Around the year 1970, the personality psychologist Walter Mischel launched a classic experiment, called "The Marshmallow Test". [1] He went to a preschool on the Stanford University campus, and placed marshmallows in front of a room full of 4-year-olds. He told them they had a choice: they could either have one marshmallow now, or -- if they waited several minutes -- they could have two. Some of the children eagerly grabbed a marshmallow and ate it. Others were able to wait, employing various means to avoid taking the tempting treat -- some covered their eyes in order not to see it, and one child even licked the table around the marshmallow as a tactic to avoid eating it.
This experiment fascinates me, not so much because of what it says about child psychology in particular, but rather for what it says about human nature in general. We are constantly being presented with situations in which we have to decide whether to take what's at hand, or wait for something better which may come along, but may not. For most of us, one of the surest signs of maturity, responsibility, and menschlichkeit is the ability to exercise self-control, the ability to delay gratification, and cope with the short term pain or frustration which inevitably ensues. That pain, we hope, will eventually lead to some long term gain, although the future is of course never as sure as the present. What if the stranger promising a second marshmallow doesn't come back, and you end up with nothing? That possibility always lurks in the back of our minds when we make such decisions, and the extent to which we live our lives based on such fears will often be a telltale sign of how we engage with the world around us.
We all have within us a pull toward instant gratification, and we all have within us the potential to resist that pull. And there are external influences as well. There is much in contemporary culture which nurtures our need for instant gratification. Consider these tee shirt slogans many of you have probably seen around town: "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of chocolate." "When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping". "I used to be God, but it was too much responsibility." "Life is a beach." "I'm easy to please as long as I get my way." And "He who dies with the most toys, wins." Yes of course there is a degree of wry humour and self-mockery in these slogans. But they also reflect the ugliest aspects of our culture - the drive for instant gratification, along with a sense of despair, apathy, and narcissism. Feed your basest instincts. Nothing really matters. Go for the marshmallow at hand, and tomorrow will take care of itself.
Professor Mischel followed the group he had studied, and found that, 14 years later, on the whole, the "grabbers" suffered lower self-esteem and were viewed by others as stubborn, prone to envy and easily frustrated. The "waiters" were, on the whole, better copers, more socially competent and self-assertive, more trustworthy, dependable and academically successful. For what it's worth, this group even scored on average about 210 points higher on their SATs.
But for me this Rosh Hashanah, the interesting question is not how to raise kids who will wait and therefore get the second marshmallow and ultimately do better on their SATs. My question is, how do we raise kids who will share whatever number of marshmallows they've got with their classmates? For in this Rosh Hashanah court, standing before our Creator, we know how truly unimportant it is how many marshmallows, or toys we accumulate. In fact, here, contrary to the tee shirt slogan, those things don't help us to "win" at all. Rather, we "win" here by living our lives like a mensch, coping with frustration and delayed gratification, and generously sharing some of what we have, whether it be our material wealth, or our time or our spirit or our love, with others.
Many of you may have read Philip Roth's powerful novel American Pastoral. In it, the main character, Swede Levov, son of the ladies' glove manufacturer Lou Levov and husband of the former Miss New Jersey Dawn Dwyer, explains to his wife why he never wants to attend synagogue: "I used to go on the High Holidays with my father, and I just never understood what they were getting at," he says. "Even seeing my father there never made sense. It wasn't him, it wasn't like him - he was bending to something that he didn't have to, something he didn't even understand. He was just bending to this because of my grandfather. I never understood what any of that stuff had to do with his being a man. What the glove factory had to do with his being a man, anybody could understand - just about everything. My father knew what he was talking about when he was talking about gloves. But when he started about that stuff? You should have heard him. If he'd known as little about leather as he knew about God, the family would have wound up in the poorhouse…When I had to go to Hebrew school as a kid, all the time I was in that room I couldn't wait to go out on the ballfield. I used to think …'Why shouldn't I be where I want to be? Why shouldn't I be with who I want to be? Isn't that what this country's all about? I want to be where I want to be and I don't want to be where I don't want to be. I couldn't be happier if I tried." [2]
For Swede Levov, who happens to be a good and upright man doing his best in a very complex world, attending synagogue represents an unconscionable intrusion on his own desires. There is something illegitimate, he feels, about doing something that one doesn't really want to do, there's something phony about it, something that is a betrayal of his most deeply held values. Of course, those who have read the novel know that this character who "couldn't be happier if he tried", ends up facing terrible tragedy. Would a more religious life have prevented his family catastrophe? I wouldn't make such a facile, and easily disprovable claim about the rewards of religious observance. Yet given what occurs in the novel, it's hard not to question his assumptions about the value of doing only what one truly wants to do. His father may have been an ignorant Jew, but perhaps in his insistence on attending shul at yontif, a place where unlike in his family or at his factory he was not the boss, a place where he "bent to something he didn't have to", he perceived something that the son missed.
