Jewish education
The Sin I’m Committing Every Day
As you may know, I didn’t grow up with either a formal or informal Jewish education. I didn’t go to Hebrew school or celebrate the High Holidays. Until I was a teenager, I thought that Snow White ate the forbidden fruit. I am largely self-taught – a living version of “Everything I Wanted to Know About Jewish Living I Learned after Age 18.” And I am still constantly learning, evolving and growing.
This year, on Yom Kippur, I learned that:
- I am fine without caffeine until about 3 pm, and then I start to lose my mind.
- I am inclined to replace the three meals I skipped with ten meals worth of noodle pudding, bagels and ice cream.
- I am guilty of a sin that I never realized was one, until I read the prayer book closely: the sin of clever cynicism.
What does it mean to be cynical? First of all, it’s not the same as skepticism. Where skeptics are open to having their thinking changed with new and compelling evidence, cynics aren’t. Cynics are distrusting or disparaging of others’ motives; they are contemptuous or pessimistic. The clever part? Thinking they’re being funny about it – especially if most people around them are cynical too. (Tweet this!)
How many of you have seen the famous New Yorker magazine cartoon of a businessman on the phone with the caption: “No, Thursday’s out. How about never—is never good for you?” It’s clever. It’s cynical. And it’s the kind of language and attitude that now permeates far too many of our conversations, whether we’re talking about our community-based organizations (“ ‘They’ know how to find me, especially if I haven’t made my annual pledge yet”), to our colleagues (“Looks like no good deed goes unpunished around here”), family (“I’d agree with you but then we’d both be wrong.”) or politics (too many examples to name!).
I’m cleverly cynical far too often to pretend that the prayer book was written just for other people. I also know that I am not alone in making snarky remarks that demonstrate a mistrust of others’ motives, and then wait for the nods and smiles of my peers that make me feel like what I said was smart and socially acceptable. The sad part is that it IS socially acceptable to be cleverly cynical. (Tweet this!) And whether you are cleverly cynical yourself or just tolerating it by suffering in silence, you’re in it with me.
I don’t know if I can change the clever cynicism of the political landscape or even the organizations that I consult with. But I can change my own outlook. Here are three things I am committed to doing:
- Be more compassionate. When I operate under the assumption that people are doing the best they can with what they have, I cut people more slack, and feel empathetic about their challenges. Lord knows, that’s what I would want people to do for me.
- Be more “pronoid.” Paranoia is when we believe that people are out to harm us, whereas pronoia is when we believe that people are conspiring to make good things happen for us. (Tweet this!) If I have to make something up, I’m choosing that perspective!
- Call people on their clever cynicism – gently but directly. When I hear a remark, I’ll ask, “What did you mean by that?” and see if I can help coach someone to get to the heart of their message AND to put a little more heart into their message.
Will it work? The clever cynic in me would surely have SOME quip to make about it. But the kinder, gentler, less cynical me would just smile and say, “I hope so. I have faith.”
To Your Success without the Tsuris,
Deb
p.s. Despite a late start, I am clearly now an “ambassador” for Jewish living, learning and life – the same kind of ambassador you want your staff and volunteers to be for your organization! Want to learn more about how to do that? Join us for our upcoming webinar “How to Be an Ambassador for Your Organization” on Thursday October 8th at 1 pm Eastern – and bring everyone on your team to learn with us!
A Life Lesson Learned Over Dessert in Israel
Shalom from Israel!
True confession: the last time I was in Israel, I was with my old boyfriend. Considering that I’ve been with my husband Michael for 18 years, it’s been a long time since I’ve been back “home”.
Of course, when I came to Israel with an old beau, I never anticipated that the next time I’d be here would be with a (different) husband and my teenage twins. And considering the inspiring and moving sites and experiences we’re having on this trip – from camel rides and rafting in the Jordan River to Havdalah at the Western Wall and a walk through Yad Vashem’s Garden of the Righteous — I never could have anticipated I’d learn the biggest life lesson at the bottom of a dessert dish.
Now, it wasn’t just any dessert dish. It was a dish of crème brulee that my son Jacob was eating at Tel Aviv’s Nalaga’at BlackOut, where diners eat their meals, served by blind waitstaff, in total darkness. The experience was startling, humbling and like nothing any of us had ever experienced. Some of us (ok, me) resorted to eating with our hands when utensils proved too tricky without a stitch of light. And by the time dessert came, we had been so taxed by the lack of visual context that we had stopped talking in order to concentrate so that we wouldn’t be wearing our dinners.
And then, Jacob broke the silence: “I’m so sad about this dessert!” he said. “Don’t you like it?” I asked him, to which he replied, “I love it. It’s the best dessert I’ve ever had. But since I can’t see it, I don’t know when it will be over!”
“Jacob,” I said, “you have just summed up one of life’s great lessons and challenges: how to truly enjoy what you have because you have no idea when it will end.”
