Morality from Eight Hugs a Day?

Per economist Paul Zak, the human brain generates oxytocin in response to experiences in which we feel close to others - weddings, hugs, receiving a gift - and this oxytocin helps us to feel greater empathy in return, and to act more generously toward others in general. He calls oxytocin "the moral molecule", because oxytocin-induced empathy will cause people to act more positively toward others around them.

You can watch his TED presentation on the topic here; his eight-hugs-per-day prescription comes at the end:



This research leads to obvious questions about moral liability for people whose oxytocin-generating mechanisms are defective, and about the ethical use of oxytocin, or oxytocin-generating actions, in order to influence the behavior of others.

It also leads me to think about the methods of successful politicians and fundraisers - the ones who hug, maintain contact, ask how you are doing, try to help you, and so on. Capitalizing on an empathy-building bond is nothing new, but providing a chemical basis for it is interesting.

The big question in my mind, though: What is it about these empathy-triggering interactions that makes our brain perceive them as worthy of oxytocin? What teaches the brain to view these as bonding experiences?

Class: Halachic issues in treating anxiety and depression

[This week's Haveil Havalim is here]

This morning I presented a shiur on halachic issues in treating anxiety and depression.

I've used other opportunities to talk about clinical depression, such as in the Rosh haShanah derashah you can find here. This was a halachah shiur, though, part of a monthly CME shiur given to physicians. The focus was on whether these mental health conditions qualify to warrant violation of Shabbat, kashrut, and the laws of contraception and abortion.

You can find the audio and source sheet here; below are the vignettes we used:

Joshua, a 45 year old man, experiences racing thoughts and mania, for which he has begun a course of antipsychotics. Is he permitted to take them on Shabbat?

Leah, a 25 year old mother of two children, experienced heavy postpartum depression after both births, managing it only with extensive therapy and drug treatment. She would like to begin birth control to avert future pregnancies. Birth control pills, generally considered the halachically best form, might lead to worse symptoms; she would want to use an IUD. May she use an IUD?

Jason, 38, displays symptoms of depression, and has spoken, albeit vaguely, of suicidal thoughts. It is Friday, and the only option for commitment is a facility where kosher food is unavailable, and he will need to remain in a non-shomer-shabbat environment through Shabbat. May we commit Jason?

Lauren, 50, is manifesting signs of serious depression, including loss of appetite, lack of care for her person, and loss of a feeling of self-worth. However, she refuses treatment. May we treat Lauren against her will?

Julia, 17, has attempted suicide with overdoses of medicine before. We would like to treat with SSRIs in order to lower risk of overdose, but we know that some studies have shown increased suicidal ideation in young patients, while others have not. May we treat with SSRI’s?

Talking to children about depression

[My Tisha b'Av article for YU To Go is now on-line here.]

Here’s a question I’ve asked and been asked over the years: At what point should parents talk to their children about depression?

The question arises for two reasons:

1. Stories in the news - From time to time there are news items about pre-adolescents, kids aged 9, 10, 11, taking their own lives, often in response to abuse from their schoolmates. The parents say the normal things – “We never knew it was this bad,” “He would swing in and out of moods, but he never talked as though he was a danger to himself,” and so on. And we wonder how we should introduce the question to our children. “Are you going through…?” “Are you thinking about…?”

2. Family histories - Studies show that one can, in fact, inherit a vulnerability to clinical depression. So when an adult is diagnosed with this condition, the follow-up questions include, “What about my children? Is there a way to test them for this? Do I warn them? How?”

It seems to me that normal child-rearing must include teaching, in an age-appropriate way, coping mechanisms for normal, non-biochemical depression. Dealing with frustration, with boredom, with tough peer groups, with love and loss – we cannot immunize our children against these situations, but we can, and I think must, help them find ways to cope, both directly and by modeling the behavior. This doesn’t require a conversation about clinical issues and genes and biochemistry.

But I’m asking about more than that, about helping our kids recognize when an emotion is outside of the normal range, and it’s time to call in the experts. Can that happen at age 10? Age 13? Age 15? Age 18?

I’m not suggesting that kids at these ages could diagnose an abnormal personal, emotional reaction – it’s hard enough for trained and objective adults – but perhaps we could tell them a little bit about the problem and its dangers, empowering them to seek out help… without terrorizing them and without leading them to a false self-diagnosis.

Obviously this not a one-size-fits-all subject, but surely someone with knowledge of developmental psychology could make some general recommendations.

I’m sending this question to my favorite Internet counseling resource. In addition, though, please comment with your thoughts, and any recommended reading material.

Dangerous Doppelgangers

Has this ever happened to you?

Standing on line at the supermarket checkout, davening next to someone in shul, sitting next to someone at a meeting, you notice that the person beside you bears a strong resemblance to someone you know, and like. Instinctively, you feel and act more friendly to him than might be expected, perhaps drawing a suspicious look.

Alternatively, she looks like someone with whom you’ve had a run-in, and you start to shy away, perhaps drawing nervous glances.

This happens to me all the time. One person I met a few months ago resembles a cousin of mine. Another looks like the principal at a school in a community in which I once lived. A third matches a regular from one of my shiurim in Allentown, and a fourth strongly resembles a boy I taught for his bar mitzvah. Yet another looks like my children’s former pediatrician, and another like a person who gave me an incredibly hard time in my shul – a dozen years ago.

The result: I meet people and instantly feel friendly or cold, paternal or jokey or turned-off or trusting, based not on any experience with them but on experience with people whom they resemble.

I know it’s happening, I l know my reaction is just the product of a resemblance, but I feel it anyway.

Where does this come from?

1. Part of it is from the general disorientation of being uprooted from a small-to-mid-sized city where I lived for eight years, to a megalopolis with a ton of people I’ve never met. Since moving to Toronto in August, I’ve meet many hundreds of people, in all parts of the city. I see people in one place, then, weeks or months later, run into them in a completely different part of the city. I meet someone at Shopper’s Drug Mart, then in shul, then at a shiur, then at a shiva house… it’s all very disorienting, and remembering people’s names and associations and roles is occasionally a real challenge.

2. Part of it is from the mind’s natural urge to categorize: We make intuitive leaps in order to simplify our input, grouping people and interactions in different ways – and some of those leaps are just wrong.

3. And part of it is that physiognomy – the practice of reading people’s character from their appearance – is real. Posture, facial expression, alertness and more are often a product of personality, and so we tend to intuit, based on experience, that people who look alike will also have similar personalities.

And so I find myself asking myself, not infrequently (and agrammatically): Who do you think you’re talking to?

Weird.

Dumb Israeli smokers, Smart Israeli rats, and more Science News

[This week’s Haveil Havalim is here]

I'm having a very busy few days as the kollel resumes programming and as my counterparts at various shuls and organizations return to normal business.

I'm also into "Do it Yourself" season - I've recently dismantled and cleaned my car brakes, re-hinged a door, washed my entire stock of white shirts by hand (long story), re-potted a few plants and replaced all of the buttons on my davening jacket.

