Return to the Folly of Wisdom - April Fool's 2012

            Good afternoon, and welcome to my seventh annual observance of April Fool’s Day. I had the idea for this observance some years ago while feeling foolish, and it seemed like the foolish thing to do would be to celebrate that feeling. The paradoxes and tensions that make us feel foolish seem to be built into human life, so I think it can be simultaneously liberating and frustrating to take some time to honor them. Similarly, you may find this speech liberating and frustrating—that tends to be the result of any effort to shed light on confusion; seeing the fog better is a bittersweet improvement. Also I might lie and contradict myself a little.

            The speech, from this point, is 11 minutes long. My longest one yet, so I thank you for your patience.

            The Book of Proverbs is found in the final third of the Jewish Bible, and is considered one of the primary books of ancient Jewish wisdom. As a book on wisdom, it has much to say about fools, including this gem: “As a dog returns to its vomit, so a fool repeats his folly.” (26:11) Lovely image, right? The metaphor illustrates how a fool doesn’t learn from their mistakes, and so persists in doing the same harmful activities over and over, despite the experience of harm. I begin my speech today with this verse because I intend to reveal myself equally foolish as the dog—my speech today is on the exact same topic as the one in 2007, and so I call it “Return to the Folly of Wisdom.”

            As a warning, this speech covers a lot of ground, and definitely leaves a lot to be said. I am in the process of ditching the word “spirit” as a rallying point, and seeing to what extent I can organize my teaching around the word “wisdom.” I’m also really early in this process. So consider this speech somewhat of a survey of tensions in “wisdom,” with a focus on the question of how someone might go about teaching wisdom.

            When I spoke on this topic five years ago, I was concerned with defining wisdom so that I could then find it. I now understand how that particular effort was doomed by assumptions I was making about the nature of wisdom—I believed that wisdom was tied to truth, and I believed that truth was monolithic. All one had to do was grip some fundamental, unchanging truth about reality, and all wisdom would follow from that truth. The Book of Proverbs endorses this approach, repeatedly informing us that there is a beginning to wisdom, and it is fear of the Lord. (1:7, 9:10) Without this initial, true reckoning with God, all attempts at wisdom will fail.

            I no longer hold this view, because I’ve lost my faith in monolithic truth. I don’t think wisdom must come from an absolute knowledge of ultimate reality, because, to me, both absolute knowledge and ultimate reality are ultimately elusive. All I get to have, as a human on earth, is personal and shared knowledge gleaned from life and lives. Wisdom is constructed from this ever-shifting, always fragmented body of knowledge.

            So what is wisdom? I can’t give a full definition, but I can point out two aspects of wisdom that I’ve noticed since the last time I spoke on this topic:

1)      In general, I would define wisdom as “advice that leads to success in life.” As a philosopher, I want to add an extra layer to this definition by also defining wisdom as “existential observations through which we understand the nature of life and of success.” To be wise means not just knowing how to get the job done, but also knowing which jobs are worth doing. This double definition of wisdom is clear when reading Ecclesiastes, another piece of biblical wisdom literature. While the advice in Proverbs is mostly practical, the speaker in Ecclesiastes mixes practical advice with sweeping statements about absurdity, time, death, and meaning. Someone who would be wise must be sensitive to life-as-a-whole, in addition to matters of everyday life.

2)     The currency of wisdom is the proverb, the wise saying. The power of the wise saying is in its broadness and brevity; it’s easy to remember and can be applied to many situations. The weakness of the wise saying, of course, is its broadness and brevity; it fails to acknowledge exceptions and never tells the whole story. This is why wise sayings have to be piled-together in order to become wisdom. “Look before you leap” is wise but incomplete advice, as is “Just do it.” A person wielding both of these proverbs is wiser than the individual with only one. And a third proverb is needed to mediate between these two, probably something like “Know when to hold ‘em; know when to fold ‘em.”

