Rabbi Jon's Website and Blog

Catching Up in College -- My College Notes Project Continued

I got behind a few weeks on my project to read along in my college notes from of the current date in my first year. Now that the Jewish holy days are over, and despite all the demanding important things out in the world, I'm catching up today.

First to psychology. I don't think I mentioned earlier how excited I was to take a psychology course in college as soon as possible, and possibly to make it my major. I had always thought of myself as someone trying to understand people and to use that to advise them and help people out in their relationships. We only a tiny bit touched on psychology here and there in high school classes. I wanted to take the straight-up intro, "Psych 1" as we knew it (I guess 101 elsewhere), but my schedule didn't fit for that so I went with the course on intro to human development. Boy was it a good and lucky choice.

Where I left off in the class Professor Demick was making the final few notes about gender issues as a critique of psychological theory and research, and I did say I am surprised to see how soon in the course this came up (I remembered it coming a bit farther along) and foundational that could be, and also how much this was in the psychology discourse apparently in the mid-1980s. In the lectures I'm catching up on, we were looking at some major developmental theories on the early/mid-twentieth century. One helpful reading was Karl Popper on "world hypotheses." This really helped me organize my thinking and recollections, and probably to structure how I think about a lot of things. He posited that theories of "everything" tend to be centered on a single "root metaphor" which organizes things and makes other things hard to see, and that there is no objective place to stand to judge between them. It's possible to critique things within a big theory, but really hard to come up with a substitute.

Popper talked about formalism, mechanism, contextualism, and organicism. It's easy to see the behaviorist theories as mechanistic, and theories like Bowlby's as organicist. Contextualism is hard for theories to start with, and then becomes irresistible after a while (this is my talking today), a way of acknowledging both the uniqueness of individuals and of times and places, and of being humble about grand theorizing. Then it's also unsatisfying, because of the relativism problem. I didn't remember but this is where I first heard the idea of being so open-minded that your brains fall out.

Freud's theory is interesting against this partly because it's got elements of a lot of these root metaphors. It's mechanistic, but the mechanisms fight with each other (I wrote in my class notes "conflict in Freud's theory is all over"). Another thing I noticed in my notes is the word "overdetermined." Professor Demick said people who oversimplify Freud and then trash him mistakenly think there is a one-to-one correspondence between a childhood experience or trauma and a symptom in adulthood. It's not that; there are always so many causes, and many of them are accidental or situational. I go back to the caution of "overdetermined" a lot when I am tempted to think I understand everything about someone, or about a social/political dynamic. This is where I first heard that and it stuck.

It "imprinted" -- we touched on Bowlby's and Lorenz's theories, and Professor Demick talked about how they put too much on one mechanism and one relationship (mother-child). 

We got to the idea of "personality disorders", particularly "borderline personality disorder", which would come up again and again and I think turned out to be one of Professor Demick's particular interests. He defined these disorders as a group as between "neurosis" and "psychosis". He talked about research into BPO as stemming from a problem of differentiation and boundaries at some still-researched early phase, and I imagine this is why it's a really hard thing to find good therapy for.

In my notes is an interlude that might possibly be a note from the first lecture or maybe just a call-back, about Heinz Werner and the "orthogenetic principle." Professor Demick was definitely part of the Werner-ian (?) school, and the idea here is that each developmental thing starts in a global phase and then comes its differentiation within in, its finer nuances, and the exceptions that to other theories look sometimes like going backward. He cites Carol Gilligan as saying first we learn rules and we overapply them, then we learn to make exceptions, by experimenting in ways that look like we're not getting the "rule" idea but actually involve practice in when to apply rules categorically and when to take other factors into account. Then Werner says later on when we reach a more advanced overall stage of development, something earlier falls into its proper place. So I guess that means we do a lot of growing in our relationships as teens (hopefully) but we don't completely finish that work until we develop the brain of an adult, and can sort out the earlier habits, memories, notions, principles, commitments. (My words sitting here, not in my notes.)

Then we hopped out of Freud to the next theory, the maturational-developmental theory of Andrew Gesell. This was much more biologically focused and genetic, with an idea that biology sets the trajectory, culture adjusts the pace, and experience creates a certain range of individual differences. But no one can "outmature" the pace of nature. He adopted the idea of "ontology recapitulates phylogeny" (the development of the individual tracks the evolutionary development of the species), which if it didn't sound smooth probably wouldn't make sense (that's me talking today). 