Bottom line: I'm short of time to write. Nonetheless, here’s a round-up of some recent scientific stories I have found interesting:

Smoking Is Dumb: Young Men Who Smoke Have Lower IQs, Study Finds
A study led by Prof. Mark Weiser of Tel Aviv University's Department of Psychiatry and the Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer Hospital has determined that young men who smoke are likely to have lower IQs than their non-smoking peers. Tracking 18- to 21-year-old men enlisted in the Israeli army in the largest ever study of its kind, he has been able to demonstrate an important connection between the number of cigarettes young males smoke and their IQ.
The average IQ for a non-smoker was about 101, while the smokers' average was more than seven IQ points lower at about 94, the study determined. The IQs of young men who smoked more than a pack a day were lower still, at about 90. An IQ score in a healthy population of such young men, with no mental disorders, falls within the range of 84 to 116.

New, Inexpensive Way to Predict Alzheimer's Disease
Your brain's capacity for information is a reliable predictor of Alzheimer's disease and can be cheaply and easily tested, according to scientists.
"We have developed a low-cost behavioral assessment that can clue someone in to Alzheimer's disease at its earliest stage," said Michael Wenger, associate professor of psychology, Penn State. "By examining (information) processing capacity, we can detect changes in the progression of mild cognitive impairment (MCI).

Simple Test Can Detect Signs of Suicidal Thoughts in People Taking Antidepressants
While antidepressant medications have proven to be beneficial in helping people overcome major depression, it has long been known that a small subset of individuals taking these drugs can actually experience a worsening of mood, and even thoughts of suicide. No clinical test currently exists to make this determination, and only time -- usually weeks -- can tell before a psychiatrist knows whether a patient is getting better or worse.
Now, UCLA researchers have developed a non-invasive biomarker, or indicator, that may serve as a type of early warning system.
Reporting in the April edition of the peer-reviewed journal Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, Aimee Hunter, an assistant research psychologist in the UCLA Department of Psychiatry, and colleagues report that by using quantitative electroencephalographic (QEEG), a non-invasive measurement of electrical activity in the brain, they were able to observe a sharp reduction of activity in a specific brain region in individuals who proved susceptible to thoughts of suicide -- within 48 hours of the start of treatment.

Inkjet-like device "prints" cells right over burns
Inspired by a standard office inkjet printer, U.S. researchers have rigged up a device that can spray skin cells directly onto burn victims, quickly protecting and healing their wounds as an alternative to skin grafts.
They have mounted the device, which has so far only been tested on mice, in a frame that can be wheeled over a patient in a hospital bed, they reported Wednesday.
A laser can take a reading of the wound's size and shape so that a layer of healing skin cells can be precisely applied, said the team at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
"We literally print the cells directly onto the wound," said student Kyle Binder, who helped design the device. "We can put specific cells where they need to go."

And one more:
Why Israeli Rodents Are More Cautious Than Jordanian Ones
Is a border line simply a virtual line appearing on the map? If so, why is it that Israeli rodents are more cautious than Jordanian rodents? Why is it that there are more ant lions in Israel than in Jordan? And how come there are more reptile species in Jordan than in Israel? A series of new studies at the University of Haifa's Department of Environmental and Evolutionary Biology and the University of Haifa-Oranim's Faculty of Sciences and Science Education are exploring the answers.

The Big Orange Splot and High Self-Monitors

I heard an interesting term on the radio this morning: High Self-Monitors. The label refers to people who pay attention to the way they are perceived by others, and try to modify their behavior in order to satisfy others’ expectations.

I was a High Self-Monitor as a kid; I was the one who hadn’t seen the latest movie, but who instinctively knew to hover in the group that was discussing the movie until I had absorbed enough to fake it. I didn’t always act on the monitoring intelligence – hence my inclusion in the “Normals” instead of the “Dragons” in junior high school – but I was always watching for what was cool.

The context of the radio piece was a study published in BusinessWeek ("Online dating as honest as real life") and on CNN.com ("Online dating liars: Why they do it"), showing that people who lie (in ‘minor’ ways) on on-line dating sites, such as by saying they “look like a model,” are more likely to be eager-to-please. Such people are called “high self-monitors,” and they are more likely to find a mate. As the newsreader put it, low self-monitors are more likely to be brutally honest, and alone.

They certainly had a point; even though I get upset when people dissemble in order to please me, I can’t ignore the fact that they are trying to make me happy with them, and that on some level this is a good thing.

I listened to the radio report with a parent’s ambivalence. I want my children to be high self-monitors so that they will fit in, but I also want them to have the confidence to chart their own paths, and do their own thing. I want my kids to follow the advice of Pirkei Avos and use public approval as a key way to gauge the morality of their decisions, but I also want my kids to be Mr. Plumbean in that '70s classic, The Big Orange Splot, doing what they feel is right rather than what they feel will help them fit in.

Of course, this is also a shul rabbi’s problem – on the one hand, a Rabbi wants to work with people, and that comes with a degree of wanting to please. On the other hand, Rabbi Yisrael Salanter’s classic observation - that rabbis who are universally approved aren’t doing their jobs – makes the point that a successful rabbi must buck the trend, too.

I expect that the answer is a Kohelesian גם מזה אל תנח ידיך, “Hold on to this, but do not let go of that.”

Be a High Self-Monitor, in the sense that we should train ourselves, and our kids, to pick up on social cues and be aware of how we will be perceived. At the same time, be a Low Self-Monitor in the sense that we should be willing to ditch that public opinion of which we are aware, when we feel it’s wrong.

Be a High Self-Monitor on issues of grave public consequence, taking public opinion into strong consideration. But be a Low Self-Monitor in deciding what music you like, what sort of art you like, in who you are inside.

And if someone lies to you in describing himself, don’t get upset. Remember: It’s just because he wants your approval.

Why our children need self-esteem

I took a little thousand-mile (all right, 950, close enough) road trip on Sunday-Monday.

I'm a music addict behind the wheel, so I spent a fair amount of time skimming what used to be called "the radio dial" for something to amuse my ears. (I don't do well with audio-shiurim while driving; either I pay too much attention to the shiur, or too little...)

One find was a country song called "International Harvester," which I found very funny. It's exactly the kind of song I imagine when people talk about country music - an amusing set of lyrics about rural life, with a rude gesture toward people who don't like it.

I also heard way too many stations broadcasting Rush, Michael, Glen et al. I can't listen to them; often I disagree, but even when I do agree, it's still painful. It's like listening to someone exaggerating my own views to the point of parody.

And I heard an interview with a parenting expert who pontificated about how we coddle, pamper and otherwise spoil our children entirely too much. That one really set me off.

I do believe that many people do pamper their children too much, but I was annoyed by the way the interviewer played down the need for parents to build their children's self-esteem. Our battles for the esteem of others pale in comparison with our battle for our own self-respect, and particularly in our adolescent years.

If we want our children to be Avraham and Sarah, striking out on their own with confidence in both Revelation and Vision, we had better provide them with self-esteem.

If we want our children to be Sarah and Rivkah, boldly protecting their progeny and shaping the next generation, we had better provide them with self-esteem.

If we want our children to be Yehoshua and Kalev, bucking the Meraglim [Spies], we had better provide them with self-esteem.

The anti-self-esteem line of thinking reminded me of a post by Therapydoc last week, available here, on the misguided notion of promoting humility by tearing kids down. As she put it, "[A] little humility is a good thing, but beat the "I" out of a kid only if you want that kid to forever compare himself and come up short. Any beating will do, to facilitate low self-esteem. Just name your abuse of the day-- emotional, verbal, physical, financial, sexual-- they'll all do the job."

