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I was in the 6^th grade, in a modern Orthodox Jewish Day school. The Hebrew teacher got very angry at one of the pupils and slapped him in the face – not altogether uncommon back in the early 1960s when “light” corporal punishment was handed out in schools. But the pupil’s reaction was certainly uncommon: he punched the teacher back – in the stomach! And then he followed that with (in Hebrew): “don’t you ever touch me again!” (And the teacher never did.)

It goes without saying that we were all shocked back then by our “colleague’s” response. I’ve thought about it over the years (the only “violence” I ever witnessed in my entire educational experience): how and why did he have the gumption to react like that? My conclusion: he was born and raised in Israel (his family came to the States somewhat recently before that event). Over “there,” no one takes “shit” from anyone else, whether age 12 or 52.

As a dual citizen, born and raised in the U.S., but living most of my life in Israel (with occasional sabbatical years back in the States), I am eminently qualified to compare these two allied countries that have very dissimilar cultures. My purpose here, however, is not an academic exercise in cross-comparative culture, but to note the difficulty that certain cultures have in “understanding” others. This is especially true of America.

First, some facts. It’s banal to note that the U.S. exists on a continent several thousands of miles away from Europe on one side and the Pacific on the other side. But this has had profound consequences on the American mentality. For most of its history that meant little international warfare and political isolationism (George Washington’s Inaugural Address is the prime example, where he warned Americans against getting involved in European politics and wars). That macro approach has filtered down deeply into the micro-level as well. Only 42% of Americans have a passport – up from 32% in 2009 when for the first time they needed one to get into Canada or Mexico. Compare that with another “even-more-distant-over-the-ocean” Anglo country, Australia, with 57%.

I could not find any similar data on Israel regarding passports, but in 2019 (the last pre-Corona year), an astounding 4.3 million Israelis went overseas – almost half the country’s population (and half of them went overseas more than once). Clearly, the percentage of Israeli passport holders is well over 50%. From a macro standpoint, Israel is the mirror image of the U.S., with constant foreign travel. In part, this might also be due to the fact that a majority of Israel’s Jewish population was either born overseas or are children of overseas-born parents.

What does this all mean? First, xenophobia is much higher in the U.S. than in Israel. I would venture a guess that most American “white nationalists” do not hold foreign passports, and thus have not really had (nor do they want) any significant exposure to “others.” Israel has some xenophobic racism, but nowhere near the magnitude found in the U.S.  Second, and more important for the world scene, American foreign policy – when it does decide to enter world politics, especially post-WW2 – tries to mold the rest of the world in its own image. Democracy in Afghanistan? That U.S. debacle is but the latest result of a profound symptom in which even (most) American foreign policymakers see the world through the prism of their country’s culture and creed. It goes without saying, though, that American “exceptionalism” not only holds within it the benefits of a liberal, democratic order, but also the disadvantage of cultural blinders that others do not have the same history, culture, or even aspirations that America has.

This is particularly perplexing for American and Israeli Jewry. On the face of it, one would expect Jews to think and behave about the same everywhere. However, after seventy-plus years of incessant conflict – in a mostly hostile regional neighborhood – Israelis have developed a culture, not only politically but also on the micro-personal level, that is worlds apart from their American (and western European) counterparts. American Jews cannot understand why Israelis are so “belligerent” towards their immediate neighbors, the Palestinians (forgetting that Israel had no problem signing peace treaties with several former enemies). Even on a personal level, the gap is wide. For example, few Israelis residing in America feel comfortable or socialize with native co-religionists for all sorts of cultural-behavioral reasons – and vice versa.

Which brings me back to the school incident. Was the teacher right in slapping the boy? No. Was the boy right in punching our teacher? Again, no. Two noes don’t make a right, of course – which is exactly the point. Jewish history is full of examples where Jews from around the world didn’t get along because of the widely disparate cultures they came from. To take but one egregious example from two centuries ago: upper class Sephardi Jews asked Napoleon not to “emancipate” (i.e., grant wider civil rights to) their poorer Ashkenazi Jewish counterparts.

