This was my D’var Torah for the second day of Rosh Hashanah in 5776 (2015). Part of the idea I have to credit to Rabbi Sharon Brous for a Rosh Hashanah sermons of her I read sometime before then, called “Moral Conundrum Ahead”, which is where I think I first got the idea of “moral priming.” This isn’t the same message but I think hers sent me thinking down a path that led to this one. I relied also on some things I read about priming in Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast and Slow.”
When I was a junior in college, I took a very small seminar on social theory with three other students in my major. One of the four has become a TV and film producer, specializing in science fiction. One is a best-selling author and guru about entrepreneurship, known in her field as “la chica loca”, Spanish for “the crazy girl” – she is actually a Jewish woman originally from Boston. Another is a rabbi. And the fourth went to law school and eventually became a regulator at the Securities and Exchange Commission. His name is Michael Gaw.
Of the four of us, Mike might seem to have taken the most conventional route. He surely enjoys the lowest cultural prestige – no one dreams as a kid of becoming a securities regulator! But after seeing all three of these classmates at my 25th college reunion last spring, it’s Mike who sticks with me most of all.
Mike and I weren’t particularly friends outside of the class, though I had always thought of him as a sweet and thoughtful guy. I’d last talked to him five years ago at our previous reunion. Mike had been working for a while at the SEC, and that reunion took place not even two years after the financial markets had nearly collapsed. Mike’s blurb in the reunion book that year was short and melancholy. He wrote briefly about his family, and expressed a general sadness with how things were going in the country. At that reunion, Mike told me about the job, and he seemed uncertain and even self-conscious about the work, and said he was wondering whether to keep doing it, whether it would make any difference.
I told him how many people I knew in our community who were still hurting because of the crash, and how much I appreciated that he was there serving us. And for whatever it was worth I said he should stick it out.
As I say, we hadn’t really been friends, so the next time I caught up with Mike was this past May at the recent reunion. He is still at the Securities and Exchange Commission, a person of some seniority but no one whose name you’ve ever seen in the paper, even the business press. But compared to five years ago – wow.
Mike was on a panel called “Your Money or Your Life.” Gone was any of his uncertainty about what he is doing. Mike talked about the fact that he knew he had the expertise to go out into the financial sector himself, make more money, and outwit the regulations that he himself was enforcing. But instead, he had decided that the right thing to do was to continue using his skills as a civil servant.
His language was striking – Mike wasn’t just talking technically about making sure the markets run smoothly and the banks don’t freeze up. Mike talked about deploying himself against lawbreaking and greed and exploitation, from a perch where no one would really see that he was there doing it. As he answered one last question at the end of the program, Mike actually held up and read from a book from the late 1700s about the psychology of moral behavior, by the great economist and philosopher Adam Smith. It was the very book we in the seminar had all read in the first semester of the first course in our major.
Mike’s life and his perspective on his choices are a perfect illustration of something the columnist David Brooks wrote about in a book he published this year called The Road to Character. In a piece excerpted in the New York Times Sunday Review, Brooks wrote about two ways of defining ourselves. He called them: “the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues…. The résumé virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral.”
Brooks writes:
We all know that the eulogy virtues are more important than the résumé ones. But our culture and our educational systems spend more time teaching the skills and strategies you need for career success than the qualities you need to radiate that sort of inner light…. You grade yourself on a forgiving curve. You figure as long as you are not obviously hurting anybody and people seem to like you, you must be O.K. Gradually, a humiliating gap opens between your actual self and your desired self, between you and those incandescent souls you sometimes meet.
My classmate Mike Gaw, whose resume looks pretty impressive, had come sometime in the past five years to a decision to view his work and his life in light of the “eulogy virtues.” David Brooks wrote his book because he wanted to know where people like that come from. He came to a couple of conclusions. One is that these “incandescent souls” fill their lives with what Brooks calls “moral adventures.” And by looking at those adventures, Brooks wrote up for his readers what he called a “moral bucket list.”
When I first read Brooks’s column, I thought that the idea of “moral adventures” was mighty pretentious. Being a good person isn’t like climbing a series of dangerous mountains, or setting off to explore new lands across a vast and treacherous distance.
