Rabbi Geoffrey A. Mitelman

The Torah of Space Exploration

2013-05-17T10:21:00-04:00

Will humans ever land on Mars? Quite a number of people are trying to make it happen.

Buzz Aldrin has just published a book, "Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration." About half a million people are expected to apply for a one-way trip to Mars through the Dutch company "Mars One." And even though it was a robot doing the landing, more than 3 million people watched Curiosity land on the red planet.

More than 50 years ago, the nation (and the world) were riveted by NASA's attempts to land a person on the moon, and bring him back safely to the earth. And when NASA succeeded, the whole world felt a sense of pride and awe when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped out of the LEM and onto the Sea of Tranquility.

In its way, space travel is its own reward. Yes, the space program has provided us with concrete benefits: GPS navigation, meteorological forecasts and even treatments for osteoporosis. But what it truly offers us is inspiration and a drive to expand our knowledge.

Neil de Grasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium, reminds us that the real value of space travel is how it captures our imagination, and how it motivates us to continue learning:

My favorite quote, I think it was Antoine Saint-Exupery who said, "If you want to teach someone to sail, you don't train them how to build a boat. You compel them to long for the open seas." That longing drives our urge to innovate, and space exploration has the power to do that, especially when it's a moving frontier because all traditional sciences are there.

We humans are naturally curious creatures -- we are born to explore. A mission to Mars excites us because we simply don't know what we'll discover, or how exactly it will add to our knowledge, or what new technologies will arise as a result. Even if we don't immediately sense its benefits, it still has value, because the journey of learning is its own reward.

That's the same message we get on Shavuot, our celebration of Torah, because the study of Torah, too, doesn't always provide an immediate return on its investment. Instead, we study Torah lishmah, for its own sake.

Why? Because Torah is not designed to train us how to build a boat. It is designed to make us long for the open seas.

Jewish learning is never supposed to give us a final and definitive answer. Instead, it is supposed to inspire us, and to push us to explore beyond what we already know. Rabbis Michael Katz and Gershon Schwartz even titled a book "Swimming in the Sea of Talmud" because Jewish study leads us into the vast, challenging and compelling unknown, which we do for the pure joy of learning something new. As they teach us, when we learn one text,

...there are a dozen new questions arising from [it]: Can this lesson be applied to other, similar situations? Is this lesson still applicable today? What would the Rabbis of the Talmud say to our particular situation, which differs slightly from the case they presented? Is the conclusion reached and the lesson derived from the text the most relevant and meaningful message? (Katz and Schwartz, 6-7)

True learning never stops; it pushes us out ever-farther into uncharted territory. As both space exploration and Torah study show us, each new discovery spurs new lines of inquiry; each new challenge forces us to create innovative solutions; each new venture helps us push the boundaries of knowledge.

Now, it is true that as vast as the open sea may be, it is not infinite. And neither, most likely, is space.

But human curiosity -- our drive to explore and learn and grow -- just might be.

'As If': The Two Little Words We Too Often Ignore

2013-03-21T13:21:08-04:00

"Each generation, people must see themselves as if they themselves went forth from Egypt."

That quote is the essence of why we celebrate Passover, read the Haggadah and hold a Seder. When we think about that sentence, we naturally focus on how Passover should inspire us to work for freedom and justice. But often, we overlook two crucial words in that sentence: "as if." And those two words may, in fact, be the most important ones.

The words "as if" inspired psychologist Richard Wiseman to write a new book called "The As If Principle," based on William James' idea that "if you want a quality, act as if you already have it." Wiseman highlights some fascinating research that shows that change doesn't always come from the inside out -- sometimes, change comes from the outside in.

In other words, if we act "as if" we were trying to improve who we are and how we behave, we actually do improve who we are and how we behave.

One striking example he brings up was a method to get heavy smokers to give up cigarettes. There have been all sorts of attempts to get people to give up smoking over the years, and most have used the scare route, such as public service announcements featuring people who have lost their voice box or ever-increasingly ominous warnings on cigarette packs. But John Mann, a researcher at Harvard, decided to try something different: role-playing.

Twenty-six very heavy smokers were randomly assigned to two different groups. One group was asked to behave "as if" they had been diagnosed with lung cancer, and even went into a room that looked like a doctor's office, complete with an actor in a white coat, X-rays and medical charts. This group was asked to think about how they would behave now that they "had" cancer. In contrast, the control group simply were simply presented information about how awful it would be to have lung cancer, but didn't do any role-playing.

What happened to the two groups? Before the study, all the participants were smoking about 25 cigarettes per day. At the end, the control group had cut back by five cigarettes. But the role-playing group had cut back by 10. Even years later, the group that had to act "as if" they needed to change their lives actually did.

Role-playing, acting "as if" we were someone else, changes our outlook and our behavior, and so that is why the Seder commands us to act "as if we ourselves went forth from Egypt" -- because Passover, at its heart, is truly an act of role-playing. We have props (the seder plate, Elijah's cup), stage directions (recline, drink wine) and a script (the Haggadah). And they are all designed to help us act as if we ourselves went forth from Egypt.

So what outlook or behavior is Passover trying to get us to change? Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman, who calls the Haggadah "the script for a sacred drama" in order to help us to role-play more effectively, argues that it's to help us connect to our history, our community, and our obligations to others. As he says, when we host our Seder and act "as if we ourselves went forth from Egypt,"

[we] do not just "play" the roles, [we] are the roles, and [we] take the roles so seriously they [we] internalize them as [our] identities. When the actress playing Lady Macbeth leaves the theater, she is not expected to murder someone on the way home; when Jews put down their Haggadah, they are expected to have a heightened sense of Jewish identity and to be more attuned to their Jewish responsibilities. People, that is, who leave the Seder and ignore the plight of the homeless have missed the point. (Hoffman, 'My People's Haggadah Vol. 1,' 5-6)

The "as if" principle teaches us that "once you behave as if you were a type of person, you become that person." So on Passover, when we act "as if" we ourselves went out from Egypt, we are also leading ourselves to act like people who care deeply about the oppressed, who fight for justice and who extend a hand to those less fortunate.

And when we act that way, we soon realize that we aren't simply role-playing; we truly are changing ourselves and our world for the better. Indeed, those two little words that we too often ignore -- "as if" -- are truly what allows us to transform our hopes and dreams into our reality.

What I've Learned Through Crossword Puzzles

2013-01-25T11:01:33-05:00

Every day, I do the New York Times crossword puzzle. It truly is a ritual for me, almost as sacred as Shabbat: Every night before going to bed, I load up the crossword on my phone or my computer, and try to plow through that mental challenge.

I've discovered that there's a deep satisfaction that goes far beyond filling in that last box to complete the puzzle, and what I've learned is more than just the fact that Charles Lamb was also known as "Elia" and a whole long list of four-letter European rivers. What I really love about crosswords is the struggle, trying to figure out how I'm going to go about solving it.

And what the process of solving crosswords has truly taught me is how easily success can become failure, and how easily failure can become success.

Quite often, I come across a clue whose answer I feel certain that I've filled in correctly. And then I discover that one of the crosses doesn't work. But I was so sure I was right! But it's not working.

That's usually when I get frustrated, because what I "knew" to be right actually turned out to be totally wrong. At that moment, my apparent success is preventing me from making further progress on the puzzle. And so the only way to break through that struggle is to say, "Maybe my assumption was wrong."

That's not easy to do in life, to be able to say, "Perhaps I was mistaken." But what I've discovered is that when I have to re-think my approach, I gain new knowledge that I wasn't expecting. I become a better solver for future puzzles. I begin to think in new and innovative ways.

To put it another way, I'm learning.

There's an important distinction between knowledge and learning. Knowledge is something to have; learning is something to do. And in Judaism, the emphasis is much less on knowledge and much more on learning. As Rabbi Bradley Artson says, "Learning is not a possession, something to have. It is a process of growth and unfolding that is a permanent accompaniment to human life" ("The Bedside Torah," 238).

In other words, learning is a life-long process, and it is never a simple journey from A to B to C -- it's a zigzag journey, and often requires several false starts. Indeed, making mistakes -- and learning from them -- is crucial for our sense of growth. In fact, building from our mistakes is what allows us to transform failure into success.