TD noted a few of the reasons why we so easily develop low self-esteem, including:

(1) The way we compare ourselves to others;
(2) The toll of failure;
(3) Lack of praise from others.

All true; we've all seen it. And in the comments on her post, I added a fourth based on my own experience, and TD esteemed it enough that I think I'll include it here:

(4) Another cause for unrealistically low self-esteem, in my experience: We live with knowledge of our flaws, and we see the damage they cause for us. Other people tend to be more forgiving of these defects (or, at least, less concerned than we are).

Humility is a good thing, and our children need it, and we must help them develop it - but not at the expense of self-respect.

Just something to think about, fruits of a long drive.

Shidduchim, and Conan O’Brien on Cynicism

[This week's Haveil Havalim is here]

A bit too much going on for a real post today, but here are two items that caught my eye recently and that I believe are worth consideration:

1. Mother in Israel has been running a series on Dating in Israel today, as her children move toward the age of shidduchim and dating and all of the challenges that come with watching our families create the next generation. Click here for the sixth installment, on Internet Dating in the Religious Zionist community.

This Shidduchim issue is not on my immediate horizon, but I still find it an interesting read. Of course, like most people, I entered the dating world wanting to be independent and do it without parental intervention and the general involvement of my seniors, but as I move toward that age and that role I begin to understand why it is so stressful to watch your children go through this stage, and why keeping Hands Off! is far easier said than done. So I can start to begin to somewhat relate to Mother in Israel’s situation.

[I remember when robotics and nanotech first started to make inroads in the popular mindset, and one of the big novelties was the thought that we could create machines which would, in turn, create more machines, which would, in turn, create more machines. This would, we thought, mean a major step toward the humanization of machines. In truth, though, the human aspect is not in the reproduction, it's in the way we do it. That humanesque threshold will be crossed only when those machines start creating Personal Ads, setting each other up, going to hotel lobbies and agonizing over their options, not to mention hiring caterers and videographers, before creating their progeny.]


2. And the second item is a CNN.com quote from Conan O’Brien’s last show, in which he holds forth on Cynicism and sounds somewhat like Rebbe Nachman:

“All I ask of you is one thing: please don't be cynical. I hate cynicism -- it's my least favorite quality and it doesn't lead anywhere," he concluded. "Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you're kind, amazing things will happen.”

Amen, Conan.

The Avatar/Jerusalem Blues

CNN is reporting on an inevitable psychological phenomenon, The Avatar Blues, in which people who immerse themselves in the film have a hard time returning to their normal lives. As one movie fan put it:

"I can understand why it made people depressed. The movie was so beautiful and it showed something we don't have here on Earth. I think people saw we could be living in a completely different world and that caused them to be depressed."

This is similar to the problems psychologists have been predicting for years, as virtual reality simulations have improved.

Look at this 1995 article from the Society for the Advancement of Education:
Pitting the wonders of virtual worlds against real-world duties and concerns, they argue, will be no contest. Legions of electronic travelers will check in to their own little virtual worlds--and they won't check out!

Or this question from a 2007 course at University of California, Santa Barbara, Exploring Virtual Reality:
Is virtual reality generated by a quest for some new art for, or by the desire to replace an incomplete reality by another, more easily mastered one, an ideal, platonic reality?

Depression over our lot in life is nothing new, and neither is destructive addiction to a substitute - think of everything from drug abuse to adultery - but we keep inventing more advanced ways for people to find satisfaction outside of daily life, and the result is that people flee to those substitutes rather than search for satisfaction in the world in which they live.

The CNN article talks about combating the problem by joining support groups, and finding ways to introduce reminders of Avatar into their lives, such as through the soundtrack. These sound like reasonable methods for handling the addiction, but I would prefer to see the Avatar Addicts look for practical ways to make the world around them more ideal, rather than simply pretend it's a different place. Discontent can fuel change, and I believe it should.

For that matter, the same problem afflicts many of our Jewish community's kids. Teens go off to study in Israel after high school, entering a world of Yeshiva and Seminary that they had never imagined, and that seems entirely beautiful to them. Month after month of pure ideological devotion at the most ideological time of their lives, reinforced by wonderful role models in their rebbeim, reinforced by their most respected peers, and facing little outside responsibility - what could be better? And so, many of them face those same Avatar Blues when it comes time to return to Earth.

I believe the answer is the same for our students as it is for the Avatarians. The short-term fix of finding ways to extend the Israel experience into their lives and seeking the support of others is great. For those who can stay in Israel, that's wonderful. Ultimately, though, I believe that the answer for many should be to use that discontent to fuel change, and personal as well as communal growth.

Mazal tov! Mazal tov!

[This week's Toronto Torah is here!]

Last night we celebrated my brother-in-law’s engagement. (To a Toronto girl, no less! I have now passed the first test of Toronto citizenship: I have mishpachah here on both sides of my family.)

And another simchah: This evening we’ll celebrate my bechor’s first siyyum, Gd-willing; we’ve finished learning Mishnayot Masechet Berachot together.

These s’machot have put me in mind to contemplate Vicarious Joy – the happiness we feel when someone else is happy.

I see two kinds of vicarious emotion:
1. I feel the same joy/sadness/revulsion/anger you feel, because I can imagine how I would feel if that happened to me;
2. I feel the same joy/sadness/revulsion/anger you feel, because you feel it.

The first, I think, is the easier one to feel; it’s natural to imagine ourselves experiencing what others experience, even if we have no direct connection to them. I heard a radio report this morning about Michelle Lang, a 34-year old reporter for the Calgary Herald, engaged to be married this summer and killed yesterday in Afghanistan, and my gut reaction was to imagine myself in that situation.

The latter is more challenging, I believe, because it requires of us that we adopt others’ emotional state. Logically, it means that I would be happy just becausehe was happy, or sad just because he was sad, even if I didn’t know why he was happy or sad, even if his emotional reaction to a situation is foreign to me.

The Torah (Shemot 4:14, as explained in Shabbat 139a) describes Aharon meeting his brother Moshe and feeling great happiness for him, after Gd selects him to lead the Jews out of Egypt. It says, “וראך ושמח בלבו,” “He will see you and be glad in his heart.” And the gemara says Aharon is rewarded with the honor of wearing the Kohen Gadol’s special breastplate upon his heart.

Rashi takes this gemara as saying that Aharon felt joy that Moshe had been selected, and he views the gemara’s praise of Aharon as praise that he was happy rather than jealous. But the Torah’s sentence itself – “He will see you and be glad in his heart” – suggests that Aharon’s joy comes before he actually knows anything about Moshe’s appointment. This read is cemented by Shemot 4:27-28, in which it is explicit that Aharon does not know: Gd tells Aharon to go meet Moshe, he meets Moshe, and then Moshe tells him about the appointment.

This suggests that Aharon’s joy is simply triggered by seeing that Moshe is happy. He sees that Moshe is glad, and therefore he is glad, even without knowing why. It’s pure. [I know there is one weakness in this: Moshe resisted being selected! אף על פי כן. His resistance was not sadness; it was humility.]

This also puts me in mind of another point: Our natural expectation that others will be happy when we are happy, and sad when we are sad. We expect it, I think, and we are disappointed when it is not forthcoming, and it makes us doubt our relationships. Interesting, but seder starts in a minute, so I’ll have to return to this thought.

