Monthly Archives: October 2009

The Pursuit of Happiness

Posted on October 30, 2009 | Leave a comment

The Declaration of Independence acknowledged that mankind is endowed with a number of “unalienable rights,” among them “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” While the first two rights are generally understood in both general and specific forms – government cannot capriciously take another person’s life or encroach on his liberty – it is the third that has proved most vexing to define, categorize, quantify and achieve.  Note, as many have, that there is no guaranteed right to happiness; rather the right is defined as the pursuit of happiness – each person in his/her own way.  And therein lies the hoary problem: if it is a pursuit, how do we know where to find it? In what direction do we turn in order to commence our pursuit of happiness, and at what point do we say that we have found it?

A traditional Torah definition – happiness is the state of satisfaction of a being fulfilling the purpose for which it was created – is both provocative and accurate, but also requires additional explication.  Fortunately, modern man quantifies, analyzes, measures and concludes from an inordinate amount of hard date – even in the realm of happiness – that leaves us capable of finding appropriate guidance.  Thus, for the last 45 years, almost a third of Americans have consistently defined themselves as “very happy,” and despite great fluctuations during this time in income, social trends, and national stability (1972-30%; 1982-31%; 1993-32%; and 2004-31%).  It is remarkably consistent.

These are the findings of a recent book by Syracuse University economics professor Arthur C. Brooks, entitled “Gross National Happiness.” Of course, the most critically important data delineate exactly what each person should want to know – what makes happy people happy? In what realms should we seek to find happiness, and what aspects of life should be enhanced? His conclusions are illuminating, at first glance somewhat surprising, and, upon reflection, most comforting to the Torah Jew.

For example, political conservatives have always polled significantly higher than political liberals on the “very happy” chart – averaging between 10-15% points higher, with the two groups only intersecting in 1974 and 1985.  Equal percentages of secular liberals say they are “very happy” and “not too happy” (22%), whereas religious conservatives are ten times more likely to say they are “very happy” than “not too happy” (50%-5%).  These statistics transcend ethnic groups and income levels.  Religious liberals say they are as happy as secular conservatives (33%).

There are a number of reasons for this, all instructive.  Conservatives generally value the role of the individual in society, and place much more emphasis on individual initiative and personal responsibility.  Liberals tend to focus on the collective.  Conservatives, thus, usually donate more money to charity than do liberals, volunteer more, and even donate more blood.  Liberals generally support government solutions to social problems (health

coverage reform, anyone?), and therefore see their primary role as inducing government to act on behalf of the less fortunate.  What is relevant here is not which group is more politically successful or logical, but that it is much easier to feel successful when one can rely on his own actions than when it is necessary to rely on the actions of everyone else, especially since the acts of the collective (even successful ones) do not necessarily reflect any individual accomplishment.

Furthermore, liberals are generally discontented with the state of society, and see injustice, victimization, and discrimination everywhere.  They are forever, like the mythical Sisyphus, pushing the boulder up the hill and watching it roll down again, and are therefore less likely to feel happy than conservatives who wish to “conserve” the status quo, for better or for worse.

Even more to the point, and most reflective of America’s divisions today, conservatives are twice as likely as liberals to attend weekly religious services, and liberals are twice as likely as conservatives to never attend religious services.  And conservatives are also much more likely to be married (2/3) than liberals (only 1/3), and more likely to have children and to have larger families than do liberals.  (Children, oddly, decrease short-term happiness but increase long-term happiness.) Married conservatives are three times more likely to say they are “very happy” than are single liberals.  Married people generally are six times more likely to say they are “very happy” (they had better!) than unmarried people.  Almost twice as many religious people say they are “very happy” when compared with secular people (43%-23%).  (Interestingly, agnostics are gloomier people than atheists.) Why ?

Religious people are more likely to be part of a nurturing community (social integration is a key determinant of happiness) and people who live in religious communities tend also to be more financially successful – because those communities reinforce a culture of hard work and prosperity.  Religious people also have an innate purpose in life that affords meaning even to the most mundane aspects of life.  It is understandable then that – to take the two extremes – 52% of married, religious, conservative people with children describe themselves as “very happy,” whereas only 14% of secular, single liberals without children describe themselves in that way.  That validates, to an extent, Tolstoy’s observation at the beginning of “Anna Karenina” that “all happy families resemble each other; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

In another subset, people who donate money to charity are 43% more likely than non-givers to say they are “very happy,” and volunteers are 42% more likely to be “very happy” than people who never volunteer.

All these numbers are exhaustively and comprehensively crunched in this engaging book – you can literally look it up – and all to tell us what we already know (!).

The keys to happiness are:

Faith: “Serve Hashem with joy, come before His presence with song” (Tehillim 100:2) and “be glad of heart, all who seek Hashem” (Tehillim 105:3).