This past week, Camille Sweeney and Josh Gosfield wrote a piece in the New York Times called "The Secret Ingredient for Success," where they shared some of the research they had done on high achievers, including David Chang, owner of Momufuku, Martina Navratilova, and the band OK Go. As they noted:

In interviews we did with high achievers ... we expected to hear that talent, persistence, dedication and luck played crucial roles in their success. Surprisingly, however, self-awareness played an equally strong role.

The successful people we spoke with -- in business, entertainment, sports and the arts -- all had similar responses when faced with obstacles: they subjected themselves to fairly merciless self-examination that prompted reinvention of their goals and the methods by which they endeavored to achieve them.

It's never easy to accept the fact that we may have been going down the wrong path. Anyone who does crosswords knows how frustrating it can be to write, erase, re-write, re-erase and start a whole section over again. But sometimes, if we take a step back and re-think what we're doing, we can figure out that one word (or even one letter) that causes the whole puzzle to fall into place. What had seemed like abject failure just a few moments earlier has now become a completed grid.

So if we can become aware of our own shortcomings, if we can realize that at times our assumptions need to be revised, and if we can open ourselves up to new ways of thinking and new perspectives, then we can grow, learn and maybe even succeed.

As my colleague Rabbi Laura Baum recently wrote, "If we are not making mistakes, we are not pushing ourselves hard enough ... But here's the catch: Let's try to make new mistakes. And each time we mess up, let's consider what we can do differently next time."

Indeed, crosswords can teach us more than just the first name of "NYPD Blue" actor Morales. They teach us how to fail, which is what we need to learn how to do in order to truly succeed.

What Makes a Miracle?

2013-01-18T09:00:00-05:00

Click here to read an original op-ed from the TED speaker who inspired this post and watch the TEDTalk below.

Do we still experience miracles today? It all depends on what we think a "miracle" truly is.

Often, when we think of miracles, we envision the events that form the basis for many religious traditions -- the parting of the Red Sea, Jesus healing the lepers, Mohammed rising up to heaven.

But we also use the word "miracle" in more everyday situations. When a family member recovers from an illness, we call it a "miracle." When we narrowly avert a disaster, we call it a "miracle." When we think, "If had missed that dinner party, I never would have met my spouse," we call it a "miracle."

And perhaps the most common way we use the word miracle is in "the miracle of birth," which Alexander Tsiaris' TEDTalk, "Conception to Birth -- Visualized" shows us quite concretely.

Tsiaris' work helps us see all the miracles that occur as each of us comes into this world, and he gives us several examples. As our body develops in the womb, our cells somehow "know" what to do: collagen, which is usually opaque, becomes transparent in the only part of our body that needs to be -- our eyes. In only weeks, two parallel strands fold over each other like origami, and we develop our heart. During one phase of pregnancy, our cells grow so quickly that if that pace were maintained for the full nine months, we would weigh 3,000 pounds at delivery.

All of the elements in pregnancy, the whole process, truly seems "miraculous," and yet it happens thousands of times each and every day. So if it is so common, how could it be "miraculous"?

Tsiaris says it well at the beginning of the talk -- when you see the journey from conception to birth, "you just have to marvel." And that's what a "miracle" truly is, at least in Judaism: something that makes us go "wow."

Indeed, the Hebrew word for miracle, "nes," really means a "sign." It's not necessarily a voice from the heavens, or even a deviation from the natural order, although those would certainly astound us. Instead, a nes is something that engenders a sense of awe and mystery.

The Hebrew word for miracle, "nes," really means a "sign." It's not necessarily a voice from the heavens, or even a deviation from the natural order. -- Rabbi Geoffrey A. Mitelman

In fact, there's even a section in the morning liturgy called the "nisim b'chol yom," "the miracles of the every day." Each morning when we wake up, we are to supposed to offer thanks to God for the most mundane realities -- for being able to see. For having clothes to wear. For being able to walk. For having awoken from our sleep.

There are at least two purposes to the nisim b'chol yom. First, it is to remind us that many people don't have a place to sleep, clothes to wear, or food to eat, and so we have a responsibility help fix that. But even more importantly, it's to remind us just how likely we are to take our daily blessings for granted. The nisim b'chol yom, the miracle of the everyday, are designed to create a daily sense of wonder. It's less about thanking God than it is about giving thanks for the mystery.

And that's how I interpret Tsiaris' line that there is "divinity" in the way we come into existence. I don't think he means it in the sense of the "God of the gaps," implying that if there's something we don't understand, "God did it." Scientific knowledge will continue to move forward, giving us a clearer and deeper comprehension of how things work. Instead, I think he means "divinity" in the way Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel talked about the goal of religious living: "to experience commonplace deeds as spiritual adventures, to feel the hidden love and wisdom of all things." (God in Search of Man, 49)

So even as we develop a deeper understanding of the way the world works, even as we understand the nuances of the complex world we live in, we can always reclaim our sense of wonder.

As Tsiaris' video so powerfully shows, life truly is a miracle -- and that's a fact we should never forget.

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Connecting in a Disaster

2012-11-01T12:56:23-04:00

At about 3:30 p.m. on Monday, our house in White Plains, New York lost TV and Internet service. We still had lights, and just a few minutes later, they came back on. We were hopeful.

But then, at about 6:30, I got a call from our landlord -- he lost power.

Then, at about 7 p.m., I started seeing Facebook statuses from people nearby saying, "No power." So I knew it would just be a matter of time.

And indeed, about half an hour later, our lights flickered, flickered and then went totally kaput. We joined the millions upon millions of people who lost power during Hurricane Sandy.

By Tuesday, our cell phone was running low on power, and our service was spotty at best. And we wondered -- while we could hear the news through our battery-powered radio, if we had no Internet and no phone, how would we connect with others? I felt very isolated -- I wanted both to hear what was going on to tell others I was all right.

During the storm, people were certainly following the news, but even more, they were following their friends' news. As Clay Shirky notes in "Cognitive Surplus," our definition of "media" has changed -- it's no longer the one-way monologue of TV and radio; it's now the conversation (both online and offline) that connects us with others.

I, too, felt a need to not only hear what others were going through, but to share my experience, as well. And what was fascinating was that I seemed to use the exact same words that so many people used to describe what was happening to them.

Facebook even provided their top 10 status updates during the storm, and they probably sound a lot like what you saw or wrote:

we are ok
power - lost power, have power, no power
damage
hope everyone is ok
trees
made it
safe
thankful
fine
affected

Those phrases convey not only information, but emotion, as well. As Rabbi Rebecca Schorr taught us, these words remind us that we share not only information but experiences with others -- both joyous and scary. We have a need not only to know what is going on, but to share important events with others.

And what has inspired me the most (especially as someone who still has no power) is seeing neighbors, churches, synagogues, libraries and community organizations reaching out to others saying, "We have power -- come to us."

Indeed, while we hope that our life is easy, with few storms to toss us around, when disasters do happen, we truly see our ability and our need to connect with others. And even more striking, we see just how much it brings out the best in everyone.

Here's hoping everyone is able to find a place of warmth, light and safety.

The Expansiveness of Joy on Sukkot

2012-10-04T17:12:28-04:00

Think about an activity you love to do that gives you a good challenge. Maybe it's playing tennis. Maybe it's sailing. Maybe you're like me, and it's working on the Saturday New York Times crossword.

Whatever it is, when you're deeply involved in that activity, you're in a state that's known as "flow" -- a state of pure enjoyment. Time seems to run at a different speed, you're totally focused on your task, and afterwards, you feel a real sense of accomplishment.

"Flow" was first described by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and he argues that flow arises when we find challenges that are just ahead of our skills. But beyond the fact that being in flow just feels really good -- it's a state of pure enjoyment -- there's another very important aspect to it, and that's the way flow pushes our skills to a new level.

If you are a tennis player, for example, you had to work your way up from getting the ball over the net (or not hitting it so hard so that it went over the fence) to improving your serve to nailing your backhand. Each new challenge was also an opportunity to improve your ability.

