“G-d remembered Sarah, and G-d did as He had promised.” With this dramatic declaration, the declaration that Sarah was indeed miraculously pregnant with Isaac, the saga of the Jewish people truly begins. One generation would lead to another. This was a pivotal moment for our people, and for all human history. A new world had begun. Hence, the recitation of this passage at the beginning of our new year, the birthday of the world.
On a more individual level, all of us can look back upon our own pivotal moments, the times when something happened that changed us, and our world. For my parents’ generation, it was Pearl Harbor. For a later generation, it was when Kennedy was shot. Still later, it was the landing on the moon in 1969. For many, the true and the faithful, it was on May 3, 1957, when it was announced that the Dodgers were leaving Brooklyn. For millennials, it was 9/11. For GenXers’, I am told, it was more personal: the day they heard their parents were getting divorced.
For me personally, and for many of my generation, it was May of 1970, when college students all over the country went on strike. It was a tumultuous time. The quagmire of Vietnam. The Chicago 7 trial. “The whole world is watching,” the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, and then Kent State –“4 dead in Ohio”—and Jackson State. Not to mention Three Mile Island and other assorted disasters.
Out of all this came a profound conviction that shaped my entire generation of boomers, and the entire course of American history to the present day: “Never trust anyone over 30.” “They lie.” And above all, “Question Authority.” Question the authority of our Establishment that had brought us to such a low point, that had betrayed so many American values, and was so steeped in greed and duplicity.
That struggle against abusive and mendacious authority continues even today. For good reason, when “they”, people in positions of authority, tell us that black “slaves developed skills” so they personally benefited from slavery, as they teach in FloriDUH—an argument that not surprisingly has already been applied to Jews who suffered during the Holocaust; when they tell us that LGBTQ people and their supporters, like me, are “groomers;” and pedophiles; and when they tell us that “The climate change agenda is a hoax.” (DeSantis, MTG, and Vivek Ramaswamy, respectively).
Questioning authority meant, of course, that the responsibility for clear thought was on our shoulders. If “they” could not be trusted, we had to trust ourselves. Problem is, it turns out that relying on ourselves is not such a metziah either. Descartes famously said, “I think, therefore I am.” Unfortunately, there are a lot of unthinking people that “am” too. It turns out we are a lot less capable than we imagine.
First, we have to contend with the Dunnings-Kruger effect, whereby people who are truly stupid are so stupid they can’t understand how stupid they are, and so therefore think they are smart. Consider, for example, the ad for the Flat Earth Society, proudly proclaiming that flat-earth adherents could be found all over the globe. [If you don’t see the humor in that, speak with me after services].
Now, stupid is not a word I like to throw around loosely. It sounds harsh and cruel. However, if you have those who actually believe that lizard people are secretly running the world, that Hilary Clinton is running a child pornography ring out of the basement of a pizza shop in Washington, and that John F. Kennedy Jr. will return after having been dead for 24 years—return to Dallas, no less—if you have people that think like this, being subtle about stupidity will help no one.
In reality, most of us are not stupid at all, and certainly not Darwin award level stupid. We wouldn’t be here if we were. But life is confusing, and our tools for grappling with it are limited, and even worse, limited in ways we do not realize. There is an entire catalogue of biases, blindspots, and bent thinking to which human beings are subject. One example: studies prove that small gifts from pharmaceutical companies—like pens and scratchpads—have a clear impact on doctors’ choices about which drugs they prescribe. And the delicious part is that doctors, with a zillion years of training and experience backing them up, imagine that because they have such expert training, they aren’t being influenced.
To use popular parlance, they are being “nudged,” nudged toward choices not of their own making. And if people that smart can be nudged, so can all of us. The world is filled with “choice architects,” who influence us in ways open and not so open. In Germany in 1938, for example, there was a paper ballot election. It asked if you support Hitler, y”sh, yes or no. The “yes” circle was the size of a silver dollar. The “no” circle was smaller than a dime. Now, the Nazis were not exactly known for their subtlety, so that was a pretty blatant example. Here’s one that’s less obvious. In the past, we have all purchased things that promise a rebate, sometimes a substantial rebate. The prospect of a rebate successfully guided us, or tempted us, to buy the product. From the company’s perspective, that was a good nudge; for the consumer, not so much, because only 10% of such rebates ever get cashed.
