and a narrow end. If you blow in the broad end, you get nothing. If you blow in the narrow end, you get a sound everyone can hear.” (Wolpe, Floating Takes Faith, 17)

Starting on Sunday, October 23, I’m going to be teaching a four-week course called “What’s the Point of All This?” It’s going to look more closely at how Judaism can be the means to lead us to the end we are hoping for – becoming a stronger and kinder human being, opening up our minds and our hearts, striving to build a more just and a more peaceful world. And the curriculum will be the four pillars of our congregation’s mission statement. We’ll look at how Torah can help us clarify our values and give us a language to speak about them. We’ll explore how prayer can raise our awareness of the holy potential of everyday life. We’ll examine what Judaism has to say about the most pressing social and economic issues of our day. And in a world where so much of our communication is in 140 characters or less, we’ll consider how we develop a deeper sense of connection with the people around us. Ultimately, its goal will be to see how we can create religion at its best, in order to enhance ourselves, our society and our world. Because the question isn’t “how Jewish are we?” The question is, “how can Judaism help us to become better people and to create a better world?”

I’ve told the story about Heather’s sukkah potentially becoming a crèche to many people, and one of them was Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, the co-president of Clal, a national Jewish think tank that aims to foster religious pluralism. He shared with me that the message he got was that both Heather and the church were focused on the same goal – telling the story’s of New York’s homeless population. But the other piece we need to remember, he told me, was that the church was no less Christian for using a sukkah, and Heather was no less Jewish for making a crèche. And perhaps because he, too, doesn’t believe that religion is an end unto itself, he wrote a book which he entitled You Don’t Have to Be Wrong for Me to Be Right: Finding Faith Without Fanaticism. And in it, he reminds us that

[r]eligion captures the very best and very worst of who we are, and to see only the best or the worst of religion is a dangerous error. If you see only the good, you become an apologist and take no responsibility for the incredible violence that religion is so capable of unleashing. If you see only the bad in religion, then you miss all the biggest questions, the most profound longings, the deepest fears and the greatest aspirations that define us. When faith is working right it can be profound, inspiring and a great force for positive change in the world, and it can help us lead more giving, productive, and fulfilling lives. (Hirschfield, 9)

The question isn’t “how religious” we are. The question is how we use religion to make ourselves and our world just a little bit better. So if we can see religion as a means, but not an end, then we can realize that someone else doesn’t have to be wrong for us to be right.

Adonai Eloheinu v’Elohei avoteinu v’imoteinu, Adonai our God and God of our ancestors – we are all on a journey, all of us hoping to become a little better this year than we were last year, and making a world a little more whole this year than it was last year. So on this Yom Kippur, remind us that the end we are all striving towards are tikkun hanefesh, the repair of our souls, and tikkun ha’olam, the repair of our world. But remind us that there are many paths to that same destination, and that others’ journeys are not our own. And yet also help us remember that we need our own path that we can embrace. So help us find our specific language to articulate our values. Help us see the world through a particular lens. And so most of all, help us to create religion is at its best, when the values of openness and devotion don’t contradict each, but instead, bring out the best in each other.

Amen, Shabbat Shalom, and g’mar chatimah tovah.

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September 30, 2011 · 12:12 am

Memory is Not About the Past — Memory is About the Future

This is the Rosh Hashanah sermon that I gave on Wednesday, September 28 at Temple Beth El. Wishing you all a shanah tovah u’metukah — a good and sweet new year!

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Joshua Foer, who happens to be the brother of the best-selling novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, spent most of 2006 trying to memorize all sorts of things: the exact order of a deck of shuffled playing cards, hundreds of random numbers, and as many names as he could to put with unfamiliar faces. He was doing this because he was in training for the 2006 USA Memory Championship, and he chronicles his journey in the book Moonwalking with Einstein – The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. He tells us that he started off his training with an average memory, at best. As he says:

Among the things I regularly forgot: where I put my car keys (where I put my car, for that matter); my girlfriend’s birthday, our anniversary and Valentine’s Day; why I just opened the fridge; the year the Redskins last won the Superbowl; and to plug in my cell phone. (adapted from Foer, 6)

Foer’s lament is certainly one that many of us share, this wish that we had a better memory. And we often tend to think about memory in terms of how: how we can get a better memory, through learning some tricks or systems that may help. But in fact, the more important question – and one we don’t really think about – is why. Why do we want to have a better memory? What really is the purpose of memory?