As Csikszentmihalyi phrased it:

Pleasure is an important component of the quality of life, but by itself it does not bring happiness. Sleep, rest, food, and sex provide restorative homeostatic experiences that return consciousness to order after the needs of body intrude and cause psychic entropy to occur. But they do not produce psychological growth. They do not add complexity to the self. Pleasure helps to maintain order, but by itself cannot create new order in consciousness...
[In contrast,] enjoyable events occur when a person has not only met some prior expectation or satisfied a need or a desire but also gone beyond what he or she has been programmed to do and achieved something unexpected, perhaps something even unimagined before.
Enjoyment is characterized by this forward movement: by a sense of novelty, of accomplishment. (Csikszentmihalyi, Flow, 46)

In other words, joy expands who we are. And Sukkot teaches us about the expansiveness of joy.

Sukkot, along with Passover and Shavuot, are called the "three pilgrimage festivals" because they were the three holidays when all the Israelites were commanded to come to the ancient Temple in Jerusalem. Each of the holidays also has their own name in our liturgy. Passover, understandably, is called "the time of our freedom." Shavuot, which marks the giving of the Torah, is naturally called "the time of the giving of our Torah." Sukkot's title, however, is a little more mystifying -- it is called "the time of our joy." Why is that?

There are any number of reasons, but one of the explanations recalls an ancient tradition from Temple times. On Sukkot, there was a ceremony called "the drawing of water," and the rabbis taught, "One who has not witnessed the celebration of the water-drawing ceremony has never seen real joy" (Sukkah 51a).

What was that "real joy"? Well, according to the Mishnah, people danced and sang, and the wisest and most pious men would juggle torches. While that sight would certainly make people smile and be happy, I think there's a deeper lesson.

Because Sukkot was one of the three pilgrimage festivals, the population of Jerusalem would increase dramatically, so before the holiday, the priests and Levites would make major renovations to the outer courtyard. They would add some extra balconies, and the courtyard ended up being a little bigger than about the size of a football field.

But lots of people were coming for the holiday. Lots of people. Probably more than what the courtyard could handle. If you want an image, think of MetLife Stadium, but instead of everyone being in the stands, everyone is on the field! But, the rabbis said, "Miraculously, tens of thousands of people were able to crowd in."

Thousands of people were coming in to celebrate Sukkot, which meant that thousands of people were coming in to feel "real joy." And while they physically may have been a little cramped, I think the true miracle was that one person's joy did not crowd out another's. While joy expands who we are, there is always room for more.

Think about this way: if you have a child, when your child was born, you didn't say, "Well, since I have only 100 points of love, so let me now figure out who I'll love less." Instead, the joy you felt caused your heart to grow. Miraculously, that joy led you to find room for more holiness, more specialness and more love.

Indeed, as Csikszentmihalyi taught us about being in flow, when we are doing anything that gives us real joy, we are learning new things and pushing ourselves. We discover that joy helps us grow -- and that there is no limit to its expansiveness.

So on this Sukkot, may we strive to create more joy in this world. We'll find the room.

Please join us throughout the Jewish High Holidays, on the HuffPost Religion live-blog, updated daily with spiritual reflections, blogs, photos, videos and verses. Tell us your story.

Shanah Tovah: It's Not About Being Happy -- It's About Doing Good

2012-09-16T15:32:40-04:00

There are two Hebrew words that we say many, many times over these High Holy Days. They express a wonderful sentiment to use when we greet others -- whether in the sanctuary, in the parking lot or with friends and family -- because they reflect our hopes for this New Year.

Those two Hebrew words are, of course, shanah tovah. And yet we almost always mistranslate them.

Perhaps it's because we Jews celebrate two "new years" -- Rosh Hashanah and Jan. 1 -- that the English greeting we tend to use is "happy new year." But that's not what shanah tovah means. "Shanah tovah" has almost nothing to do with happiness. Instead, "Shanah tovah" really means "a good year," and there is a difference between our year being a "happy" one and our year being a "good" one. And I would argue that we shouldn't focusing on "being happy." Instead, we should focus on "doing good."

Now, I can already hear an objection: Don't we want to be happy? Is there anyone here who would wish for less happiness this year? Well, of course, if we had the choice, we would obviously rather be happy than be sad. But it also depends on what we mean by the word "happy." Generally, we define "happiness" as "a pleasurable feeling," but here's the thing -- feelings come and feelings go. So yes, we all hope that this year will have many moments of pleasure. But we also know that this year will bring moments of sadness. Of anxiety. Of struggles. In fact, there is even significant research that shows that we have only a limited amount of control over how happy we actually are.

Sonya Lyubomirsky, professor of psychology and author of the book The How of Happiness, tells us that there are three main factors that determine our happiness level. The first part is genetic -- our "happiness set point," as it's called. Just as some people's genes make them taller or shorter than others, genetics play a role in our psychological make-up, as well, which naturally influence what our "baseline happiness" tends to be. According to the research, our genetic tendencies make up about half of our happiness level - and so half of our happiness is something we have no absolutely control over.

The second part of the happiness equation is life circumstances -- are we partnered or single? How much money do we have? Are we healthy or ill? These are the areas where we tend to invest a lot of our time, energy, and resources. We try to put money into savings. We go to the gym. We try to eat better. Yet even a cursory reflection on last year shows us just how much luck is involved in our attempts to change our circumstances. We may have tried to save money - but found that landing a job was surprisingly difficult. We may have gone to the gym and eaten better - but were sideswiped by an illness we never saw coming. We can do our best to try to improve our circumstances, but we know that in this area, as well, we have only limited influence.

But what's surprising is that it turns out that life circumstances make up about only 10 percent of our happiness level. While there is always an initial shock when our circumstances change dramatically -- both for good and for ill -- within a few months, their power generally lessens. Why is that? Because we humans have what's called "hedonic adaptation," which is just a fancy way of saying "whatever it is, we tend to get used to it."

Author and behavioral economist Dan Ariely explains it well:

If you've ever gone to a matinee and walked from the dark movie theater to the sunny parking lot, the first moment outside is one of stunning brightness, but then your eyes adjust relatively quickly...

[Similarly, w]hen we move into a new house, we may be delighted with the gleaming hardwood floors or upset about the garish lime green kitchen cabinets. After a few weeks, those factors fade into the background. A few months later we aren't as annoyed by the color of the cabinets, but at the same time, we don't derive as much pleasure from the hardwood floors.

Just as our eyes adjust to changes in light and environment, we can adapt to changes in expectation and experience. (Ariely, The Upside of Irrationality, 158-159, 168-169)

So while we may try to change our circumstances in 5773 in order to "be happy," we have to remember that not only do have only a finite amount of control, and not only would we need to invest significant time and effort in changing them, even if we do succeed, they will only minimally affect our level of happiness.

So if 50% is genetics and 10% is life circumstances, what's the other 40 percent? It turns out that the remaining 40% of our happiness consists of simple actions that we choose to do. What are those actions? They're ones you would probably expect to hear: Express gratitude. Practice acts of kindness. Be fully present in your actions and with those around you.

And what's interesting is that through these behaviors, we re-orient how we perceive this year. While these actions do make up 40% of what makes us happy -- what make us "feel good" -- they are almost 100 percent of what it means for us to "do good." Expressing gratitude, practicing acts of kindness, being fully present -- these types of actions make both us and our world a little bit better. So as we look towards 5773, we shouldn't be asking the question, "Will it be a happy new year?" Research suggests that a large part of that equation is outside of our direct control. So instead, we should be asking, "How will we do good this year?"

Now, if this sounds a little bit like "moral self-help" -- it kind of is. And that may not such a bad thing. Earlier this week, Megan McArdle, a journalist for Newsweek and the Daily Beast, wrote a piece entitled "What's Wrong With Self-Help Books?" She notes that people often denigrate them, because

[t]he lessons they offer are obvious -- be nice to your spouse, save more, give constructive feedback to your team members, eat less and exercise more. And of course this is true, not through any particular fault of the authors, but because there are very few revolutions in human affairs. The basic facts of living, getting along with others, and dying haven't actually changed all that much since they were first discussed in blockbuster self-help titles like The Bible.

But that doesn't mean they don't bear repeating...[And s]ome messages can only be heard when [we] are ready. (McArdle, "What's Wrong with Self-Help Books?" The Daily Beast, 9/13/12)

Similarly, the messages of the High Holy Days are ones we hear all the time: reflect on our actions from this past year. Be kind to others. Be kind to ourselves. Make restitution for the mistakes we made. Forgive. These are messages we hear each year because these are messages that bear repeating.

