Ta-Nehasi Coates writes on race in America. He’s published an award-winning indictment of the way black men - and unarmed black men in particular - are being killed by members of the police force. At the heart of the book is the tale of his friend, Prince Jones, shot, unarmed, by police in the year 2000, and the Officer faced no criminal charges.
I heard Coates interviewed on the subject earlier in the year.[1] The big thing that’s changed since Jones was killed 18 years ago, he reflected, is the rise of video-cameras in phones. Now everyone has a video camera. Everything gets seen, everything gets recorded. There’s loads of evidence. And you might expect, he reflected, that in this new all-recorded-all-the-time world all these cameras would make a difference. You might expect, he reflected, that people would look at the footage, and see the unarmed victims and that something would change. But, he reflected, you don’t. Despite all the evidence, unarmed black men are still getting shot by police in extra-ordinary numbers. And the officers still, routinely, face no criminal charges.
Or here’s another one. Did you see the article, written by a barrister, advocating banning juries in cases of causing the death of cyclists by reckless driving.[2] The problem, wrote Martin Porter QC, a man - let it be said - with a professional interest in there being lots and lots of jury trials - is that juries in these trials tend not to pay attention to the evidence of the defendant’s reckless driving. They tend, in his words, to be ‘overly sympathetic’ to drivers. ‘There but for the grace of God go I,’ they think, so says Porter. And a high proportion of jurors are drivers - who tend to have empathy for drivers. And jurors who are drivers tend not to have empathy for cyclists. Did I mention that I’m a cyclist?
I’m interested tonight on the impact of cognitive dissonance on our decision making.
Cognitive dissonance is a fancy term for what happens inside our conscious, inside our souls, or our minds, when a new piece of evidence comes in which - if we were to take it seriously - would force us to change already something deeply embedded in our lives.
The thing about cognitive dissonance is that it is so much easier to disregard new evidence than change something already deeply embedded in our lives.
I make no apology for going back to this issue of Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party. Jeremy Corbyn’s deeply embedded thing is that he is a life-long opponent of racism, and a life-long supporter of Palestinian causes. Well that’s fine. But when new evidence comes in that suggests that, despite your life-long opposition to racism, you are behaving like an antisemite you have to make a decision. You might not even be aware of making this decision, but your unconscious is going to be at work. Do you take on board the evidence and change some deeply embedded part of yourself? Or do you disregard the evidence, do you explain away the evidence, and stick with the ‘you’ you already know and inhabit so well.
I’m headed somewhere religious, I promise. Sorry to anyone for whom all of this is already too political, but I need to stay on the front pages so we can understand what we do to the evidence that our soul can’t or won’t accept. If you want to know how evidence that might require us to change gets beaten up, chewed over and spat out when it isn’t to be taken on board, watch Russia, or Trump. There’s no sustained enquiry into whether one thing or another is actually factual, rather our twitter feeds, or our flunkies or our propaganda-agencies and spy-agencies, if we have them, just throw mud. And if cognitive dissonance works this way on a macro-political level, it’s only because it’s working on a micro-intra personal one also.
This is precisely the critique levelled at the Children of Israel in this morning’s Haftarah. If only the people would change their ways, says the prophet, God will heal them, guide them, comfort them. “But vyigr’shu meimav refet v’tit - they throw up mire and mud like a driven sea”[3] It’s almost as if God is trying to explain where the Children of Israel are going wrong and we are responding by saying, we didn’t do, or if we did, they deserved it, or it was only an accident or, or ... vyigr’shu meimav refet v’tit.
In this morning’s Haftarah the Children of Israel go around protesting how pious they are, fasting ever so nicely on Yom Kippur - pretending to know God’s ways, hen l’riv umatzah tatzumu - but you fast with grievance and strife - screams the prophet, fully aware that nothing he says, no matter how true, is changing anything.
I know nothing changes because the Haftarah we read this morning is challenging the Israelites after they return from their exile in Babylonia, and we also have prophetic texts dating from before the exile. And they read precisely the same. Haven’t you realised, prophet after prophet rails, that you are behaving badly. Can’t you see the evidence for you to change your ways?
It’s always been easier to change the way we consider the evidence than change the way we behaved. That was the case before the first Temple was destroyed, or after the Second Temple was built, or after that Temple was destroyed or after this thing and that thing and the other thing. And here we are.
And the gates are closing.
On the first day of Rosh Hashanah I spoke about alterity - recognising difference in others and being firmer in claiming our own difference. A number of you responded warmly, letting me know of a decision you made, one way or the other in the past few days. Thank you - it’s always lovely to hear someone’s listening. And there will be others of you, responding to other things I’ve said, or you’ve read, or reflected on in these past awesome days. But I don’t make the error of over-estimating the impact of any of this on our lives once these gates finally close.
It’s one thing to hear a sermon and agree - even a sermon that does something as shocking as suggest we come to Shul on a Friday night. It’s another thing to actually change. It’s one thing to nod as the evidence comes in, but to surmount the challenge of cognitive dissonance is hard, really hard. Because as soon as we get back out there the quiet moments of introspection get drowned out by the shoutiness of the world - and if we’ve taken a day off work today, we are already a day behind.
On the other hand, at least we know how to behave in the skin we currently inhabit.
My sense is that for most of us, anything we’ve heard, anything we’ve reflected upon, any newly understood truths, any seeds of unformed decisions about our future that have just started to take root, are due to be overwhelmed by the barriers of our embedded patterns of behaviour once the Shofar is sounded and off we go into the world again.
We need to learn ways to handle cognitive dissonance. Perhaps it will help to be prepared. Get ready. Know the challenge that is to come. I hope that will help. Know that you aren’t perfect already - that’s not personal, that’s all of us. We’ve these few more precious moments together before the gates close and it’s an invitation to bed something in; to commit, to gird ourselves as we re-enter the world.
The quiet voices that suggest maybe we don’t have it quite right, just yet, are the important voices. The commitments to the future don’t need to be extravagant, in fact we are probably best advised to tread gently.
If over these last ten days you have thought my pleas to take Judaism more seriously was worthy of attention, don’t let embedded resistance get in the way of doing things differently in this year to come.
If your private reflections have instilled in you a seed of a different way to treat others, to treat the world differently, take this opportunity to bed these commitments in.
Take these last few minutes, before the gates close, to articulate a commitment that has a chance of withstanding the cognitive dissonance and the world out there.
And in so doing may we all be blessed with a year to come of courage, strength, health and happiness,
Gemar Chatimah Tovah
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