Progress
Bad Decisions, Good Decisions & Indecision
When I was a pure, naive kid, there were behaviors that I used to see as completely forbidden and taboo, and yet, some years later, in college, those same behaviors had become my average weekend fare.
On the flip side, there were other behaviors that I used to see as impossibly adult, mature, and out of my league, and yet, today are part of my everyday routine.
We can make decisions that set us back, confusing what was once clear to us, and we can make another sort of decision that move us forward, clarifying what once confused us.
This XL seeks to elaborate on this essentially intuitive idea in order to provide a sturdier framework for progress and growth than the ones that are peddled to us by the right and the left.
WARNING: what follows are caricatures of the “right” and the “left” in order to help us see their limitations and pursue something truer and more useful.
Let’s start with “the right.” The conservative perspective on the choice between right & wrong is that there is a singular, absolute, and objective right & wrong, and you either subscribe to it or are offsides from it. This is the way most people view religion. Whatever your religion is, you can neatly divide the globe into “believers” of your religious system and “heretics.”
It doesn’t need to be an actual religion, though. Anyone can be a fascist. Even liberals can be “conservative” according to this pejorative view that sees “Truth” as a small island amidst a sea of falsehood.
The liberal perspective on “the left” is ostensibly the opposite. In this worldview, there is no absolute right & wrong. It simply doesn’t exist. There is no independent “Truth” — only the individual subjective “truths” that people choose to believe in thereby making them “true” (for them). And who are you to question anyone else’s truth?
Ironically, the only ones who are unequivocally and objectively wrong are those on the right because they delusionally believe in objective “Truth.”
The perspective of the Torah is best appreciated by contrasting it to these other two ways of seeing the world. The Torah does not see Truth as an exclusive island that only the Jews, or the ultra-orthodox, or even the holiest rabbis in history monopolize. Nor does the Torah see the world as a completely subjective free-for-all in which there is no such thing as Truth.
Instead, the Torah sees Truth as a landscape.
The moral fabric of reality is a multi-dimensional landscape in which every one of the 613 mitzvot is a dimension a soul can travel on. Some people start further ahead on some of these paths due to their nature or nurture, but it doesn’t mean that they don’t have a lifetime of travel ahead of them. No one is perfect, and as long as you’re alive, you can improve.
Some people start further back, but it may not be their fault — on the contrary, they may have more merit for pulling themselves out of a moral pit up to a hilltop that someone else may have been comfortably born on.
Take for example one of the 10 Commandments that seems pretty obvious — “Do Not Murder.”
A pejorative “conservative” would think simply that the world is divided into murderers and non-murderers.
A pejorative “liberal,” on the other hand, might think that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”
The Torah’s view is, in a sense, a combination of both, but in another sense neither of the two.
Let me explain.
Murder in cold blood is a low bar for most humans. But while most people go a lifetime without experiencing a moral dilemma as to whether or not they should murder an innocent person, some people struggle regularly with it.
I once met a man as I left shul in the Upper East Side of New York one Saturday night. He was probably in his 70s, in a wheelchair, and said “Good Shabbos” to me as I walked by. I stopped, and said back to him with a smile, “Shavua tov” (the appropriate post-Shabbat greeting). We started speaking, and he quickly opened up to me that what he’d done over the course of his life…God would never forgive. I naively responded to placate his fears that God forgives all those who sincerely wish to change their ways. He went on to tell me that when his father died when he was 12, he and his mother did not have a way to feed, house or clothe themselves, so he became a courier for the mafia. By the time he was 16, he was a hitman, and eventually had killed more people than he could count.
(Gulp)
As I listened to him, I palpably felt the heavy remorse in his voice. I understood that his conscience had never totally left him, but it was deeply repressed. He told me how eventually he battled with himself to get out of that world of crime, and succeeded in doing so, but was left with deep psychic scars, which he believed that he would never rid himself of.
I was reminded of a seminal essay by Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler, composed during WWII. In it, he describes the very meaningful, incremental moral progress that even the worst criminal can make.
As we’ve developed in recent XLs, free will is actually the free choice a person makes as to who he is. Is he his higher aspirational self-less self or his lower inertial selfish self?
Every moral decision is ultimately a question of identity.
A hitman who may have been fighting an inner battle for months, and finally decides in the heat of the moment to shoot a bystander in the shoulder instead of the head has made a monumentally good decision — not just for the one who is maimed as opposed to dead — but also for himself. He has just made moral progress by identifying if only with that decision with his higher, better self.
Moral progress means that you have moved your moral “line of scrimmage.” You are always fighting a pitched battle at your line of scrimmage no matter where you stand. Whatever shred of moral conscience and clarity you have is pitted against an equal but opposite defensive line of your amoral urges pushing back against you to “take it easy.” They ask you “do you realize what the consequences of this will be for you?” And bully you for being holier than thou — “Who do you think you are?! You’re the same heartless jerk you were yesterday.”
The only thing that breaks the stalemate is your choice as to who you want to be.
Good decisions move the ball down the moral field. You will, most definitely, have a new battle to face with first down, but yesterday’s moral battle will be a little bit easier today thanks to yesterday’s small victory. Small wins on the lifelong road to enlightenment. The mafia man who decided to cut back on the number of people he is whacking on any given Thursday has many more battles to win before he can restart his life as a regular law abiding citizen, but he has objectively made progress along the dimension of “Do Not Murder.”
And guess what? “Law-abiding citizens,” who don’t shoot people in the head, all struggle with some form of social homicide either through public shaming, or slander behind people’s backs. The Talmud considers causing someone embarrassment in public akin to murder, and speaking negatively about another person as well. As long as our hearts are beating, we have defining decisions to make — a lifetime of growth.
But notice how this vision incorporates the objectivity of the “conservative perspective” in terms of there being a clear right direction and clear wrong direction. There is moral progress and there is moral regress. This is not the amorphous moral backwater of 21st century college campuses in which anything goes (as long as you don’t support Israel).
On the other hand, this vision also manages to incorporate the undeniably relevant subjective dimension of different people coming from different backgrounds and having different challenges that is the hallmark of the “liberal perspective.” While a human-run court of law can only judge based on uniform legal codes, and cannot be expected to accurately incorporate criminals’ backgrounds into their judgements, God certainly can, and certainly does. How could He not?
The Torah’s vision liberates us from the narrow visions on both the right and the left.
The freedom we celebrate on Passover is not merely freedom from external forces. More profoundly and perhaps more meaningfully, Passover is the celebration of the human being’s freedom to make choices — even and especially when the only things in our way are within us.
The Jews who left Egypt had to make a choice. Did they have it in them to choose a better life for themselves and their families? Could they walk out that blood-framed door into the unknown?
Starting the journey is binary. You can’t “kind of” leave Egypt. You either leave or you don’t.
But then, there are all the other decisions that follow. This is the process of “the Omer,” counting our progress day by day. Everyday we can make the decision of growing and advancing or resting on our laurels.
The freedom has been given to us, but the choice is ours.