But perhaps even more important than the words we speak is the way that Rosh Hashanah forces us to do what's called cheshbon hanefesh -- an accounting of our soul. A joke among many people who work in the Jewish world is the hope that the holidays will be postponed or even cancelled because "we're just not quite ready for them." But that's the point -- whether we are ready for them or not, the purpose of the High Holy Days is to put ourselves in a particular mindset. They are designed to confront us with the question, "What are the messages that we truly need to hear, and are finally ready to heed?"

And centuries of Jewish wisdom have accumulated many messages about how we do good. Indeed, Judaism's vision of "self-help" isn't about "helping ourselves" -- it's about how we help others and make this world better. As Dr. Byron Sherwin and Dr. Seymour Cohen explain in their book Creating an Ethical Jewish Life:

Rather than demonstrating how to accumulate wealth for [ourselves], Jewish ethical literature deals with how wealth may be employed for the benefit of others. Rather than offering strategies about how to manipulate others to do [our] will, it focuses on how best to live a life correlative with the divine will. Rather than teaching [us] how to deliver a speech, it is preoccupied with how to speak without harming others... (Sherwin and Cohen, xi)

So we don't judge this year on how we felt. We don't judge it on whether we were "happy" or not. Instead, as our machzor tells us, "the Shofar's sound [should] awaken the voice of conscience..." (Gates of Repentance, 64-65) We should judge this year on the "good" we can do; how we can build, maintain, and repair our relationships - to ourselves, to each other and to God.

If we can do that, if we focus on "doing good," then we can also rethink what "being happy" might actually look like. While one definition of "happiness" is feeling good, Russ Harris, author of the book The Happiness Trap, reminds us that true, deep, lasting happiness isn't about the fleeting moments of pleasure. As he says,

[w]hen we take action on the things that truly matter deep in our hearts, move in directions that we consider valuable and worthy, clarify what we stand for in life and act accordingly, then our lives become rich and full and meaningful, and we experience a powerful sense of vitality. This is not some fleeting feeling - it is a profound sense of a life well lived. (Harris, 5)

In the end, that's what these High Holy Days are about. We are not looking for a happy new year, but a good new year -- and that means "a year of goodness." We need to concentrate our attention and actions on what "we consider valuable and worthy" and lead us to "clarify what we stand for in life, and act accordingly." And because it is natural and easy for us to go through the days and months of the year without reflecting on our actions, Rosh Hashanah forces us to consider the kind of life we are building, and to ask ourselves not how we can "be happy," but how we can "do good."

Adonai Eloheinu v'elohei avoteinu v'imoteinu, Adonai our God and God of our ancestors, as we reflect on this past year and look towards the new one, remind us to be grateful for the joyous moments and simple pleasures we experience. Remind us of the kind of life we should be living, so that it is a life of compassion and of justice. And remind us that we should evaluate this year in terms not on how happy we felt, but on how we helped improve ourselves and our world. As our machzor says, "We look ahead with hope, giving thanks for the daily miracle of renewal. For the promise of good to come." (Gates of Repentance, 52) May the promise of 5773 be that we bring a little more goodness into our selves, to others and our world.

Amen, and shanah tovah - may it be a good year for all of us.

Jonah Lehrer and the Betrayal of Trust in the Internet Age

2012-08-02T18:40:27-04:00

Jonah Lehrer was one of my favorite authors. I found his writing style engaging and his content thought-provoking, but what I loved most was his ability to explain complicated scientific studies in ways that laypeople could understand.

Because my focus is on the interaction of science and religion, and in particular, how cognitive science can inform who we are as human beings, I constantly drew on his work, and quoted him in multiple posts. He was a great explainer and popularized some very complex and important ideas.

So when I read that he had fabricated and willfully misinterpreted quotations in his book "Imagine" (which I had read only a month and a half ago), I felt betrayed. Yes, I know that it's important to be a critical thinker of what I read, and to have a healthy skepticism of any information I may come across. But since I don't have an academic background in cognitive science, it would have been very hard for me to even know what questions to ask, or precisely how to examine the studies Lehrer talked about.

Instead, I simply had to trust him and trust his integrity. Unfortunately, as I found out on Monday, I couldn't.

Beyond my personal feelings of betrayal, however, there's a deeper issue that I've been thinking about these last few days: the importance of trust in the Internet age.

Many people are mystified as to how Lehrer could have thought that his lies would go undetected. In an article on Salon.com, Roxane Gay wondered: "In the age of the Internet, when everything is just a click away, how did Lehrer think he wouldn't get caught ... when he simply lied over and over?" Indeed, truthfulness is a sine qua non for bloggers and writers who want to be respected, simply because if they don't check their facts, eventually somebody else will.

But while crowdsourcing has made it infinitely easier and faster to uncover lies, there is now so much information out there that it's impossible for us to personally verify each and every thing we read. And today, if we come across something intriguing, we go beyond simply reading it -- we immediately share it, tweet it, draw on it, remix it and build off of it. The only reason we do that is because we implicitly trust the accuracy of that information.

And as soon as we link our name with someone else, we link our credibility to theirs, as well.

Indeed, in the Internet age, we are all not only consumers of content, but producers of it, as well. Anything we say or share might become the basis of others' work, and more likely than not, they will simply have to trust that we are telling the truth.

That's why the rabbis highlighted an intriguing characteristic about the Hebrew words for "lie" and "truth." In Hebrew, the word for "lie" is sheker -- shin, qoph, resh. The shape of those three letters are balanced on thin footing, and are precariously balanced.

In contrast, the word for "truth" is emet -- aleph, mem, tav. The shape of those three letters rest on more firm footing, and have stronger bases.

So in the Babylonian Talmud, the rabbis looked at those letters and asked, "Why does falsehood [stand] on one foot, while truth has a brick-like foundation? Because," they answered, "truth can stand, but falsehood cannot."

Ultimately, in the Internet age, everything we say becomes a potential building block for others to use, and the only way to ensure a solid foundation based on trust is to be truthful.

And as Jonah Lehrer learned, lies will topple your world.

What Believers and Atheists Can Learn From Each Other

2012-05-30T12:50:04-04:00

Rabbi Geoffrey Mitelman: It's inherently challenging for believers and atheists to have productive conversations. Discussing topics such as belief and nonbelief, the potential irrationality of religion, or the limits of scientific knowledge is difficult since each side often ends up more firmly entrenched in their own worldview.

But one bright person interested in broadening the conversation is Sam McNerney, a science writer who focuses on cognitive science and an atheist interested in religion from a psychological point of view.

I found Sam through his writing on ScientificAmerican.com, and started reading his blog Why We Reason and his posts on BigThink.com. We discovered that even though we approached religion from different perspectives, we had great respect for each other.

So as two people with different religious outlooks we wondered: What can we learn from each other?

Sam McNerney: There are many things we can learn. Let's take one: the role of authority.

A recent New York Times article points out that secular liberal atheists tend to conflate authority, loyalty and sanctity with racism, sexism and homophobia. It's not difficult to see why. Societies suffer when authority figures, being motivated by sacred values and religious beliefs, forbid their citizens from challenging the status quo. But a respect for authority and the principles they uphold to some degree is necessary if societies seek to maintain order and justice and function properly. The primatologist Frans de Waal explains it this way: "Without agreement on rank and a certain respect for authority there can be no great sensitivity to social rules, as anyone who has tried to teach simple house rules to a cat will agree" (Haidt, 106).

Ironically, atheists' steadfast allegiance to rationality, secular thinking and the importance of open-mindedness blinds them to important religious values including respect for authority. As a result, atheists tend to confuse authority with exploitation and evil and undervalue the vital role authority plays in a healthy society.

Geoff: You accurately bring up one aspect of why organized religion can be so complicated: it is intertwined with power. And I'm glad you note that authority and power are not inherently bad when it comes to religion. In fact, as you also say, a certain degree of authority is necessary.

To me, the real problem arises when religion adds another element into the mix: certainty. It's a toxic combination to have religious authorities with the power to influence others claiming to "know" with 100 percent certainty that they're right and everyone else is wrong.

One thing I learned from several atheists is the importance of skepticism and doubt. Indeed, while certainty leads to arrogance, uncertainty leads to humility. We open up the conversation and value diverse experiences when we approach the world with a perspective of "I'm not sure" or "I could be wrong."