Blamespeak

Ever since my Remembrance Day post, I’ve been thinking about a post on sensitivity to the left vs. sensitivity to the right, but it’s not quite there yet. That, in addition to the day-to-day schedule and my travel to New York this past Sunday and Monday, has slowed down my blogging. A quick item, though, since I haven’t posted in a couple of days.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Blame – why we need to blame people, even ourselves, for the various problems of our lives. Children are always looking for someone to blame, largely as a way to shift responsibility away from themselves. As we get older we also learn to blame ourselves, sometimes productively and sometimes unproductively. We blame Gd, too, in ways both subtle and direct, and this can be a demonstration of sincerest faith or a blasphemous attack.

The neviim talk at length about blame, because as a nation, we blame Gd for our problems, we blame luck for our problems, and we rarely blame ourselves/our errors for our problems. The result is that we go looking for solutions in all the wrong places; see Hosheia 7 (which comes to mind only because I just taught it yesterday; there are many other excellent examples in Tanach).

Blaming can accomplish great ends, or it can be self-destructive, or it can simply affirm our sense that there is an order, purpose and meaning in life.

Casting blame on others can be an attempt to make ourselves feel better about ourselves, but I suspect that approach doesn’t work, and in fact induces frustration and shame, in anyone with a modicum of self-awareness.

Not to mention, blaming the wrong party guarantees you won’t solve your problems, and possibly make them worse. Which brings me to a simple event from Monday night.

My Continental flight from Newark to Toronto was supposed to depart at 8:30 PM… which became 9:00… which became 9:10 PM… which became 9:40 PM… and we eventually took off somewhere around 10 PM, to arrive in Toronto about 11:30 PM. By this time I was good and tired, tired enough to forget that I had flown out of Toronto on a different airline, from a different terminal, so that my car was not at Terminal 3, but at Terminal 1.

I headed for the parking lot and its self-pay machines, and inserted my ticket in the first slot I found. Rejected. Being the person I am, though, I decided to try a second machine; blame that first machine for its incompetence, of course. (Yes, I entirely ignored the model ticket on the machine, which very clearly did not resemble my own ticket.) Strike two – it was rejected. Undaunted, I blamed both of those gadgets and tried a third machine. Yes, this was clearly the fault of two defective machines.

The third machine liked my ticket so much that it decided to keep it. Push Cancel. Nothing. Mull kicking machine, decide against. Push call button, speak to the nice attendant, certain that it’s the machine’s fault. Wait. Wait. Wait. Attendant comes, opens machine. Attendant patiently explains that this ticket is for Terminal 1 parking, not Terminal 3 parking. Thank attendant very much for his time at midnight, and head for train to Terminal 1 and my eventual arrival at home at about 1 AM.

Whom do I get to blame for getting to sleep so late? Myself, of course. Well, Continental for the delay, myself for the parking mess.

And the lesson: Be careful where you cast blame for your problems, or you’ll end up digging your hole even deeper.

When you hear hoofbeats, think of horses, not zebras

The other night I attended a meeting in which a key participant avoided answering an important question. I passed a note to a friend, saying, “If it ducks like a duck, it’s a duck.” To which he replied with an equally zoological note, “When I hear hoofbeats, I think of zebras.”

I wasn’t familiar with this line, but it had the ring of a popular saying, so I tried to deduce what he meant.

My first thought was of Monty Python, of course, and the scene with the coconut-shells being rapped together to sound like hoofbeats… but I couldn’t see any relevance.

Then I thought it might have to do with the classic zebra question – is the zebra marked with white stripes on a black background, or black stripes on a white background? But that really had no relevance here, that I could see.

So then I thought about zebras and how life isn’t black-and-white. Perhaps I should hear hoofbeats and think of horses, understanding that life can be gray sometimes, rather than draw black-and-white conclusions a la zebras. Was this a rebuke about my swift judgment of the duck?

I was confused… so, upon arriving back at shul after the meeting, I turned to Wikipedia, and found out that it’s actually a medical aphorism, related to diagnosis. Horses are simple, Zebras are complex. Essentially, the message is this: When faced with symptoms, assume the least-complex diagnosis first. (There’s even a book with that title, available at Amazon here.)

(Which, by the way, means that when I took a labyrinthine route to reason out the meaning of those words, I actually ended up violating their advice...)

To put this in other words, the line is another version of Occam’s Razor, or the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid): Don’t reason beyond the data.

Which, while good advice, is easier said than done. Human beings are physically and spiritually wired to reason beyond the data, to make leaps of deduction that have little relationship with reality. When we are happy about this, we call it intuition and human creativity; when we are less pleased, generally after the fact, we call it foolishness.

It reminds me of an article I read a month ago, regarding an experiment with dog owners who were told that their dog had done something wrong. A great percentage of them thought their dog was wearing a guilty expression in regret for its crime – but, in fact, in half of the cases the dog had done nothing wrong at all. If anything, the dog’s expression was a response to rebuke, not a response to an emotion of guilt, but the dog owners had assumed that the dogs could feel guilt for their misdeeds.

We see zebras all the time in the realm of religion. It’s the tendency that encourages people to see their deity in a piece of toast, or a fluffy cloud, or the trunk of a tree. It’s the tendency that allows people to see patterns in their lives, in events both positive and negative. It is not always a pro-religion force, though; we also see zebras when we question Gd’s existence, finding proof of randomness or malice wherever we choose.

And, as so often happens, the gemara’s sages described this tendency perfectly. They said regarding Bilam (Makkot 10b), “בדרך שאדם רוצה לילך בה מוליכים אותו,” which translates roughly as, “A person will be brought along the path he wishes to follow.” It was true for Bilam, and it’s true for us as well.

"Giving it to him" is usually a bad idea

A friend related that he had finally told off a very difficult person at work. “I really gave it to him,” he said. The conversation reminded me of a shul finance official who once told me he wanted to contact people who don’t pay their dues, and “really give it to them.”

(I suspect this is the sort of giving many people are actually contemplating when they say, “It’s better to give than to receive!”)

I’ve never found this tactic useful. I'll admit that I've done it a few times, but it's never accomplished anything positive, and it has generally yielded negative results.

Sure, unloading on someone allows me to express my frustration, but it's just that, an emotional reaction, not a reasoned strategy. Worse, it makes people defensive, it tells them they have gotten to me, it sounds like a child’s tantrum… it’s a negotiating disaster, in other words.

Juts look at the Torah’s classic example of "giving it to someone," Yaakov’s lecture to Lavan (Bereishit 31:36-42) after Lavan had chased him down and accused him of theft. I love this tirade. Translated loosely:

And Yaakov was angered, and he fought with Lavan, saying to him, “What is my rebellion, what is my transgression, that you lit out after me? You have felt through all of my possessions, what of your household items have you found? Place it here, before my brothers and yours, and let them identify the truth between us!

This is twenty years I’ve been with you, your ewes and goats never lost their young and I never ate any of your sheep. I never brought you a torn up animal; I made it up myself, you demanded it of my hand, whether it was stolen by day or by night.

I was consumed by dry heat in the day and frost by night, and sleep flew from my eyes. This is twenty years for me in your house, I worked for you for fourteen years for your two daughters, and six years for your sheep, and you even altered my salary ten times! If the Gd of my father, the Gd of Avraham and the One who awed Yitzchak, had not been with me, you would now have sent me away empty-handed! Gd has seen my poverty and the strain of my hands, and judged it last night.

