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

Some Light Summer Reading - Ways of Looking at Suffering - Part One

I’ve been making my way through Scott Samuelson’s newly published, Seven Ways of Looking at Pointless Suffering. I know, there are lighter offerings on the shelves, but I’m drawn to this stuff. I should probably consider a career in the Rabbinate or something. En route to my Yizkor sermon (and again Rosh Hashanah falls on the evening of 9^th September), I’ll be sharing in this blog from some of the insights in the book and suggesting a Jewish response to them.

Chapter five of Samuelson’s work features the response of the Stoics. This response entails seeing suffering as no more and no less than the rules of game. As Samuelson imagines us playing chess, and wishing our pawn could zip up the board and take the opponent’s queen several ranks away, but that simply wouldn’t be chess. Similar we could wish that we, or a loved one, wouldn’t be suffering, but to wish for a life without pain is to wish for a breaking of the rules of existence. We can’t all live for ‘beyond average’ lengths of time. To think, says Epictetus, father of the Stoics, that “the fall of leaves is ill-omened, or that it is evil for a bunch of grapes to turn into raisins” is a waste of emotional energy, and worse, such an expectation only sets us up for disappointment and added heartbreak.

There is, clearly, an attraction in a stoic worldview. It’s safe from breeding disappointment. And, indeed, somewhere in a called-for Jewish response to our own bad things come the urge that we find a way to accept our experience of bad things in general and human fragility in particular. In Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur’s most magisterial prayer, the Unataneh Tokef, we acknowledge that ‘humanity comes dust, and ends in dust; like a broken clay shard, withered grass, a shrivelled flower ...’

But the response of stoicism is not the first response. And we cannot - must not - skip to the end of the story before its time. As well as acknowledging our mortality we are called to remember we are ‘little less than angels,’ that ‘the Universe is created for our sake,’ that we embody ‘the image of God.’ And so on. Life is precious, astoundingly so. Loss, pain and suffering are not invitations for cool-heads to nod coolly. They are tragedies to be mourned. In one of my favourite Talmudic passages, the young Rabbi Yochanan enters the room of the dying leader of his generation Rabbi Eliezer to see his teacher in tears. “Why do you cry?” the neophyte asks as if tears are somehow a failure of greatness. “I cry because of the beauty that is to rot in the earth” the Master responds, “And they cry together.” We don’t express our humanity through being so tough, so smart or so stoical that we feel no pain. That is the characteristic of a rock, not a being of flesh and soul. We should not feel called to transcend our humanity. For humans the more we love, the more we hope, the more we invest in the relationships which are the true touchstones of humanity, the more we hurt when these hopes are dashed. To hurt is to be human. Transcendence of our mortal realm is not the goal. Our suffering, as painful as it may be, is not pointless if it connects us to our humanity, rather it reminds us, even in our pain, of the importance of having a soul at all.

A Guide to Jewish Life - Part Two - Love

Last week I gave the first of what I hope will be a three part series of sermons trying to get at the heart of what it means to be a Jew.

I talked about belief - to be more specific a rational supernaturalism - that celebrates the scientific achievements of mankind while still valuing that which cannot be open to rational solution - while still believing in that which is beyond scientific exploration - while still believing in belief.

I had some wonderful feedback, thank you. And also this very good question, 'yes,' said a loyal member, 'that's all very good, but how do you get from there to Shabbat and Kashrut?' I hope, in part to join those dots today.

I want to talk about love, as the next step in underpinning Jewish life, specifically a very Jewish sort of love. There are, in fact, three commandments to love mentioned in the Torah.

V'ahavta et Adonai Eloheicha - And you shall love Adonai your God - that's from the Shema.

V'ahavta et Reicha Cemocha - And you shall love your fellow as yourself - that's the verse Rabbi Akiva, no less, considers the single greatest principle underpinning the entire Torah.

And V'ahavta et haGer - And you shall love the stranger - the single more repeated verse in the entire Torah.

A whole lotta loving. Actually our sister Synagogue, New North London, has these three obligations up in stone on the wall surrounding the ark. It's an impressive site.

I'm going to leave the obligation to love the stranger for next week. Today I want to focus on the twin obligations of loving God and loving one's fellow. In particular, I'm interested in the connection between them.

One the one hand these two ideas, loving God and loving one's fellow seem radically disparate. God is the force beyond all measurement, beyond all constraint of particularity and form. And humans are - breakable, fallible and ephemeral.

But I believe these two ideas are more than linked, they are the equally the necessary outcome of the greatest idea in Judaism.

If I was to be cast ashore on a desert island and given one Biblical verse to take with me, it would be the verse that speaks of the creation of all humanity in the image of God - Btzelem elohim. It's such a radical notion. There's a smart commentary in the Etz Hayim pointing out that all kinds of Ancient Near East religious traditions considered the King, or Pharoah as an embodiment of God. But The Torah goes far, far further - all humanity contains this spark of divinity within. Each of us here, and those not here, the men, the women, the powerful and the powerless, each contain that spark of the creative source of life. How extraordinary is human life. It's such a radical notion, will underpin the value of human rights, democracy, any liberation movement you care to name.

And if we, each of us, are refractions of Divine, containers of Divinity expressed as finite existence - then the command to love God and the command to love one's fellow become more than related.

Certainly it's not possible to claim to love God while treating humanity - any human - poorly. I would say that the reverse is equally true. If you place humanity at the very heart of your every action and motivation then you embodying what it truly means to love God. Certainly the best advice I could give to anyone professing atheism, to anyone unsure about this whole God thing is don't worry so much, concentrate on loving your fellow and let the magic of the utterly profound nature of our existence seep in slowly. The best way to become religious is to be loving.