Ok, so far so good. If these two points do anything, they make sure you understand how complicated wisdom is. Wisdom is about achieving success, but it’s also about questioning the meaning of success. Wisdom is composed of bits of wisdom—proverbs— all of which are fragments, and many of which contradict. To throw on one more complication, I’ll point out that one can be wise in work, in money, in love, in family, in health, and in many other realms, or one can be foolish in some, and wise in others. We can see already that the attempt to become wise is foolish because there is simply too much to be wise or foolish about, and in too many ways! In this life, the odds are likely that I’m going to be foolish about a number of things, on a number of levels.

            Ok, ok, I hope you’ll forgive me when I say that all of this was just an introduction to the general idea of wisdom. The real folly comes out in a riddle, which I will express as two questions about wisdom: How is it acquired and how is it transmitted? I hope you can see that these questions are two sides of the same riddle.

            The first question, taken alone, actually has some obvious answers. Most wisdom is acquired through experience. If I had to make a formula out of it, I’d say that obtaining wisdom equals experience plus reflection. This explains why wisdom is most often paired with age—the longer someone has lived, the more chances they’ve had to learn about life, about themselves, and about what works and what doesn’t work. Wisdom isn’t just knowing; it’s ‘knowing better,’ and a person usually is able to know better after many opportunities to make mistakes and learn from them. You can see here why reflection is key; the fool repeats mistakes, while one both is wise and becomes wise through a commitment to learning from experiences.

            Experience appears to be the most powerful teacher of wisdom, and this point exposes how wisdom is never purely intellectual. Like Bob Marley says “Who feels it knows it.” I like to think of wisdom in terms of the Kabbalistic term da’at, which is metaphorically represented not by the head or heart, but by the spine. Wisdom is truth about life that is ingrained in a person, fixed there by hard-won lessons.

            I’ll share two bits of wisdom that I earned the hard way, both in my senior year of college. Now, I’m going to be vague about the stories behind these lessons—they were powerful experiences, but often that also means they were very private.

The first one is “Being smart is different than being good.” If this is an obvious point to you, then way to go—I spent most of my life thinking that my intelligence would keep me from harming myself or others. At the beginning of my senior year, I learned this wasn’t true; I learned just how much I had the ability to hurt other people, despite my book smarts. This was a humbling experience, one that made me more sensitive and self-critical—these two traits, essential to wisdom, are difficult to obtain without difficult experiences.

My other bit of wisdom goes like this: “Embrace your incompleteness.” At the end of senior year, I felt simultaneously triumphant and ridiculous. I had learned so much but was only just beginning to grow and mature as a person. And the only way to continue growing was by being honest with myself and others about all of the information, skills, and maturity that I lacked. To hide those failings meant to protect them; only by exposing them to the light of day could I begin to overcome them. This is a hard piece of wisdom, because the instinct is to hide or ignore our weaknesses, and certainly never to allow others to point them out.

            So, really, it’s easy to say how to become wise—live life, reflect on experiences, and be open to growing and learning.

            The second question is what turns this whole wisdom-venture into a riddle: Can wisdom be transmitted? That is, if one person has a bit of wisdom, how can they successfully give it to another? I’m doubtful that this is possible, and so I have reason to suspect that the would-be teacher of wisdom is actually a great fool.

            For the moment, let’s think of wisdom as simply this internal perspective that enables wise behavior. In terms of how this perspective is acquired, it seems like “experience” “reflection” and “proverbs,” are arranged in a very specific order—experience and reflection produce the perspective, and the perspective can then be expressed as a proverb. Do you see the problem? The proverb comes after the wisdom, and never before. So using a proverb to try to make someone wise is foolish. Any proverb I ever appreciated was one I already knew, or one for which I had the kind of experience that enabled me to appreciate it as soon as I heard it. Any proverb for which I was too young or foolish would bounce right off me, or more likely, disappear into me, waiting until I had enough experiences to activate it. For example, I heard the expression “You get what you give,” for years and years before I had the wisdom to understand it. In this way, it seems like wise sayings are not worth much—the foolish can’t hear them, and the wise know them already.