Recently, astrophysicist Adam Frank wrote a beautiful piece on NPR's blog 13.7 about how valuable uncertainty can be:

Dig around in most of the world's great religious traditions and you find people finding their sense of grace by embracing uncertainty rather than trying to bury it in codified dogmas...

Though I am an atheist, some of the wisest people I have met are those whose spiritual lives (some explicitly religious, some not) have forced them to continually confront uncertainty. This daily act has made them patient and forgiving, generous and inclusive. Likewise, the atheists I have met who most embody the ideals of free inquiry seem to best understand the limitations of every perspective, including their own. They encounter the ever shifting ground of their lives with humor, good will and compassion.

Certainty can be seductive, but it hurts our ability to engage with others in constructive ways. Thus when religious people talk about God, belief or faith, we have to approach the conversation with a little humility and recognize that we don't have a monopoly on the truth. In the words of Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, we need to realize that another person doesn't have to be wrong for us to be right.

This doesn't mean believers and atheists will agree on the role of religion in society, the validity of a particular belief system, or even the very existence of God. In fact, believers and atheists will almost certainly continue to vehemently disagree about these questions. But we have to remember that not all disagreements are bad. Some arguments are quite beneficial because they help us gain a deeper understanding of reality, encourage clearer thinking and broaden people's perspectives.

The rabbis even draw a distinction between two different kinds of arguments. Arguments they call "for the sake of Heaven" will always be valuable, while arguments that are only for self-aggrandizement will never be productive (Pirkei Avot 5:20). So I'm not interested in arguments that devolve into mocking, ridicule, name-calling or one-upmanship. But I'd gladly participate in any discussion if we are arguing about how we make ourselves and this world better, and would actively strive to involve whoever wants to be part of that endeavor, regardless of what they may or may not believe.

Sam: You are right to point out that both atheists and believers under the illusion of certainty smother potentially productive dialogue with disrespectful rhetoric. What's alarming is that atheism in the United States is now more than non-belief. It's an intense and widely shared sentiment where a belief in God is not only false, but also ridiculous. Pointing out how irrational religion can be is entertaining for too many.

There's no doubt that religious beliefs influence negative behavioral consequences, so atheists are right to criticize religion on many epistemological claims. But I've learned from believers and my background in cognitive psychology that faith-based beliefs are not necessarily irrational.

Consider a clever study recently conducted by Kevin Rounding of Queen's University in Ontario that demonstrates how religion helps increase self-control. In two experiments participants (many of whom identified as atheists) were primed with a religious mindset -- they unscrambled short sentences containing words such as "God," "divine" and "Bible." Compared to a control group, they were able to drink more sour juice and were more willing to accept $6 in a week instead of $5 immediately. Similar lines of research show that religious people are less likely to develop unhealthy habits like drinking, taking drugs, smoking and engaging in risky sex.

Studies also suggest that religious and spiritual people, especially those living in the developing world, are happier and live longer, on average, than non-believers. Religious people also tend to feel more connected to something beyond themselves; a sentiment that contributes to well-being significantly.

It's unclear if these findings are correlative or causal -- it's likely that many of the benefits that come from believing in God arise not from beliefs per se but from strong social ties that religious communities do such a good job of fostering. Whatever the case, this research should make atheists pause before they dismiss all religious beliefs as irrational or ridiculous.

Geoff: It's interesting -- that actually leads to another area where atheists have pushed believers in important ways, namely, to focus less on the beliefs themselves, and more on how those beliefs manifest themselves in actions. And to paraphrase Steven Pinker, the actions that religious people need to focus on are less about "saving souls," and more about "improving lives."

For much of human history the goal of religion was to get people to believe a certain ideology or join a certain community. "Being religious" was a value in and of itself, and was often simply a given, but today, we live in a world where people are free to choose what they believe in. So now, the goal of religion should be to help people find more fulfillment in their own lives and to help people make a positive impact on others' lives.

It's important to note that people certainly do not need religion to act morally or find fulfillment. But as Jonathan Haidt writes in his new book "The Righteous Mind," religion can certainly make it easier.

Haidt argues that our mind is like a rider who sits atop an elephant to suggest that our moral deliberations (the rider) are post-hoc rationalizations of our moral intuitions (the elephant). The key to his metaphor is that intuitions come first (and are much more powerful) and strategic reason comes afterwards.

We need our rider because it allows us to think critically. But our elephant is also important because it motivates us to connect with others who share a moral vision. Ultimately, if we are striving to build communities and strengthen our morals, we cannot rely exclusively on either the rider or the elephant; we need both. As Haidt explains:

If you live in a religious community, you are enmeshed in a set of norms, institutions and relationships that work primarily on the elephant to influence your behavior. But if you are an atheist living in a looser community with a less binding moral matrix, you might have to rely somewhat more on an internal moral compass, read by the rider. That might sound appealing to rationalists, but it is also a recipe for .. .a society that no longer has a shared moral order. [And w]e evolved to live, trade and trust within shared moral matrices. (Haidt, 269)

Since religion is a human construct, with its "norms, institutions and relationships," it can be used in a variety of different ways. It can obviously be used to shut down critical thinking and oppress others. But as you mention, religion has positive effects on well-being, and religious beliefs correlate with a sense of fulfillment. Perhaps the job of religion, then, should be giving us a common language, rituals and communities that reinforce and strengthen our ability to become better human beings and find joy and meaning in our lives.

Ultimately, we don't have to agree with someone in order to learn from them. As Ben Zoma, a second century Jewish sage, reminds us: "Who is wise? The person who learns from all people" (Pirkei Avot 4:1). When we are willing to open ourselves up to others, we open ourselves up to new ideas and different perspectives.

Indeed, I have come to believe that our purpose as human beings -- whether we identify as a believer, an atheist or anything in between -- is to better ourselves and our world. And any source of knowledge that leads us to that goal is worth pursuing.

Embracing the Intuitive AND the Analytical

2012-04-26T17:58:04-04:00

A study has just come out that argues that analytical thinking weakens religious belief, while at the same time, intuitive thinking may strengthen religious feelings.

Though the article comes out in a new issue of Science, this idea has been hypothesized for the last few years. For example, last September neuroscientist Joshua Greene and colleagues at Harvard University

asked hundreds of volunteers recruited online to answer three questions with appealingly intuitive answers that turn out to be wrong. For example, "A bat and ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?"
Although $0.10 comes easily to mind (it's the intuitive answer), it takes some analytical thought to come up with the correct answer of $0.05. People who chose more intuitive answers on these questions were more likely to report stronger religious beliefs, even when the researchers controlled for IQ, education, political leanings and other factors.
In the same study, another group of volunteers wrote a paragraph about a time in their lives when either following their intuition or careful reasoning led to a good outcome. Those who wrote about intuition reported stronger religious beliefs on a questionnaire taken immediately afterward.

So why might critical thinking lessen religious belief? Why might intuitive thinking strengthen it? And what are the implications for the religious community?

First, from the critical thinking side, it seems obvious as to why analytic thought might lessen religious belief. After all, when you start to think critically, you stop accepting things purely "on faith." So when people look at their texts or beliefs through a critical lens, they naturally begin to question the religious tenets that they held throughout their lives.

And yet religion is not just intellectual -- it is designed to be predominantly emotional and spiritual. It is supposed to make us feel things -- it is supposed to generate a sense of awe and wonder, build connections to others, elevate our compassion for those in need, and make us work to right the wrongs in this world.

So what does this mean for religion today? It means that for our world today, religion has to strive to be both intellectually sophisticated and emotionally resonant.

If religion is simplistic, or dogmatic, or anti-scientific, then as soon as new information or new ideas arise, it will shut itself off from the outside world. And as soon as it closes the door on new ideas, religion will stop being relevant.

And if religion is stale, or boring, or uninspiring, then no one will want to be part of it.

But if religion speaks to our deepest longings, if it inspires us to become better people, and if it can embrace not only faith but doubt, as well, then it will have the potential to become a great force for good in this world.

As Mayor Cory Booker said in a post on The Christian Left:

"Before you speak to me about your religion, first show it to me in how you treat other people; before you tell me how much you love your God, show me in how much you love all His children; before you preach to me of your passion for your faith, teach me about it through your compassion for your neighbors. In the end, I'm not as interested in what you have to tell or sell as in how you choose to live and give."