Gesell's theory also accounted for seeming regression, suggesting an "innovation" cycle of trying a new thing and integrating it awkwardly before finally organizing it. Apparently he noticed things that are pendulum-like, such as a child who is shy at 3 and loud six months later and inward again in another six months. Unlike Freud's stormier theory, Gesell thought this is a normal trajectory within a given stage. Apparently there are a lot of critiques here, some because the stage theory is too rigid in terms of ages, and some from evidence that environmental and social effects are higher than Gesell credited.

More interesting to me were the conditioning and learning theories -- classical, operant, and social-learning. I remember (and who would be surprised) being particularly interested in the social learning theory of Bandura. I'm intrigued by something in my notes, which is that the classical conditioning studies (Pavlov's dog etc.) weren't about development at all, but there was an interest at some point in developing theories that didn't depend on getting "inside someone's head" which seemed impossible. A reaction to Freud, I guess, but what would have been going on in the world? Anyway the opening was for a more outside-in and objective approach, and I imagine also this tracks with the growing industrialization of more of the European world.

Looking now at the notes, social learning theory seems like a catch-all that really fuzzed the mechanisms on a global level. But this is the theoretical framework we rely on a ton in education, and parenting, and it has a lot of local application even if it's not unified. Maybe only now in the age of neuroscience do have a better chance at nailing down the magnitudes and mechanisms, but I think we're way early on still. It's still a lot of feeling and judgment, very hard to isolate what are the learning factors in the rich world we all live in. But I know I tried to learn more about that family of theories early on, and I think there's more than what was in my class notes.

This is where I first learned about things like token economies, payoff schedules, aversion therapy and cognitive-behavioral therapy. I feel like I was stuck in my early conceptions of them for a good decade if not way more, and needed when I started to think about being a rabbi-counselor to let go of an overconfidence in these simple methods or mechanisms. I know now that CBT for instance is a really nuanced and sophisticated and hard thing to do well, and how could it be otherwise -- as I said, there are so many factors that are "stimulating" us and eliciting "responses", so getting ourselves to focus on a subset or just one is incredibly hard.

My first paper in the class was handed in on October 25! I guess not the first college paper because I was taking Expository Writing. I think this is the one where I had to stay up all night, and relied at 3 or 4 am on a diluted instant espresso from a packet given me by Marco/Kevin, my Italian next-door neighbor. I hand-wrote two drafts before typing the final one, 4+ single-spaced handwritten drafts. The paper was a report and critique of five studies on when children can differentiate between moral rules and conventional rules (like the rules of kickball). I was so excited to do this topic both because of the Justice class and my interest from Talmud Torah and Earl Schwartz in moral development theory.

I was intrigued to discover studies that show this differentiation all the way back to age three. My TA wasn't blown away by my paper (said I had too much detail and too little conceptual analysis), and it looks like at the end I was grasping for an interesting critique or two. I did say one interesting thing, which was to hypothesize that even when children could differentiate different types of rule-breaking, they might have trouble showing it because their language for talking about it might not have caught up to the intuition.

Wow, that was a lot to reread. I'm going to take a break, and come back to Justice probably tomorrow.

 

Back to College #2: Utilitarianism; Gender and Psychological Theory

Looking at my notes from "Justice" and Psychology today -- it's neat for me to see where the terms consequentialism and utlitarianism first entered my mental landscape. Professor Sandel did a nice job (and I did a good job in my notes) capturing both the simplicity of Bentham's theory and the nuance of Mill's revisions of it, to bring it into conversation with some accepted moral principles ("do unto others"), the emerging liberal framework of rights, and the Aristotelian concept that some goods are more good than others. Interesting that I caught that without knowing much about Aristotle (until later in the course, but probably until much, much later in studies and probably long after my formal studies). In some ways it's a wonder utilitarianism sticks at all, in light of the discussion we had the way my notes reflect it and Professor Sandel's later critique of liberalism generally.