The best we can hope for, indeed strive for, is greater toleration of the “other” (Jew and non-Jew alike) and even some appreciation of the fact that any culture tends not to be “superior” (or inferior) to most others – just humanly different.

“Everyone thinks of changing the world,
but no one thinks of changing himself.”

— CAL THOMAS

 Although I look much like my mother, and seem to have her healthy genes too, when it comes to personality – especially temperament – I was born on my father’s side of the family: fiery. Alongside many positive traits, the Wilzigs have a temper. So did I. Which leads to my question: can someone change one’s own basic personality and behavior?

Neuroscientific research in the past few decades has come to quite a clear conclusion: we have great brain plasticity i.e., the brain can change in response to external challenges; we can also change our brains by practicing. For instance, the area of the brain connecting the two hemispheres – the corpus callosum – is larger among musicians than the average non-musician. The causation is “practice  corpus callosum,” and not that people born with a larger corpus callosum tend to become musicians.

Does this apply to personality and general behavior as well? Not so much regarding the first, but certainly yes for the second. The kind of people we are seems to be relatively “hard-wired”: introvert vs. extrovert, adventurous vs home-body, etc. However, none of this means that with some effort we can’t “overcome” some personal trait that we (or others around us) find unbecoming or problematic. To put it in “philosophical” terms: just because we do not have complete free will does not mean that we are slaves to our essential being.

However, in such cases, precisely because we are attempting to do something that goes against our innate personality, it takes a lot of work to change a habitual behavioral trait or pattern. And motivation.

At the relatively young age of 57 my father suffered a massive heart attack and passed away half a year later. His sister, my aunt Rosa (a warm, wonderful woman, but another “yeller”) also died relatively early – and my father’s brother Freddy (the biggest yeller of all, but with a big heart) also didn’t live past his early 70s. As I approached my 50s, I began to think about the connection. Type A personalities (intensely temperamental) don’t have the longest lifespans. Could I do anything about this?

This was motivation enough, even if it was somewhat selfish, as the other major problem with a temper is that it makes people living around you very uncomfortable – and the bigger/more frequent the temper, the tenser family (and work) life becomes. I did think about this as well, but being brutally honest (in retrospect), it was self-preservation that constituted the main push to change.

In any case, I figuratively “sat down with myself” and made a conscious effort to control my temper whenever something (in the past, LOTS of things) would get my goat. It took a while. In fact, I found this not too much different than “practicing” other more mundane things in life, like shooting a basketball from the foul line, or improving my writing skills. I tried different approaches, keeping those that worked best for me. After a few years (yes, YEARS), I had succeeded in cutting down my temper outbursts by about 80% – to the extent that one day my son Boaz actually asked my wife Tami: “what happened to Abba? He hardly yells anymore…”

Should I have tried to do this earlier in life? Absolutely. Could I have succeeded earlier? I doubt it. Successful self-change can really come about only after a certain amount of “living life” (some call this “maturity” – but that’s not right because maturity is the outcome and not the driver of change; perhaps “aging” is better).

I didn’t intend (or think about) this but there are ancillary benefits to such change. First, success begets success. If we succeed in changing one problematic aspect of our behavior, it then becomes more likely that we will attempt to change another one as well. That doesn’t mean we will always succeed (I have had no success in stopping my finger-picking habit), but even trying to change can be a salutary enterprise. Second, not only will such change improve us personally, but as noted above it will also benefit our loved ones who have had to “put up” with the problem. And if they are happier, then we become even more satisfied with our personal effort.

I’ll conclude with what really is the hardest part of this whole “project”: admitting to ourselves in the first place that we have a serious personality flaw! Looking in the mirror is not for the weak-hearted (or much fun) but it’s crucial for self-growth. Once we get past that emotional obstacle, the rest of the self-change project is almost easy by comparison. In short, the expression “physician, heal thyself” is intended for all of us to rectify our basest behavior.

“Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born,
and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.”

— JAMES BALDWIN

I was accepted to an experimental program for my freshman year at City College of New York, with our “campus” in the CUNY Graduate Center. We had the very best lecturers, one of whom taught English Composition: FIVE days a week for the entire academic year!

