and tell him, “This is what you did wrong today, what you said wrong today, whom
you hurt today. ... Decide,. Jonah Lehrer discusses how the moral mind works.
Mistakes Don’t De-ine Us Rabbi Erin Polansky Erev Rosh Hashanah -‐ 2012
Can you imagine someone coming to you every night and telling you, “This is what you did wrong today, what you said wrong today, whom you hurt today”? Can you imagine being confronted every night with every single transgression you committed during your waking hours? Most of us probably would not look forward to going to bed!
Yet, legend tells us that the prophet Nathan would come to King David every night and tell him, “This is what you did wrong today, what you said wrong today, whom you hurt today.” King David would hear these things, and he would write a song of happiness.
David’s transgressions were not small matters—he committed adultery, culpable homicide, he lied, and he cheated. And yet, when confronted with the truth of his actions, he wrote a song of joy because he understood that only with this information would he know what he needed to correct—and only with this information would he be able to reveal more of his potential in the world.
King David understood that the mistakes he made did not define him, and Jewish tradition supports this view. Nobody refers to King David as an adulterer, murderer, liar or cheater. On the contrary—he was the greatest king that Israel ever had; he is extolled for his virtues and even given the kavod/respect and honour of (eventually) being the ancestor of the Messiah.
How can our tradition—so moral and rigorous—stand for a king and messianic 1
Mistakes Don’t De-ine Us
Rabbi Erin Polansky Erev Rosh Hashanah -‐ 2012 figure who is so flawed? How can we come to terms with the fact that our leaders, our neighbours, our family members, friends and even ourselves are flawed as well and yet our tradition shows us time and again, that our flaws do not determine or define who we are as people? Can we be as generous with others and with ourselves—not simply to forgive, but to let go of past mistakes, and sing a song of happiness as we look ahead?
We may not be like King David in his ability to repent and to pour out his feelings in the beautiful poetry that we refer to as the book of Psalms, but I believe that each of us has the ability to show empathy for others’ shortcomings and even for our own. Those who can show empathy are able to see the error in their ways because they can understand the pain and suffering they have caused others. They can repent effectively because they truly feel remorse. Neurologists tell us that a person utterly incapable of empathy is called a psychopath. What do psychopaths have to do with anything? In his book How We Decide, Jonah Lehrer discusses how the moral mind works. Why do some people sin—decide to do the wrong thing, or do not realize that they are obviously doing the wrong thing? Lehrer uses the extreme example of psychopaths to illustrate what is at play in the mind in order to make moral choices. While psychopaths are prone to violence, Lehrer writes, their neurological condition is best defined in terms of a specific brain malfunction: psychopaths make poor —sometimes disastrous—moral choices.
2
Mistakes Don’t De-ine Us
Rabbi Erin Polansky Erev Rosh Hashanah -‐ 2012 “At first glance, it seems strange to think of psychopaths as decision-makers. We tend to label psychopaths as monsters, horrifying examples of humanity at its most inhuman. But every time they commit murder, killing without the slightest sense of unease, they are making a decision. They willingly violate one of the most ancient of moral laws: thou shalt not murder. And yet they feel no remorse. “Psychopaths shed light on a crucial subset of decision-making that’s referred to as morality.” Morality can be a vague concept, but at its core, it’s nothing but a series of choices about how we treat other people. Lehrer points out “when you act in a moral manner—when you recoil from violence, treat others fairly and help strangers in need— you are making decisions that take people besides yourself into account.” You are thinking about the feelings of others, putting yourself in their shoes, inferring how your behavior will affect them. This is what psychopaths can’t do. Psychopaths cannot do this because they have damaged emotional brains. “Psychopaths have a fundamental emotional disorder,” says James Blair, a cognitive psychologist at the National Institute of Mental Health and coauthor of The Psychopath: Emotion and the Brain. “You know when you see a scared face in a movie and that makes you automatically feel scared, too? Well, psychopaths don’t feel that. It’s like they don’t understand what’s going on. This lack of emotion is what causes their dangerous behavior. They are missing the primal emotional cues that the rest of us use as guides when making moral decisions.”