Marriage:“It is not good for man to dwell alone, I will make a helper for him” (Breisheet 2:18).

Work: “When you eat the labor of your own hands, you are happy, and it is good for you” (Tehillim 128:2).

To be sure, there are plenty of unhappy conservatives, unhappy religious people, unhappy marrieds, happy liberals, happy singles and happy seculars – so none of this affects the life of any individual person who still must make his/her own choices.  Abraham Lincoln said that “most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” And, of course, life throws us its curves every now and then that necessitate adjustments, and cause temporary variations in our happiness levels..  But the overall message for us is one that is worth summarizing and internalizing: How does one pursue happiness ? Get married, start a family, stay married, go to shul, do mitzvot, give tzedaka, do acts of chesed, work hard and be a friend to others.

And realize that these are Hashem’s blessings that He bestows according to His will.

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Posted in 1, Contemporary Life, Current Events, Machshava/Jewish Thought

The Changing World

Posted on October 25, 2009 | Leave a comment

The Great Flood is re-visited annually in the Torah reading, and it is often helpful to return to basics and ask a simple question: why did all of mankind (except Noah and family) have to die? G-d promises the “end of all flesh” because of their wickedness, corruption and violence, but why? If a parent has five children, and four misbehave persistently and grievously, we don’t take the four out back and shoot them, and rebuild through the fifth!  So why didn’t G-d talk to that generation, negotiate with them, dialogue with them – in our parlance, and try to solve the world’s problems without violence – instead of drowning away all His disappointments, so to speak?  The answer reveals as much about our world as it does about theirs.

The story’s hero, of course, is the righteous Noah, but who are the villains? Everybody else? Eventually, yes, but the Torah focuses on two groups that led everyone down the primrose path to destruction. One was called the “Bane Healthy” – literally, the sons of G-d or the sons of the powerful, and they were influenced by the “Nefilim” – literally, the fallen ones, and together the devastated the world. But who were these two groups, and from where did the fallen ones fall?

Finally, G-d ultimately concluded that He must destroy them, because “I have reconsidered having made them.” But how does G-d reconsider anything? What happened that G-d, so to speak, did not anticipate?

There were two major changes that occurred after the flood that explain the “reconsideration” – and both for the identical reason. G-d created man as a being with free will, and with the scales of free choice evenly balanced. Adam stumbled, to be sure, but then man was placed in an environment where he could indulge his soul and pursue spiritual delights for centuries on end. He could sow once and have enough food to last forty years; he was living for 700-800-900 years in perfect health (without fear that politicians – income re-distributionists – would take away his Medicare advantage or otherwise bankrupt Social Security). Every need was taken care of – man had every possible opportunity to nurture the divine image within him – the tzelem elokim.

But it was too much – man had too much luxury and leisure, temptation was too great, and G-d’s moral strictures were perceived as both elective and ephemeral. It did not have to be like that – Noah was proof of that. But after the flood, the power of the instinctual forces were greatly diminished: the land was never again as fertile, and man would have to work, and work, hard, to earn a living; the change of seasons – cold and heat, summer and winter – were all challenges that man had to overcome in order to survive – and survive he would but for dramatically reduced life spans – from the high hundreds to the low hundreds, and then, for most, to less than 100 years. Longevity and leisure were inducements to sin. Nature itself changed – but man could not have survived the turbulence that accompanied the dramatic change of nature – effectively, a “new” creation – so it was a divine act of kindness that G-d took mankind at once in the flood. The global environment posed too difficult an obstacle for man to overcome – except for Noah, and a system that is adhered too by only one person cannot long endure.

And there was another great stumbling block – the Nefilim. Who were these fallen ones? Perhaps the following is plausible: there are, of course, credible accounts of what is called pre-historic man (man pre-Adam), which should not pose any problem to Torah Jews. The Ramban indicates that the unique creation of Adam was that he was a nefesh chaya, infused with a soul, with the divine image, that rendered him an ish acher, a different type of “man, in implied contrast to other beings that possessed a similar form to his – but were not created in G-d’s image. (Thus Chava could eat from the Tree of Knowledge, and give her husband to eat as well, Rashi says, for “fear that she would die and leave Adam to marry someone else.” But who else – the shidduch pool was very small ? And the answer would be one of these human-like creatures that looked the same, but was not endowed with a soul, with a tzelem elokim, and lacked any moral sensibility at all.

These were the Nefilim, “fallen ones” because they had never risen to Adam’s level – but they successfully corrupted the “Bnei Elohim,” the children of G-d, i.e., the descendants of Adam, and for the most obvious reason: a society cannot endure if it has different rules for different people, if the law doesn’t apply equally, if one group (Adam’s descendants) lives with moral restraint and another (the Nefilim) with immoral abandon.

