The Patterning Instict, Religion and the Improvement of our Human Selves

I want to talk about a book I’ve been reading, Jeremy Lent’s The Patterning Instinct

Lent starts with the model we think we know about how human beings evolve. He suggests that most of us think that human development starts with a proto-ape who hits another proto-ape with a bone, resulting in the other fighting back with a stone, then a pointy thing, then a bullet then a missile. And the narrative of human development is I’m going to hit you and if you hit back I’ll hit you harder. And the world out there can feel a bit like that.

But then he says this – we’ve got it backwards. The driving force of human development is not ever-increasing violence, it’s ever-increasing kindness, or rather ever-increasing turning towards community building and co-operation.

And he starts piling on the evidence.

If the goal was to be stronger and tougher, why are we so weak? Through evolution we have lost claws, lost sharp teeth, our skin is soft. In area after area he documents how the human has evolved to work together, in community, in selflessness, not selfishness.

The scientific consensus is that being tougher and harder isn’t how the fittest of us have survived.

We’ve survived through becoming softer and weaker – almost so as to force ourselves, as an entire human race, into relying on other people for our own survival and flourishing.

The book piles on the evidence for this in terms of the evolution of our bones and organs, our brain most particularly – on a neurological level – we are built to look for patterns of interconnectivity.

And I know we live in a world that too often doesn’t feel that way, but it turns out that the story of humanity is the story partnering with one another, using empathy and being communal, rather than selfishly minded.

It’s a big issue, in our fragile world, at this fragile time. I saw one reviewer suggest that Lent’s book could be read as a counter-argument to the conclusion of a similarly expansive narrative of the human race, Noah Yuval Harari’s Sapiens. Harari sees the human as essentially violent. He sees religion as essentially a tool wielded by frauds to wreck that violence. He sees the end of the human race – and this emerges in his second book Homo Deus – as we are overtaken by computer algorithms and, with a nod to no-self Buddist teachings, he’s fine with that.

Lent on the other hand wants to stop us slipping away from who we truly are as social, interconnected, communal minded creatures. There’s work to do pull the tiller towards the direction of this social version of ourselves, it’s urgent work, but it’s work to pull the tiller towards who we truly are. That’s hugely optimistic.

So what does Lent have to say about religion? Of course, if you want to know about how humans beings have come together to form communities – religion is going to be at the heart of that narrative. If you want to know about our greatest communal creations; from the buildings we have built to the music we have composed to the stories we have told – religion is going to be at the heart of that narrative. If you want to tell a story of how one person changed or improved the life of another person, or how one group of people sought to improve the life of other – religion is going to be at the heart of narrative again, and again across time and across the world.

Let me pause a moment and address this canard; sometimes I hear people say that religion is a cause of violence and therefore a bad thing. Let me just try this. Think of the three worst instances of violence in the century now 20 years past – I’ll give you Stalinism, I’ll give you Nazism and I’ll give Maoism, or I don’t know you would want to include genocide in Cambodia or Rwanda or former Yugoslavia – well I would consider religion culpable of zero out of six right there. And if you were to want to suggest that every now and then there was a Pastor who supported Hitler or a Jew who became entranced by Stalinism, I would say this. Let’s put religion’s culpability for violence on one side of a scale, and then put religion’s power as a force for peace on the other. Give me, as the advocate for religion, points for Archbishop Desmond Tutu for his work in the peaceful dismantling of Apartheid, give me points for all the religious among the Righteous Among the Nations who gave their lives and risked their lives for the sake of Jews fleeing Nazi brutality – give me points for Sister Maria Rozak who turned her nunnery into a shelter for dozens of Jewish refugees from the Vilna Ghetto including the great poet and resistance fighter Abba Kovner and future Member of Israel’s Kenesset Haika Grossman.

 Give me points for Martin Luther King, an ordained second-generation Baptist minister, and his good friend, the man who marched on his right hand side at Selma, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel – actually the great uncle of one our members here. Give me points for every act of charity and love and mutual support that has ever emerged from a church, a mosque, a Gurdwara or a Synagogue and I’ll stack any failing of religion on the other end of the scale and, Dr Harari, Prof Dawkings and colleagues, we’ll see how the scales balance out.

