Showing posts with label Thinking fast and slow. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Thinking fast and slow. Show all posts

Friday, 11 April 2025

Thinking of doing something wrong?

Akavya ben Mahalalel (Avot 3:1) gives us three things to think about if we seek to avoid transgressing Jewish law and breaching the norms of Jewish morality:

דַּע מֵאַֽיִן בָּֽאתָ, וּלְאָן אַתָּה הוֹלֵךְ, וְלִפְנֵי מִי אַתָּה עָתִיד לִתֵּן דִּין וְחֶשְׁבּוֹן. מֵאַֽיִן בָּֽאתָ: מִטִּפָּה סְרוּחָה. וּלְאָן אַתָּה הוֹלֵךְ: לִמְקוֹם עָפָר רִמָּה וְתוֹלֵעָה. וְלִפְנֵי מִי אַתָּה עָתִיד לִתֵּן דִּין וְחֶשְׁבּוֹן: לִפְנֵי מֶֽלֶךְ מַלְכֵי הַמְּלָכִים הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא

Know from where you came, where you are going, and before whom you are destined to give an account of yourself. From where you came—from a putrid drop; where you are going—to a place of dust, maggots and worms; and before whom you are destined to give a judgement and accounting—before the supreme King of Kings, the Holy One, blessed be He.

Human decision-making processes have been a subject of extensive study in recent times. The late Nobel Economics laureate Daniel Kahneman took this topic from the academic sphere to the popular arena in his best-selling book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. One of the most impressive things about his book is not his discussion of the way we make decisions but the vast array of research data and results that he cites, a body of learning that testifies to the near-obsessive nature of our desire to understand why we choose to do one thing over another.

Kahneman’s conclusion can be summarized as follows. Since our lives are shaped by a virtually uninterrupted sequence of decisions as to what to do or not do (choosing to nothing is also a decision), we can only navigate our day by shifting the vast majority of our decisions to a sort of autopilot, leaving just a small number of decisions to be made on the basis of conscious thought. For example, our daily routine for getting up and dressed in the morning requires consciousness but not a great degree of conscious thought (“thinking fast”), while our deciding whether to upgrade our cell phones may consume a considerable amount of time and brain-space (“thinking slow”).

The speed at which we make a decision has a direct effect on how we understand our relationship with God, the Torah and our fellow humans, but that direct effect is ambivalent. Our sages have long taught us that our kavanah, the intention and thoughts that precede the fulfilment of a mitzvah, is important: the more we understand and appreciate the consequences of what we do and our reason for doing it, the more laudable and worthy of reward are our deeds. Against that, the value of a deed is in the doing of it. Rabbi Chaim Volozhiner (Nefesh HaChaim) presses this point: an action done without thought remains an action, while a thought without an action has no substance to it.  And Rabbi Eliezer Berkovitz speaks up for actions that require no thought: is this not how the obedient soldier functions best—when each order (and a mitzvah is an order) is met with immediate execution, not careful deliberation on the part of the soldier instructed to carry it out?

In truth, Jewish philosophy places a value both on the deed and on the thought, since human existence is comprised of them both. But some commentators do show a preference for one over the other. Thus Rabbi Asher Weiss (Rav Asher Weiss on Avos) writes the following:

“Anybody with any sense should consider his ways and plan his path in advance. Before he does anything he should ask himself, “From where have you come? Where are you going to? Based on your experience in the past, what benefit will you gain from the act that you are about to do? Is it correct and worthwhile, or perhaps will the loss outweigh the gain? Could silence perhaps be a better course than speaking?”

In an ideal world, this would be the ideal approach to making a decision. But the reality often poses challenges that the ideal finds difficult to handle. One is that, for most decisions we make in our daily lives and that demand careful thought, it can be hard to see how where we have come from as being a criterion we can helpfully apply. And one of the factors that most commonly makes us stop in our tracks and think carefully is the absence of relevant past experiences that might guide us—for if we had their benefit our decision might not detain us long. Likewise, it is in those situations where we are not about to choose between right and wrong, between gain and detriment, that we find it most difficult to reach a decision at all.