That’s a great tirade, Yaakov really let loose on him. I love leining it; the words, combined with the trop notes, are so energized, so dramatic.

But what does Lavan do? Next sentence:

And Lavan asserted and said to Yaakov: The daughters are my daughters, the sons are my sons, the sheep are my sheep, and everything you see is mine…

“Giving it to him” doesn’t work, folks; it didn’t work for Yaakov, and it doesn’t work today.

Instead, Tanach’s recommendation (Mishlei 15:1) that ומענה רך ישיב חמה, “A soft assertion will settle anger,” works far better for me.

Of course it's the computer's fault (or the horse's fault, if you're a Hamasnik)

Sitting in the airport waiting on a flight to Toronto, I scanned this week's email from ScienceDaily and found this gem:

Students who get stuck look for computer malfunctions

Excerpt:
When students attempting to solve a mathematical problem, were informed by the computer that their answer was incorrect, they often focused on trying to find the reasons for this in the functions of the educational software itself.

"They would maintain that their answers merely needed to be rephrased, that the computer's answers were wrong in the same way as answers on an answer key of a mathematics textbook could be wrong, or provided other similar explanations," says Annika Lantz-Andersson.

Does this really surprise anyone who has ever dealt with (a) computers, (b) students, or (c) human beings in general? [The article does not indicate the age of the students, but I'd guess high school.]

I'll bet the Hamas attackers in this story blamed their hi-tech option, the horses...


One noteworthy element in the story:
"There is a kind of silence in the relationship between students and the educational software they use. The computer never gets tired, is not bothered by endless examples of random answers, does not distinguish between students, but on the other hand cannot provide individually-fitted feedback, which is one of the most important tasks of a teacher", she continues.

This reminds me of one of the major reasons why Torah sheb'al peh, the spoken Torah (midrash/mishnah/gemara), was meant to be kept verbal rather than written. The ideal teacher/student relationship requires bi-directional feedback, which will never occur with a written text.

Israel, Canaan, Palestine, Eretz Yisroel: The Power of Nomenclature [and Noah-menclature]

[A great new edition of Haveil Havalim is out here.]

A few years back I noticed that Israel’s Dalton Winery was producing a line of wines called Canaan. It rubbed me entirely wrong; aren’t we supposed to be getting away from the whole Canaan thing? Isn’t there a biblical instruction about not emulating the ways of Canaan?

(Of course, the Canaan name might be a tip of the hat to the rabbinic teaching that Canaan was the one who discovered his drunken grandfather Noah (Genesis 9) - but, really, how much better would that be?)

At this time of year I feel the same discomfort as I speak about the parshiyyot in which Avraham and Sarah, and then their descendants, are introduced to the land that would, eventually, become known as Eretz Yisrael. Technically, I should describe our ancestors as arriving in Canaan, as moving around Canaan, as living in Canaan - in fact, as being Canaanites. But the word carries such baggage that I am uncomfortable with it, and so I say absurdly illogical things like, “HaShem appeared to Avraham and told him to travel west, into Israel.”

In truth, I do the same thing in using, or not using, the historic name Palestine. Yes, I know, there’s never been an Arab state called Palestine, there’s never been a Palestinian government, et cetera - but much of the land known today as Israel was identified as Palestine two thousand years ago. When we talk about the “Jerusalem Talmud,” we really mean “Palestinian Talmud” - it was not written in Jerusalem, at all, and it was written in a land whose governors called it Palestine. Many of our Tannaim were Palestinian. But, outside of academic circles, I feel funny using those terms - so that when we read the mishnaic descriptions of the boundaries of Eretz Yisrael, I translate the land's name anachronistically as “Israel” instead of calling it by the correct secular name of that day, “Palestine.”

And lest one think this substitution of “Israel” for “Palestine/Canaan” is solely the province of Zionists who wish to manufacture historic credentials for a modern state, let’s remember that anti-Zionists as well as anti-government Zionists do the same in reverse, invoking “Eretz Yisroel” today rather than use the word “Israel” when referring to the medinah.

Bottom line: We play games of nomenclature in order to bring our speech in line with our political and religious views. I think we do it both in order to clarify to our listeners what we believe, and in order to make ourselves more comfortable with the words emerging from our mouths.

To return to the winery, though, “Canaan” might not be the most offensive name out there for an Israeli vineyard; there is a Noah winery as well. The Noah name offers a redeeming feature, though: They could have a great ad campaign, in the wake of the collapse of the world’s financial markets. “Want to forget the world’s just been destroyed, get falling-down drunk and curse your grandchildren? Then have we got the wine for you!”

Daf: Gittin 73-78 – Divorce psychology

Avoiding preparing a derashah for Shabbos Haazinu, I will instead catch up a little more in these notes on Daf Yomi. There isn’t much here for the non-Daf reader, except perhaps for the note on Gittin 74a on the Talmud’s view of the psychology of divorce. If you are looking for more colorful material, may I suggest my post below on the Unity Kollel concept – and why I think we can already do this, in Israel.

Gittin 73b
The gemara gives examples of scenes one might witness, in which we would or wouldn’t be concerned that there was inappropriate sexual conduct. One of the cases is that we saw her “sleeping by the legs of his bed.” One of my Daffies noted the similarity to Ruth 3:14, where we also say nothing inappropriate happened.

Note that Abbaye here opposes changing editions in order to solve a problem. Elsewhere Abbaye is the one who offers an answer by changing an edition, and someone else (generally Rava) calls him on it.


Gittin 74a
Talmudic Psychology of Divorce: Rashi indicates here (אבל גט), based on the gemara, that in a normal case of divorce the husband does not wish to divorce his wife, but is compelled to do so. On the other hand, Rashi on Gitin 74b (דלצעורה איכוון) indicates that divorce arises from enmity.


Gittin 74b
This gemara’s account of Hillel’s enactment shows that the law of בתי ערי חומה (in which houses in Israeli walled cities may be reclaimed by their sellers, unilaterally, within a year of sale, by refunding the purchase price) was followed in the second Beit haMikdash. This is one of the proofs brought by Tosafot (בזמן) on Gittin 36a to show that all of the Yovel-related laws were practiced during the second Beit haMikdash. Ramban there, though, says it was practiced as a rabbinic law, not a biblical law. One practical ramification of this disagreement is in the question of how Prozbul works.


Gittin 75b
The gemara says Rav Huna quoted Rav, which is fine, but in the margin that is amended to Rav Huna quoting Rebbe. If so, I believe it should say משום רבי, not אמר רבי, since Rav Huna would not have met Rebbe.

The gemara presents an apparent conflict between our mishnah and a braita. Our mishnah says that if a woman’s get is conditional upon nursing a child, she must nurse the child for two years (the talmudic norm, per a gemara in Ketuvot). A braita, though, says she must only do it for a day in order to fulfill her condition.
Rava says there is no conflict – the braita is where no time was specified, the mishnah is where he specified two years. But I am confused: If such is the case, why would we need our mishnah? פשיטא, it would be obvious that two years would be the requirement!


