A beloved rabbi is on his deathbed. His followers bemoan his passing, each mentioning one of his superb qualities. “He was so honest,” said one. “And so generous,” said another. “Oh, and so learned,” said the third. And when they fell silent, the rabbi opened one eye and said, “Don’t forget about my humility.”
“Don’t forget about my humility.” The joke is funny, obviously, because the truly humble don’t brag about their humility. But the joke is revealing because it underscores that there are blind spots we have about ourselves, an inability to see, or admit to ourselves, the truth.
When we recite the confessional on Yom Kippur, “ashamnu, bagadnu, gazalnu” “We are guilty, we have betrayed, we have stolen,” our instinctive reaction is to say, “Who, me? Not me. I haven’t done any of these things. Maybe somebody has, maybe some guy who lives down the block, maybe the person sitting next to me, maybe even my brother, but not me.” But as any good psychologist will tell you, the more we resist and deny, the deeper the truth we are trying to hide. Carl Gustav Jung referred to it as our shadow side, the unspeakably ugly part of ourselves, the Mr. Hyde to our Dr. Jekyll—or, in more modern parlance, the Darth Vader to our Obiwan Kenobe—that we thoroughly reject, consciously, but are enslaved to, unconsciously.
Beware of the dark side, indeed.
The wisdom of our tradition teaches us that what we cannot acknowledge will control us. Like the rabbi in the joke, who imagined himself humble because he couldn’t see the pride dominating his inner life, if we are not conscious of our faults, they will dominate our lives in ways we can hardly grasp.
The Kotzker Rebbe taught, “Nothing is easier than to deceive oneself”. My colleague Rabbi Ed Feinstein has reminded us of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s retelling of this teaching: “as the mind grows sophisticated, self-deception advances.” Rabbi Feinstein also pointed out that as early as age 3, children exhibit a “positivity bias,” a tendency to exaggerate their own positive characteristics.
We’re a lot older than 3.
So, keeping a long story short, trust me, ashamnu, we are indeed guilty. Bagadnu, we have indeed betrayed. Gazalnu, we have indeed stolen. And so on, through all 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. That’s the truth about ourselves, the whole truth. But today, I’ll stick to the aleph, bet, and gimel.
Ashamnu, we are guilty. This refers to that which we have done in secret, that which we cannot reveal about ourselves. To understand how dominant this sin is in our modern life, we need look no further than to the world of social media. The contrast between the glowing promise of Facebook, for example, and the corrupted reality, is a parade example. Social media was supposed to help us find old friends, make job connections, and stay in touch with Aunt Sadie in Seattle. Instead, it has become anti-social media. To give just one example: Reddit, the ninth most visited site in the U.S, believes in unalloyed free speech; the site only eliminated the sub-reddits, the comment boards, “jailbait,” “creepshots” and “beatingwomen” because of threats of legal action. And my son Joseph tells me they are back in business, under slightly different names. Anti-social media has introduced a new word into our vocabulary—trolling. The mythological troll was a malevolent creature, vaguely humanoid but not fully human, interested only in hurting people. The used to live in isolation, under rocks and in caves,
Today, they hang out in front of computer screens. A whole army of them. Roughly half of all Americans have been subjected to cyberbullying and harassment, had accounts hacked, personal information stolen, embarrassing facts or pictures exposed. Among 20 somethings, it’s 2/3. And of course, most victims are women. Big surprise there.
Trolls love creating conflict and tension. The more inflammatory they are, the more successful they are—the textbook definition of anti-social. Not to mention narcissistic, perhaps even pathological, and very definitely sadistic. If character is determined by what we do when no one is watching, our character, collectively, is in the gutter. The more faceless a person is, the more anonymous, the more likely they are to be brutal in their internet behavior. There’s even a name for it. “Psychologists call this the online disinhibition effect, in which factors like anonymity, invisibility, a lack of authority and not communicating in real time strip away the mores society spent millennia building.” (Joel Stein) . And if there is now an army of trolls unleashed upon our society, it is precisely because the internet offers the possibility of anonymity. The good news is that only about 10% of internet users are trolls. The bad news, is that that translates out to a mere 317 million people world wide.
Now of course, most of us are not trolls. But real card-carrying trolls only do a small percentage of the actual trolling. Whitney Phillips, a literature professor at Mercer University, tells us that people who troll “… are mostly normal people who do things that seem fun at the time that have huge implications. You want to say this is the bad guys, but it’s a problem of us.” A problem of us. We are indeed guilty. Ashamnu.