The point is this, if we are communally hardwired, as humans, and I believe we are, it’s not, I believe, just a mathematical weighing up that has caused us to be this way. Somewhere, somehow we have trained our subconscious to look beyond our own need. We have been touched by a belief that otherness, beyondness is necessary for our human flourishing. And that’s where religion comes in. Religion is the millennia-old act of believing that there is something to be gained by looking beyond our own personal selfish understanding, and an attempt to fuse that looking out at the beyond ourselves with the looking out of our fellows, other people with whom we share a belief in the way to look beyond. And all the stories we tell of our religions, and all the traditions and songs and the foods and all of that – it’s how we hold ourselves together so we can look beyond.

And I believe, as a person of faith, that somehow, somewhere in all of that, we are met – in our looking beyond, by that which is truly beyond. Somehow, we are touched, or if not ourselves, we’ll share the journey with someone we believe was so touched – even if they are long dead. And that, in that moment of being touched, all our reaching toward community and the beyond is guided towards decency and selflessness, or, as I would say as a religious person, holiness.

That’s why I believe in religion.

But let me give Jeremy Lent his due, and I also want to say something about so-what, about what we should do now.

For Jeremy Lent religion is a spandrel. 

A spandrel is the triangular piece that emerges in architecture when you use arches, or really any kind of circular form embedded in a square form. We’ve got a good few in this very building. For Jeremy Lent the spandrel is something that is capable of looking beautiful and attracting attention, but it’s not really a genuinely important part of the architectural scheme – it’s the bit that is left over because you really wanted an arch. His point is that though religion might seem to be integral to how human beings have come together through thousands of years and integral to how human beings have shown kindness and altruism for thousands of years, religion isn’t really the thing behind all this. Religion, says Jeremy Lent, is the left-over bit from the other stuff. Well I just don’t agree. That is to say, I do agree about the metaphor, I just don't agree with the message. The real issue about a spandrel is that it’s a necessary part of building an arch in a square space. You can’t have one without the other and every architect knows that. Spandrels are the equivalent of a Rubin-vase-that-is-also-two-human-faces. Similarly, religion is an intrinsic part of the human instinct and a necessary complement to our quest for human progress, it isn’t the irrelevant afterthought. And it's unfair and lacking in a much-vaunted claim to desire scientific rigour honesty to suggest otherwise.

That’s some high-level theology. So what do we do about it? Actually, this week’s Torah portion provides helpful insight. Jacob is dying and he has twelves sons he wishes to bless. Lola gave the example of the blessing Jacob give Joseph – about a wild donkey and an archer and she said it wasn’t a blessing that could guide her in her life, and indeed, I think that’s the point. Jacob’s blessing of Joseph wasn’t a blessing for Lola, it was a blessing for Joseph. And for each of his 12 sons Jacob has a different blessing, and a different blessing for his grandson also. We could have had a very short Torah reading today in which the Torah could have said, Jacob wanted to bless his children. He called them all together and said … and then there would have been the thing he would have said to all of them. But that’s not what the Torah records. It records each blessing individually.

I’m reminded of a portion we’ll read later in the year. Eventually, the children of Israel will get out of Egypt and head into the wilderness and receive the instructions to build a Tabernacle in the wilderness. And when the tabernacle is dedicated, a representative from each of the twelve tribes of Israel brings an offering. Each tribe brings;

One silver bowl weighing 130 shekels and one silver basin of 70 shekels, both filled with choice flour with oil mixed in, a gold ladle of 10 shekels, filled with incense; a bull a ram, a lamb in its first year, a goat two oxen, five rams, five he-goats, and five yearling lambs. 

And we get told, in identical language, this list 12 times, for each of the tribes. And the question is asked, why didn’t the Torah just tell us that everyone bought the same thing and do it once and be done.

The Rabbis say it’s to remind us that each individual needs to be honoured in their own right.  Just as Jacob does at the end of his life.

Here’s how to give a blessing; You look into the heart of a person, You look to find that particular part of that person that is utterly unique, never before seen, never after to be seen – it’s to look for what we would call the Tzelem, the image of God infolded into each human – but infolded differently in me than in you or you or you.

And it’s to direct that Tzelem, that unique perfect possibility, on a path of goodness. That’s my job. That’s why I’m so honoured to be a representative of religion and of this religion most especially. A blessing is a direction towards the path of our souls, that part of who we are which knows, somehow that we are here to good, to be kind, to reach towards others. It’s a nudge along the path each of us know we want to tread but area nervous, or blocked, or blinded.