3
Mistakes Don’t De-ine Us
Rabbi Erin Polansky Erev Rosh Hashanah -‐ 2012 They seem to have a broken amygdala, a brain area responsible for translating negative emotions such as fear and anxiety. As a result, psychopaths never feel bad when they make other people feel bad. They never learn from adverse experiences; they are four times more likely than other prisoners to commit crimes after being released. The absence of emotion makes the most basic moral concepts incomprehensible. G.K. Chesterton was right: “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” How we make decisions is one of the biggest mysteries that humans have grappled with. Even though our decisions may define us—at least for a time—we ourselves are often unaware of why we choose what we choose; of what is happening inside our heads during the decision-making process. You can’t explain why you made an impulse purchase of napkin rings when you already have a perfectly good set of napkin rings; why you choose one brand of paper towels over another; or why you watch the Real Housewives of New Jersey. Even important hiring and firing decisions sometimes defy explanation. On the evaluation sheets of NFL scouts, decision-making is listed in the category Intangibles. It’s one of the most important qualities in a quarterback, and yet nobody knows what it is. Rationality is defined as a particular style of thinking. Plato associated rationality with the use of logic, which he believed, made humans think like the gods. Modern economics has refined this ancient idea into rational-choice theory, which assumes that people make decisions by multiplying the probability of getting what they want by the amount of pleasure (utility) that getting what they want will bring. This reasonable 4
Mistakes Don’t De-ine Us
Rabbi Erin Polansky Erev Rosh Hashanah -‐ 2012 system allows us all to maximize our happiness, which is the goal of every rational agent. This reasoning takes place in our prefrontal cortex and is what separates us from the animals. And yet, the research shows us time and time again, that often our best decisions, our most accurate choices, are made when we are guided by our emotions. To be sure, there needs to be a balance. King David acted from pure emotion when he committed adultery with Bathsheva—he did not think of her husband’s feelings; to David, the husband Uriah was a non-entity and in fact without compunction he sent him off to the front lines in battle to get rid of him forever. Our mystical tradition, Kabbalah, teaches that King David knew through his own divinely given spirituality that he was always meant to be with Batsheva—they were soulmates destined for each other. It was also revealed to him that her husband was going to die in battle. But rather than wait for fate to run its course, David took matters into his own hands and forced events to unfold on his own schedule. That was his real sin. He used any means necessary to arrive at the inevitable end. To be guided by emotion alone is to be callous and unfeeling; we need empathy and reason to balance our emotion. And yet, just because King David let his emotions override his reason does not make him a bad person across the board. He made the wrong choices, to be sure. Once he was enlightened to that fact, his reason—his sense of right and wrong along with his sense of empathy—caused him great distress over what he had done. He regretted and repented. He wished that he could undo his action. He resolved never to commit such a sin again. He did teshuvah.
5
Mistakes Don’t De-ine Us
Rabbi Erin Polansky Erev Rosh Hashanah -‐ 2012 Teshuvah is why we are all here. Each of us is here to seek forgiveness for falling from the right path in one way or another. But teshuvah is not simply forgiveness or absolution from sin by God. Teshuvah, if done properly, actually has the power to erase sin. The Ramchal in Mesillat Yesharim explains that the mercy of God is that while every action does have an immediate spiritual consequence, that consequence can be suspended for a period of time giving the person time to repent. He says that every action really has two parts. The first part is the formation of intent. The idea and the desire to act are the first part of every action. Then we act; that is the second part. The action causes the immediate result. Physical and spiritual. Each action is “owned” by its actor. So when one makes a wrong choice the act is connected to them. The action is the end of a chain that hooks up to the actor. The hook on the end of the chain that is connected to the actor is the desire for the result. So a flow chart would look like this:
Actor—->Desire—->Action—->Result.
The result is only connected to the actor through the desire. Teshuva is the process of “undoing” the desire for the action and its result. True repentance occurs when the actor wishes with all her heart that she had never acted the way she did. When the person truly regrets his choice, the desire part of the action can be unhooked from the actor! If there is no hook connecting the action to the actor (the desire) then the actor and the action are no longer associated with one another. That is teshuva. Repentance is disassociating the action from the actor by removing the desire to act. Of course, in order for the desire to be disassociated from the actor, the actor must do everything in his 6
Mistakes Don’t De-ine Us
Rabbi Erin Polansky Erev Rosh Hashanah -‐ 2012 power to fix the horrible results of his action. But once that is done, repentance can be achieved and the action can be clipped away from the actor. Certainly, the deed is done. What’s done is done. We cannot change the past. But we can change our association with the past. This kind of repentance leaves no room for baggage and guilt. It is a clean break from the past and allows us to move forward to a future of better choices. What separates us from the animals is our ability to pull back, to look at a situation, acknowledge our emotions, appeal to our reason, and make decisions. Sometimes we will choose correctly, sometimes incorrectly. That is the foible of being human. Each of us will make the wrong choice now and then, and knowing this, we can be generous with one another in accepting true repentance. According to physicist Niels Bohr, an expert is “a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” This is not just an insightful saying. In fact, it is based on neuroscience. Science has introduced us to something called dopamine neurons. These are brain cells that help us learn—they predict future events based on having experienced the same or similar event in the past. In the early 1990s, Gerald Tesauro, a computer programmer at IBM, began developing a new kind of artificial intelligence. He created Deep Blue, the powerful set of IBM mainframes that managed to defeat chess grand master Garry Kasparov in 1997. Deep Blue analyzed more than 200 million possible chess moves per second, before it chose the best strategy. (Kasparov’s brain, however, evaluated only about 5 moves per