G-d “reconsidered” the ground rules of creation, in the sense that the global environment and  man’s social environment were hopelessly corrupted. Man’s “free choice” was mostly incapable of living in luxury and making virtuous choices, and it was untenable, in a sense, to ask beings with free choice and consequences for those choices to live in harmony with beings without free choice and no consequences for those choices. No one likes double standards – and a society that is founded on it cannot long sustain itself.

That is what Roman Polanski has just learned, to his utter surprise, and to the chagrin of the other inhabitants of his amoral Hollywood universe – civilized society does have rules – but that is what Jews live with constantly. And it makes life unpleasant.

What is the Goldstone Report? Rather than admit that Jews have a right to defend themselves, the world would rather completely transform the rules of war – essentially arguing that an attacked party cannot respond if civilians might be harmed (a most novel, unprecedented and bizarre interpretation – and one that no nation has any intention of ever applying elsewhere but to Israel. How obscene is it that Russia, that killed thousand of civilians in Chechnya, and Sudan, that has killed millions of civilians in Darfur, sit in judgment of Israel, and with a straight face, and without a hint of irony or shame. Mind-boggling.

It is hard to live in such a world – hard to maintain any aspirations for moral goodness in such a world. If Israel is to be criticized anyway even though it tried to avoid any civilian casualties, why bother making the effort? Do what all other nations do. It is hard to justify the continued existence of such a world. But Noah was spared, and in a sense, so are we, in generation after generation, century after century, in society after society across the globe, so we can continue to point out – often to the remnants of the amoral Nefilim who surround us – what is right and what is wrong, what is moral and what is immoral, what is the word of G-d and what is the falsification of the word of G-d.

That remains our mission, in this irrevocably hostile world, as Isaiah prophesied, to be “a witness to the nations and a commander to their regimes,” so that eventually they will join us to bring glory to our Creator.

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Posted in Chumash, Contemporary Life, Current Events, Israel

Premature Congratulation

Posted on October 9, 2009 | 3 Comments

At almost every Jewish wedding I have attended (40-50 annually), immediately after the first dance, a chorus, often led by the (occasionally off-key) newlywed husband, serenades the new wife with a rousing rendition of Eishet Chayil, the paean to the Jewish woman, wife and mother found in Proverbs, Chapter 31. And I usually think to myself: “Really ? ‘A woman of valor’ ? Already ? Shouldn’t the husband at least wait until she cooks a meal, or performs some other wifely function, or at least he gets to know her a little better – before pronouncing her in front of hundreds of people an “eishet chayil” ? It seems just a tad premature, an exercise in wishful thinking.

Well, perhaps not. President Obama was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace for his work on behalf of…his diplomatic initiative in…for bringing peace to… I am not quite sure. It is quite a mystery. Certainly, he has made some nice speeches, and has articulated a vision – albeit unrealistic, even slightly preposterous – of world disarmament, universal peace, and friendship among all nations (he is a little light on the freedom and democracy talk), but shouldn’t a prize carry the expectation of some accomplishment in the field in question ? Doesn’t the baseball MVP actually have to play the game ?

Usually, one would not bestow a prestigious art award on someone who has a fine canvas and a variety of paints but has not yet painted anything, nor would we declare a child who has just learned aleph-bet a “Gaon.” It is also appropriate – and healthier – to wait until bananas actually turn yellow before consuming them. This must be different.

Most other Peace awardees have actually achieved something in the area of peace and diplomacy, rather than merely spoken about the subject. Contrast Obama with the only two other American presidents to win the Peace Prize while still in office: Theodore Roosevelt (1906, for negotiating the end to the Russo-Japanese War of 1905) and Woodrow Wilson (1919, for his Fourteen Points, and his creation of the League of Nations at the Versailles Peace Conference at the conclusion of World War I. President Obama take note: Congress wasn’t as impressed, and refused to ratify America’s participation in the League).

Say what you will, but those were accomplishments. Ditto most of the other honorees, even though some had a debatable connection to “peace” (Al Gore, in 2006, for sounding a shrill, unending alarm on global warming ?). Even Jimmy Carter (2002), who was associated with a host of disreputable causes, at least did something. Is there an anticipatory award, a motivational award ? None that I am aware of.

Certainly, the Nobel Peace Prize has made some dubious choices. The trio of Rabin, Peres and Arafat (!) won the 1994 award, just in time for Arafat to escalate his terror war against Israel that lasts until today. But at least they had an impressive signing ceremony. This ? I must be missing something.