The psych lecture continued the overview of methods and types of theories, and my reading notes were about gender bias in contemporary psychological research. Professor Demick started very early to point out how gender affects conceptions of development, and the particular study we read about to take notes on (Broverman?) was about how when people were asked to rate traits as male or female, and as I guess mature or well-adjusted or not, or something like that, the male-associated traits were more likely to be rated as better-adjusted. This held true largely across ages, or between researchers and students, so it becomes a bias passed down within the field unless pushed back on, as well as a reflection of society generally. I don't remembering this seeming like some kind of radical thing to say back in 1985; Professor Demick presented it critically but rationally as a tool necessary for interpreting observations and studies. I also at some point noticed, maybe when this came up next or maybe right away, that despite my male-ness I myself seemed to track more of the "female" qualities than the average male in the study. I know some friends and I, or maybe just my friend Tova who was also in this class, talked about that in the dorm!

More Daughters of Tzelophechad, Less Pinchas: How to Stand Up Today

This is my D'var Torah from last Shabbat, Saturday, July 23, 2022.

“It’s not a movement if everyone’s just sitting.”

That’s a line from a conversation between then-Professor Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her 15-year-old daughter Jane in the film On the Basis of Sex, which is partly the story of how RBG, zichrona livracha, came to win her first major court case for gender equality. Professor Ginsburg has just come back from teaching her newest law students, after walking through an anti-war demonstration to get into the building. Her own students in class are passionate and impatient, and it throws her for a loop. At home that night, RGB brings up a note with her name that Jane forged so she could skip school and attend a Gloria Steinem rally. They argue about which strategy is necessary for women’s equality -- the legal process or the rallies -- and Jane gets in her zinger: “It’s not a movement if everyone’s just sitting. That’s a support group.”

I think about this argument when I read the story of the five daughters of Tzelophechad in the Torah portion Pinchas. Machlah, Choglah, Milkah, Noah and Tirtzah are sisters who are absolutely the spiritual ancestors of Justice Ginsburg. She a modern icon of equality and the exemplar of a certain approach to change, and the five Torah sisters also icons especially in our age -- but there is a lot of arguing these days against the approach they have in common. So I want to explore how the Torah and the midrash understand the daughters, the B’not Tzelophechad, and to argue why we need more of their approach even though there is truth within Jane Ginsburg’s critique.

The story of B’not Tzelophechad (Numbers 27) is that their father had died in the desert, before the assignment of future land holdings in the Land of Israel to every family. They have no brothers, and according to the law communicated so far, their immediate family will not have any holding of land when the arrive shortly. So the sisters approach Moshe, El’azar the high priest and all the tribal leaders, in front of the whole community.

Vatikrav’na Bnot Tzelophechad -- they “came close.” Which I think we can understand this way: their strategy was to shrink the distance between themselves, and the judges and the men of the community. The best way to read the story in the Torah might be to have in mind the first cases that RGB pressed as a lawyer. Such as the one at the climax of the film, Moritz vs. Commissioner, argued in federal appeals court. There she challenged the constitutionality of a law that denied an unmarried man a tax deduction for the expenses related to care of his mother, even though a woman would have qualified.

So too when the sisters speak, they center not themselves as women but their father. They say avinu, “our father”, three times. Only at the end of their speech do they say give us, t’nu lanu achuza, give us something to hold among our father’s brothers. They mention that their father was not like the other men who had in fact been enemies of Moshe and El’azar’s father Aharon, part of the insurrection against them led by Korach. Those men deserved to be punished by not getting a holding in the land -- but not avinu, our father.

That’s exactly how Attorney Ginsburg started building a set of precedents striking down laws on the basis of sex discrimination: with a series of cases centering men. B’not Tzelophechad, like RBG, did not call into question the whole patriarchical system of property and inheritance. They found a place where the authorities might agree on their own terms to a ruling that benefits women.

And indeed, the five sisters win their case when Moshe takes it to his court of appeals, to God -- and the law is taught that in a case where there is no son then daughters shall inherit. We might say dayenu just at the fact that God seems to respond to this argument from women. That’s suprising all by itself, no? And not only that, but the first words of God’s response put B’not Tzelophechad in the center, and repeat their request as a court order -- naton titen lahem, “give, yes give to them” -- and “their father” isn’t mentioned until last part of that sentence.

But the midrash goes even further in explaining the process of legal response that happens here.