Yes, critical thinking may lessen religious belief, and yes, intuitive thinking may strengthen it. But we have to remember that "religious belief" is not a value in and of itself.

Instead, the real question is how we use our religious beliefs to improve ourselves and our world.

The Science of Compassion: A Conversation With Professor David DeSteno

2012-04-12T11:50:19-04:00

Compassion is a deep-seated value in every religious tradition. Judaism teaches that the world stands on Torah, on prayer and on acts of loving kindness. Christians celebrate the story of the Good Samaritan in Luke. And a major reason the Dalai Lama is so honored is because of his Buddhist teachings on compassion.

But compassion can also be studied scientifically, and one of the foremost researchers on compassion is Professor David DeSteno, author of the book "Out Of Character: Surprising Truths About the Liar, Cheat, Sinner (and Saint) Lurking in All of Us" and the director of the Social Emotions Lab at Northeastern University.

On April 15 at 4 p.m., Professor DeSteno will be speaking about the science of compassion at Temple Beth El of Northern Westchester. I had an opportunity to ask him some questions about how the the science of compassion can inform our religious and ethical outlooks:

Geoffrey Mitelman: Does religion foster or hinder our ability to be compassionate?

David DeSteno: It's a trickier question than one might think. There's been a debate going on in psychological science for the past decade about the nature of morality. Do our moral sentiments spring from innate intuitions (e.g., ubiquitous evolved responses) or from conscious dictates (e.g., religious doctrines, ethical principles). There's data to support both sides, and therein lies the reason for the ongoing debate. It's not simply one or the other. It is true that the challenges of human social life, among which is the question of when to feel compassion and act altruistically, have existed for much longer than we've had the cognitive wherewithal to engage in rational analysis. So, it makes good sense that we have moral intuitions that automatically guide our actions. We never would have made it out of the "ancestral savannah" if we didn't.

Of course, the more recent ability of the human mind to engage in abstract reasoning opened up additional ways for us to embrace (or avoid) ethical actions. The result is that we're of two minds -- an intuitive one and a deliberative one. The trick is to realize that they're both attempting to solve the same problem: how to navigate the social world optimally. Neither "mind" is more moral than the other, and that's the most important fact to understand in learning how to live more ethically. You can't always trust your intuitions or your rational mind. Both are capable of leading you astray.

When it comes to compassion, I think we can all agree that most religions embrace the view that compassion is a virtue and that we should help those in need. So, at a conscious level, I think religion works to increase the likelihood that we will help others. However, religion also functions as a social category; it can divide us into "us" and "them," into believers and nonbelievers.

What we know from our own research is that, on the intuitive level at least, how much compassion we feel for others is a direct function of how similar we feel to them. For example, our work has shown that simply having people wear similar color wristbands to denote their membership in a recently created "team" alters the levels of compassion they feel for each other. When one individual is harmed, the level of compassion another feels for him is modulated up or down depending on whether the victim is wearing the same color wristband.

Consequently, we have to be aware that while our religious beliefs may be urging us to act compassionately, our religious identities may be introducing an asymmetry into our responses. We may feel the pain of our brethren more and the pain of others less.

An interesting fact here can be seen in some traditions of Buddhist meditation. A basic technique of compassion meditation is to realize that all beings are equally similar. That technique is quite congruent with our findings. The more the mind automatically comes to see all beings as alike, the more ready it is to feel compassion equally for all in pain.

What situations most bring out our compassion? What situations bring it out the least?

As I've hinted at above, the level of compassion we feel for others is greatly influenced by whether we see ourselves in them. If you think about it, it makes great sense biologically. Feeling compassion usually motivates us to act to help others, often at a cost to ourselves. If a person were moved to feel compassion for everyone in every instance, it could become paralyzing. That person would experience constant sorrow and utilize all of her or his resources to help others. Now, this might be a noble goal, but in terms of evolutionary logic, it's anathema.

Consequently, the intuitive mind makes us feel more compassion for those with whom we share some affiliation. Of course, that affiliation can take many different forms -- familial, team membership, or group-based identities along various social dimensions (e.g., vegetarians).

In short, it's not just the nature of the tragedy that makes us feel compassion; it's also whether the victim is likely to help us in the future. No one would be surprised that an American soldier would feel more compassion for a wounded comrade than for a Taliban fighter who sustained the same injury. But this phenomenon of relativism is so deeply ingrained in the mind that we find the same asymmetry simply due to mirroring another's movements. If you tap your hands in time with a person right before they are victimized, you'll feel their pain more and work longer and harder to help them than if you didn't tap your hands in time with them. Synchronous movement, after all, is an ancient marker for joint purpose.

What's the relationship between compassion and ethical action?

Compassion, like all emotions, is a feeling state that serves as an engine for action. Once we feel an emotion, it increases the likelihood that we'll engage in certain behaviors (or at least makes us work harder to avoid them). Fear prepares us to flee. Anger prepares us for conflict. Compassion prepares us to support others. If you accept the view that emotions function to increase adaptive responding, then it makes great sense that humans have a suite of emotional responses that impel them to build social capital. We're a social species at heart. We depend on others to flourish. Consequently, we have to possess emotional responses that enhance prosocial actions and not just ones that are aimed at selfish pleasure or competition and aggression.

***

In Judaism, compassion is not primarily a feeling -- it is an action.

"Just as God is compassionate, we should be compassionate. Just as God clothed the naked (by making clothes for Adam), we should clothe the naked. Just as God visited the sick (by going to see Abraham after he was circumcised), we should visit the sick. Just as God comforted mourners (by speaking to Isaac after his father died), we should comfort mourners. Just as God buried the dead (by burying Moses), we should bury the dead." (Sotah 14a)

As DeSteno noted, there often is tension between our religious beliefs and our religious identities -- between our religious teachings that tell us to be compassionate to all people, and the way religious groups can create an "us" and "them" mentality.

But "who we are" is very much "what we do." If we act compassionately, we begin to view ourselves as "compassionate people." Our sense of identity arises not only from the group we associate with, but from the actions we take.

So when we think about using religion to foster compassion, then, the focus should not be on how we strengthen our sense of identity -- that simply reinforces divisiveness. Instead, as DeSteno's research on science of compassion shows, we should aim to strengthen our values, to think about how we behave and to consciously expand how we can "see ourselves" in others.

The Why and How of Freedom: The Enduring Message of Passover

2012-04-03T07:31:28-04:00

For Jews, the exodus from Egypt is the paradigmatic freedom story for all generations.

In the Book of Exodus, Moses tells the Israelites to "remember this day on which you went out from Egypt, from the house of bondage, how Adonai freed you from it with a mighty hand. ... You go free on this day, in the month of Aviv..." (Exodus 13:3-4).

One can read the repetition of the words "this day" to imply that the Exodus took place at a specific moment in the past, but that the possibility of redemption -- communal or personal -- is also always available "this day."

But this leads to an interesting challenge in verse 14: "And tomorrow, when your child asks you [about the Exodus] ... You shall say, 'It was with a mighty hand that Adonai brought us out from Egypt, the house of bondage.'"

While every parent knows that a child can be forgetful ("Where is your sweater? I forgot it at school.''), would a child really forget about the Exodus the day after it happened?

The rabbinic commentary, Mekhilta de Rabbi Ishmael, addresses this question by saying that "[t]here is a tomorrow now, and there is a tomorrow at a later date." In other words, when the scriptures talk about "tomorrow," they are not necessarily speaking literally about the day after today, but perhaps metaphorically about the future.

This interpretation invites us to think carefully about our relationship to the future. When we think about planning for "tomorrow," it matters which "tomorrow" we're talking about. As psychologist Daniel Glibert notes in his book "Stumbling on Happiness":

Whereas the near future is finely detailed, the far future is blurry and smooth. For example, when young couples are asked to say what they think of when they envision "getting married," those couples who are a month away from the event...envision marriage in fairly abstract and blurry ways...such as "making a serious commitment."...But couples who are getting married the next day envision marriage's concrete details, offering descriptions such as "having pictures made" or "wearing a special outfit."...
When we think of events in the distant past or distant future, we tend to think abstractly about why they happened or will happen, but when we think of events in the near past or near future we tend to think concretely about how they happened or will happen... (Gilbert, 116)

While Passover foreshadows our ultimate redemption -- a time when we will live in a world of peace and justice -- that vision is especially blurry. So our challenge is to begin transforming the "why" into the "how" -- turning the abstract into the concrete, actualizing the message of Passover today.