Some of it is anti-Bush (as in Cater and Gore), some of it is reflexive European satisfaction at Obama’s constant apologizing for America’s perceived sins, some of it might be the hope that Obama follows through on his rhetoric, and some of it might be a preemptive strike to induce Obama not to send more troops to Afghanistan, not to attack Iran’s nuclear weapons program, and to abandon Iraq prematurely. Or perhaps, with the world at war in so many places, there were no other choices that were meaningful – like there were none from 1939-1943, and so no award was given then. Unlike now. But a new standard has been set: maybe next year Ahmadinejad will win the Nobel Peace Prize for not using his nuclear weapons anywhere. The bar has been set very low.

The real question is: where can Obama go from here ? He might be peaking too soon. Now might be the time for his diehard supporters to seek a repeal of the 22nd Amendment that currently limits a president to only two terms and therefore was clearly racist in intent (it preceded the civil rights movement by more than ten years.). Many feel he is the Messiah – he himself jokes about it – so his only promotion is to the deity. Of course, he can win the NBA Most Valuable Player Award this year, because he talks such a good game. His failure to join a team is a technicality. The world loves him, far more than the American people.

Fortunately, the Nobel people have the capacity to honor him for years into the future. Extrapolating from today’s award, it is clear that Obama should win the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature (he has written two fine books – about himself, but fine books); the 2011 Nobel Prize in Medicine (for his achievements in the field of health care, whether or not his reforms pass); the 2012 Nobel Prize for Science for successfully shifting the alarm from “global warming” to “climate change” (which I have actually experienced in my Succa from the beginning of the holiday until today); and, of course, the 2013 Nobel Prize in Economics for his most novel theories: health care for all while reducing costs, jobs for all while reducing the deficit, spending money that one does not have as a sign of compassion, and – the most classic – demonstrating how a government takeover of the economy brought prosperity to America and the world.

And a permanent, annual award for bringing hope and change to mankind. Congratulations !

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Posted in Contemporary Life, Current Events

Olympian Failure

Posted on October 8, 2009 | 1 Comment

I was stunned – STUNNED – when Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympics was rejected apparently with prejudice and contempt – in the first round of voting, no less. And all this in utter disregard of the fact that President and Mrs. Obama had flown all the way to Copenhagen to make this personal appeal.

My assumption was that the choice of Chicago was already a done deal (which was fine with me) and that Obama only went to bask in the glow of this great “victory” for his new, internationalist foreign policy. I assumed that, Chicago style, the money under the table had already exchanged hands and that the votes had been counted. Why else risk the prestige of the American president ?

Now, originally I did not think that such a trip was becoming the American president, notwithstanding that the heads of government of Brazil, Spain and Japan did appear. And that was the point – the United States is not those these middling countries, and its president is not just another leader, primus inter pares (first among many). He is the leader of the free world, the world’s most powerful nation, and the leader who is expected to set the tone and direction of international affairs. So to travel there and make a speech – about himself, mainly – and then to lose ignominiously in the first round was a stinging rebuke to Obama personally and to the United States. And even if he went to satisfy a debt to his Chicago political cronies who stood to make a mini-fortune on these games, the defeat reinforces one unsettling notion about the stagecraft (and statecraft) of this White House: it is amateurish.

Granting that Obama took office with the least experience of any modern president, it is still the responsibility of the White House staff to put the president in positions that enhance his personal – and our national – prestige, rather than dissipate it. I may not care for Obama’s policies, but when the American President can be so easily trifled with – dismissed, as if he were the Prime Minister of, say, Spain – then the United States is hurt. And that is what is happening across the globe. Obama packs no punches, carries no weight, and has to be chided even by… France (!) for a lack of toughness.

Certainly, Netanyahu was able to reject Obama’s demand for a settlement freeze by just saying “no” (as advised in this space several months ago) without any consequences, and to his credit. That is good for Israel. What is bad for Israel – and the free world – is when Obama’s efforts are also summarily rejected by Iran, North Korea, Russia and the list goes on. There is a lack of gravitas, and experience, that might turn out to be frightening. Nations toy with him; he fires a volley of words at them, and they respond – occasionally – with pleasing words to him, that buys time but does not change behavior. That is more than naiveté; that is amateur hour in prime time.

Witness as well this week’s White House visit of dozens of doctors in support of Obama’s health coverage proposals. It is fine for him to rally support – but to dress them all in white coats, as if they were coming straight from their offices ? And for the White House to provide white coats to those who didn’t bring them ? Such a display – hokey beyond description – is a childish and heavy-handed attempt at a photo op and unworthy of an American president.

Every president uses photo ops to reinforce his image or policy goals. But do it with class, with dignity, and with more than five seconds’ of thought. Think Mike Deaver, Dick Morris or Karl Rove, and – like them or not – they knew how to stage-manage a presidency. Amateur hour can have grave consequences, far beyond the joy of watching pole-vaulters and marathon runners alongside Lake Michigan.

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Posted in Contemporary Life, Current Events, Israel