That’s an appropriate question for Rosh Hashanah, because our liturgy for today is filled with language about remembering. Part of tomorrow morning’s Shofar service, for example, is called Zichronot, “Remembrances,” and in fact, another name for Rosh Hashanah itself is Yom HaZikaron, “The Day of Remembrance.” As Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman explains, “Rosh Hashanah posits a connection between past and present. What we did once has repercussions later, just as what we do now will unfold in all its fullness only in years to come. On Rosh Hashanah, the past catches up to the present.” (Hoffman, Gates of Understanding, 94).So certainly, part of the message of Rosh Hashanah is for us to reflect on the past.

But in fact, reflecting on the past is not the real purpose of memory. Instead, as Professor Steve Joordens says, memory is “any time when a past experience has an effect on current or future behavior.” (“Memory and the Human Lifespan,” The Teaching Company Coursebook, 6) In other words, memory is not about the past – memory is really about the present and the future.

In truth, that idea is actually not all that surprising. When we, like Foer did so frequently, forget things like where we put our car keys, it’s not that the past disappeared. It’s that we couldn’t access that information when we needed it at that moment. Indeed, that’s the reason why Foer spent so much time trying to enhance his memory. He knew there would be no practical reason for him to try to memorize the order of a deck of shuffled playing cards – that in and of itself would not a useful skill. But, he says, “To the extent that experience is the sum of our memories and wisdom the sum of experience, having a better memory would mean knowing not only more about the world, but also more about myself.” (Foer, 7) So in its way, the question of Rosh Hashanah is, “how do we improve our memory?” Not to be able to store more information, but to strengthen that link between past, present and future.

After all, we know that, quite often, that link is rather weak. When we forget someone’s name, or an important appointment, or why we opened the refrigerator, we realize that what’s important to remember isn’t necessarily what we actually remember. But why is that? Why do we remember some things and not others? While there are several factors involved, there is one that is particularly crucial. Quite simply, we tend to remember the things we think about most frequently. As cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham explains:

Your memory lays its bets this way: if you think about something carefully, you’ll probably have to think about it again, so it should be stored. Thus your memory is not a product of what you want to remember or what you try to remember; it’s a product of what you think about. (Willingham, 53)

Or, to put it another way: “Memory is the residue of thought.” (ibid, 54)

And that’s why we Jews are commanded to remember things. We can’t just rely on our memory, because we know how faulty it can be. Instead, in order to remember the things that are most important, we need to be reminded to think about them. That’s why we constantly talk about “never forgetting” the Holocaust, why the Torah continually tells us to “remember the Exodus from Egypt,” and why we say Kaddish for our loved ones each year. As Steve Joordens says, “Every time we remember an event or a person, it is like we are breathing a little life into them.” We keep the past alive when we think about what has happened, and the more frequently we think about something, the more likely we are to remember it.

But the flip side is true, as well. We tend to forget the things that we don’t think about. So perhaps that’s why these High Holy Days tend to remind us all the ways we missed the mark this past year. After all, it is human nature to “conveniently forget” all the ways we hurt others, or stretched the truth or acted unjustly. In the book Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), authors Carol Tavris and Elliott Aronson note that our intense desire to protect our self-image often keeps us from remembering all the actions we took that we now regret:

Confabulation, distortion and plain forgetting are the foot soldiers of memory, and they are summoned to the front lines when the totalitarian ego wants to protect us from the pain and embarrassment of actions we took that are dissonant with our core self-image. “I did that?” That is why memory researchers love to quote Nietzsche: “‘I have done that,’ says my memory. ‘I cannot have done that,’ says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually – memory yields.” (Tavris and Aronson, 71)

It is painful – and at times, even difficult to impossible – for us to truly remember the ways we have sinned this past year. And so that is why it is essential to keep in mind that the reason we reflect on our mistakes is not to dwell on them. Remember – the purpose of memory is not simply to recall the past. It’s to use the past to create an effect on our present and on our future.