And then there’s the negative nudge, known in the psychology business as a “sludge.” Here’s one we’ve all experienced: There we are, on hold for 45 minutes for customer service which is experiencing—say it with me—“higher than normal call volume.” But we are urged to hold on because our call is—say it with me—“very important to them.” And we listen to music that wasn’t good in the first place, but now is even worse because it’s playing at an incorrect speed. When a human finally picks up the phone, they can’t solve your problem (and that’s assuming you can understand what they say, which you often can’t) but then you get bumped to a supervisor. If you haven’t been disconnected, which you often are, when you get to a supervisor at the beginning of the second hour, they solve your problem in two minutes. What’s happened here? The choice architect for the company has stacked the deck. This isn’t about providing customer service. This is about making the process so infuriating that next time you will not even bother trying to get customer service.
We said we could only trust ourselves. But when we take into account the stupidity, the psychological weaknesses and misperceptions, and the nudging and sludging in directions not of our choosing, the results are not pretty. The morass seems to be ever widening, and we personally and collectively sink ever deeper. Fear of war, environmental disaster, school shootings, systemic racism, sexual assault, and socioeconomic inequality are literally driving young people crazy, with the highest level of depression and anxiety ever recorded.
In a word, it’s a mess. And we who questioned authority and trusted only ourselves helped to make it that way.
Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, who literally wrote the book on nudging, said “…people are most likely to need nudges when decisions require scarce attention, when decisions are difficult, when people do not get prompt feedback, and when they have trouble translating aspects of the situation into terms that they can easily understand.”
In other words, you need nudges when you’re alive. Because those conditions describe exactly the situation in which we find ourselves. So what do we do now? Well, whenever I ask my kids that question, their first response is “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” Since this is about life, I don’t think we can do that. So after that, my kids say, “Go for a factory reset.” Go back to the beginning and start over. And this is where traditional wisdom comes into the picture. When all else fails, read the instructions. This, I am quick to point out, is not simply a matter of tribal loyalty to our national sky god. It’s not a sloppy reliance on that “ol’ time religion.” It is a qualitative judgment, a reflection of the depth and wisdom of our tradition, refined and purified in the crucible of millennial experience.
Consider, for example, just the book of Genesis. In Hebrew, about 50 pages long. A short list of the moral and ethical concepts mentioned in that book—many introduced to the world for the very first time—include:
Paradise
Love
Goodness
Loss and Hope
Perseverance
Devotion
Inspiration
Courage
Friendship
Beauty
Culture
Modesty
Self-improvement
Repentance
Forgiveness
Resistance to temptation
Humility
Atonement
Self-sacrifice
Patriotism
Commitment
Trust
Vision
Above all, vision.
And that’s in just the first 50 pages of our massive tradition!
I am not suggesting that mere bible-thumping will solve our problems. I am instead pointing out that in a world of countless choice architectures, the most important variable is the architect. In this case, ours is the Architect with a capital A. Our tradition teaches: talmud torah keneged kulam—nothing is more important than the continual study of Torah. It forms the shared intellectual arena within which we can reason and search together, within which we rely on neither draconian authority nor individual hubris. Torah study involves balancing opposing points of view—which you can find literally on every single page of Talmud—with mutual respect, subtlety, an awareness of complexity, and humility. Together, in sacred community, we can overcome our unconscious predilections and our limited self-understanding.
If it were the case that we all paid full attention to every detail of our lives, that we knew all that we could know, that we were able to think clearly without any human foibles or weaknesses, and could resist every temptation to do the wrong thing, then perhaps we wouldn’t need the ongoing study of Torah. But then we would be unlike any human being who ever lived. Again, Thaler and Sunstein: “The false assumption is that almost all people, almost all the time, make choices that are in their best interest or at the very least are better than the choices that would be made by someone else. ….this assumption is false—indeed, obviously false.” And the Torah is completely aware of this—in fact, it has been given to us for precisely this reason—to give imperfect people who are meant to perfect the world a nudge in the right direction.
There is no body of knowledge in the world that is more cognizant of the disparity between belief and behavior than the Torah; but at the same time no traditional source more willing to—indeed, insistent upon—allowing each of us to make our choices, for better and for worse, for life and for death. And we indeed are facing life and death choices.
The Torah doesn’t tell us what to think about quantum entanglement; it doesn’t tell us what to think about melting glaciers—there aren’t many of them in Israel; it doesn’t tell us what to think about using AI to write a High Holy day sermon—as tempting as that may be. But it does teach us how to think, how to use our minds, the collective minds of our community, and the collective minds of our people over 4000 years. Our choice Architect, Architect with a capital A, has given us the tools to nudge ourselves in the right direction and choose life—life for ourselves, our children, our society, and our world.
“The Torah is a tree of life to all who hold it.” Choose life.