The problem is that the "why" is often much more compelling than the "how." With bills to pay, children to carpool, and the day-to-day minutiae of life, working for justice and peace can feel overwhelming.

And Gilbert helps us understand this challenge:

[When our sister asks if we can] babysit the nephews and nieces next month...we look forward to the obligation even as we jot it in our diary. [But] then, when it actually comes time to buy the Happy Meal [lunches], set up the Barbie playset, and [try to] ignore the fact that the NBA playoffs are on, we wonder what in the world we were thinking when we said yes. Well, here's what we were thinking: [we tend to see] baby-sitting next month [as] an "act of love"... [but] baby-sitting right now [as] an "act of lunch." (Gilbert, 117)

But what we so often forget is that in fact, "acts of love" mostly consist of "acts of lunch." It is often hard enough to simply imagine what kind of world we want to create; it is even harder to take the steps to do it.

And that's why productivity expert David Allen focuses so much attention on concrete next steps. As he explains, if you want to write thank you notes, that's fine, as long as you have pen and cards. But if you don't have the cards, you'll avoid doing it (see "Willpower," p. 79). Goals are critical, but execution is where the rubber meets the road.

To take a particularly moving contemporary example, faith leaders recently engaged in a powerful campaign, protesting Village Voice Media due to the sex-trafficking of minors that has taken place on its subsidiary, www.backpage.com. By collecting 250,000 signatures and calling upon Village Voice Media to shut down the adult section of backpage.com, these religious leaders concretized the message of the Exodus, pursuing freedom for all those young people enslaved by the Pharaohs of this despicable industry.

WATCH Faith Leaders Rally Against Sex-Trafficking:

So, too, do we on this Passover have an opportunity -- and responsibility -- to hold in our hearts and minds a grand vision of justice and peace, and to move from the general to the specific, from the abstract to the concrete.

As the famous Passover song Dayenu reminds us, we must mark our journey from slavery to freedom step by step, turning our "tomorrow at a later date" into our "tomorrow now."

ON Scripture -- The Torah is a weekly Jewish scriptural commentary, produced in collaboration with Odyssey Networks and Hebrew College. Thought leaders from the United States and beyond offer their insights into the weekly Torah portion and contemporary social, political, and spiritual life.

How to Talk About Science and Religion

2012-03-05T08:49:16-05:00

As someone who loves both religion and science, I often struggle with how they interact.

Are they in opposition to each other? Do they need to be reconciled? What happens when new scientific knowledge challenges the tenets of my faith?

Part of the difficulty in talking about science and religion is that there are several different ways we can discuss their interaction. Dr. Jennifer Wiseman, the Director of the Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, outlined several different models in an outstanding talk. Therefore, inspired by her, I want to share four different ways we can frame the discussion about how we talk about science and religion.

Contrast

The Contrast model is probably the most common way people speak about the interaction of science and religion. Often, this view is boiled down to the idea that "science deals with 'how' and religion deals with 'why.'"

Stephen Jay Gould popularized it with the phrase "Non-Overlapping Masteria" (NOMA), which he describes as follows: "The magisterium of science covers the empirical realm: what the Universe is made of (fact) and why does it work in this way (theory). The magisterium of religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. These two magisteria do not overlap."

But there are two problems with this paradigm. First, religion has theories about what the universe is made of -- for example, Jewish tradition has statements about the way the world came into being and why the world is the way it is. And science is now talking about morality and even meaning, with books like Sam Harris' "The Moral Landscape" about the science of morality and "The Brain and the Meaning of Life" by Paul Thagard about neuroscience and meaning. Thus, the magesteria, in fact, do overlap.

Second, and perhaps even more importantly, it's simply not true that science talks only (or even primarily) about "how" -- there's a lot of "why" in there, asking questions like, "Why is there something instead of nothing? Why do our brains work in the way that they do?" Similarly, religion doesn't talk only (or even primarily) about "why" -- there's a lot of "how" in there, asking questions like, "How do did humans come to be? How should we act in this world?"

So for people who view themselves as both scientific and religious, the Contrast model often makes them comfortable. But as science enters into the realm that has historically been the purview of religion, and especially if we look more deeply at religion and at science, this model stops working very well.

Concert

The Concert model is the opposite of the Contrast model, as people try to directly reconcile science and religion. It is another attractive outlook to those who are both dedicated to their faith and committed to reason, since it means they would not have to reject either. This model makes claims such as the concept of a "day" in Genesis may actually be billions of years, or that the crossing of the Red Sea was actually finding a swamp that could be crossed at low tide.

But here, too, there are problems with this view. After all, science is always changing, discovering new data and revising theories. If science and religion are in concert, what happens to religious faith when new scientific evidence arises? Indeed, not only physics and biology but also human sciences such as archaeology, political science and history are helping us understand who we are, why we do what we do and our place in the universe. So if religious faith is based on science, what happens when science presents new evidence?

Indeed, this model makes it hard to do a critical analysis of biblical texts, and that type of study frequently leads to a crisis of faith. In order for it to work, this model requires significant mental gymnastics, and forces people to maintain only a surface understanding of both science and religion.

So while this view may be appealing at first, it is actually quite fragile. All that needs to happen is for science to discover something that contradicts a deeply held belief, and people will easily elect either atheism or fundamentalism.

Conflict

The Conflict model is the paradigm that gets the most press, and it claims that religion and science are inherently incompatible. It's the idea that if you buy into one, you must reject the other. This worldview is exemplified by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens on one side, and people who deny evolution because it contradicts the Bible on the other.

But while this outlook generates the most passion from people on the extremes, there are a vast number of people who do not buy into it.

An article in The Huffington Post describes recent work by sociologist Elaine Ecklund, who

...interviewed 275 tenured and tenure-track faculty members from 21 research universities in the United States. Only 15 percent of respondents said religion and science were always in conflict, while 15 percent said the two were never in conflict. The majority, 70 percent, said religion and science are only sometimes in conflict.

Similarly, a study from Pew Research Forum showed that "a solid majority of Americans (61 percent) say that science does not conflict with their own religious beliefs. Even among those who attend worship services at least once a week, a slim majority (52 percent) sees no conflict between science and their faith."

Thus, while zealous advocates on each side often dominate the discussion, there is a large silent majority who do not see science and religion as inherently in conflict.

The bigger problem is that while the Conflict model produces a lot of heat, it rarely creates light. It regularly devolves into unproductive arguments and ad hominem attacks, and causes both scientists and religious people to become either overly aggressive or feel themselves to be "victims" of the other side.

So even though for some people, this is an outlook they hold strongly to, it is much more likely to shut down conversations than to open them.

Contact

This is the outlook that I find most resonant. In this model, science and religion can remain in their own spheres, but when it is appropriate, they can also mutually inform each other and provide us with a variety of ways to help us know what it means to be human. Indeed, its great value is that it reminds us that both religion and science have to be understood in the context of human experiences, because both religion and science are human endeavors.

The Contact model reminds us that science is not independent of the scientists who pursue their field of inquiry. After all, while the universe may be 13.7 billion years old, and humans may have evolved on the African savannah, it has only been since modern times that human beings have sought to undertake a rigorous understanding of fields like cosmology, paleontology, psychology, neuroscience and biochemistry. We have to remember that not only does scientific knowledge provide information, it is deeply influenced by the passions, the curiosity and the personal experiences of the scientists who pursue it.

Similarly, our own personal experiences influence our religious outlook. People's feelings about religion are naturally affected by how they were raised and what has happened in their own lives. In the words of Rabbi Laura Geller, "All theology is autobiography." And while religion is older than science, it is still a human creation, helping us structure our human experiences, and asks deeply human questions like, "How should I act? What should I value? Who should I choose to associate with?"

When we place science and religion in the context of human experiences, we recognize that both science and religion are driven by human needs and are victim to human foibles. The Contact model thus encourages humility in both science and religion, reminding both sides that there are things we do not know, and things we will never know.