And what’s fascinating is that the mental faculties we use to recall the past are the exact same ones we use to imagine our future. Try a little experiment here with me. And I want you to think about what’s going on in your head during this time. Ready?

First I want you to remember a Yom Kippur break fast from when you were a kid, or maybe even just last year’s. What food was served? Where was it? Who was there?

Now, I want you to imagine yourself ten days from now, at your break fast this year. What food will be served? Where will it be? Who will be there?

You might have noticed a similarity between those two experiences. On some level, they “felt” the same – both times, it probably felt like there was a little movie going on in your head. And the reason those experiences felt the same was because on a mental level, they were the same. Researchers talk about how we construct our autobiography from a series of “episodic memories” – all those snapshots and vignettes that have occurred in our lives. And yet episodic memory has not only a “rewind” button to give us a window into our past, but a “fast forward” one, as well, that gives us a glimpse into our possible future.

But the key word there is “possible.” There is one significant difference between the past and the future – the past is gone, but the future is ours to shape. And unlike memory – which we don’t always have control over – imagination is a conscious act. We get to decide how we want to imagine ourselves. So what kind of parent do we want to be in 5772? What kind of child? What kind of spouse? What kind of friend? What kind of person? Since the future has not yet been written, as important as it is to reflect on 5771, it is that much more important for us to envision our best selves in 5772.

Now, if we think rationally, we’ll realize we probably won’t live up to our best selves in 5772. But imagining ourselves at our best gives us something to work towards. It gives us hope. And when it comes to hope, a little irrationality is a good thing. Author Tali Sharot tells us that

[h]ope, whether internally generated or coming from an outside source, enables people to embrace their goals and stay committed to moving towards them. This behavior will eventually make the goal more likely to become a reality…[And w]hen our hopeful predictions turn out to be wrong, well, then we…simply learn from our errors and try again. As the old saying goes, all’s well that ends well; if it is not yet well, then it is not quite the end. (Sharot, The Optimism Bias, 58)

So what is our goal for this year? How do we want to imagine ourselves? If we keep that vision in mind, then when we miss the mark, “we simply learn from our errors and try again.” And if we can remember to orient ourselves towards the future, and not the past, then our memories can become the raw materials that we use to create the life and the world we want. As Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf once said, “Uniquely Jewish is the idea of memory as will. Memory is not seen as something that befalls a passive consciousness. It is something purposefully appropriated in awe and love.” (Unfinished Rabbi, 33) The question isn’t what has happened in the past – the question is how we decide to use the past to shape our future.

Rabbi Dov Peretz Elkins tells us that “[t]he Baal Shem Tov, founder of Hasidism…[made] a remarkable and profound statement about remembering that captures the essence of Judaism’s emphasis on memory…: ‘Redemption lies in remembering.’ We remember the good and the bad of what happened before us, so that we can make tomorrow better than today and yesterday.” (Elkins, Rosh Hashanah Readings, 280). So while it’s true that Judaism is a religion that honors tradition and the past, on a deeper level, Judaism is really a religion that focuses on the future, emphasizing the hope that, despite our setbacks and missteps, we can move towards the person we want to be and the world that we wish to build.

Adonai Eloheinu v’Elohei avoteinu v’imoteinu, Adonai our God and God of our ancestors – on this Yom HaZikaron, this Day of Remembrance, help us to improve our memory. Not to help us put more information in our heads, but to help us see the connection between past, present and future. Help us to look back in order to look forward. Help us to imagine our best selves and a world redeemed. And most of all, help us to find the strength and the will to transform that vision into reality.

Amen and Shanah Tovah.

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September 16, 2011 · 4:38 pm

Do We Create Our Own Morality?

You may have seen David Brooks’ recent article entitled “If It Feels Right,” where he talks about “moral individualism” — how young adults are coming to believe that they have the power to define their own moral code, and why that individualism is such a big problem for our society.

As Brooks explains, “The default position, which most of the [young people come] back to again and again, is that moral choices are just a matter of individual taste. ‘It’s personal,’ the respondents typically said. ‘It’s up to the individual. Who am I to say?’”