            The other major reason that teaching wisdom is foolish is that young people are punks. If they don’t know what you’re talking about, they assume that you must not know what you’re talking about. If it doesn’t make sense to them, then it doesn’t make sense at all. Lousy punks. Of course, I am also one of them. I trust my own eyes, my own reasoning, and my own sense of the world. When someone tells me something that negates that, I naturally repulse it.

            The problem is that there seems to be no proper place for skepticism in the traditional model of giving wisdom. According to the book of Proverbs, only a fool would reject a proverb. And yet, even the book of Proverbs has a term—simpleton—to refer to an individual that believes everything they hear. I think there are some wise sayings in the book of Proverbs; two of my favorite are “A soft answer turns away wrath, but a distressing word stirs up anger” (15:1) and “Iron sharpens iron, as one person’s mind sharpens another.” (27:17) Great sayings. Then again, Proverbs tells us “Don’t fail to discipline your child; though you beat him with a rod, he will not die.” (23:13) Interpreted literally, this is a horrifying proverb. But if I am merely a student of wisdom, do I have any right to question the wisdom that’s given to me? After all, what do I know? The Book of Proverbs repeatedly discourages the listener from “appearing wise in one’s own eyes.” (3:7, 26:12) Of course, given this expression, it seems like there should no wisdom literature at all—who would be foolish enough to think they had wisdom to give? Can any wise person have the strong-headed confidence necessary to present themselves as a wise person?

            Ok, this is running long, so I’ll sum up. Wisdom can’t be taught because proverbs are only for those who already understand. Wisdom can’t be taught because the wise student learns to think for themselves, rather than simply accept the authority of others. Wisdom can’t be taught because wisdom is gained through life experiences and personal reflection, rather than lectures and proverbs. Wisdom can’t be taught because anyone who would pose as a wise person exposes their foolish lack of humility. The attempts to teach the wise virtues of humility, listening, and discernment are all undone by the teacher’s lecturing and desire to be taken as authority.  

            This is the folly of teaching wisdom. I hope you’ve all learned something. The best I can recommend, if you find that you simply must offer your wisdom to others, is to expect failure. Expect your words to be unappreciated, at least in the short term. Maybe years down the road, when your listeners have gained their own wisdom, they will appreciate yours. As for myself, I will continue exploring the potential for the concept of wisdom to be a rallying point for virtue and values in a secular sense, and I will return again and again to the work of teaching wisdom. Thank you.

What makes a ceremony Humanist? What makes it un-Humanist?

            This post is intended as an initial survey of possible answers to the above questions.

            What makes a ceremony Humanist is relatively simple—if it affirms the values of Humanism I’ve been invoking for the last three posts (or others from the Humanist Manifesto III), then it’s a Humanist ceremony. Here’s what that might look like: 

• Common elements: strictly naturalistic language, family/communal gathering, invocation of cultural-historical heritage, symbolic activity, the intention to “tell the story” of the life-cycle as it plays out in individual lives (“Everything we do creates a story. Let’s tell the story we want to tell.” – Rabbi Jerris)
• Baby-welcoming: meaningful name-giving, symbolic welcoming ritual, and public profession of shared responsibility and hope
• Coming-of-age: ceremony marking transition into maturity, possibly involving a talk on personal philosophy or the culmination of a meaningful project, with words and gifts relating to maturity given by adults
• Wedding: focus on the couple as individuals and as a unit in larger chain of life; affirmations of promises and shared goals made by the couple;  invitation to all witnesses to lend support; acknowledgement that marriage effected by life and commitment rather than by pronouncement
• Funeral/Memorial Service: framed as part of a process of loss and grief; looks at a person’s full life authentically, and “begins the legacy” of the person through a “celebration of life”; embraces the finality, tragedy, and universality of death