Moreover, there is something in the loving of either God or our fellow that when we successfully love either God or our fellow we are in some sense protecting and celebrating that which is within us. We are images of God and when I love my fellow I'm loving a cousin, I'm celebrating a commonality, I'm celebrating that which brings us together.

So what do I mean by loving, what does it mean to love God, or our fellow?

I spoke a little about this on Yom Kippur. Loving, certainly as the Torah understands the term isn't an emotional reaction. Judaism cares little for our private emotional state. Loving means acting in a caring way. There's an insight in another of my desert island pieces of Torah, a passage in Talmud Sotah (14b) where the Rabbis are working out how to fulfil the Biblical obligation to 'walk in way of God,' what the Christians would call imitatio dei - how to behave in a godly manner. They come up with a list of Divine accomplishments that are most remarkable for their being least remarkable.

Just as God gives clothes to Adam and Eve as they are exiled from the Garden of Eden, so we are called upon to give clothes to the unclothed. Just as God visits Abraham as he recovers from circumcision, so we are called upon to visit the sick. Just as God comforts Isaac on the death of his father, so we are called upon to comfort the bereaved. Just as God buries Moses we are called upon to bury the dead. Nowhere is there a suggestion that we should resurrect the dead, split the rea, heal the terminally ill. Rather we are called, in that lovely Yiddish phrase, to be Menschen - to be a human through simple acts of kindness, offering basic support and comfort. Loving means acting.

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And loving means taking these obligations seriously. If you love someone don't be slapdash, don't be rough and approximate. Take what you are doing seriously. I made the point last week in the context of the construction of the Sanctuary in the desert, the same point could be made regarding today's reading. If you want to be in serious relationship with God, take it seriously. Assume that it matters whether there are 49 poles in the sanctuary, or fifty. Assume that it matters whether one eats a cheeseburger or remembers to call one's mother Shabbat eve. Assume that if we aren't careful we don't get to call ourselves loving.

And here we are at the birth of the entire Halachic system, the entire apparatus of Jewish do-s and don't-s. It's an attempt to do the right thing when the desire to act in a loving way is felt. It's at the heart of the balance of Jewish do-s and don't-s that compel us to act in specific ways towards our fellow human beings and towards our creator.

Should we say a blessing before we eat food, of course we should, it's a taking of the fruits of creation and by inculcating within ourselves that spiritual discipline we condition ourselves to be aware of our place on this planet, we become increasingly aware of what we can and can't achieve of our own volition. And then the pursuit of detail takes over; what do we say before we eat this or that, what should we say after.

Should we give to this charity or the other, and how much should we give; these are all entirely genuine questions faced by the Halachic system - how do we balance up the competing claims of different humans, different refractions of the human image; some close to us, some further away.

There's a great legal responsum on whether and how we should treat the poshtei yad - the beggars on the street. There seem to be more and more of them, have you noticed? What if we don't like the fact they might spend the money on booze, or their dog, or their gang master? Complex this business of being loving to your fellow. Needs thought, needs working through. Thankfully we have just such a system of working these issues through - it's called Halachah.

The point is that it's not acceptable to be generally loving, generally nice. The point is that if we want to act in a loving way we need to be precise. Sometimes, I'll admit it, the pursuit of detail can blind. Sometimes we become so obsessed with detail that we lose the bigger picture - but the bigger picture is acting in a loving way.

Even those parts of the Jewish system that seem a long way away from this idea of love, I believe connect. Let me take the most love-less example of a Mitzvah I can find, Shatnetz - thou shall not mix wool and linen. Loveless, no? Well no, I don't think so. The prohibition of wearing Shatnetz is part of a series of obligations to hold different elements of creation differently. Don't eat meat and milk together, don't yoke an ox and a mule together, don't plant different kinds of plants together in the same field. They are attempts to get us to understand that everything is not the same. It's so easy to lose track of where the products we take for granted come from. Milk comes from cartons, no it doesn't it comes from cows; sometimes organically raised, sometimes bloated on chemicals. If we are paying attention when we walk into a shop and pick a carton off the shelf we can choose one decision over another. But if we only see clothing as something for us to use and not as a result of a process of manufacture, if we are blind, say, to the difference between clothing that comes from plants and clothing that comes from animals how are we supposed to care about the treatment of animals, or the wages paid to cotton pickers in Ukraine, or the working conditions of garment manufacturers in some awful factory in India that collapses under the weight of human greed - ours as much as the manufacturers. A strange Mitzvah, the very strangest Mitzvah is about awakening our powers of observance. As we observe it we become more observant, and the more we see, the more we understand, the more capable we become of taking care, of acting in a loving way.

The gift of having a system, the Halachic system, is that it gives us a headstart on so many of these issues. We don't need to re-invent the entire interplay of morality and ethics and compassion with our every breath and every bite. Instead, we get to observe Shabbat, keep Kosher, even wear non-Shatnatz clothing and we get to use these pathways of love to become ever more loving.

That the Jewish legal system.

A system of walking in the path of the Divine, recognising the image of God in all humanity and trying desperately to be worthy, trying desperately to understand the right thing to do in the ever more complex web of relationships, pulls and tugs that make up our lives.

It's easy, I know it's easy to lose track of the bigger picture, but the bigger picture is love. Love is at the heart of every call to action we know as Jews.

It's at the heart of what I call on us all to do today, and into the future.

Care more, love more, use our actions to demonstrate our commitment to value all humanity as creations in the image of the Divine, use our actions to demonstrate our commitment to value our creator and indeed, our very creation.

Shabbat shalom