But then I thought about Avraham and Sarah. Because our first moral exemplars did exactly those things.
Today’s Torah reading gave us the story of the Akedah, a story of moral decision set on a hike through a dangerous mountain range, toward a hill of life or death. And the whole story started with Lech L’cha, a trek from the center of civilization in Ur, toward the unknown land that God would show them.
A few years ago during the Olympics, I mused from the bimah that while we have an international Olympics for sports, we should have an Olympics for solving great moral problems in the world. Some event that concentrates our best minds and our collective attention, with a goal and a reward that everyone can see. There isn’t a moral Olympics – but imagine what the world would be like if there were.
And in the same way, imagine how our lives would be different if we saw them as a series of moral adventures.
Adventures aren’t defined by the dragons and the bridges guarded by trolls. Adventures have beginnings, and they have goals. Adventures have dangers and obstacles. There are always companions, who have some strength or smarts or wisdom you don’t have, but that fits together with who you are. There are evil forces and temptations to outwit. There are unexpected tools or charms, forces for good beyond all expectation that appear at just the right moment. And it’s impossible to complete an adventure without growing, and without a new idea of who you are.
If we chose to see not only periodic moral choices in our lives, but our whole lives as moral adventures, think what we would do, and how we would continue to grow.
The Torah decorates the story of Avraham and Sarah with battles and kings, journeys to distant lands, climbs up various mountains, and visions in dreams. The Mishnah says that the two of them experienced asarah nisyonot, ten “tests” – or as David Brooks would say, ten moral adventures:
In Ur Kasdim, the cradle of civilization, they faced the test of comformity, as they saw the cost of beliefs that even their parents held, but that were fundamentally wrong.
They faced the test of authority – how to weigh the demands of King Nimrod and the traditional Mesopotamian gods, against the powerful voice speaking inside of them.
Arriving in Canaan, they faced the test of new relationships – with people of the new land, some of whom were suspicious of them and some of whom revered them almost as gods.
They faced the test of separation from each other – when first Pharaoh, and then the Philistines, took Sarah to be part of their harems.
They faced the test of family strife – over and over.
They faced the test of greed, as kings tried to buy their loyalty.
They faced the test of generosity – when three strangers passed their way and Avraham and Sarah couldn’t know whether they were friendly or not; they just knew the travelers would be hungry and thirsty. They faced the test of justice – when the lives of people in the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, down in the valley from their own comfortable hilltop, were in danger.
They faced the test of old age – wondering how to live with purpose when their capacities were weaker, or if they would leave any legacy at all; Avraham wondering how to live on after Sarah died.
And as we read today, they faced the test of life in the face of absurdity – when everything they had staked their life led them toward the impossible, the unthinkable.
The chasidic tradition says that each of us, like Sarah and Avraham, has ten moral adventures in store for us – but we don’t automatically know what they are, or when they are. That’s why the Torah told us today, at the introduction (Genesis 22:1), Vayehi achar hadvarim ha-ele, v’ha-elohim nisa et Avraham – It was after these things that God tested Avraham. We have to train ourselves to see the next moral adventure coming toward us, or to live our lives as though any phase could be one of them.
And just seeing our lives that way makes a difference in how we act. There is a whole field of study in psychology about what’s called “priming.” So for instance, two groups of people are given the same photograph of two people, and asked to write a story about it. One group is given a cup of hot chocolate to hold while they wait to participate, and the other a cold soda. And on the whole, the groups write different stories, with more warmth or coldness between the people in the photo.
There is evidence for moral priming as well. If before a person encounters a situation, he or she is told that what is coming is a moral challenge, the person is more likely to act in a moral fashion. In one study, all it took was giving someone a piece of paper with the Ten Commandments to read – a reminder that life in general has a moral dimension.
So too we can prime ourselves to see the moral dimension of our lives, or of a situation or a relationship we find ourselves in.
How do we do that?