And what are we doing? I daresay that all of us are subject to the general principle that being on line turns us into moral idiots, saying and doing things that we have no business saying or doing. Troll culture has an impact on the way we treat one another, whether we are trolls or not. People who are exposed to troll comments become more polarized. Just what we need today, more polarization. And as groups are dehumanized through constant denigration, it increases the likelihood that people will consider it acceptable to hurt those in that group.
As Jews, this should scare the heck out of us.
There are some small steps we can take to fight back. Mute trolls. Unfriend them. Block them. Don’t engage with them (otherwise known as “Don’t feed the trolls.”) If you want to get creative, let them know you’ll give tzedakah to a charity they would hate every time they contact you.
But above all, remember that it isn’t about them. It’s about you. It’s about us. Ashamnu. We are guilty.
Bagadnu, we have betrayed. Who, us? Betrayed? Who have we betrayed? The answer is, believe it or not, our young people. Our young people? But the children are our future!
Well, that’s what we say. That’s certainly the image we wish to have of ourselves. The party line. But a closer look reveals another picture. Here are three statistics that can illustrate the point. Between 1983 and 2010, the average household net worth of boomers, that’s the majority of people in this room, more than doubled. The average household net worth of people aged 29-37 dropped by a fifth. Between 1973 and 2015, productivity, which is output based on human work hours, productivity in this country has risen by 241%. Hourly wages in that same period have remained stagnant. Since 1960, the elderly have gone from the poorest demographic to the richest, in large part because of state support, state support that millenials are paying for. Poverty among the elderly has dropped to below 10%, while poverty for children has risen to over 20%. The juvenilization of poverty, they call it.
Bagadnu. We have betrayed. We told our kids that if they studied hard and worked hard, the American dream was theirs for the asking. It didn’t work out that way. For them. For us, it worked out just fine. That doesn’t mean we didn’t work hard for our money. That would be a lie. We worked plenty. But that doesn’t negate the fact that we’ve been given a lot of breaks along the way, including a tax system that privileges the old over the young to the tune of nearly a trillion dollars a year.
Meanwhile, they got saddled with a zillion dollars in student debts; a string of unpaid internships; part time jobs—strategically limited to be just below the threshold where benefits would be received; precarious jobs demanding 24/7 service and a frenetic pace; and housing prices that make independent living a challenge. It used to be a given that each generation was wealthier than the previous one. That was true for almost all of us. Nine times out of ten.
Not any more. Right now it’s a fifty-fifty shot. Contrary to the fantasy that America is the world capital of upward mobility—work hard and you too can make it big!—it is harder to move up in America than in almost any other country in the advanced world. There’s a reason. Upward mobility is in inverse proportion to inequality —the greater the inequality, the harder it is to move up the ladder. Inequality in America is the highest in the Western world. And we are responsible for the inequality. Bagadnu. We have betrayed.
And if you want to see the results of this betrayal, you don’t have to look any further than birth rates. Next time you walk into a shul and ask, “Where are all the kids?” here’s your answer: Millenials are postponing having kids, or won’t have them at all. Birthrates among twenty somethings have dropped more than 15%. For the first time in history, women in their 30’s are having more children than women in their teens or 20’s. The reason is simple. It’s not because they’re selfish—an ugly and misogynistic judgment if ever there was one. It’s the opposite. They’re being responsible. They can’t afford to have children. The average entry level salary in New York is $32,000. The average housing cost for a one bedroom apartment in Brooklyn is $32,000. Think there might be a problem here? And on top of that, the job insecurity, the wage stagnation, the impossible work hours. Simply put, many young adults feel their lives are too unstable to bring children into the world. And unlike people of our parents’ generation, and unlike nearly all of us, they do not share the hope that things will get better, and everything will work out.
If you don’t believe me, ask them.
Teilhard de Chardin, the great Catholic mystic, once said, “The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason for hope.” That’s what we have betrayed. Bagadnu.
And we have stolen. Gazalnu. So imagine you’re in an office somewhere. On the desk in front of you is a bowl filled with change for the Humane Society or the Cancer Fund. You’re on your way out, and no one will see you. What are the odds you’ll take some of the money and put it in your pocket? No chance, right? We wouldn’t do that, right? Not us.
Well, not so fast. Because this has been researched over and over again, and you know what they found? That as the level of wealth increased, the chances increased that the person would take money from the bowl. Even candy from a bowl marked “For children only.” Similar kinds of tests have been done about sharing money, cheating at games, lying in negotiations, endorsing unethical behavior at work, taking bribes, lying to customers, and stopping for pedestrians. In every case, the wealthier the person was, the more likely they would make the inappropriate choice. Take the pedestrian, for example. The test was done in California, where the law is that cars have to stop for pedestrians trying to cross the street. In one experiment, none of the cars in the least expensive category broke the law. Not one. Of the most expensive vehicles? Fifty percent. Five-zero.