What does all this have to do with us? We're all sitting here now, which automatically puts us in a very different category than Swede Levov. Our presence demonstrates a level of commitment to our community that he never attained or even aspired to. Nevertheless, we're all a part of the same larger culture which nurtured him, a culture which encourages us to think of ourselves and our own individual needs first. And those of us whose job it is to promote Jewish life face a choice - do we resist this aspect of our wider culture, or embrace it? It appears that most of us have decided that "resistance is futile." As sociologist Steven M. Cohen notes, "Contemporary…Judaism is replete with the language of spiritual quest, personal journeys, and searches for healing. At worship services, it is common for rabbis to speak of the Sabbath, for example, not as an ot brit, a sign of the everlasting covenant between God and the Jewish people, but rather as a means of private emotional release, urging congregants to treat the day as a time for reviewing their personal experiences of the week just past, and for letting go of their everyday cares."[3] This is how we try to reach the Swede Levovs of the Jewish world. This is how we "make the case" for Jewish life - by appealing to the piece of all of us which desperately wants our individual needs to be gratified. Look here, we say. Judaism can do it for you. This approach is not limited to the liberal branches. Contemporary Orthodox literature about the laws of family purity for example, stress how beautiful and healthy it is for a husband and wife to live according to cycles of physical intimacy and separation. Now I'm not saying it's not true, but we should realize that promoting the observance of a mitzvah because it enriches one's sex life, is a very different argument than promoting it because God said so!
Another way in which rabbis buy into the individualistic, need-gratifying tenor of our times is in the emphasis on life cycle events as central and defining Jewish moments. We know that families want, even need us, for those life cycle moments such as Bar/Bat Mitzvahs, weddings, and funerals, and boy do we like to be needed. And we strive to meet people's needs in a professional and dignified and meaningful way. There is of course nothing wrong with that. But the essence of a life cycle event is honouring an individual person. We all like to be honoured and celebrated, and the hope is that the experience will be such a positive one that people will feel very positive about their Jewish identity. But I'm not so sure that the proposition is true that if you bring someone in for an occasion when they or their loved one is going to be honoured, they will be so moved that they will then come back at times when they're not going to be honoured, when it's just about sitting in the pews as a regular member of the kahal, dust and ashes like everyone else. Are we, through our emphasis on individually gratifying life cycle events, conveying the message that what Judaism is about is honouring people, instead of conveying the message that what it's about is facilitating an opportunity for people to honour God? That's why these Yamim Noraim are so important, and why it's so wonderfully counter-cultural that you're all here - because these days, when they work, do convey that message of humility, as we stand before our Creator and our Judge. Next week especially, on Yom Kippur, we will not only not gratify our needs, we will actively deny our own most basic needs, for a whole day. Our willingness to do so is a strong statement in the context of our time.
Now, is need gratification necessarily such a bad thing? Do we want to make the case that it is negative for people to find the Sabbath personally meaningful for their own spiritual journey? Do we want to say that it's bad for a young person to come up to the Torah as a Bar Mitzvah, and have their worth affirmed by the community at a very sensitive and vulnerable stage in their life? Clearly not. These things are wonderful. But our emphases and our choice of language both reflect and influence our culture, and therefore bear comment. If I want to move you to greater observance of the Sabbath (and as a rabbi I surely do), then I'm going to use the language that I think you'll find compelling. In our time, the language of personal fulfillment, affirmation, and need gratification is what works best. But using that language does come with a cost, because it reinforces the notion that that's what Jewish observance is about. It's about Me. And My needs. And at the end of the day, if that's what it's about, then if you tell me, "Rabbi, in fact, going to shul doesn't meet my needs on Shabbat. Going to the golf course or the ski hill or the mall or working on my dissertation is what meets my needs" there's very little I can say, because I've bought into the argument that your needs are what we're talking about. But I'm in a bind, because what choice do I have? If I try to move you to deeper observance of the Sabbath because you're a Jew, and you're one small part of an amazing covenant that's thousands of years old, and that because you're part of a Covenant, that's what God commands you to do, my fear is you won't even listen to me at all, because that message is certainly not in tune with our wider culture. Swede Levov certainly wouldn't respond to it, and I don't think he's alone. So what's a rabbi to do?