             The more controversial question ends up being “What makes a ceremony un-Humanist?” This question raises the difficult issue of determining the boundaries of Humanism—what’s in, what’s out? Over the course of the weekend training, the discussion of each life-cycle ceremony had its own testing of boundaries:

• General challenges: To what extent can a secular Humanist ceremony borrow language, actions, or objects from its religious counterparts? To what extent should a Humanist celebrant welcome, tolerate, or discourage religious, traditionalist, or nostalgic elements that may compromise their own values as a Humanist? To what extent should a Humanist ceremony explicitly define and endorse Humanism as a philosophy and life-stance?
• Baby-welcoming: Is circumcision rationally or morally defensible? Is there such a thing as a Humanist baptism (or, in general, a Humanist baby-welcoming water ceremony)?
• Coming-of-age: Is it good/right to pressure a child to produce a coming-of-age project? Are coming-of-age rituals little more than indoctrination? 
• Wedding: How feminist must a Humanist wedding be? Can a bride be “given away” at a Humanist wedding? What structures (or traces) of patriarchy can be brought into a Humanist wedding in good conscience?
• Funeral/Memorial Service: Is there a ‘more Humanist’ way to dispose of a body, and how much should environmentalism play a role in considerations?

 **STAY TUNED! Writing concise thoughts on these last five bullets points is going to take awhile.**

Why would Humanists hold a life-cycle ceremony?

            Before I get bogged down in philosophy, I need to acknowledge the glaring, more concrete reason I’m drawn to life-cycle rituals—I was raised in a (Jewish) culture of them. They were the signposts of life as I grew up, experiencing some ceremonies for myself, and witnessing countless others. This is the autobiographical basis of my attachment to ritual.

I begin with this point so as to highlight how an individual’s connections to ritual are often largely culture-driven (aka from nurture), and this is cause for great diversity in secular attitudes towards ritual.  If a Humanist has strong roots in a particular religion and its ceremonies, those early experiences can set that individual’s image of what meaning-making is supposed to look and feel like. And if a person was raised without much attachment to rituals, there’s a great chance they won’t develop a taste for them later in life. So, when it comes to Humanist ritual celebration, some people just will never be that into it. Some people are academic or activism humanists, but not song-and-dance humanists.

            So I won’t say Humanist life-cycle ceremonies are for every Humanist, or every human.

            For myself as a Humanist, I am drawn to life-cycle rituals by a need to mark time, to live intentionally, and to gather with others—and to accomplish these things by use of the symbolic in word, object, and act. Rituals develop our sense of meaning and purpose, our capacity for wonder and reverence for the triumphs and challenges in life. Our life-cycle ceremonies honor our relationships and celebrate our intersubjectivity. And we express these meanings and values by drawing on (and often creating afresh) the rich heritage of human cultures.

*(I’m just borrowing a lot of the language from the Humanist Manifesto III in this whole paragraph, but I think you’ll agree it echoes a number of the Existential/Feminist themes I mentioned in my last post.)

            As a Humanist, I would want to hold a baby welcoming ceremony in order to make explicit and public our joy, hope, and solemn sense of responsibility in welcoming new life and growing a family.

As a Humanist, I would want to hold a coming-of-age ceremony in order to give adolescents an opportunity to be recognized in their transition from childhood to adulthood, to be honored for developing and sharing their own thoughts and values, and to feel supported in finding new roles in the community and society.

As a Humanist, I have held a wedding because as a human in love, I wanted to make explicit and public the commitment, joy, and hope that follow from that love, and to be supported in this endeavor by friends and family. I held a progressive, Humanistic wedding in order to honor the egalitarian values over those of patriarchy which plague human relations.