Gittin 76a
One view in the gemara says that since the Torah goes out of its way to show both positive and negative language being used in many instances of contract conditions (such as regarding Reuven/Gad with Moshe, and the Sotah’s condition), that proves that this excessive language is not really needed for normal contracts. Had the Torah only stated it in one case, I would have said that the Torah meant for me to expand automatically to all other cases.
I am bothered by this proof – after all, some of the cited cases are simply citations of actual language, such as Avraham’s contract with Eliezer. Should the Torah have altered his language?


Gittin 77b
About ten lines up from the bottom, I think the word should be קיימה rather than קיימא – it is describing a woman standing in a yard.


Gittin 78a
Tosafot אינו is interesting.

Dealing with Depression - in others (Rosh HaShanah 5769 Day 2)

And Gd told Avraham to bring up his son, his only son, whom he loved, Yitzchak, as an offering on Har haMoriyah. And Avraham obeyed the Divine instruction. And Yitzchak, too, obeyed, and allowed himself to be bound hand and foot and placed atop the altar, atop the wood. And Avraham stretched out his hand and took the hatchet - and then an angel called out, “Avraham, Avraham! Don’t send your hand toward your child, don’t do him any harm!”

This is a story full of pain - father sacrificing son, Gd putting faithful followers to an excruciating test, a son offering up his own life for the sake of his father’s beliefs - but perhaps the greatest pain waits for the end of the story, the way in which the Akeidah is closely followed in the Torah by the death of Avraham’s wife, Yitzchak’s mother, Sarah. A medrash explains the association:

וישב אברהם לבאר שבע, Avraham returned home, without his son, Yitzchak; Yitzchak went off elsewhere. And Sarah -
the righteous woman who had abandoned home and family to travel where Gd would lead her;
the woman who was taken captive by kings and rescued by Divine decree;
the righteous woman who received a child at the age of ninety because, as we read yesterday, Gd had heard her prayers;
the prophetess regarding whom Gd told Avraham, “Do everything she tells you” -
this woman Sarah saw Avraham returning alone and believed that her husband had killed their precious son.
ותבך ותחנק ותמת מן הצרה, she wept, she strangled, she died in agony.

She died, in pain, not knowing that, in fact, her son was alive.
She died, in agony, not knowing that it had all been a Divine challenge.
She died - and the medrash allows us to believe it might even have been by her own hand - in the deepest depression imaginable, a mother who thought she had lost her child, her only child, whom she had loved, Yitzchak.

I read this medrash and cannot help but be distraught. So tragic - and so wasteful, so unnecessary! In vain! How could Gd allow her to wallow in this depression until she passed away?
And yet, we allowed it to happen just yesterday. And today. And, if we don’t do anything about it, tomorrow as well. It happens every day, every minute of the day.
On a daily basis, people around us suffer from psychological pain, from the angst that comes with unemployment, with bankruptcy, with family trouble, with inability to cope, with stress and fear, with biochemical imbalance. Some of them find ways to manage, through counseling and friends and medicine. Far more never find ways to manage.
If we are torn by Sarah’s death, then we must do more than shed tears over this lost queen of Israel.
We had a breakfast program about this issue in February of 2006. I spoke about it on Yom Kippur last year, too. Nonetheless, I want to re-visit it: Our Judaism and our humanity obligates us to do more to prevent such deaths.

Our Torah obligates us to help.
In a series of paragraphs at the end of Sefer Vayyikra, the Torah speaks of our responsibility to help each other economically:
כי ימוך אחיך ומכר מאחוזתו - If your brother becomes impoverished and sells his ancestral fields…
כי ימוך אחיך ומטה ידו עמך - If your brother becomes impoverished and seeks a loan from you…
כי ימוך אחיך עמך ונמכר לך - If your brother becomes impoverished and is sold to you …
In each of these cases, we know what to do. If he sells his ancestral fields, redeem them for him. If he seeks a loan from you, lend him the money and be prepared to turn that loan into a gift. If he sells himself into servitude, treat him with respect and set him free. Yes, we know that we are obligated to help our economically destitute brethren, and we know how to do it.

But poverty comes in many forms, and economic poverty is nothing compared to emotional poverty, to a need which is often born of circumstances entirely beyond your brother or sister’s control. It can come from biochemistry. It can come from stress. In the end, the result is the same: A poverty that demands our help. There is no greater כי ימוך אחיך than when your neighbor is suffering emotional pain, is in the shoes of Sarah Imenu.
The Torah says that we are obligated to restore lost objects to their owners; how much more so, to restore lost control, lost stability, lost hope.

The mitzvah of tzedakah itself is contoured to provide not only financial help, but also emotional support. We are taught that it is better to give a penny, with a smile, than to give a dollar with a grimace. As the gemara explains, giving with a grimace is worse than giving nothing - it actually takes something away from the recipient.

Many other mitzvot instruct us to gladden others:
Every Jew is obligated to tithe Israeli produce, and part of that tithe is supposed to be shared with the needy. At the end of each tithing cycle, the Jew declares for all to hear, שמחתי ושימחתי אחרים, I rejoiced, and I helped others rejoice as well, with these tithes.
When a man gets married, he is obligated to fulfill the mitzvah of ושמח את אשתו, making his wife happy. And during the wedding and the immediately ensuing week, everyone is obligated in the mitzvah of שמחת חתן וכלה, gladdening the bride and groom.
On our national holidays, we are obligated in ושמחת בחגך, to gladden not only our families but also the strangers around us, and the widow and the orphan and anyone in need.
The Torah is filled with mitzvot related to bringing joy to others - because we dare not allow Sarah’s agony to recur. This is our obligation.

Of course, it’s easy to want to help - but often we don’t know how. Fortunately, though, the Torah also tells us how to help people in their emotional need, giving us the example of Yosef - a man who had a technicolor dream coat, and who was also an excellent empath:
One day, when Yosef was in jail, וירא אותם והנם זועפים, he noticed that two of his fellow prisoners, the former royal butler and former royal baker, were dejected.
Yosef’s reaction was immediate: He approached them and asked, מדוע פניכם רעים היום, “Why are you so down today?” They told him they had experienced frightening dreams, and Yosef offered to listen, and they took him up on the offer, and the rest is history and a Broadway show.
Yosef gave us two hints here, for preventing future Sarah’s from perishing in grief:

First, we take Notice. Yosef was almost killed by his brothers, then sold as a slave, then thrown into prison on false charges; he was certainly deep in his own troubles. He could be excused for missing the cues when his cellmates were down - but he didn’t. He saw their pain.

Second, We don’t tell people to snap out of it; we listen to them. Yosef didn’t tell the butler and baker to get over their problems, to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, to trust in Gd the way that he did. Rather, Yosef asked them to tell him what was wrong, and - when they were willing to talk - he listened carefully.

To these two pieces of advice I would add a third lesson of the Torah: Recognize that people who are depressed are not “crazy,” they are not out of touch with reality. They are, if anything, more realistic than the rest of us: This world is broken.

It’s certainly broken if you read the newspapers - Washington is broken, or so I’ve been told a few hundred times in this campaign season. The trans-Atlantic Alliance is broken, or so I’ve been told a few thousand times over the past eight years. The economy is broken, say the Democrats. Public morality is broken, reply the Republicans. And so on. And, in many ways, they are right. It’s no wonder that the rates of suicide and emotional dysfunction among highly intelligent people are reportedly higher than for the rest of the population; they are just reacting to what they are seeing.

Judaism, too, declares that we live in a broken world. The gemara calls it עולם הפוך, an upside-down world. Justice is rare and suffering is rampant and Gd is visible only if you look very, very hard.

