Yom kippur drasha - good intentions. advice?
Dani Schreiber
The Navi in Shabbos Shuva declares “שובה ישראל עד ה' אלהיך”. About this pasuk, the midrash claims that Reuven is the first to ever do teshuva and so his descendant (Hoshe’a) will call out to Bnei Yisrael to do teshuva.
What does this mean? How is Reuven the first to do teshuva? We know that Adam did teshuva, as well as Kayin!
Also, what’s so special about Hoshe’a? Didn’t all the nevi’im call out to Bnei Yisrael to do teshuva? Also, that first pasuk ends with כי כשלת בעונך – a strange phrase, because כשלת is a lashon of mistake, but עון is a purposeful sin. How do they jive?
Dan Ariely is a behavioral economist who studies why human beings act in the strange way they do. In his latest book he examines dishonesty and other vices.
Ariely
writes that humans want to do two things which don’t shtim: 1. We want to be able
to look in the mirror and feel good about ourselves. 2. On the other hand we
want to benefit from being dishonest. These seem to be mutually exclusive. But
thanks to our ability to rationalize our actions, we can do both.
Ariely set up a test to see why and how badly
people cheat. The subjects are brought in to take a difficult math test. In the
control group, they hand in their tests and are graded. Let’s say, on average,
each person answers 3 out of 10 questions correctly. Then another group is
brought in, and they are able to cheat because they grade their own tests and
then shred them. On average, people do cheat, but not by so much.
Ariely and his team headed back to the lab again and again to try different variations of the test. They’re all interesting but one particular permutation was especially shocking and dismaying. In this experiment, the experiments allowed the subjects to grade and shred their tests, but they had the participants perform the task in tandem with a partner, in the same room, and informed them that they were to split the total of the winnings that the two of them earned in sum. So, for instance, if one participant claimed to have earned $4, and the other claimed to have earned $2, they would have earned $6 together, and so both participants would receive $3 each. The question is this: “do you think people in this situation would cheat more than they did in the individual shredder condition?” Ariely found that when participants learned that both they and someone else would benefit from their dishonesty if they exaggerated their scores more, they ended up engaging in even higher levels of cheating, claiming to have solved three more matrices than when they were cheating just for themselves. Okay, we like to engage in social cheating. But it gets much much worse.
Wanting to probe a little further into the matter, Ariely and his team decided to run this experiment again; only this time they removed the motivation of self-interest entirely, and had their subjects take the test together with the shredder condition, but where all of their winnings would go to a third party. When self-interest was taken out of the equation entirely, cheating increased to the largest degree.
In order to explain this result, Ariely ventures the following: “I think that when both we and another person stand to benefit from our dishonesty, we operate out of a mix of selfish and altruistic motives. In contrast, when other people, and only other people, stand to benefit from our cheating, we find it far easier to rationalize our bad behavior in purely altruistic ways and subsequently we further relax our moral inhibitions. After all, if we are doing something for the pure benefit of others, aren’t we indeed a little bit like Robin Hood?”
Remember we wondered why Reuven is considered the father of teshuva? One answer to why Reuven is different is that Reuven’s sin was different from Adam and Kayin’s in a fundamental way. When Adam sinned, he had an explicit command from God that he was contradicting. When Kayin killed, even if he didn’t understand what he was doing (as some midrashim say), he was at the very least acting out of a wicked rage.
Reuven, however, was completely different. His intentions were pure – he didn’t want Yaakov to disrespect Rachel by having another child with one of the shfachot. This all means that Reuven was the first to do teshuva for a specific kind of sin – the sin that comes from good intentions.
Hoshe’a, the descendant of Reuven, calls out specifically to Yisrael to do teshuva. Yisrael is the term used for Bnei Yisrael when they are actually acting properly. Hoshe’a is calling out to the best of the people to examine their actions and see if there are things they are engaged in which are questionable. כשלת בעונך – it’s not that they are doing aveirot on purpose – they have mistakenly fallen into their sins.
It’s very difficult to do teshuva for a sin that you justify. That you rationalize. How many of us engage in practices which we justify as being “mitzvot”? Sometimes we do things for the sake of our children or family, sometimes we do things in order to increase comraderie with the non-religious at work, sometimes it’s because we think it’s important to be an enriched and “modern” person.
But how much scrutiny do we use to examine those actions?
Ezra Goldschmiedt
By definition, addressing this lema'aseh will offend people, because, as you mentioned, they're doing the "right thing".
Something this reminded me of:
http://vbm-torah.org/archive/develop/12develop.htm
How much of our Centrism indeed derives from dialectical tension, and how much from tepid indifference? Is our commitment to talmud Torah truly as deep as that of the Right, but only modified in practice by the need to pursue other values? Do our students devote as much time and effort to talmud Torah, minus only that needed to acquire culture or build a state? Comparisons aside, let us deal with specific educational issues: What has all the time wasted on television, the inordinate vacations, a system of religious public schools in Israel which shuts down at one or two in the afternoon, to do with culture or Zionism?
- Ezra
> --
> -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
> Groups "iChabura" group.
> To post to this group, send email to cha...@googlegroups.com
> Any questions, email iChabur...@gmail.com
> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
> chabura+u...@googlegroups.com
> For more options, visit this group at
> http://groups.google.com/group/chabura?hl=en
>
> ---
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "iChabura" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to chabura+u...@googlegroups.com.
> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.