So the other crucial piece to bear in mind for the Contact model is that "religion" and "God" are two separate things. "God" is bigger than any one human being or group of people; "religion" is our particular attempt to understand God, and is necessarily limited. As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel taught: "[R]eligion for religion's sake is idolatry ... The human side of religion, its creeds, its rituals and instructions is a way rather than the goal. The goal is 'to do justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.' (Micah 6:8)" ("I Asked for Wonder," p.40-41)

So for those of us who feel connected to God, when we forget that religion is not Divine, but human, we can easily fall into the trap of arrogance and narrow-mindedness. Micah thus reminds us that justice, mercy and humbleness are truly the most important values.

Indeed, our ultimate purpose in life is to strengthen ourselves, both as individuals and as a society. Science does that by giving us a fuller understanding of the world, by advancing knowledge, and by examining the relationship between theory and evidence. Religion does that by giving us a sense of purpose, by strengthening communities, and by giving us a potential glimpse of the Divine.

When we remember that both science and religion are human enterprises, we can remember that the most important question isn't whether they need to be viewed separately, or if they can be reconciled, or if they are inherently in conflict.

The most important question is: How are they being used?

How Much Do We Value Our Values?

2012-02-22T08:14:24-05:00

A friend of mine -- an ardent environmentalist -- just had a baby. She was trying to decide whether she would buy cloth diapers, which would be much friendlier to the earth, or go with disposables. She naturally started with cloth, but within a couple of weeks of washing and reusing and washing and reusing and washing and reusing, she gave in and bought disposables.

"I love the environment," she said. "Just not enough."

Very often, when we talk about values, we want to talk about simple right and wrong -- we should be good stewards of the earth, or remember that we have a responsibility to help those in need, or ensure that every human being has certain rights. But while some values are about simple right and wrong, in truth, the vast majority are actually about costs and benefits.

Indeed, even one of the greatest scholars in Jewish tradition realized that doing the right thing often has a cost -- and doing the wrong thing sometimes has a benefit. In Pirkei Avot, a collection of rabbinic sayings, Rabbi Judah had suggested that we should "calculate the loss of doing a mitzvah against its gain, and the gain of a transgression against its loss." (Avot 2:1)

And yet there is something unsettling about thinking about moral values in terms of gains and losses. After all, each of us has certain core beliefs -- sacred values that define who we are and that we would never compromise on.

But as my friend realized, we don't always know how much we value our values. So when do we look at values in terms of right and wrong, and when do we look at them in terms of costs and benefits?

Two Different Ways of Looking at Values; Two Different Parts of the Brain

A recent study at Emory University showed that when we think about our principles, our mental processes lead us to think differently about the values that we hold most dearly and the values that we are more willing to compromise on.

In this study, as participants were placed in an fMRI, they were presented with 62 pairs of two contradictory statements, such as "you support gay marriage" and "you oppose gay marriage." They then had to choose which one they agreed with.

After people decided on which side of the fence they fell, the experimenters gave them an option: if they agreed to sign a statement that was the opposite of what they believed, they could "auction off" that value, and receive up to $100. But if they truly felt strongly about a particular moral tenet -- what the researchers called a "sacred value" -- participants could refuse the money.

The experimenters weren't interested in which particular values people held; instead, they were wondering how those values were processed in the brain. And the results were striking.

Gregory Berns, the author of the study, explained that "the brain imaging data showed a strong correlation between sacred values and activation of the neural systems associated with evaluating rights and wrongs (the left temporoparietal junction) and semantic rule retrieval (the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex), but not with systems associated with reward." In other words, depending on whether a particular value viewed as "right and wrong" or as "costs and benefits," a different part of the brain was activated.

Not only that, when it came time to decide whether they would pay money to give up their sacred values, the participants' amygdalae were aroused, which happens only when there is an emotional reaction. As Berns noted, "Those statements ... would be expected to provoke the most arousal, which is consistent with the idea that when sacred values are violated, that induces moral outrage."

So perhaps surprisingly, we think about our values in two very distinct ways. Some are dispassionately calculated in terms of gains and losses, while others are emotionally charged and are felt to be inviolable.

The question is, what causes us to think about values through one frame or the other?

Perhaps not surprisingly, religion plays a big role in that answer.

Religion and Values

There was one other intriguing result from the Emory study: people who were more connected with groups had stronger activity in the parts of the brain that correlate to sacred values. Berns posited that "[o]rganized groups may instill values more strongly through the use of rules and social norms."

Organizations with a purpose, therefore, can help us internalize values. They not only give us a common language to talk about what we hold most dear, their social nature also reinforces those ideas.

And "organizations with a purpose" is a textbook definition of religious institutions.

Jonathan Haidt is an expert on the psychology of morality, and has an upcoming book entitled "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Religion and Politics." And as an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education notes:

A big part of Haidt's moral narrative is faith. He lays out the case that religion is an evolutionary adaptation for binding people into groups and enabling those units to better compete against other groups. Through faith, humans developed the "psychology of sacredness," the notion that "some people, objects, days, words, values, and ideas are special, set apart, untouchable, and pure." If people revere the same sacred objects, he writes, they can trust one another and cooperate toward larger goals.

So while humans certainly don't need religion in order to be moral, religion brings people together around a shared sense of mission and purpose. And perhaps the greatest impact religion has had on the world is that it helps us move the discussion of values from "costs and benefits" to "right and wrong."

A Unique Moral Code

The most well-known statement of religious values is, of course, the Ten Commandments. We may think that the reason they continue to inspire and to resonate is because they outline a moral code, or are simple to understand, or because "ten" is an easy number to remember.

But biblical scholar Dr. Joel Hoffman has a different idea. What makes the Ten Commandments unique, he believes, is that the five commandments surrounding interpersonal relationships -- don't murder, don't commit adultery, don't steal, don't bear false witness, and don't take your neighbor's possessions -- were designed to focus on "right and wrong," and not on"costs and benefits." As Hoffman explains:

The entire body of [legal] code in America doesn't make any distinction between right and wrong. It never says, for example, that killing someone is wrong. All it says is, "If you do, here's what happens..."

Here's an example: let's suppose you're a 16-year-old boy, a high-school dropout, and you have no future in front of you except for flipping burgers. Fortunately, you have caught the eye of a very, very wealthy 55-year-old woman. Being 16, you think that 55 is "almost dead," and so you marry her. Then you realize that she might live for a long time...And so what you do is take your wife's money, put some of it in an off-shore account and then you kill her. And you figure you're going to get a good defense and you're going to out in 7-12 [years]. So at the end, you'll be thirty years old, single again and wealthy and you say to yourself, "It's worth it."

There is nothing in the entire body of American law that says you are not entitled to make that calculus. Nowhere does it say that even if you're willing to do the time, you shouldn't do the crime.

That's why the Ten Commandments are so important. The Ten Commandments are a list of things that are wrong even if you are willing to pay the punishment. They are unlike any legal code, unlike anything I can see in America.

Every society has laws. But those laws are almost always about the consequences of violation. In contrast, the section of the Ten Commandments that govern human interaction -- the ones where we would be most likely to see consequences listed -- don't even mention costs and benefits. While the writers of the Torah didn't have access to modern neuroscience, the Ten Commandments seemed to have been intentionally written in order to activate the "right and wrong" part of our brain, and not the "costs and benefits" part.

How Should We Talk About Values?

We don't often realize that we categorize values in two different ways. Some are experienced emotionally, while others are computed more rationally. So our task is one that is at the same very simple and very complicated -- namely, to recognize when we are moving from one system to the other.

On the one hand, we often forget how hard it is to be rational when we are emotionally charged about something, and that rational evidence never convinces anyone (even ourselves) when we are riled up.

On the other hand, as my environmentalist with the baby friend realized, sometimes the values we hold most dear are actually the result of a cold cost / benefit analysis, and we often forget that doing the right thing has a cost.

So the real question isn't, "What do we value?" That's a comparatively easy question to answer -- we all talk about things like justice, peace, and fairness. The real question is, "How are we experiencing this particular value?" Are we deliberately calculating, or emotionally reacting?

Because only by answering that question can we learn how much we truly value our values.

Give Your Brain Some Rest

2012-01-30T09:54:51-05:00

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 in 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.