When God hears the sisters’ case, God’s first words to Moshe are: Ken B’not Tzelophechad dovrot. “The daughters are speaking right.” Also ken means “thus”, as in: the daughters of Tzelophechad are speaking the exact words I God have been instruction you Moshe to say already.

In this interpretation, God is saying: Moshe, you have been teaching the people the law of inheritance but you have left a gap. I have told you about it, but you have had a blind spot. Not me, not I the Divine -- but you are not seeing it. Even I haven’t been able to teach you yet how a law about families without sons is necessary. So now here are five real people -- do you see them? Do you get now the situation I’ve been telling you about?

So according to the midrash, God’s law isn’t being changed at all. It’s just being unblocked. Moshe finally is able to teach this part of the law to the people. And this is what makes him realize that it’s time to get to planning better for his retirement and succession. The rest of the chapter is Moshe saying to God: Let’s find a new leader who can lead around these matters better than I have been doing.

It is a compelling case of influencing leadership from the grassroots for social change. Ken B’not Tzelophechad dovrot.They speak ken -- they speak honesty, with integrity, with respect. They say ken to the men in charge -- ken means “yes.” Yes to the basic framework of Torah. The sisters have a better understanding of what God wants than even Moshe does.

That’s famously how RBG did it, particularly at the start of her career. She won more than one case on behalf of men, and got male judges to say that legal equality between the sexes was not new but had been in the Constitution all along.  Justice Ginsburg spoke again and again about what we might call the vatik’rav’na principle, shrinking the distance, and the ken principle, not losing your integrity in the process. And as for what her daughter Jane said in the film, the Torah describes B’not Tzelophechad as va’taamod’na, they stood up. They absolutely did, and this is how they did it.

I hope so far I’ve made a good case for B’not Tzelophechad. But Jane Ginsberg age 15 and plenty of adult critics still have what to say back. Of course a group of male rabbis in the Talmud 1500-plus years ago are going to approve of this soft-spoken, gradual approach from women. And what did B’not Tzelophechad really achieve -- one fix for one specific case. If they had been five sisters with one brother, they would have gotten nothing. If only Miryam had been alive still, maybe she would have spoken more fundamentally about the bias in the whole system. We need an approach based on wider questioning and more pressure and more discomfort.

Well our own Torah reading presents a version of that approach a couple chapters earlier. It’s Pinchas the son of El’azar the high priest, who was faced in real time with a terrible social injustice -- an insurrection against God in the form of a pagan orgy in concert with the people of Moav. People were about to start dying in the conflict, or some say people were already dying. (I would make the case, though this is a whole other talk, that this particular pagan orgy is offensive to the Torah partly because of how degrading idolatry and its rituals were to women.)

Pinchas sees what is happening, the threat to lives and I will say to women. He sees a particular man and woman together and he skewers them through with a sword, killing them -- and the whole thing stops and the dying stops. And the Torah says that God rewards Pinchas and his descendents that they will be the major lineage for the kohanim (priests) from now on.

This is passion. The Torah has God say: Pinchas is passionate for the things I am passionate for. It’s something like what Professor RBG is afraid of according to the film. If a door is opened to violence as a response to social ills, who knows what happens after and who will be its victims down the road, as bystanders or targets. RGB was afraid that people who meet the violence of the current reality with mass protests that are too broad and too agressive, they might stop a plague but also unleash one.

And that’s why the tradition is skeptical about Pinchas, even though the Torah says he is devoted to the right things and he is rewarded. The midrash trends toward a real concern about him. So one interpretation is that Pinchas was allowed only one of these violent acts in his life. And that’s why the Torah labels his reward brit shalom, a covenant of peace. From now on, Pinchas has to include peacemaking in all of his future work and all of his future activism. Otherwise he will be too dangerous an actor, even for God, even against this kind of pagan insurrection that is a clear affront to the Ten Commandments.

(It’s clear to me that the story of B’not Tzelophechad is told the way it is intentionally as a contrast with Pinchas, through wordplay. Pinchas has passion, kin’ah, but B’not Tzelophechad have integrity and honesty, ken. The sisters draw close, vatikravna, in a twist on the root word karav that labels the offerings so associated with priests like Pinchas, the korbanot. Pinchas is unusually for the Torah introduced as not just son, but also grandson. B’not Tzelophechad are given three more generations of lineage than that. Pinchas jumps up -- vayakom -- but B’not Tzelophechad stand and stand together, vata’amod’na.)