Rav Kook noted evidence of this brokenness in the actual structure of the Talmud, the core of Jewish tradition. The Talmud is composed of six sections, each covering a different area of law. One section is called Nashim, and it deals, primarily, with marriage and divorce.
One might have expected the Marriage section to start with laws of betrothal and weddings - but it doesn’t. Instead, it begins with the laws of Yibbum, of levirate marriage, the case in which a man dies without children, and his wife marries his brother in an attempt to restore life after this devastation.
Rav Kook taught that the Marriage section begins with the laws of Yibbum in order to show that it is normal, we must expect it, to live in a ruptured, broken, world. The real world doesn’t have many neat marriages and well-adjusted children. The real world has death and childlessness and Yibbum - and this is the reality which many depressed people see.

This is why the concept of tikkun olam b’malchut Shakkai, repairing the world under Gd’s reign, is so important in Judaism. Judaism’s central mandate of repairing the world forces us to recognize that the world bequeathed to us by Gd is not a Panglossian best of all worlds; it is broken, and it’s waiting for us to fix it.

So when we see people who are dealing with Depression, we don’t dismiss them as crazy. Instead, we follow Yosef’s lead: Take Notice, and offer to Listen.

I readily admit that I am very flawed in this. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were people sitting here thinking, “I’ve been depressed for years, and the rabbi hasn’t taken any notice,” or, “I’ve tried to talk to him about it, and he hasn’t listened well.” I’m not the best at it - but I’m working on it.

CNN ran a story a few months ago about Yukio Shige, a retired Japanese police officer. Shige patrols Japan’s Tojinbo cliffs twice each day, to keep people from leaping off to kill themselves.

The story described a 34-year old man named Hiro who came to the cliffs one day, intending to jump off at sunset. His mother had died. He had no friends, and a great deal of debt. But as Hiro waited for sunset, Officer Shige came by and asked Hiro if he needed to talk. Shige listened, and then helped set him up with financial counselors. The key wasn’t in the financial counseling, though; Hiro, today, credits Shige with saving his life by showing him that someone would be upset if he died. It made all the difference - listening, showing that he mattered. That saved a life.
In four years, Shige has saved 129 lives this way.

Helping people is not an endless pursuit; we need not be afraid of being sucked into some vast, bottomless pit of emotional need. With friends and with medical help, people survive depression; I know numerous people who were on medication and are now off, who spent years dreading getting out of bed and are now healthy. It can and does happen - not in all cases, but in some.

Today we all wish each other a happy and healthy year. We pray to Gd for a happy and healthy new year, too. But if, by Rosh haShanah next year, we notice just one Sarah and offer her an on-going ear, then we will have done much more than wish and pray: Aided by the merit of our matriarch Sarah, we will have created a happy, and healthy, new year.

-
Notes:
1. I first started emphasizing this theme in response to the writings of Rivka at Ha'azina Tefilati.

2. The midrash about Sarah's death is cited, among other places, in Targum (pseudo)Yonatan. (Note that Ibn Ezra says Avraham and Yitzchak did, indeed, return together.)

3. On gladdening others with maaser, see Mishnah Maaser Sheni 5:12; Sifri Devarim 303.

4. On highly intelligent people experiencing Depression, Google it; it's all over.

5. The idea from Rav Kook was cited by Prof. Shlomo Carmy in a recent edition of Tradition.

6. The idea regarding Yosef's treatment of the butler and baker was sparked by a Yossy Goldman article I happened across here.

7. Yukio Shige's story is found here. Note that Tojinbo is also rendered, in some places, Tojimbo.

Newsflash: Peer Pressure affects diet, alcohol consumption

[Note: This week’s Haveil Havalim is here.]

I love those studies that make you scratch your head and say, “And just how much did you spend on this?”

Yes, I know that sometimes we need the proof that comes with statistical analysis, and sometimes a study does provide refined insight… but please don’t tell me that the overall findings in these tautological studies are "surprising":

People without job training or experience
earn lower salaries!
Film at 11!

Popular people tend to be invited to more parties,
studies show

Well, here’s one fresh out of the Inbox: Part Of The In-group? A Surprising New Strategy Helps Reduce Unhealthy Behaviors.

The article explains, “Authors Jonah Berger (University of Pennsylvania) and Lindsay Rand (Stanford University) found that linking a risky behavior with an "outgroup" (a group that the targeted audience doesn't want to be confused with) caused participants to reduce unhealthy behaviors.”

So, in other words: To avoid being associated with a certain group, I won’t act like the members of that group.

Didn’t we all learn this back in high school?

Here’s one study they ran: “Students on their way to a campus eatery were surveyed about perceptions of the media. A control group read an article about politics and pop culture, and a second group read an article associating junk-food eating with online gamers (an "outgroup"). When research assistants observed the two groups ordering food, they found that the group who had read the article about online gamers made healthier choices.”

Right – The geeks eat junk food, I don’t want to be called a geek, so I won’t eat junk food. Thank you, U of P and Stanford, for clarifying that point for me. (Apologies to on-line gamers; this was not my study.)

In truth, there is one pedagogic point I should make, and I would have loved to see the study examine this:

The study's method is a negative reinforcement technique, preying on people’s fear of being despised. It’s the equivalent of telling your child, “Don’t wipe your nose on your sleeve; only low-class people do that.”

Far better – and more effective, I would hope - to choose a positive reinforcement technique: “You know, respectable people use tissues.”

Avot d’Rabbi Natan records regarding Aharon haKohen: Aharon would make sure to greet everyone warmly and inquire after their welfare. Then, one those people were faced with opportunities to sin, they would resist the temptation – because they wanted to be the type of person worthy of being greeted by Aharon haKohen.

Yes, I’d prefer the positive – Link healthy behavior with the in-group, and watch how people flock to it.

Lighten up, Rabbi! ... not

[This week's Haveil Havalim is up!]

Cambridge Dictionary of American Idioms, 2003-
Lighten up
to be less serious about something. People are usually relieved when they're given a chance to lighten up.
Usage notes: often used as an order: When she complained that these people were being treated badly, he told her, “Lighten up.”

To which I would add: A two-word expression which should be abolished from the English language, particularly when used as an order.

"Lighten up" is so presumptuous, so judgmental, so heavy-handed - and often so wrong for the situation.

I will grant that I am particularly sensitive, perhaps hyper-sensitive, on this point; I am, from time to time, on the receiving end of this instruction (or "Rabbi, you're such a misnaged!"). I go to a celebration after seeing a pain-riddled person in the hospital or after sitting with a bereaved family, and if I’m not the life of the party I can generally count on at least one person to try to pull me into the middle of it, and to accuse me of being a ‘party-pooper’ if I hang back.

Now, my case may be somewhat different, because a rabbi is supposed to be able to lighten up:
-First, my role is professional, so that some expect me to be able to compartmentalize.
-Second, my professional role includes celebrating happy occasions with people, not only being a compassionate listener and counselor.
-Third, in my fishbowl role, my joy is supposed to catalyze joy in others. But, in truth, people don’t only do this to me – they do it to everyone, and with a very heavy hand.