Let us go back to the opening of Akavya ben Mahalalel’s mishnah, before the three things to the reason for the teaching itself:

הִסְתַּכֵּל בִּשְׁלֹשָׁה דְבָרִים, וְאֵין אַתָּה בָא לִידֵי עֲבֵרָה

Reflect upon three things and you will not come into the grip of transgression. 

Within the context of seeking to avoid sin, the advice of the mishnah makes sense. If you are the person who is contemplating whether to sin or not, you may gain inner strength and self-discipline from asking yourself: who am I? Am I entitled to do this, and what will the consequences be—both in the here and now and for my long-term emotional and spiritual future?

The efficacy of this advice however depends on a number of variables. One is our ability to recognize which decisions require deep and careful thought and which do not. We all have God-given instincts and impulses, and the decision whether to review and assess them at all itself requires serious consideration.  Secondly, we have to be totally honest with ourselves. Akavya ben Mahalalel is concerned with situations in which we may decide to commit a transgression. This already suggests that we are, as probably the vast majority of humans are, at least prepared to contemplate breaking the rules. For many people the decision they are thinking about is not whether to sin or not, but whether and, if so, how they can justify the sin they would like to commit.

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Monday, 28 June 2021

Pinchas and Moshe: Thinking, Fast and Slow

Imagine the scenario. Right there, in the middle of the Israelite camp, one of the most prominent members of the establishment is locked in a passionate, uncontrollable embrace with a foreign princess. Shocked, horrified but unable to avert their gaze, the Israelites look on. Around them in the camp a plague breaks out. Rooted to the spot, they cannot move. Suddenly a young man springs into action. He grabs a spear and, with one firm thrust, skewers the pair of lovers. They instantly die and the plague ceases. This is the story of Pinchas (Phineas). It is also a tale of Pirkei Avot.

Moshe (Moses) is at this time the undisputed leader of the desert tribe. Why does he not act? We know that Moshe does not shrink from committing necessary act of violence, as we see from his killing of the Egyptian who was beating an Israelite slave (Shemot 2:11-12), and there is no reason to believe that, with his unsurpassed Torah knowledge, he had less idea than Pinchas as to what to do.

While the narrative of the killing of the Egyptian is sparse, it reveals a great deal. At Avot 2:13 Rabbi Shimon ben Netanel teaches that the “good path” to which a person should keep is one where he looks towards the outcome of his actions. Before killing the Egyptian, Moshe is already calculating the consequence of his act, looking this way and that before striking the fatal blow. Moshe exhibits this same trait when, in his encounter with God on Mount Sinai (Shemot 3, 4), he is unwilling to accept his mission to redeem his people without first working through a sequence of “what-if”s.

Pinchas is a very different character. He acts spontaneously. No-one else steps forward to kill the lovers and stop the plague—so he does. As Hillel teaches (Avot 2:6), where there is no-one else to take the initiative, whoever can do so must rise to the occasion. This principle is also seen in the decision of Zipporah to circumcise her son Gershom, spilling blood in order to save her husband Moshe’s life (Shemot 4:24-26), as well as in the aggadic and midrashic first steps into the Sea of Reeds taken by Nachshon ben Aminadav (Sotah 37a, Bemidbar Rabbah 13:7).

We cannot say that Moshe’s approach is wrong while that of Pinchas is right. This is because we are not dealing with mitzvot—commandments that usually have clearly delimited parameters. What we are talking about here are middot, ways of behaving, and their application is far less clearly defined. The performance of mitzvot ideally requires thought, understanding and an intention to fulfil God’s will. Middot, in contrast, are generally performed most efficiently when a person can train himself to perform them without any specific intention or forethought.

Although it is not a commentary on Avot, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, sheds much light on how we practise our middot. Some, like judging other people according to their merits (Avot 1:6), can only be done by thinking slowly, inhibiting one’s instinct to make a superficial snap judgment (as in Avot 1:1), and weighing up the evidence. Moshe, as a seasoned judge, might thus well have paused to consider not only the religious and political consequences of killing the high-status lovers but also whether there might have been any extenuating circumstances. Pinchas, in contrast, may have intuited what needed to be done. As a student of Moshe and his grandfather Aharon, his awareness of Jewish values would have been ingrained from youth, as was his understanding of God’s wishes (Avot 4:25). This being so, the instinctive reaction of Pinchas to the crisis before him is quite understandable.