The same dilemma confronts rabbis over the very delicate issue of intermarriage. For most of the young people I interact with, whether they've had a strong Jewish education or not, it is self-evident that the choice of marriage partner should be utterly determined by whom you love, regardless of religion. This is such an article of faith in our society that it's hard to argue with. Popular culture valorizes those who allow love to triumph over petty tribalisms. The issue becomes framed as condemning someone to a loveless marriage in order to satisfy the needs of the larger group they were born into. There's an entire literary and cinematic tradition around that theme, which is embedded in our culture, and which makes the tragic consequences of that choice plain. Who today could ask someone to make that sacrifice of their own individual need for love, for the sake of the community? I don't think that's the only way the issue can be framed, but it is the dominant way because of the wonderfully multicultural character of the society in which we live.
And yet I as a rabbi, as someone who is charged at least in part with safeguarding our Jewish communal future, have to live with the fact that for Jews aged 25-39, 96% of in-married couples (including of course, couples where a conversion has taken place) celebrate a Passover seder, whereas only 46% of intermarried couples do. For High Holiday service attendance, the statistic is 87% for in-married, 31% for intermarried. Synagogue membership? 80% of in-married affiliate, 19% of intermarried. Of those who contribute at least $100 to a Jewish charity in a year, the figures are 60% and 16% respectively[4]. These are sobering statistics for anyone who cares about the Jewish future.
We all want to be happy, and we want that for our kids too. That's fair. The ugly tradition of sitting shiva for one's kids who have "married out" is thankfully a thing of the past for the vast majority of Jews. We all know, and indeed many of us are related to, non-Jews who are lovely, supportive, kind, menschlich people. It's easy to be happy with such people. It's sometimes challenging, however, to live a full Jewish life with a partner who isn't -- whether by birth or by conversion - themselves Jewish. Not impossible, as many individual families can testify (and they deserve our support and our love), but hard. And I suspect that's where all those statistics come from.
We all want to be happy, and we want that for our kids too. But there's a wider issue for us as human beings to think about on this day which is the anniversary of the Creation of the whole world. How can we really be happy, and sleep well at night, in a world where 10 ½ million children under the age of 5 die every year, most from preventable and treatable diseases like diarrhea and pneumonia, malnutrition and lack of access to clean drinking water (that's 30,000 children per day!). How can we truly enjoy the very clothes on our backs if we consider for a moment the conditions of the people (often children) in far off lands who produced them? How can we post-Holocaust Jews simply carry on, as another genocide takes place in our own time in Darfur? Very few of us can live with a consciousness of these facts every day. We have to find some way to bracket this information and live our lives, both for our own sakes, and for the reason that if we were to really contemplate the way in which so much of the rest of humanity lives, most of us would sink into despair - and our despair then becomes a self-indulgence that doesn't help anyone.
So we can't live with it every day. But that doesn't mean we should forget about it altogether. There is a connection - complex, hard to define, but true -- between our good fortune and the misery of much of humanity. You don't have to be an anti-globalization crusader to acknowledge that link, and if there's any day in the year for acknowledgements it is this day. What the answer is I don't know. Communism certainly wasn't it. And I personally don't think that disbanding the WTO or the IMF or other international agreements is the answer either. But at least on these days, even if we don't have answers, we should acknowledge that however important our own individual happiness is, it is not in fact "all that's important". Our responsibilities to our Jewish people, our responsibilities as human beings to other human beings, our responsibilities to God as members of a Covenant - all these things are, dare I say, even more important than our own individual happiness. Ideally, we won't have to choose. That's the best - to be good people, good Jews, doers of mitzvot and good deeds, and be happy and content all at the same time. To find a way so that there's enough marshmallows for us to have as many as we want, and also share with others so that they have as many as they need, or want. What gets sticky is when we find that there aren't enough, and we have to make hard choices because we can't both gratify our own needs and do our part for the wider society as well. That's what this time of year is all about - because sometimes we make good choices about which we're proud, and sometimes we don't.
I'd like to conclude with a word about Israel. I was lucky enough to spend a month there this summer - two weeks studying at the Hartman Institute Rabbis' seminar, and some vacation time as well. We were there as the Lebanon war broke out, and we experienced that uneasy feeling associated with having a good time, while we knew that so many Israelis in the north of the country were living in bomb shelters, and so many Lebanese civilians were paying a terrible price for living in an area which was being used as a staging ground for attacks on Israel. Where we were in Jerusalem, the war was not felt directly at all. The streets were crowded, everyone went about their business, buses, cafes, tourist sites, shops were all full - probably even busier than usual because so many people had come south to escape the missile threat.