Sometimes, it’s through teshuvah – by focusing on a time we have failed, and resolving to make overcoming that failure our deliberate adventure. Ruth Messenger is the president of an extraordinary organization called the American Jewish World Service, which concentrates the power of Jewish tzedakah and organizational skills to strengthen grassroots groups in the developing world. I heard Ruth tell the story of how she became a leader in the interfaith coalition to stop the genocide in the African region of Darfur in Sudan. She had been the borough president of Manhattan in 1994 when the Rwandan genocide had taken place. As a prominent political leader, Ruth said, she had done nothing. And she swore that if something like that happened in the world ever again, she would never again stand aside.
Sometimes, a group of people with incredible foresight can band together toward a moral challenge before it fully materializes. One of the most dramatic examples in modern history of moral priming was the rescue of the Jews of Denmark in October of 1943. Bo Lidegaard, editor of one of the largest newspapers in Denmark today, set out to figure out how that happened.
He discovered that the groundwork began ten years before. When the Nazis came to power in Germany, a group of Danish politicians realized how similar their society was to that of Germany. So they decided to start in public speeches to say “Danish” and “democratic” at the same time, over and over, so there would be no difference between the two. And they decided to speak in a way that would make it clear that “Danish” meant everybody in the country.
Even three years of German occupation and the death of the original leader of the movement couldn’t overcome this moral priming. When the order came for the Jews to be deported to the camps, neighborhoods and churches and fishermen mobilized to ferry almost all the Jews of the country to Sweden.
For me, one of the most important practices of moral priming is what we’ve been doing today – it’s prayer.
When I open the Siddur, I find Avraham and Sarah at the start of the Amidah. The words we say over and over – tzedakah, shalom, chayim – life; chesed – generosity; ahava – love – these are my moral bucket list. When I am home in the mornings during the week, davvening without a minyan, my prayer discipline is short. I put on my tefillin, the leather boxes with words of Torah pressed to my body. To my forehead, to remind me to think of the ethical obligations ahead of me, and to remind me to see the people I will encounter all day with the third eye, the one that sees everyone as the image of God. I wrap the tefillin on my arm, to remind me not just to see but to be active. And in addition to the Shma, I say Mi Chamocha, to remind myself of the Torah’s other great moral adventure – the Exodus from Egypt, the rescue of the powerless and poor, the elevation of former slaves to bearers of Torah. I tell myself to make that the story of my day somehow, whether I am to be Moshe or Aharon or Miryam, a relentless advocate or a peacemaking negotiator or a soothing singer.
And there is another facet of prayer that is relevant: the other people gathered as a congregation, like today. If you’ll allow me to switch my metaphor, I think of the congregation as a kind of Hogwarts, where we are all in training together for the very different moral adventures each person here faces in our lives.
Moral priming is why, more than any other reason, I hold and cling to the traditional form of Jewish prayer.
Sometimes, the moral adventure thrusts itself on us so obviously. But when it’s not so clear, these might be the kinds of things that belong on your moral bucket list:
To stand up for someone when no one else will – against a bully, or against a majority.
To face an overwhelming problem in the world, like today’s crisis of refugees fleeing wars in the Middle East, and to find one way to make a difference.
To reach out to one person who needs a friend or talk to someone who stands alone at Kiddush.
To stand by someone at a time of loss, when like Avraham and Sarah your own faith is shaken and you don’t know what to say.
Leading a moral life is more even than just making ethical decisions when they are before us. My classmate Mike Gaw told us about a conversation with an old boss, who had been in some of the frantic meetings in 2008 at the height of the financial crisis. His boss told him about stepping outside, and seeing people going about their business with no real awareness that the world was at the edge of an abyss. Yet he went back inside, to do the ethical work that no one would see or understand, or even know was going on.
That, says Mike, is what he decided to do by staying in his job. To live in a part of the world that seems ethically invisible, and bring it into the moral universe.
In the year ahead, may we be on the lookout for the next of the ten tests in our lives that make us the heirs of Sarah and Avraham. It’s not always about a stark choice of right or wrong. Sometimes it’s just about noticing that life is indeed a set of moral adventures, in more places than we might have realized. Even in places where the resume virtues seem to mean more than the eulogy virtues. May we know all the delights of those adventures too – a sense of purpose, companions for the journey, and unexpected gifts of goodness that we never believed were there. Shana Tova.
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