על חטא שחטאנו Al cheit she chatanu l’fanecha—for the sin we have sinned… for our failings… for the ways we have missed the mark…
The Hebrew language speaks about sin in terms of targets and slippages. To sin, להחטיא lehachti, is literally to “miss the mark.”
I’ve never tried to string a bow, loose an arrow, and hit a target, but judging from how much strength, precision, and patience it seems to require, I can only assume I would have done terribly in The Hunger Games. Sometimes, as the long and hungry minutes of Yom Kippur slowly tick away, I picture myself awkwardly raising an arrow to the taut bow. I’m already straining and my form is all wrong. And then, like a whisper in my ear, my own doubt distracts me—and the arrow falls lamely to the ground two inches in front of me. Nowhere near that bulls-eye. I failed.
Sometimes, even when we hit the target, but off somewhere in the outer edges, we also think to ourselves, “I failed.” We want that perfect shot. We want to succeed. And, somehow, success means only one thing. There’s one red bulls-eye, and our arrow simply must reach it with speed and precision.
None of us are strangers to this pressure to succeed—this pressure to excel at hitting that coveted bulls-eye. And the pressure seems to begin earlier and earlier these days—apparently, my wife and I are supposed to tour preschools this fall to ensure our 16-month-old son a spot in “the twos class.” We compete with our neighbors and our classmates for dwindling spaces in prestigious graduate school programs, or for research and travel grants. We put increasing pressure on ourselves to make more money, to earn more accolades.
And it seems that our cultural model of success is failing us miserably.
In her books The Price of Privilege and Teach Your Children Well, psychologist and educator Madeline Levine demonstrates how our cultural obsession with success hurts us. In her work with middle- and upper-class adolescents, Levine discovered that pressure to conform to one, narrow model of “success” has contributed to a range of emotional, physiological, and behavioral problems among young people, including “stress, exhaustion, depression, anxiety, poor coping skills, an unhealthy reliance on others for support and direction, and a weak sense of self.” Levine is not alone Writers and researchers in education and adolescent psychology voice the worry that, in our manic scramble to “succeed,” we are failing at creating a culture of self-aware, self-confident individuals who can adapt to change and who, perhaps more importantly, have developed strong character traits and values. In our well-intentioned race to “the top,” we are neglecting to nourish a broad range of human emotional, psychological, and character needs. We are feeding ourselves on material success—on iPhone fives and on just one more minor and on another A for the GPA—but what are we missing? Levine tells of one affluent young girl, well on her way to admission to an ivy-league college, who turns over her arm to show the word she has carved into her own skin: “Empty.”[1]
“Empty” is a charge often railed against an entire generation—the generation and the demographic depicted in Lena Dunham’s HBO series Girls, the tale of a twenty-something named Hannah whose parents have cut her off financially and who struggles, as she says in one episode, “trying to become the person that I am.” Many critics argue that Hannah wants a “success” that has no substance—she simply wants to be successful. One Tablet magazine writer quips, “What neither character nor creator seem to understand is that success, defined on those terms, is impossible. If success is the goal, and if no other depths of feeling or breadths of interest are anywhere in evidence, what hope do these girls have other than making a spectacle of their lives?”
Don’t get me wrong—I like the show just as much as I know some of you do. I’ve talked to several of you about the strange experience of watching Girls—both the pain and the delight in seeing a struggle that many can relate to. Is it merely a show about self-indulgent, spoiled youngsters with an entitlement problem? Or is it a sign and a symptom of a broader cultural ailment? Levine argues that such a skewed vision of success is practically a cultural epidemic. She writes, “Many kids have become proficient at image management”—young people know how to appear successful. But, she continues, “[A] deeper examination of these children shows that their external success is superficial and even meaningless to them.”
Somewhere along the line, we have become caught up in a notion of success that leaves too many of us feeling empty. This “success” has gripped us tightly—so tightly that we can hardly breathe.
I have been thinking about success and failure a lot lately, as I watch my young son develop in ways that seem to me miraculous. Suddenly, it seems, he can throw a ball! For weeks, I had watched him try, and for the first time I really thought about how complex it must be—not just the aiming part, but knowing precisely when to let go of the ball. I watched him try and “fail.” I let him get frustrated. And then one day he held on to the ball much longer than usual, refusing, this time, to let it slip behind him. He threw the ball! Obvi, we all celebrated with a dance and some hugs and maybe a high five.