I was able to see many things I hadn't seen on previous trips - the new Yad Vashem museum - which was extraordinarily moving in a way that surprised me after having read and seen so much about the Shoah, the Menahem Begin Heritage Center - which provides a fascinating account of the career of one of Israel's most controversial politicians, the Southern Wall Excavations just beside the Kotel - an archeological site which conveys in a very powerful way just how our ancestors experienced that holy site centuries ago. I watched the World Cup Final on a giant screen on the plaza in front of Jerusalem City Hall with hundreds of fans (mostly yeshiva bochers), I recoiled from posters all over town filled with hateful rhetoric and threats about the upcoming Jerusalem Gay Pride Parade, I kvelled from the amazing Shabbes ruach at Congregation Shira Hadasha, a Standing Room Only minyan which pushes the envelope on egalitarianism in an Orthodox setting, and I studied Torah with some of the most outstanding scholars of our generation at the Hartman Institute. All in all, a treasure trove of experiences, all overshadowed by the war. We hosted friends from up north, as did so many others, and in a strange way it was a privilege to actually be there at such a difficult time rather than just read about it in the newspaper.
What does Israel have to do with the marshmallows? I certainly can't say that life in Israel is any more conducive to an ethic of delayed gratification, or sharing with others, than life here. And as far as individualism goes, there may have once been a time when the national ethos favored communal over individual needs - but most Israelis found that quite stifling, and have now - for better or for worse - joined the rest of the western world in prioritizing the needs of the individual, and we certainly can't blame them for wanting the same comforts and the same choices that we enjoy here.
However, I do think that for Diaspora Jews like us, Israel represents something bigger. A vacation spent in Israel is for us not like a vacation on a Caribbean island, or in Scandinavia - not that there's anything wrong with those places. For us, going to Israel (or, for the truly intrepid, living there) represents - especially in time of war - a decision to prioritize one's membership in the Jewish group over one's own personal needs. And I think that's true even if one is lucky enough to be able to stay in the best hotels and eat in the best restaurants, of which there are plenty, because there's a reason that one is in Israel and not in the south of France or on the Amalfi Coast or in Disneyland. One is in Israel because that is the homeland of our people, and there one can hear our ancient language spoken by Jews who come from so many dozens of lands, and there one can see the archeological remains of our ancestors, and one can see the kind of society that our contemporaries have built, and we can agonize together over the ethical dilemmas associated with the occupation of our neighbors, and we can worry together about the Iranian nuclear threat on our people, and grieve together over the loss of our soldiers and civilians in war. One can have a really fun holiday there, don't mistake me. But for me, it is that feeling of identity with the history and challenges and triumphs and losses of our people that draws me back time after time, and I hope you'll have a chance to experience some of that as well on your next trip. The feeling that it's not about me, it's about us, a Covenant people.
We stand in the Rosh Hashanah courtroom this day, grateful for having made it to another new year, filled with both excitement over what 5767 will bring - the accomplishments we anticipate, the new people who will become part of our lives, the new friends, teachers, partners, babies, the new places we'll visit, the new experiences we'll have, and the new things we'll learn. And we allow ourselves perhaps just a little bit of hope that beyond our own individual lives, 5767 will bring some advances for humankind - some new technology or advance in medicine perhaps, or a surprise peace agreement in a place like Darfur or our beloved Israel, or better safety and security for our troops in Afghanistan, and the people who live there as well. The beginning of a new year is a time to remember that, despite bitter experience, sometimes things can change for the better. If the United Church of Canada can be dissuaded from adopting a one-sided anti-Israel divestment strategy as they recently were, voting instead for a much more positive and even-handed policy, then there is always hope!
But of course we're also filled with trepidation over what 5767 might bring - the setbacks we'll have to deal with, the relationships that might fray, the tasks which will remain undone, the sickness we might face, the loved ones we might lose. And how will world events impact on us in the year just dawning - will terror strike us, or our friends and allies? Will bird flu reach us? Will global warming begin to take a toll? Will our economy weaken? Will sick people with guns wreak more random violence? Will anti-Semitism become a major problem? Will Israel face more war and a further erosion of its support from the West? So much potential in the year ahead. So many unknowns.
As we gather together this Rosh Hashanah, we strengthen each other to face whatever the year ahead may bring. And we strengthen each other to do what is right in the year ahead, whatever challenges we may face, praying that even as we go about pursuing our own happiness, comfort, security, and marshmallows, we may remember that we are also part of something much bigger than ourselves.
References
[1] Wikipedia article on Mischel, and David Brooks "Marshmallows and Public Policy" NYT May 7, 2006.
[2] American Pastoral, pp.314-315.
[3] Cohen and Wertheimer, "Emerging Forms of Jewish Connections" Commentary June 2006.