7
Mistakes Don’t De-ine Us
Rabbi Erin Polansky Erev Rosh Hashanah -‐ 2012 second.) Even while the press was celebrating the achievement of a machine defeating the greatest chess player in the world, Tesauro was puzzled by its limitations. This machine could think millions of times faster than the human, and it had only barely won the match. Deep Blue should have crushed Kasparov. Tesauro concluded that Kasparov’s neurons were effective because they had trained themselves. They had been refined by decades of experience to detect subtle spatial patterns on the chessboard. Kasparov’s brain didn’t need to analyse millions of chess moves in one second, because of its past experience and learning, it automatically eliminated the vast majority of them, only needing to evaluate 5 moves per second. So Tesauro set out to create an AI program that acted like Garry Kasparov—one that could learn from its mistakes. This time he chose backgammon and named the program TDGammon. (The TD stands for temporal difference.) This software began with zero knowledge. It learned to play backgammon by making errors, and learning how to predict better each time. It learned by focusing on its mistakes. Expertise is simply the wisdom that emerges from cellular error. Mistakes aren’t things to be discouraged. On the contrary, they should be cultivated and carefully investigated. Psychologist Carol Dweck of Stanford points out that the same strategy TDGammon used to excel at backgammon is also an essential tool in the classroom. Unfortunately, children are often taught the opposite—instead of praising kids for trying hard, teachers tend to praise them for being smart. Dweck has shown that this type of encouragement actually backfires since it leads students to see mistakes as signs of stupidity and not as the building blocks of learning. The unfortunate outcome is that kids 8
Mistakes Don’t De-ine Us
Rabbi Erin Polansky Erev Rosh Hashanah -‐ 2012 never learn how to learn. This realization so astounded me that now, when I ask my kids how their day was at school, my next question is: what good mistakes did you make today? I want them to know that I expect them to make mistakes, and that good mistakes are ones we learn from. I have been sharing research with you from bestselling science writer Jonah Lehrer. Would it distress you to learn that his latest book, Imagine: How Creativity Works, was recently pulled from the shelves after he admitted to fabricating Bob Dylan quotations? He has been harshly judged by his peers. Forbes, for example, noted a scheduled appearance by the author at Earlham College. The headline: “Jonah Lehrer Was Going to Give a Speech on Ethics. It's Canceled, Obviously”. Scientific American weighed in with "Jonah Lehrer Turned His Back on Science.” The one person who dared cast Lehrer’s sins in less harsh light (one of his former editors) was savaged. How did Lehrer react? He was contrite. He immediately resigned from his position at the New Yorker. He apologized. He will need to continue to do teshuvah if he is going to redeem his name and work again in his chosen field. But, if he does it correctly, I have no doubt that he will return as a more responsible, ethical writer than he ever was before. Jonah made a mistake. No doubt. And this from someone who knows how the brain works and how it decides between right and wrong! Does his mistake call into question everything he has ever written? Amazon.com thought so. They removed all of his books from their store. They have judged his current mistake to apply to his character in general. This is not the Jewish way. 9
Mistakes Don’t De-ine Us
Rabbi Erin Polansky Erev Rosh Hashanah -‐ 2012 Judaism judges us based on our ability to learn from our mistakes. Teshuva should be an exercise in safeguarding ourselves against repeating the same mistakes. Judaism wants us to become experts in leading an ethical life, and that means that we will need to make some mistakes, and train our dopamine neurons not to make those mistakes again. Jewish tradition realizes that sometimes emotion clouds our judgement and gets in the way of our ability to empathise with others, thereby neglecting their feelings and causing hurt and pain. So what does our tradition do? It frames most of our mitzvot, our commandments, based on our relationships with others. Our tradition understands that our most powerful moral emotions are generated in response to personal moral scenarios, so that’s how the Torah frames the vast majority of the commandments. Just look at the most well known ones: the 10 Commandments. After God makes a series of religious demands (don’t worship idols, keep Shabbat), He starts issuing moral orders. The first is the most basic: do not murder. Then come some more moral decrees that are all phrased in relation to other people. God doesn’t simply tell us not to lie, He tells us not to testify falsely against our neighbour. He doesn’t prohibit jealousy in an abstract way, He tells us not to covet our neighbour’s wife, or slaves or ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to our neighbour. God understands that the most powerful moral emotions come about through responding to personal moral scenarios. Jewish tradition gives us the tools to do teshuvah—that is what these ten days are all about. What would life be like if we constantly held up a mirror, taking a good long look at ourselves and asking why we have made the mistakes that we did? How can this mirror help us to disassociate ourselves from the desire to have done the action; and then
10
Mistakes Don’t De-ine Us
Rabbi Erin Polansky Erev Rosh Hashanah -‐ 2012 help us to resolve never to repeat that mistake? If we can learn from our mistakes, then our mistakes do not define who we are as people. On the contrary, they make us experts in becoming the type of people we want to become. And they help us to be generous with others and with ourselves—not simply to forgive, but to let go of past mistakes, and sing a song of happiness as we look ahead.
11