What am I teaching my son about “success” as he sets goals, misses the mark, and eventually reaches a target? What in our Jewish tradition can help guide me as a parent in teaching a more meaningful and realistic and emotionally healthy version of “success”? What in our Jewish tradition can guide each of us to a new kind of target?
The word מצליח—succeeds—appears many times in the Torah. Sometimes it implies that there is only one outcome that “counts” as success—hitting that bulls-eye. Often, the verb is associated with God: God is the one, the only one, who can truly be called accomplished and reliable. From the prophet Isaiah: “So is the word that issues from My mouth: it does not come back to Me unfulfilled”—literally empty, ריקם—“but performs what I purpose, achieves”—הצליח—“what I sent it to do.” Never a misstep, never a word spoken in vain, never a promise un-kept, never a goal un-reached. Certainly such “success” seems divine!
What about us humans? I think the verse in Isaiah points to an important factor in success, which is desire. When God says that all of God’s words “perform what I purpose,” the verb for “purpose” is חפצתי—what I desired. Every self-help book on success tells you: to succeed, you have to know what you want.
Today, on Yom Kippur, on our holiest of days—the day on which we acknowledge our missteps, our missed targets—what do we want… besides a sandwich right about now?
Many of us think we do know our goals for success: we can visualize ourselves in that career, or living in that beautiful house. But let’s make sure that what we desire is realistic enough, flexible enough, broad enough, ethical enough, emotionally and spiritually fulfilling enough—to really count for success.
From a Jewish perspective, some of the things that make us successful as people are not items to be checked off on a list—achieved once and displayed like so many trophies. “Honor thy father and mother? Check!” The Mishnah tells us that there are some obligations—some values we carry as Jews—that we never “check off the list.” There are some values we must fulfill again and again and again. Our rabbis adapted this list of values and inscribed it in our prayerbooks so that we might remind ourselves daily: “These are things that have no limit […]: honoring one’s father and mother, engaging in deeds of compassion, arriving early for study, morning and evening, welcoming guests, visiting the sick, providing for the wedding couple, accompanying the dead for burial, being devoted in prayer, and making peace among people. And the study of Torah encompasses them all.”
These verses kept coming to mind as I read Paul Tough’s book, How Children Succeed. Tough urges us to measure success not only by material success, but by emotional health, creativity, and empathy. He challenges what is known as “the cognitive hypothesis,” which he defines as “the belief, rarely expressed aloud but commonly held nonetheless, that success today depends primarily on cognitive skills—the kind of intelligence that gets measured on IQ tests, including the abilities to recognize letters and words, to calculate, to detect patterns—and that the best way to develop these skills is to practice them as much as possible, beginning as early as possible.” The cognitive hypothesis contributes to the preschool-rat-race and to parents’ spiraling fears about their child’s scores on a whole battery of tests that require her to regurgitate bits of information. But, Tough argues, what really contributes to success is not whether we instill in our child piles upon piles of discrete information, but rather, “whether we are able to help her develop a very different set of qualities, a list that includes persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit, and self-confidence.”
To tend to those things that are limitless—to take seriously an obligation to those items on the Rabbis’ list—requires emotional generosity and a great deal of empathy. It requires redefining success to include not only material wealth or professional accolades but how much we have integrated ourselves into our communities, how much we tend to learning for learning’s sake, how much we cultivate spiritual exploration, and how much we give to those in need. Success is measured by how well we tend to that which is limitless: our character.
And, during our 25-hour Yom Kippur fast, we remind ourselves of another important lesson for success: failure.
It’s something many of us fear. It’s something we even dread. I recall the many times when, as an instructor in NYU’s Writing the Essay, I received emails and phone calls from frantic parents about their child’s grade. Many of them were worried not about a literal failure—all of my students passed the class. They were worried about a B+. Trust me, I’m an overachiever, and my own definition of personal success is often, frankly, unreasonable. But I know, too, that I need days like today: I need Yom Kippur. I need it not to set the bar even higher, not to convince myself that all I’ve done over the past year is miss the mark again and again and again. I need Yom Kippur to remind me that missing the mark can help me to be a better person. I need Yom Kippur to help me recalibrate my notions of failure and success.