As we thanked our blind waitress for her excellent service, we thanked God for the gift of our sight, and felt truly thankful for this incredible family trip to Israel. And while it’s the first for the four of us, I hope it isn’t our last – but no matter what, we are truly enjoying what we have because we have no idea what the future will bring to any of us.
Shalom from Israel.
Is Your Halo Hollow?
For the past two years, if you were looking for me on weekday mornings between 8 and 9 am, you would have found me at my local CrossFit – that workout regimen that combines Olympic gymnastic and weightlifting moves and high-intensity aerobic training with weeping, grunting and collapsing. This was going to be the habit that upgraded my physique! This was going to be the new activity that changed my life for the better!
Guess what? It didn’t work – and not for the reasons you might think. It didn’t work because I misplaced my halo.
For two years, I believed that if I exercised the way that professional athletes do, I could also eat the way professional athletes do. 50 pull-ups? 100 squats? 200 sit-ups? Surely that’s a recipe for carte blanche dining, right? As it turned out, it wasn’t. I had fallen prey to a behavioral halo effect bias that was hurting me both physically (100 squats!) and emotionally (feeling stuck at the same weight).
The “halo effect” is defined as the tendency for a person’s positive or negative traits to “spill over” from one personality area to another in others’ perceptions of them. My halo effect was behavioral – I was expecting the benefits of one overwhelming positive action (intensive exercise) to spill over into another area of my life (my eating habits). I thought that if I behaved beautifully in the gym, I could misbehave at the table. So maybe I could have gotten away with it a little bit, but I couldn’t get away with it nearly as much as I told myself. And as much as I tried to right-size my portions, I couldn’t shake that “halo” feeling that I shouldn’t have to work out so hard to still eat so little.
I am not alone. Have you ever worked for a manager who believed that her intelligence and talent gave her the right to explode at her direct reports? Behavioral halo effect. Do you know a major donor who thinks that the size of his gift permits him to boss other volunteers (as well as professionals) around? Behavioral halo effect.
And how about you? Do you:
- Treat your members and customers with incredible patience at work…and then come home and blow up at your kid for leaving his shoes in the hall?
- Give your undivided personal attention to your boss but keep one eye on your cell phone when a direct report wants to talk with you?
- Attend every board meeting but cancel your supervision meetings?
- Make sure your babysitter or nanny never wants for anything, while brushing aside your spouse’s needs?
- Take care of everyone else while ignoring your own health and happiness?
If you answered yes to any of these, your halo is hollow. You’re allowing one set of positive behaviors to cast an artificial glow on others that clearly don’t deserve a spotlight. How do you fix it? Stop granting yourself permission and excuses to behave carelessly, and start giving yourself credit for the fact that you clearly have what it takes to act responsibly, considerately, and like a mensch. If you can do it somewhere, sometimes, and with some people, you can do it (almost) everywhere, every time, and with most people. Especially with and for yourself.
So how did I drop the halo and its blinding effects? I quit exercising and eating like a linebacker and started working out like someone who needed to 1) have better balance and 2) be careful about what she ate. I no longer allowed one overwhelmingly positive action to grant me permission for excess or carelessness. By dropping the halo, I raised the bar for my behavior and dropped the excuses — along with almost 25 pounds — along the way!
The Pain of Participation
My husband Michael sits on the executive committee of our kids’ Jewish day school. An alum of the school himself, he takes his board work seriously, and is proudly following in the footsteps of his parents (his dad was board president and his mom was president of the Parents Association). And like so many of us involved in mission-driven work, he has come home from his board meetings frustrated at times — with a process, a decision, a comment, etc.
When I see his annoyance, I often think about a comment I heard from Reconstructionist Rabbi David Teutsch, one of the foremost Jewish communal thinkers in America, who currently leads the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College’s Center for Jewish Ethics. When discussing the interplay of Jewish values and organizational decision making, he commented that “the people who make the decisions should also feel the pain of those decisions.”
I have to imagine that he meant pain both literally and figuratively — but I do know that many of us in volunteer work — paid or volunteer — feel that pain, that frustration, that disappointment often enough for us to wonder if this is worth the tsuris.
While I don’t have the answers, I do have an evocative question for you to ask yourself, shared with me by master coach Steve Mitten:
Do you want to serve where it’s easy — or where you’re needed?
What did that bring up for you? What answers? What feelings? What considerations? Sit with your thoughts for a while. Ask yourself again on a different kind of day. Ask your professional or lay counterpart. Have a discussion.
On my last day of coaching school at Coach U., my esteemed faculty team warned us that coaches are NOT to coach their family members without their permission. I tested that theory out soon after graduation, and found, of course, that they were right on the money.
So the next time I see Michael come home from a board meeting feeling that way, I think I’ll just hear him out, and maybe let him know that I have a blog entry he might want to check out…
Deborah
www.myjewishcoach.com
