I’d like to dedicate
my derashah this morning in memory of Ari Fuld, HY”D. I was in school with Ari,
and his older brother Donny. As most of you know, Ari was murdered this week by
a terrorist in the Gush. That’s how he died; at the end of the derashah, I’ll
have more to say about how he lived.
Thinking, Fast and
Slow
In a 2011 study,
researchers reviewed parole decisions by Israeli judges.[1] They
found that judges who had just returned from a food break approved about 65% of
parole requests. That percentage dropped in the ensuing hours, to the point
that rulings just before the next food break rejected almost all parole
requests. Then, after the food break, they went right back to 65%.
Another study, this
one out of MIT in 2006.[2] They
asked students and executives to participate in an auction. For each item, they
asked the participants to first record the last two digits of their social
security numbers as though that was their bid. Then they asked them to enter an
actual bid. Believe it or not – people with higher social security digits bid
up to 346% more than those with lower numbers. For example: On a cordless
keyboard, the people with digits between 00 and 19 bid an average of $16; those
with digits between 80 and 99 bid an average of $56.
Educated,
experienced judges; students and executives at MIT! How could they be so easily
influenced by appetite, and irrelevant numbers?
Starting about
twenty years ago, Professors Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahnemann[3] sought
to explain these and other cognitive slips by pointing to research[4] which
shows that our brains consume more energy than most other parts of the body. As
Kahnemann wrote, “When you are actively involved in difficult cognitive
reasoning or engaged in a task that requires self-control, your blood glucose
level drops.” (I don’t know how many calories you burn by listening to this
derashah, but I know I burned a lot of them composing it.)
In 2002, Kahnemann
won the Nobel Prize for his work, which enshrined in scientific history
something we all intuited in high school: Concentration uses energy; therefore,
our brains avoid doing it. To the extent possible, we get by with what Kahnemann
calls shallow “System 1” thinking, using approximations of the world around us
and loose methods of problem-solving, to conserve energy. Only when forced to
concentrate, such as due to a sense of danger, do we go to the more thorough,
intense and precise “System 2” thinking.
This is why the parole
decisions become more negative as the judges’ blood sugar drops; it’s easier to
be machmir. And this is why the MIT bidders were influenced by entering random
digits before bidding – they didn’t focus carefully, and so they were subliminally
influenced by the social security digits they entered.
Davening, Fast and
Slow
Kahnemann’s insight
regarding thinking is important beyond behavioural economics; here in this
room, and all around the BAYT, we can observe a related phenomenon – System 1
Davening and System 2 Davening.
From the vantage
point of Torah and halachah, System 2 davening is the goal – an intense
religious experience. But more often, we are like the Israeli judges and MIT
bidders. Witness the passage from the Talmud Yerushalmi[5] in which one sage admitted, “When I stand in Shemoneh Esreih, I count
birds.” Another acknowledged, “I count the bricks in the wall!" And a
third confessed, "I'm grateful for my head, because when I arrive at Modim
it bows on its own", even if I'm not thinking about the words! As Tosafot[6] said,
even our greatest sages have had trouble concentrating for davening.
But what can we do
about this? Today is a landmark opportunity to ask Hashem for a clean slate,
how can we avoid falling into the automated System 1?
Medical answers
There are some great
solutions for the problem of System 1 thinking; Professor Pat Croskerry from
Dalhousie has done remarkable work in teaching doctors how to avoid System 1 pitfalls
when seeing patients.[7] But these methods are hard to
apply in the middle of the day on Yom Kippur. One step, for example, is to be
well-fed to avoid the low blood-sugar phenomenon… good luck with that today. So
what can we do now, right here?[8]
The Importance of Emotion
One answer may be to turn
to an aspect of our personalities which is more powerful than our thoughts: Our
emotions.
Psychologists and
philosophers have long debated the role of emotions; already in 1890, American
philosopher William James wrote that he was tired of the efforts in the field,
and would prefer to listen to “verbal descriptions of the shapes of the rocks on a New Hampshire
farm” rather than read papers on the role of emotions.[9]
But I think a key element suggested by evolutionary biologists is useful here: our
emotions are activated when issues of survival are raised.[10]
Our intellect solves problems; our emotions help us survive.
Because our intellects
aren’t always alert to the stakes and threats at hand, we fall into System 1
thinking, or System 1 davening. But when circumstances trigger fear or love or anger
or sympathy, that overpowers the intellect, energizing us, stimulating our
nervous system, our endocrine system, our circulatory system, and forcing us to
focus.
Further – the more vital
an emotion, the more intense the sense that survival is at stake, the greater
the power to command our attention. Rabbi Yosef Dov haLevi Soloveitchik[11] made this point; he
described a man in pursuit of an aveirah so sweet, so desirable, that he
steamrolls his intellect in pursuit of the opportunity. But on the way to his
rendezvous, as he races across a frozen lake, his foot slips – and suddenly, the
thunderclap of fear for his life overwhelms all that he had been feeling a
moment earlier and grabs the reins ; the more vital the emotion, the tighter
its grip.
Applying this to our
tefillah and teshuvah
This is how we can break
out of System 1 davening – by summoning vital emotions which compel our
concentration.