What matters for success—so says Paul Tough and Madeline Levine and positive psychology and educational experts and our Sages, the Rabbis, too—what matters for success is not so much how much information we can stuff into our heads. It is not so much how well we did on our SATs. It is, rather, how much grit and determination and passion and drive we bring to all our endeavors. It is our ability to envision not just hitting the bulls-eye, but the ways we might miss… and what we might do when that happens. It is developing our character and our values through habits, through daily and weekly and yearly practices that remind us that we are whole persons—brains and hearts and hands and souls.
Our target is not a small one, but an ethos. Our target—our definition of success—is not a bulls-eye. It is a way of being and acting in the world. This is what we desire.
The prophets remind us that what God wants of us is not that we “check off” items on a list. Not that we rack up accolades in just one area of human existence. We can succeed by imitating the God who declares, “For I the Eternal act with lovingkindness, justice, and righteousness in the world, for it is these I desire.”
חסד משפט וצדקה—Lovingkindness, justice, and righteousness. These are not achieved in isolation. These are not achieved with a quick tweet. They are achieved through a daily attention, in community, to a broad range of human needs—intellectual, material, emotional, recreational, financial, spiritual. Levine puts it this way: “While we all hope our children”—and, we might add, ourselves— “will do well in school, we hope with even greater fervor that they will do well in life. Our job is to help them to know and appreciate themselves deeply; to find work that is exciting and satisfying, friends and spouses who are loving and loyal; and to hold a deep belief that they have something meaningful to contribute to society.”
When our son was born, Rachel and I thought about the values we wanted to pass on to him, and we gave him a name that would serve—both for him someday, and for ourselves, too—as a reminder of those goals, those values. Ilan.
An ilan is a tree. A tree that drinks deep and reaches to the sky. A tree that can offer shade. A tree that must, if it hopes to survive the winds of the world, remain flexible. We read in the Mishnah:
Rabbi Elazar ben Azariyah […] used to say, anyone whose wisdom exceeds his deeds, to what may he be compared? To a tree—an ilan—whose branches are many and its roots few—the wind comes and uproots it and turns it on its face […]. But anyone whose deeds exceed his wisdom, to what may he be compared? To a tree whose branches are few and whose roots are many—that even should all the winds in the world come and blow on it, they will not move it from its place […].
Our success is measured not by what we know, or how much we know, or how many pieces of paper we have to prove that we know it. Our success is measured in our deeds. In deeds that increase our love of learning. In deeds that increase our empathy. In deeds that nourish our roots and that enable us to spread out our branches, sheltering others in our shade.
This Yom Kippur, may we each find the potential to be that tree, that person of whom the Psalmist writes: “[T]he Torah of the Eternal is his desire, and on that Torah he meditates day and night. וְהָיָה כְּעֵץ שָׁתוּל עַל פַּלְגֵי מָיִם אֲשֶׁר פִּרְיוֹ יִתֵּן בְּעִתּוֹ וְעָלֵהוּ לֹא יִבּוֹל וְכֹל אֲשֶׁר יַעֲשֶׂה יַצְלִיחַ He shall be like a tree planted beside streams of water, which gives its fruit in it season, and its leaves never fade, and all that it does succeeds.”
[1] Levine, Madeline. The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids. New York: Harper Collins, 2006.
[2] Leibovitz, Liel. “The Unbearable Lightness of Girls.” Tablet. April 6, 2012.
[3] Levine, Madeline. Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success. New York: Harper Collins, 2012.
[4] Isaiah 55:11.
[5] Daily prayerbook, adapted from Mishnah Peah 1:1.
[6] Tough, Paul. How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Jeremiah 9:23.
[9] Levine, Teach Your Children Well.>br>[10] Mishnah Avot 3:17.
[11] Psalm 1:3.
1 comment:
So beautifully written Nikki. You're the best... Come to Rochester! Love, Aunt Margot
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