As a Humanist, I will want a funeral or memorial service because the people I leave behind may need that ritual to help process their loss. And because, as an Existentialist, I believe it is healthy and meaningful for humans to engage with mortality—“It is better to go to the house of mourning… for that is the end of all men (sic), and the living will lay it to heart.” (Ecclesiastes 7:2)

Humanism as a philosophy, Humanism as a life-stance

            Humanism is a philosophy and a life-stance. As a philosophy, it is commonly agreed that Humanism eschews the supernatural, understands human goods as derived from human need, and embraces the human development of knowledge, ethics, community, and meaning-making. As a life-stance, Humanism is the individual’s and the collective’s living expression of the philosophy of Humanism.

            I tried to make the above description as diplomatic and broad as possible, but I also think that Humanism (as philosophy and life-stance) more often is crafted on a much smaller scale, by each individual and group according to their understanding of what it means to engage and pursue ‘the good’ in a naturalistic world. Personally, I tend to conflate Humanism with my take on Existentialism (with a focus on concrete existence, meaning, freedom, responsibility, anxiety, death, relationships, authenticity, social criticism, nothingness, the limits of rationalism) and my take on radical Feminism (with a focus on egalitarianism, social criticism, relationships, experience, authenticity, self-critical analysis, and social justice activism). My Humanism is a commitment to human flourishing insofar as it is pursued through all of the Existential/Feminist themes I listed. No doubt other secular thinkers will mold Humanism in the image of their own constellation of non-supernatural priorities and ideals.

            All well and good so far, but I’ve really only discussed Humanism as a philosophy. Humanism as a life-stance is all about what one does with their Humanist philosophy. A person could pursue Humanism in their career, in their politics and activism, or in their communal-cultural practices. I have mixed feelings about whether a self-proclaimed Humanist necessarily must pursue Humanism in all realms of their life—on the one hand, I don’t want to be the one to set or demand a standard; on the other, I personally find it difficult to see career, politics, activism, community, and culture as non-overlapping realms.

Regardless of how it is implemented, I think it is developing Humanism as a life-stance that is the main goal of the Humanist Community Project at Harvard. Developing Humanism as a life-stance is the best expression of the truth that Humanism is more than just atheism, which itself can only serve as the philosophical frame or foundation for a lifestyle. Humanism, as a progressive philosophy, includes the requirement that it be lived in order to be affirmed. Developing Humanism as a life-stance requires the creation of opportunities for people to actualize their Humanist values—in work, in activism, and in life and community with other Humanists.

Why I spent last weekend training to be a Humanist Celebrant

            This weekend I was fortunate to be part of an exciting and fascinating training on Humanist Celebrancy, facilitated by Rabbi Miriam Jerris of the Society for Humanistic Judaism and hosted by the Humanist Community Project at Harvard. For about three days, Rabbi Jerris talked us through the principles and pitfalls of facilitating the production of Humanist life-cycle rituals, including baby-naming/welcoming, coming-of-age, weddings, and funerals. We also had brief conversations about crafting ceremonies for name changing, sex/gender changing, coming out, and “coming-of-wisdom” (hat-tip to Rev. Q). I found the entire experience electrifying, and hope to write more about my thoughts and hopes following this training. For now, I will just explain why I attended:

            My primary motivation in attending this training was professional. I am hoping that my experience and aptitude as a teacher, workshop-facilitator, and Fabrengen leader means that I could have success officiating at meaningful life-cycle ceremonies, and I was looking to add this training to my credentials. After spending three days with a veteran celebrant like Rabbi Jerris, I do feel this training provided me with a fuller sense of each ceremony's structure and substance, in addition to raising my sensitivity to the philosophical and logistical minefields built into such events.

            I was also driven to attend by my passion for philosophizing about Humanism, rituals, the life-cycle, and general meaning-making. There were plenty of opportunities for that! Foundational philosophical questions dogged every discussion. While these questions were debated on and off all weekend, we never addressed them directly or comprehensively—a necessary frustration for a weekend training. Still, these are the questions that have kept my head spinning from Friday afternoon through this afternoon:

            “What is Humanism?”

“Why would Humanists hold a life-cycle ceremony?” and

“What makes a Humanist ceremony Humanist; what makes it un-Humanist?”