- Music can summon those emotions; 900 years ago, Rabbi Yehudah haChasid[12] wrote that when we daven we should find tunes which will draw our minds into rhythm with the words we are saying, whether they are psalms of thanksgiving or anguished pleas. I find certain tunes do this for me; I say almost none of the piyutim in the repetition of the amidah, but I try to sing וכל מאמינים and כי אנו עמך, because the memories they evoke for me summon tears of hope and joy which, for me, are life itself.
- A memory of an emotional experience can do it. Over a century ago, the Piaseczner Rebbe, Rav Kalonymus Kalman Schapira, was approached by young men who wished to refine their personal spirituality. In response, he wrote a book called בני מחשבה טובה, and in that book[13] he counseled that whenever we become excited, whenever we feel extreme joy or love or sorrow or fear, we commit those feelings to memory, and then we call forth those feelings when we are ready to perform mitzvot, and to daven. For me, I can call forth the image of my mother giving me a berachah before Yom Kippur.
- Recalling a loved one can do it. Moments ago, people recited Yizkor and remembered relatives who have passed on – the emotions those relatives summon in our hearts are valuable, too. And for those of us with the good fortune to be able to step out for Yizkor – we can still think of people like Ari Fuld הי"ד. Ari’s widow, entering Yom Kippur without him. Ari’s four children. Ari’s parents.
If low blood sugar and exhaustion
undermine our concentration, then let us jumpstart our emotions – with a tune,
with a memory, with a loved one, with something which will alert us to the
intensity of the moment, the magnitude of the opportunity of כי ביום הזה יכפר עליכם לטהר אתכם [14] to start again with a clean slate. Then we will be able to daven
a System 2 davening, with a full heart and a dedicated mind.
Closer
An article about Ari Fuld appeared
on Aish.com in 2007;[15] it described his deployment
in Lebanon as a paratrooper during the Second Lebanon War. Every day, before
heading into battle, his unit would say Viduy, as we will at musaf, minchah and
neilah. And one day, 28 kilometers deep in Lebanon, they came under direct
attack by Hizballah. Two groups of soldiers fell to rocket fire, and Ari was
tasked with leading a group of soldiers to retrieve as many bodies as he could.
As he described it, “We
left most of our protection behind, and all of our gear. All I had on me were
my Tefillin, a book of Psalms, and some other holy writings. Oh -- and bullets.
A whole lot of bullets.”
They took just
ten steps out of the orchard where they had been hiding, and then they heard a
whistle – and seconds later, three missiles landed right where they had been,
in the orchard. Ari felt blood coming from him; he had been hit by a piece of a
mortar. The medic found that the shrapnel had gone through his protective vest,
but had miraculously stopped there – he was safe, for the moment.
When they made
it back to Israel, Ari was inspired to take a year off from his career, to
devote himself to study Torah. And after the year was over, he turned down
financial opportunity, choosing instead to join the staff of Yeshivat Netiv
Aryeh. He displayed that mortar shrapnel in his home, beside his kiddush cup
and menorah, as a sign of the miracle of his survival.
I tell this
story for three reasons:
First: Because I think it’s
important that we remember Ari not as yet another casualty, but as a remarkable
human being and Jew.
Second: Because by following his
inspiration to take time off to learn Torah, Ari demonstrated what we have been
talking about – using emotion to override life’s automatic gear and focus our
energies.
And third: Because when we say
viduy today, we can call the viduy of Ari’s unit to mind, and they can inspire
us to abandon System 1 davening, and invest in System 2.
Ari said of the
shrapnel he kept, “That warped piece of iron that you're looking at... it looks
like a piece of garbage - but that's my miracle.” May his
story inspire us to our own miracle, to a day of davening which is not about
counting birds, or bricks, or the moments left in the fast, but instead about confronting
our deepest truths, connecting with Hashem, admitting and apologizing for our
wrongdoing and truly committing ourselves to growth, and so earning a clean
slate and a גמר חתימה טובה.
[1]
Extraneous Factors in Judicial Decisions, Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21482790
[3]
See, for example, Thinking, Fast and Slow pg 42
[4]
Such as https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17279852;
but see also https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mind-design/201108/glucose-is-not-willpower-fuel
and https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303445162_The_Bitter_Truth_About_Sugar_and_Willpower_The_Limited_Evidential_Value_of_the_Glucose_Model_of_Ego_Depletion
[5]
Yerushalmi Berachos 2:4. There are variant explanations of אפרחייא
[6]
Tosafot Rosh haShanah 16b and Bava Batra 164b [But see Pnei Moshe (they were
distracted by Torah), Pri Tzaddik to Vayyeshev, http://www.temanim.org/shtaygen/dvr_tora/70/2-8.pdf]
[7]
See Diagnostic Failure: A Cognitive and Affective Approach and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFE6D5460oE
[8]
For my shiur for doctors, see https://www.yutorah.org/lectures/lecture.cfm/902006
Also, my shiur on cognitive bias and teshuvah is at https://www.yutorah.org/lectures/lecture.cfm/906339
[9]
Principles of Psychology Chapter 25; https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/Principles/prin25.htm
[10]
For example: Evolutionary Explanations of Emotions, Human Nature 1:3
(1990); The Nature of Emotions, American Scientist 89:4 (2001) https://www.jstor.org/stable/27857503
[11]
Beit haLevi to Parshat Yitro
[12]
Sefer Chasidim 158
[13]
אות ח-יא
[14]
Vayikra 17: For on this day Gd will accept your atonement, to purify you