In the past, I might have said that the Torah is giving us two models of activism in B’not Tzelophechad and Pinchas, and we need them at different times or they suit different people. A time for passionate and force and absolutism, and a time for up close engagement and gradualism. A time for Gloria Steinem and a time for RBG.

But today I say: Enough with adding more Pinchas. There is too much of it among the bad folks and even the good folks. Our spiritual and political air is choked with aggressive speech, metaphors of force and fight and violence in our speech and writing, zingers far worse than Jane Ginsburg’s to her mother. Not to mention actual violence.

It can feel so good to tell off, to mock and insult. Enough people do that, in direct speech and on social media. They’re on the wrong side but they’re on your side too. It’s more than covered, the aggressive, the Pinchas. It’s not just masculine either. It’s probaby not possible to change all the Pinchas-style behavior once it’s begun.

But we need more people to learn the ways of Bnot Tzelophechad. I don’t mean to be content with only one change. Or to decenter the people who should be at the center. Jane Ginsburg and the other critics are so right about that. But I don’t think the most important thing about Bnot Tzelophechad, or RBG, was the gradualism, the strategy. It’s believing that there is power that comes with ken dovrot, with speaking correctly and out of integrity, with figuring how to communicate what is eternally true and you know it when that’s still new to someone else. There is power in vatikrav’na, to coming toward someone else’s perspective -- it challenges them but not in a threatening way. It challenges in a charged but still inviting way. There is power in believing that the changes that are needed are ken -- they are already here in the Divine image of the world, they are already more eternal and more permanent than anything else, they just haven’t been seen or spoken aloud enough.

These are powerful moves -- they just might not look as forceful from the outside and they sure are not violent. But powerful are B’not Tzelophechad whenever they appear in our world. Enduring change doesn’t come only from force or only from keen strategy. It comes from affecting how people see alternate leaders, the effect of their integrity. Respect for them transforms enough opponents and enough bystanders. It need not transform them all.

People acting like the five sisters might be a support group, and that isn’t a bad thing. But they are not sitting -- they are standing up together. Without them, without us acting like them, there can never be any movement at all.

Tov! Special Purim Episode Is Out!

I haven't posted a Tov! update for a while, but a few new episodes are out the past month and one of them is keyed to Purim which begins tonight. Listen right here or on YouTube (it's just audio), or check out the episode page with the audio and full show notes. Or just subscribe on any of your favorite podcast apps. Simchat Purim, wishing everyone a joyous and meaningful Purim celebration!

 

Integrating America: An Artifact That Represents America

#integratingamerica

Assignment: Choose an artifact that to you represents America, American society, or American culture. Feel free to share an image and/or explanation in the comments here or in your own post.

---------------

When I began co-teaching the course, the artifact I chose was the book and album “Free to Be You and Me.” It’s a 1972 project created by Marlo Thomas. For the younger people here, that’s Rachel’s mother from “Friends”, and this project is one reason why that casting is so amazing in a counter-to-type way (read on).

“Free to Be You and Me” was a series of songs and stories for kids aimed at breaking down gender stereotypes. What a boy and a girl has to be like, want to be when they grow up, etc.

I chose this as my artifact for three reasons.

1. The really interesting take on the ideas of freedom and equality and how they intertwine. Not being limited by preconceived gender roles is presented as freedom; this is the era of the ERA (Equal Rights Amendment)!
2. The interplay between self-expression and banding together. My favorite piece is called “Atalanta”, a princess who enters the footrace with all the male suitors who wants her hand. In the end, it’s tie between Atalanta and Young John, who wants to be her friend, and they spend a day together before going off on their own explorations of the world.
3. The money line in the title song: “There’s a land that I see where the children are free/and I say it ain’t far to that land from where we are.” The vision of freedom, the awareness the land of freedom isn’t completely here yet, but it’s not far and we could get there together.

This last point in particular is what I want to interrogate through the course of this year. That assumption, and whatever knowledge I need to gain and reflect on in order to assess how far it is.