So many issues sprout from these questions, I don’t yet know where to start, and it will certainly require much more writing beyond the space of this blog-post to flesh out my own theory or approach to the subject of Humanist celebrations.

            While my thoughts on these questions remain uncertain and unorganized, my ultimate motivation to attend this training was my love and commitment to the generation and popularization of modern, secular, meaningful life-cycle rituals. Lack or loss of God does not, and in my opinion should not, signal lack or loss of meaning. Perhaps it’s my conflation of Humanism with Existentialism and radical Feminism, but I think all humans deserve (and can benefit from) opportunities for personal and collective meaning-making throughout life.  

And, hopefully, more Humanist celebrants will lead to more secular individuals having those opportunities.

"The Empty Throne" got name-checked on a podcast!

Rabbi Adam Chalom's "Kol Hadash Humanistic Congregation Podcast" is great. You can find it on the itunes store, and search the archives for a podcast title that sounds interesting to you. Rabbi Chalom is an excellent and humorous speaker, a confident and educated voice for Humanistic Judaism. And he referenced this blog on his podcast! Specifically, it's title, and the first post ever, in which I explain the title of the blog. While he doesn't exactly do the title justice (Yes, Rabbi, there should be a throne, and it should be left empty-- the beauty of an aniconic symbol), it's still pretty cool that he mentions the blog.

Listen to the episode in which he references The Empty Throne here.

What will we teach the kids to say?

**This is my entry (not the winner) from Moment Magazine's recent "Elephant in the Room" contest, responding to the question "What does it mean to be Jewish without belief in God?"

           I’ve been Jewish with God, and I’m currently Jewish without God—a fundamental difference, yet still I’m Jewish. When I was Jewish with God, every word, every act, was an opportunity to fulfill my purpose, obeying commandments, studying Torah, or meditating on God. God was One, which made everything else—my personal plans, values, and all aspects of worldliness—two, at most. In my opinion at that time as a Ba’al Teshuvah, Judaism, like all religions, was a theocentric philosophy and lifestyle.

           What does it mean to be Jewish without belief in God? I ask my students this question in my class “Judaism Beyond Belief.” I make the students draw extended metaphors for Judaism, placing God somewhere in the picture. For some, Judaism is a flower, and God the sun—without the sun, it wilts, and blooms no more. For others, Judaism is a car, and God the engine—without the engine, no movement, only idleness and rust. One student, a budding Humanist to be sure, drew Judaism as an onion, with God as a layer—without this layer, many other rich layers remain.

           As a Jew without God, I continue to be dedicated to these other rich layers, although the centrality of God in the religion leads to some awkwardness in my adoption of the tradition. I sing niggunim (no words!) instead of prayers at services. Or I stay up all night studying on Shavuos, and then leave before the sunrise morning minyan. I embrace the radical reading of Passover as a holiday of universal liberation, glossing over the clearly religious nationalist message at the core of the Haggadah text.

           My partner and I are both post-Conservative, atheistic Jews. This Friday night we will be hosting our first Shabbos dinner as a married couple. How will we bless the wine? We are facing the fact that Judaism without God, first and foremost, is whatever we want it to be. Our current plan is to recite the traditional Kiddush (to make our more traditional guests comfortable, and to satisfy the part of ourselves that finds comfort in the tradition) and to recite secular blessings created by Humanist Rabbi Sherwin Wine and Morris Sukenik. In this manner we will stay true to our religious pasts and our present secular values.

           Doubtless, the question of the meaning of Judaism without God will be raised again when we have children. What will we teach the kids to say—the traditional or the secular humanist blessings, or both? What reason will we give for each? What will we have besides nostalgia to offer, if we want our kids to learn Hebrew and sing about God’s creation and covenant? We will teach them that to be Jewish without God means to find beauty and wisdom on the outer edges of a religion that values learning, family, ritual, art, nature, and social justice—all of which we seek to embrace, casting aside its pre-scientific, pre-democratic, pre-feminist roots.