So try this, try this if you are a parent or a child, a person living alone, or living by yourself or in community – find someone to bless. You can like them, or not like them, they can be relatives or strangers – and look for that piece of that person that is truly important. You don’t need to tell them you are blessing them – if you are English that bit will feel awkward, but share something with them that can guide them on this path of goodness, of shared communal existence, share something with them that guide them well on path in which their soul needs to travel. Open up a possibility, acknowledge a piece of wonderment. Just wish ‘em well. But guide towards the good.

I think that action, that moment of blessing or being blessed is the very heart of what it truly means to be religious. And I do like, as I hope you have figured out, I do like religion.

Shabbat Shalom

BRCA - Bracha - Reflections on Breast Cancer

In a few moments, we’ll begin our Yizkor service, and I know that many of us who are here today have memories of beloved relatives so close to our hearts and minds at this time. But I want to take this time to talk, not about those who are no longer with us, but us, who are here, and our relationship with our own mortality. Specifically, I want to talk about breast cancer.

I have a remote, but still nasty, relationship with breast cancer; in my life, my work, and my faith.

I never met my mother-in-law. She would have been 70 this year, but died of the disease before I met her.

A BRCA1 mutation - the single most significant important predictor of breast cancer - wanders through my wife’s extended family. As, of course, it wanders through other families in this special community, and others.

Thinking about this sermon, I’ve spoken with several BRCA mutation carriers, I’ve heard them called previvors – I like that term. I’ve spoken to cancer survivors and previvors who’ve chosen to remove breast and ovarian tissue, women who’ve chosen to remove breast tissue, but not ovaries, and ovaries, but not breasts.  I’ve spoken to a previvor who had a ‘bye-bye-boobs’ party featuring pink-frosted cupcakes with nipples. And I’m sharing this sermon in honour of all these remarkable women – and men – who’ve fought the cruel irony – that the ovaries and the breast – the source of human life - can become lethal if a microscopic chain of amino-acids don’t behave the way they should.

Let me back-track. Somewhere in our vast genome – on the long arm of chromosome 17 – we carry a gene that regulates the repair of broken threads of DNA. It’s called BRCA1. And there’s another gene on Chromosome 13 – BRCA2 – that does much the same thing. And if these BRCA genes are doing what they should do, broken threads of DNA get repaired perfectly. But certain kinds of mutations in these genes can result in mis-repairs and these mis-repairs, can result in tumours, tumours in breast tissue  -for both women and men - and ovarian tissue especially.

And then there is this; certain BRCA mutations have a particularly high incidence among Ashkenazi Jews. In the general population 1 in 400 people carry one of the over 60 different kinds of BRCA mutations that have been charted. Among Ashkenazi Jews, 1 in 40 of us carry one of three BRCA mutations, all of which are dangerous.

Earlier this year I was flown to Brazil to officiate at a wedding of two of our members here – perk of the job. At the reception I was talking to one of the guests, Renee, who told me she carried a BRCA mutation and had not only taken some serious decisions about how to respond herself, but she had also set up an organisation in Brazil to support Jews getting screened and giving support.[1]

Renee told me that until she set up her organisation there was very little information available in Portuguese and very little support available in Brazil. I told her there was a terrific organisation doing similar work in this country – Jnetics. I’m a fan. There’s some information on their work in the foyer. Their founder is the daughter of long-term members here.

And then Renee told me the thing has been gnawing at my mind ever since, ‘JNetics,’ she said, ‘nice name, I called my organisation Brachah’ It was late in the evening, the music was playing, she had great English, but a heavy Portuguese accent and I had to ask her to say it again, ‘Brachah – like BRCA. They sound the same’

And this is the thing I’ve been thinking about, ever since – where, in all the nastiness, pain, and sheer mortal threat of breast and ovarian cancer – does a person find Brachah – blessing?

The thing about Renee, and many of the women I’ve spoken to, who have responded to news that they carry a BRCA mutation by choosing to undergo surgery and the like is that, when they talk about their lot, they tend to use words like ‘blessing,’ and ‘being grateful’ more often than you would imagine.