 You probably think that there can’t be a worse college experience than that. I certainly did. In fact, it was quite painful – but “boring” certainly not. Indeed, looking back on this after five decades, it probably was the most important course I took in my whole academic career – not merely for the skills it gave me, but for its life lessons as well.

On the very first day of class, Mr. Gordon C. Lea (a well-tanned Brit) asked us to sit there and write a two-page essay on anything we chose, as long as it contained an argument for or against something. We handed them in before the class was over. By the very next day, he had already marked all thirty essays and handed them back in class, one student after another in alphabetical order. Being a “Wilzig,” I was going to be one of the last to receive mine. As the “returns” went along I began to hear sobbing in the classroom; several students were silently tearing up and others had gone white in the face. With growing apprehension, I waited for mine to be returned. 

I had always known how to write. I liked words, I had a “Germanic” disposition for grammar, and my elementary school and high school made us sweat “book reports.” Moreover, I was chosen to be one of the editors of my high school yearbook…

“Wilzig!” he called out. I went up to Mr. Lea and took my paper without peeking at it until I returned to my seat, although out of the corner of my eye, I could see a lot of red markings. Then I looked directly: the grade was C-! I was shocked. Later I discovered that this was the second-best grade in the class!!

Here was the first life lesson: failure is a relative matter. Relative to one’s expectations (subjective), and also relative to what others have done (objective). Which is more important? As we go through life, most of us tend to focus on the subjective aspect: how did we do compared to others? Where does this leave me on the social (or professional) totem pole? But that’s not the way to go through life, because we can never be the “best” at anything, or (in almost all cases) even close to the best. Yes, it pays to have an external benchmark, but this should be set by what each of us is capable of reaching. In short, success in life has to be based on some inner-directed criterion.

“Most of you came here thinking that you knew how to write. Hopefully, now you understand otherwise. But…” Mr. Lea stopped for dramatic effect, “by the time this course is over, you WILL know how to write – as long as you put in the effort. And I’m going to give you an incentive for that: your final grade will not be an average of all your paper grades throughout the course but rather it will be based on your degree of IMPROVEMENT from now to then.” Hearing this, I didn’t know whether to be sad or happy: sad, because as one of the “top” scorers, I would have less “improvement” to make; happy, because I was closer to an “A” than the others.

That was life lesson number two: in the end, success should be measured more by the process, by the effort, than the final product. Of course, if we finish the “job” with failure, that’s not enough; however, we shouldn’t measure our success only by what we accomplished, but also (primarily?) by how well we did relative to our ability.

As the year went along, almost everyone in class made great strides in improving their writing skills. At the end, we arrived at the final exam – only to have one last surprise waiting for us. The main essay question was this: “In 500 words or less, make an argument to convince me [the teacher] that you should receive the course grade that you think you deserve.”

Life lesson number three: technical skills are useless without accompanying cognitive skills – and even more so, without a clear goal. I am sure that when you read “English Composition” at the start of this essay, you said to yourself: grammar, spelling, punctuation… Of course, those rudimentary skills are the foundation for good writing, but far from enough. On top of that, we need three additional elements: the ability to organize our thoughts into a meaningful whole (“composition”), the ability to think logically and persuasively (“rhetoric”), and the ability to know what you want to achieve i.e., where you want to “go” with what you’re writing (“goal-orientation”). In fact, these should be undertaken in reverse order: First, where am I heading here? Second, how can I organize the argument? Third, what specifically should I argue and how to put it into words?

I argued in my essay that I deserved an “A,“ and that’s what he gave me for the course. I was more pleased by this “A” than any other I received in college precisely because I had to “sweat bullets” to achieve it.

That was the main (fourth) life lesson I “processed” successfully: no pain, no gain…

As a practicing social scientist, I eagerly devour the latest research on religion and…war; and also religion and…peace. Although academics are used to some ambiguity in research results (after all, humans don’t behave predictably like most atoms), on the issue of the relationship between religion and violence the results and “opinions” are all over the place.

After last week’s post on individual religious belief, the time has come to tackle some broader, societal question(s).