Gazalnu. We have stolen. Paul Piff, a social scientist, summed it up this way, “As a person’s levels of wealth increase, their feelings of compassion and empathy go down, and their feelings of entitlement, of deservingness, and their ideology of self-interest increase.” The wealthier a person is, the more likely they will agree with the fictional Gordon Gecko of Wall Street that greed is good, and looking out for number one is moral.
And why should that matter to us? Surely I’m talking about somebody else! We would never do anything like that. And besides, we’re not all that privileged, are we?
Well, maybe not, but the fact is that Jews, statistically, have the highest household incomes in America. 44% of Jews have a household income over $100,000/year. The national average is 19%. So we’re more than twice as likely to be in the group that would be tempted to exercise its privilege in inappropriate ways. And, as Oscar Wilde famously said, “The only thing I succumb to is temptation.” Now of course this does not mean that all wealthy people are nothing but thieves. Certainly not. All these statistics are some kind of bell curve, rather than a black and white dividing line. But collectively, we, the privileged, are more likely than others to be guilty. We need to own it. Gazalnu. We have stolen. We have stolen.
So what should we do?
As the rabbis teach, “asu sayag latorah.” We should always build in protective mechanisms that will keep us from going down the wrong path. First, we need to recognize our sin. Gazalnu. We have stolen. That’s the plain truth. And then we need to build the fence by reinforcing our awareness of the humanity of the people around us, the people who are less fortunate than we. Studies show that something as simple as seeing pictures of childhood poverty almost immediately restores empathy and generosity in the otherwise privileged and selfish.
Ashamnu, bagadnu, gazalnu. And all the rest. This is the truth about ourselves. We need to be honest about it. As the prophet Zechariah taught, for redemption to happen, you must love honesty. (8:19) His vision is read in the synagogue as part of the 10 week long period of alienation, reconciliation, and restoration that leads up to Yom Kippur. For a reason.
We need to be honest. We need to hold up a mirror so we can see ourselves clearly, cut through our positivity bias, our tendency to think too highly of ourselves, and reveal our shadow side. But how?
I don’t know the whole answer, but I know an essential part of the answer. Memory. Yizkor. Memory is a magic mirror. When we hold up a regular mirror, we see ourselves as we imagine ourselves to be, limited by our lack of insight and introspection. When we hold up the mirror of memory, it reflects the past, but shows us a vision of the future, a vision of what we could become if we were honest enough to admit what we see.
How does this work in practical terms? What can memory do about our hidden guilts, ashamnu? The story is told of Joseph and Mrs. Potiphar, who was trying to seduce him. The Torah says the he fled and went out. Vayetzei. But if it says he fled, it’s clear that he went out. Why add that extra word? The rabbis suggested Vayetzei was an abbreviation for the words, “And Joseph saw a vision of his father.” He might well have been tempted, and, except for Mrs. Potiphar, and we know how she felt about it, he was alone. No one else would have known. But the image of his father was enough to help him avoid the disinhibition effect I mentioned earlier. Memory kept him from guilt.
How about bagadnu, our betrayal of future generations? How would memory help? Well, speaking personally, I can say without the slightest shadow of a doubt that my parents would rather have died than deprive me or my sister in order to enrich themselves. It would have been simply inconceivable for them, a violation of their very being. I can hear my mother’s voice, may she rest in peace, speaking with an urgency, and a stridency, that would not be denied, saying, “But what about the children?” Her memory will keep me from betrayal.
And gazalnu, the abuse of privilege? I remember my father of blessed memory, bidding against a competitor. The competitor offered a higher price, and got the account. I asked my father, “Couldn’t you have overbid him?” “Yes,” he answered, he was in a much stronger position than his competitor was. “Well then why didn’t you do it?” I asked him. “Because,” my father said, “the other guy also has as wife and children. Everybody’s got to make a living.” Maybe my father’s finances weren’t as wonderful as they otherwise could have been—but he never had trouble looking himself in the mirror. And if I follow his example, I won’t either. His memory saves me from theft.
And I suspect that if we went down the whole list, dibarnu dofi, he’evinu, v’hirshanu….at every turn those who walked this earth before us would have something to teach—whether by example, if we are blessed with beautiful memories, or by counter-example, when we know that something went wrong and we need to live up to a higher standard.
The truth about ourselves is that all too often we are blind to our weaknesses. By the same token, we do not fully grasp the moral heights that beckon us. At this sacred time, therefore, we call on the memories of our ancestors to open our eyes, soften our hearts, strengthen our will, and guide our path.