The keyword, for so many of these women, is agency – the ability to exercise control over that which threatens to control you. Susan Sontag, who had just been diagnosed with cancer herself, wrote in 1978 about the way we talk, or at least talked, about cancer.  Cancer, she wrote, was depicted as “an evil, invincible predator, not just a disease.”[2] Cancer was seen as an automatic death-sentence which could be delayed, perhaps, but no more than that. Cancer, back then, seemed to enable no decisions, no agency. That is, if one even knew what was going on. Sontag records a conversation with a French oncologist who told her that a fewer than a tenth of his patients even knew they had the disease, it was considered too distressing to tell anyone who was not ‘exceptionally mature.’

And now comes, among so much extraordinary scientific and medical progress, the discovery of these BRCA mutations and a world of questions and decisions that are, I know they are, scary and complex and we would wish nothing more than not to have to face them. But cancer is not invincible, it’s not even inevitable, not even for previvors who carry BRCA mutations.

Nowadays, previvors step into a world of percentages; the likelihood of contracting this cancer, or that, before or after this age; the degree risk can be reduced by electing to have prophylactic surgery – the counsellors you need to see before you can go under the scalpel don’t call it preventative surgery because, like so much else in this murky uneasy world, not even surgery comes with a guarantee. It’s knowledge, but it’s not certain. The cancer previvor and the cancer survivor inhabit a world between thinking they can live forever and feeling they are the inevitable victims of Sontag’s ‘invincible predator.’

Perhaps, seen like this, these previvors aren’t so different from the rest of us, those of us with perfectly functioning BRCA genes, but nonetheless destined otherwise to mortality. Perhaps you, or I, carry a genetic marker that predisposes us to one illness or another, by some percentage or another, or perhaps we don’t carry a marker, it’s just that mortality will visit us for some other reason. Maybe the thing that will get us is spectacularly unlikely, but even the tiniest of percentages will manifest somewhere, on someone.

As science does that thing that science does, we will find out more and more about our predispositions to mortality in its different forms. And we will be given more choice about how to balance the desire to live in ignorance of what is coming, and the desire to know – to manage our choices.

Back in the late 1970s, Sontag wrote that we are born with dual citizenship; membership of a kingdom of the well and a kingdom of the sick. We all wish to use only the passport of the kingdom of the well, she wrote, but ‘sooner or later we have to identify as citizens of that other place.’ But surely, we are all in the same kingdom, the kingdom of life which is both astounding and glorious, and fragile and mortal. We are all sliding up and down a scale of confidence in our strength and awareness of our fragility.

And we are all juggling bits and pieces of knowledge as we slide up and down the scale. Sometimes the knowledge comes delivered by a professional genetic counsellor who’s looked into the very depths of our chromosomes and can give us statistics backed up by peer-reviewed research. And sometimes the knowledge is chaotic and second-hand and quite possibly nonsense. What’s that about turmeric, and is red-wine good or bad for you this week? It’s hard enough just avoiding the things we know are bad for us when there are so many more complexities being revealed by science.

Well, here’s the bad news for anyone who finds this mass of options and knowledge and confusion frustrating or intolerably morbid; the future is going to present us with more of this; more complex knowledge, less certainty, more uneasy squirming in the face of increasing understanding of exactly how you or I are most likely to die. We would do well to be ready for this brave new world – more ready than we are.

Let me share three lessons I’ve learnt from the previvors and survivors I’ve met.

The first is; get knowledge.

None of the previvors I have spoken with regrets getting screened. Not that they advocate everyone getting screened regardless of their age and stage of life, but get the knowledge about the right age and stage of life to be screened and get the knowledge. It doesn’t make things easy, but the knowledge is worth it.

In some ways the Ashkenaz Jew in the screening room is back in the Garden of Eden, standing before a tree which will allow us to understand things we will never be able to un-learn. The tree promises understanding but that could come at the cost of the myth of our immortality. But here, there is no command to avoid the fruit. Rather, in a post-Eden-world, perhaps the best guiding principle is this verse from Deuteronomy. ‘See I have placed before you blessing and curse, choose life so that you shall live.’ Again, there is information about JNetics in the foyer if you want to know more about screening.

Without understanding, our life choices are no better than random guesses. With knowledge we gain the ability to make meaningful choices. Knowledge is the gateway to the second great lesson I’ve learnt in these conversations.

And the second lesson is; claim agency.

Make meaningful choices. None of us can direct the totality of our existence – that’s the great religious truth of our day, but we do have some power over some elements of our fate – so we should claim the right to make these choices.