First, notice the word “relationship” above. There might well be some connection between religion and violence/war, but that doesn’t in any way “prove” that the first causes the second. As the truism goes: “correlation is not causality.” One can think of a huge number of leaders who use religion as a (false) basis of going to war e.g., Saddam Hussein. The power-hungry will turn to any useful “ideology” to further their own ambitions.

Second, it is also clear that if religion does cause people to go to war (or act violently), it certainly isn’t the only “ism” to do that. In the 20^th century, Marxism (Stalin and Mao) killed far more people than all the religion-based wars put together (admittedly, in Stalin’s case, Marxism was a cover for pure self-aggrandizement; Mao, though, probably believed in Marxism). Not to mention Hitler, whose war-craze was partly based on anti-religion (expunging Judaism and Jews). So even if religion can be said to be an important factor in world history for causing war – and that is correct only from Christianity onwards; in the BCE era, religion per se almost never played a part in international warfare, although it had some influence on civil wars e.g., Jews vs. local idol worshipping Canaanites – it is certainly not the only, or even the major cause.

Having said all that, we do live in an era of intense religious strife – mostly trans-religious i.e., between different religions (Moslem vs Christian) instead of what previously was the dominant paradigm: inter-religious (Catholic vs. Protestant; Christian vs. Jew), although the latter still exists: Sunni vs. Shiite Islam (located exclusively in the Middle East and northern Africa).

With all that, why are so many people in the world still religious? Well, first of all it has to be noted that the vast majority of them are peaceful, so it’s not as if “religious belief” automatically drives people to violence; there is no evidence for that whatsoever. Just as a relatively mere handful of secular extremist ideologues (Marxists, Libertarians, etc.) use violence to further their ideals, so too the same small proportion of religious extremists give religion a bad name.

The answer to religion’s continuing popularity is that it provides several advantages from a societal standpoint. First, it turns out that on average, regular worshippers have an added few years lifespan! Speaking as social scientist, that’s not because God is looking out for them, but rather because of the health benefits (mental and physical) of sociality and communality. Going to synagogue, church, mosque, temple on a regular basis brings people together. If the number one killer of older people is “loneliness” (that’s so great a problem that both Great Britain and Japan have established a Minister for Loneliness!), then clearly regular, communal religious gatherings are going to alleviate that critical problem, whatever the religion or level of belief.

Second, as I discussed in my previous post, another possible factor in increased lifespan is the believer’s reduction of existential angst; we know how much “stress” in general can cause illness and general bodily malfunction. Thus, instead of “rage, rage against the dying of the light” (Dylan Thomas’s immortal verse – pun intended), a true believer can face the eventual prospect of death with greater tranquility.

Third, religion has given humanity most of its moral code – or at least has provided a strong underpinning to buttress Homo Sapiens’ “natural” moral tendencies. It’s one thing to fear the government’s threat of punishment for transgressions, but those police powers cannot be everywhere; for true believers, God is everywhere and sees everything, so that further encourages rightful behavior. Having said that, the latest data clearly show something “peculiar”: the countries with the lowest levels of criminality and violence are the most secular (e.g., Scandinavia); the ones with the highest levels of corruption are the most religious (Middle East and parts of Africa). Of course, that might have nothing to do with religion per se, but rather a function of socio-economic level (that is also negatively correlated with religion – see the next paragraph).

Which brings us to the social downsides of religiosity – at least from a modern standpoint. It can be a stultifying, overly conservative force: maintaining patriarchy, continuing homophobia, undermining personal freedom, and in general leaving the population behind socio-economically. It is not a coincidence that the further one goes from south to north in Europe, the less religious and the wealthier/socially-advanced are the countries. But again, is that because secularism leads to more wealth, or because more wealth (and especially education) leads to less religiosity? Probably more the latter than the former, but there’s no unequivocal evidence either way.

Confusing? That’s precisely the point I started out with: there is no clear, one-way relationship – positive or negative – between religion and positive/negative societal outcomes. Like every other area of life, one factor – as important as it might be – cannot explain or influence the rest of our very complex, social world.

You better believe that!