I see it at a shul Purim Seudah or during Simchas Torah dancing, with attempts to draw wallflowers into the middle of the action. There are legitimate reasons why many of these people hang back: a close relative in the hospital, a bereavement marked at this time of year, a job concern, physical pain, an issue of alcoholism, a problem with diet. But not everyone thinks of those possibilities; it's easier to simply grab people and try to pull them in.

“Lighten up” has many roots and motivations, among them:
- A well-intentioned religious belief of מצוה גדולה להיות בשמחה, that it’s religiously proper for people to celebrate life with joy.
- The presumption that those who are not celebrating do not have a worthwhile reason for failing to celebrate.
- The reality that Debbie Downer drags down the celebration of others.
- That Cambridge line up top – the pervasive belief that “People are usually relieved when they're given a chance to lighten up.”

But some forethought is worthwhile before approaching someone to try to relieve his mood. Specifically, it might be wise to contemplate two indicators before demanding a jubilant smile:

1) Body language – Does this person seem to want to participate? Is he held back only by a lack of confidence? Is he held back by apathy? Or does he seem more psychologically comfortable remaining on the sidelines?

2) The person’s life circumstances – Do I know anything about why this person might not want to participate? Does this person ever participate? Might this be something I could discuss with him, more thoughtfully, on other occasion?

I do hate to spoil the fun of the Lighteners – but from my own experience, and from the experiences people have reported to me, it would be wise for the self-appointed Lighteners to lighten up their approach, first.

Derashah: Shemini 5768 - The Appeal of Jeremiah Wright

After a month of hearing about Jeremiah Wright this and Jeremiah Wright that, I finally gave in and watched the video of his famous sermons: the 9/11 sermon, the “Gd Darn America” sermon, the whole bit.

Honestly, I sometimes wish I had license to speak with that kind of animation and monochrome passion, that kind of shout-at-the-rafters anger… but it doesn’t work here. Our crowd tends to be sensitive to nuance and to loathe extremes; waxing passionately salivary about some potential evil yields responses like, “Well, that’s interesting,” “To each his own” and “Are you sure we need to be so harsh?”


For example, look at this potential dvar torah for Parshas Shemini:
I could condemn Nadav and Avihu, who enter the Mishkan disrespectfully while drunk and are struck down by Divine fire.

I could rant that to a person who owns no respect for the mishkan, for avodah, for HaShem, Judaism is just one snack at a lifelong party, just a step along our way to satisfying physical lusts. Partaking in a kiddush is chowing down at a buffet, the avodah of a korban is no different from bloodthirsty butchery, it’s all one big bacchanalia.

I could then fire it up and say that it is this bacchanalia which Gd punishes, which Gd must punish. These people who used religion, who turned their Divine essence toward physical satisfaction, they got what they deserved.

Or how about this tirade: We, today, live in a world of Nadav and Avihu. A world of empty religion, of empty prayer, of empty mitzvot. A world in which a Jew can get drunk on Kosher wine, can stuff himself with Kosher food, can take extravagant trips around the world for Pesach, can fill his den wall with a large-screen TV and kiss the mezuzah on his way into the room to show how pious he is, and all along not give a dime to tzedakah.

Then I could go all-out Jeremiah Wright, point a finger in the air and shout: Those people are Nadav and Avihu, and our parshah provides us a grave warning about what happens to those people, to Nadav and Avihu, with their fancy cars and stylish clothes. Nadav and Avihu burn in Divine fire!

And then I could really have fun: Those people who neglect their souls, people who think this world is about eating, drinking, and merriment, people whose concept of religion is that it’s a fun thing to do on Shabbos morning to make them feel better about what they do the rest of the week - they had better watch the skies, because what came for Nadav and Avihu is coming for them, too!

Now: Fast-forward to the kiddush conversations: Rabbi, that’s pretty strongly worded! Are you saying that we shouldn’t enjoy this world at all?

And fast-forward to the lunch table: Did you hear what the rabbi said? The rabbi said that people who go to hotels for Pesach are going to burn!


So it doesn’t play here - But we know there are places in the Jewish and non-Jewish world where these speeches do play well, and it’s important that we understand who responds to such speeches, and why.

That Nadav and Avihu dvar torah would play very well in a low-income church, or a run-down shtiebel or mosque for that matter, with people who bitterly resent a world of pleasure they cannot afford, and they therefore condemn.

That sort of dvar torah would resonate with cynically self-righteous people who think everyone else is guilty of gross impiety, and with teenagers in the throes of adolescent rebellion, who think they’ve discovered the true meaning of life.

That sort of dvar torah would even ring true among wealthy people who carry a burden of parents or grandparents who were oppressed, or people who find comfort in feeling that the world is against them.

Demagoguery works with people who are angry. Demagoguery works with people who want to be angry.


Our chachamim were wary of this; they called it איבה, enmity, and they proposed a solution for it: They instructed us to act in דרכי שלום, ways that would build peace with the nations around us, that would make us partners with the world instead of setting us in opposition.

We’ve discussed, on other occasions, avoding arousing jealousy in those around us. We don’t flaunt such success as we might have. But beyond that, we try to build up positive feelings with דרכי שלום. Therefore, the gemara says מבקרין חולי עכו"מ עם חולי ישראל, we should be certain to visit non-Jewish patients along with Jewish patients, מפרנסין עניי עכו"מ עם עניי ישראל, we support non-Jewish charities while supporting Jewish charities, and to take care of general communal social needs even as we take care of Jewish social needs.

Lest one think that דרכי שלום is some petty after-the-fact rationalization for assimilation, these are the words of the Gemara: “כל התורה כולה דרכי שלום היא, שנאמר "דרכיה דרכי נועם וכל נתיבותיה שלום" - The entire Torah is about paths of peace, as it is written, ‘Its ways are pleasant, and all of its paths are peace.’”

Of course, this isn’t about helping others at the expense of our own immediate family - but it is about building affordable bridges to the larger human community, a practical consideration for a Jew living in a very angry world, a world eager to assign blame for its ills.


Which brings me back to our reaction to Jeremiah Wright’s speeches. All the chain emails and newspaper columns and worries about Senator Barack Obama in the world won’t change the fact that Jeremiah Wright found a ready and welcoming audience for his venom in that Chicago church - just watch the video of the cheering crowd! There are an awful lot of angry people who are ready to blame you and me for their own suffering, or the suffering of their ancestors.

I believe that our response must be to embrace the gemara’s model of דרכי שלום, of community-wide initiatives which build bonds with the larger human world out there.


One such initiative is coming up on April 6th. I mentioned this project a few weeks ago, but not many people from our shul have signed up. It’s a community service day, involving Jews and non-Jews, for everyone. One project, which our own shul will be chairing, is for the Holocaust Resource Center at Lehigh. There are many more projects, such as work at shelters, Turning Point, housing construction sites and more.

I have known my own anti-Semitism, from being attacked in a mall by a couple of larger kids when I was all of five years old, to facing a group on a subway late one night when I was in college. I can’t say that our דרכי שלום would prevent attacks like those; there will always be angry people, and there will always be people who want to blame others for their problems, and so will be open to the Jeremiah Wrights.

Nonetheless, every step we can take will be positive, on April 6th and beyond, and can only help.

-
Notes:
1. I still wish I could do the rant-and-rave thing every once in a while. It looks like a lot of fun.

2. I actually had much more in the Nadav/Avihu section, but the good Rebbetzin advised me to take it out. She thought people would think I was serious.... and who's to say I'm not?...