It once happened, the rabbis teach in Midrash Tanhuma,[3] that the Roman Emperor Turnus Rufus and Rabbi Akiva were debating. ‘Which is greater’ the Emperor asks, ‘the works of God, or the works of humans?’ ‘The works of humans,’ the Rabbi responds.’ ‘But how can you match the heavens and the earth?’ the Emperor asks. So Akiva brings out some stalks of wheat and some loaves of bread and says, ‘These are the work of God, and these are the work of humans. Isn’t the bread better than the stalks of wheat?’ The Emperor acknowledges he is defeated by the Rabbi who believes in the greatness of human agency.

In our claiming agency over our lives, we justify and celebrate our existence. Exerting agency over our lives stops us from being nothing other than a sufferer, a victim, it allows us to become the actor – the star, the hero of our own story. I mean we talk about a book of life and a book of death on this holy day, but we are all going to die eventually – that’s the one shared decree we all face – so the question is rather – what do we do with the life we are given. What difference can we make, over our own life and the lives of others while we have the chance?

There are always decisions of agency to make, certainly in the case of BRCA mutations and even at the end of life.

Get knowledge, claim agency.

And thirdly, find the Brachah – find the blessing, if at all possible.

Maybe blessing – Brachah - is too provocative a word. I know this is a tricky one. Maybe a better Hebrew word would be Todah or Modeh. Modeh is usually translated as ‘Thanks’ but it actually means something that doesn’t really translate into English. To be Modeh is to acknowledge the gift of existence as a whole, even if the momentary experience is painful and challenging. Being Modeh is not about being grateful to carry a gene mutation or being thankful to have cancer – God forbid. But there is something about finding gratitude in our encounters with life, even with its pain and inevitable mortality, that can lift us and attune us to what it means to be alive – and it is beautiful and wonderful to be alive, even in pain and mortality.

I know this is difficult. And I don’t want to judge anyone who experiences pain and simply wants to say – stuff this, this is awful. Pain is never good. But I’ve seen, and I know many of us have, people who can experience pain and still find this quality of being Modeh.

Judaism doesn’t want us only to bless, only to express this quality of being Modeh, just when things go well. The Mishnah states Hayav levarech al harah cshem shehu mevarech al hatovah – a person should bless equally when things go well, as we when things don’t.[4] It’s a challenge, but cultivating that sense of being Modeh allows us to feel empowered by our acts of agency. We might not change the outcome, but we can change the way we experience our pain. That’s not insignificant. In fact, it might be the very greatest act of our humanity.

Let me share one example. Judaism has, of course, if does, a blessing to be said when you go to the toilet.

It's a blessing that thanks God for creating in our human bodies, holes and pipes and pipes and holes. Galui va’Yadua lifnei kise kevodecha – it is revealed and known by You – God – that if one of the holes that should be opened should close, or one of the pipes that should be closed would open, it would be impossible exist, for even a moment. Blessed are you God – the blessing ends – who does wonderous things.

It’s a great blessing to be said when everything is going well with our bodies and we feel capable and powerful. It’s also a great blessing to be said when … it’s not and we become assailed by a sense that we are nothing more than fragile physical entities guaranteed only to decay.

I’m not trying, necessarily, to advocate the formal words in the siddur. I think you can express this idea in so many, many ways. I’m also not suggesting that a person shouldn’t feel angry, even express anger and bitterness and all the rest of the emotions that come up when we experience our own mortality in this way. Cultivating this sense of Modeh, while being angry at being ill and fighting with every ounce of our strength to get better, that can all fit together as part of a commitment to finding the very best in the lives we can make for ourselves. But somewhere, somehow, it's helpful to cultivate a sense of being blessed, a sense of being Modeh.

Judaism at its best doesn't lie. It doesn't offer panaceas to the inevitable human condition of mortality. But it does tell us to get knowledge, to claim agency and to find blessings. I think that’s because getting knowledge, claiming agency and finding blessings transforms us from being the victims of a sick irony like cancer and into human beings in the very fullest sense of the term. Getting knowledge, claiming agency and finding blessings makes us the heroes of our lives, it frees us from suffering, even if we do experience pain.

May we all be spared from any experience of pain in this year to come, but should it come, may we play these roles – of seeking knowledge, claiming agency and finding blessing with distinction and courage, both in this year, and in many years to come.

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[1] https://brachabrasil.org for the British organisation see https://www.jnetics.org/

[2] Illness as a Metaphor, p.7

[3] Tazria 5

[4] Mishnah Brachot 9:5