There’s naturally a fear that this rise of moral individualism will lead to moral relativism, where the rules and norms that define our society will no longer hold. But while an ethic of “do what you feel” would obviously be disastrous, there may be a way to transform this “moral individualism” into “moral ownership.”

Here’s how: any time we feel like we are the ones creating something, we will have a significantly deeper sense of ownership over it. Psychologist Dan Ariely calls it “The IKEA Effect” — we have much more attachment and love for a bookshelf that we made ourselves than for a bookshelf that was just given to us when we moved into our apartment.

So if we can lead young people to own their sense of morality — rather than feeling like it was “given” to them — we may be able to help them further develop their sense of right and wrong.

Far too often, those of us who have a stake in trying to create a moral society have focused on teaching, leading us to “give” students lessons in morality. In particular, those of us in the religious community have often used a top-down (and generally unsophisticated) approach of teaching morality by simply saying, “It’s what the Bible says,” or “It’s what Judaism teaches.”

And perhaps that’s why young people are having such difficulties in talking about ethical issues. Brooks notes that “they have not been given the resources — by schools, institutions and families — to cultivate their moral intuitions, to think more broadly about moral obligations, to check behaviors that may be degrading.”

It’s not that these schools, institutions and families haven’t tried to teach morality. Instead, it’s most likely that these values were taught from up on high in an overly-simplistic way: “Be nice to people,” “Love your neighbor as yourself,” “Show respect.” And as Dominic Randolph, headmaster at the Riverdale Country School, reminds us in this week’s New York Times Magazine, “[t]he danger with character is if you just revert to these general terms — respect, honesty, tolerance — it seems really vague.”

So that’s why moral education needs to join in the major educational shift towards a focus on the learner, rather than on the teacher. After all, every teacher knows that what we teach and what our students learn are two very different things.

Recently, there’s been some excellent research done about what helps students learn, and one of the best new books on this subject is by cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham, called Why Don’t Students Like School? He emphasizes that to improve learning, it’s much less important for the teachers to know all the answers, and much more important for the teachers to know how to pose the right questions. He explains:

The material I want the students to learn is actually the answer to a question. On its own, the answer is almost never interesting. But if you know the question, the answer may be quite interesting. That’s why making the question clear is so important. But I sometimes feel that we, as teachers, are so focused on getting to the answer, we spend insufficient time making sure that students understand the question and appreciate its significance. (Willingham, 75, italics in original)

So this provides a great opportunity for those of us who want to teach about morality. Moral questions, by their very nature, are complex and raise a whole host of follow-up questions. How do we spend our money? Who do we have a responsibility to take care of? What happens when our values conflict?

There are no easy answers to these questions, and they can lead to deep, rich, and nuanced discussions. And in fact, it’s the very difficulty in answering them that makes them so valuable — if they are explored well, challenging moral questions require students to think deeply about them, leading to a deeper level of ownership over how they respond to them.

And it’s also crucial to remember that despite the fact that moral individualism easily leads to moral relativism, it appears that students don’t want to be moral relativists. Christian Smith, who ran the study that explored young people’s moral individualism, believes that “most youth would like to understand and believe in moral realism — that real moral facts exist in the universe that are not merely human constructions — but nobody has taught them how that is possible, how all the pieces can fit together in an intellectually coherent way.”

It’s not that “nobody taught them” — it’s that nobody taught them effectively. Most likely, schools, parents and religious institutions ended up giving simple answers to complex questions.

So if we can change the focus in moral education from “what we need to teach” towards “what our students need to learn,” not only may these young people find the resources they want and need to strengthen their moral sense, they may also be able to own their sense of morality more deeply, as well.

Because in the end, on some level we do “create our own morality,” since ultimately, we are the ones responsible for our own individual decisions. But it’s also true that everything we have learned, we have learned from others — from our communities in school, in our family, and in our house of worship.

And so whatever community we are a part of, we have a responsibility — as well as an opportunity — to not simply teach morality, but to grapple with the hard moral questions that will help our young people learn and live it.

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