By Joel Grossman, October 5, 2024
Shabbat Shalom
Today is Shabbat Shuvah, the Shabbat of repentance which always falls between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. The name Shabbat shuvah come from the first words of the Haftarah, Shuva Yisrael, turn back, or return, oh Israel.
I want to thank my wife Fran for giving me the idea for this dvar Torah. A couple of weeks ago we were just chatting when she mentioned that while she was driving she heard an interesting show on NPR. During the show some asked what people would be the best kind of HR person to interview candidates for a job opening. The choices were an optimist, a pessimist and a cynic. Without going into too many details, she told me that the worst choice would be the cynic. I was interested in what she was telling me, so I went on the NPR website to look for a program about cynicism. Well I found another one, and it introduced me to Jamil Zaki, a professor of psychology at Stanford, who has just written a book called “Hope for Cynics.” This led me to Youtube, where I found an hour interview with Zaki on another podcast. I was so intrigued that I bought the book.
The central issue in the book is that cynicism is really bad, and must be replaced by trust and hope. He tells us that the opposite of cynicism is trust in others. Who is a cynic? Someone who believes most people shouldn’t be trusted, whatever they say or do, they are just in it for themselves. He says to determine if you are a cynic, ask yourself if you agree with the following 3 statements:
- No one cares much what happens to me
- Most people dislike helping others
- Most people are honest chiefly through fear of getting caught.
Zaki tells us that cynics earn less money and die earlier than other people.
Each of us, at times, is a cynic. But Zaki’s goal is to have us work on ourselves to stop being cynical. He also makes a point about the clear distinction between cynicism and skepticism. It’s absolutely necessary to be skeptical when you are told things that don’t seem right. Scientists must be skeptical and double and triple check their work. But to be skeptical is not to be cynical, it simply is the correct way to perceive what you see and what you are being told. Zaki says: “cynicism is a lack of faith in people, Skepticism is a lack of faith in our assumptions. And skeptics update their beliefs based on new information, allowing them to adjust to a complex world.” By contrast, cynics don’t update their beliefs based on new information. They just are cynical about the new information. Perhaps the most important part of the book, and of Zaki’s various podcasts that I listened to, is to give up cynicism in favor of hope. And the more he spoke about hope, the more Jewish his ideas seemed to me. We are a people of hope. Yesterday, in the haftarah for the second day of Rosh Hashan, we read about Jeremiah comforting the exiled Jews by telling them, yesh tikvah l’acharitech, there is hope for the future, v’shavu banim ligvulam, and the people will return to their land. We endure tragedies, October 7 only the most recent of them, and we sing Hatikvah, the hope.
This past week we started working on ourselves on Rosh Hashono, and we will continue this work throughout the 10 days of Tshuva. We can be cynical and say to ourselves something like “what good are these prayers that we say every year and that don’t change us?” We might say, “ I can’t change the world, I am just one person.” Or we might say “what reason do I have to be hopeful given the current state of the world?”
We are told to wash away our sins, at tashlich throw them int the ocean. I would add, let’s wash away our cynicism and throw it in the ocean. Let’s trust people, and trust ourselves to do the right thing, not every time but often. Hope is powerful.
I know on Yom Kippur we have a very, very long list of sins that we have committed, and for which we seek forgiveness. But I would like to add two more:
- For the sin we have committed by being cynical.
- And, For the sin we have committed by failing to be hopeful,
Now you might ask me, what good is being hopeful. If I just sit around hoping for a new job, a new romance, a new home, that won’t do any good. I certainly agree with you that’s a very good point. And let me answer with two quotes. First, Professor Zaki has a short quote at the beginning of the book by an American writer named Rebecca Solnit. This is what she said about hope:
“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky…it is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency.”
And this is what the author of Psalm 27, which we recite at this time of year says about hope:
Kaveh el Hashem, chazak v’yaametz libecha v’kaveh el Hashem—Hope in God, be strong and have courage, and hope in God.”
Amazingly, these two quotes, written thousands of years apart, are pretty similar. Rebecca Solnit says don’t sit on the couch hoping your lottery ticket is a winner, be inspired by hope to take an ax and break down doors. And the author of Psalm 27 doesn’t just say, hope in God and God will take care of you. No, the author says hope in God and be strong and courageous, which might very well mean take an ax and break down doors.
This Yom Kippur, let’s take that ax and break the doors of apathy, of hopelessness, of thinking that life is bad and will never change, and people are bad and they will never change. Let’s take that ax in our hands this Yom Kippur because life is an emergency. Be strong and be courageous and Hope in God.
Shabbat shalom and shana tova u’mtukah.