How to Succeed at Resolutions Without Really Trying (or at Least Taking It Slowly)

A few year’s ago on an episode of Prairie Home Companion that fell on the weekend around Rosh Hashanah, Garrison Keillor wished his Jewish listeners a happy new year and then told everyone else that they’d just have to make do with the year they still had for a few more months. In last year’s January/February Temple Israel Hakol, I wrote about the Jewish significance of tonight’s New Year’s Eve, in light of the one we celebrated a few months ago. I won’t go into those details here, but I will acknowledge, like I did then, that New Year’s Day still has significance for us as people who operate not only under the Jewish calendar, but also the Gregorian calendar.

I try to make my New Year’s resolutions leading up to the 1st of Tishrei, not the 1st of January, but I can’t help but be reflective at this time of year, as well. The changes I make this time of year are sometimes more mundane than the ones I tried to initiate a few months ago, eating better, exercising more, the usual. At the same time, I’m keenly aware that New Year’s resolutions don’t stick.

In a study done by a British psychologist about the effectiveness of New Year’s resolutions, it was revealed that only about 1 in 5 people actually keep their resolutions. What he discovered was that most of the people who failed to keep their resolutions went about it all wrong. They focused on the negative, the downside of not achieving their goals. They pasted pictures of skinny people on their refrigerators or relied on willpower alone. Of those that succeeded, the common thread was that they had broken their goal into smaller steps and rewarded themselves along the way. Rather than focusing on the bad stuff, they focused on the benefits of success.

At the beginning of this week’s Torah portion, Va’era, God hears the moaning of the Israelites, who are being held in bondage by Egypt. Moses is told that God remembers the covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and promises to bring the Israelites into the Promised Land. God tells Moses to let the Israelites know that God will free the Israelites and deliver them from bondage, redeeming them and taking them as God’s people. But when Moses relays this message to the Israelites, the text tells us that they would not listen to Moses, their spirits crushed by cruel bondage.

Within just a few short verses, we witness the Israelites’ crying out for help and then, when help comes, deciding that they can’t do it; they are overwhelmed. Sounds a little like how we handle our resolutions! And when we make resolutions and break them, we find ourselves feeling dispirited and despondent, like the Israelites.

So, why do the Israelites all of a sudden withdraw their bemoaning. And why can’t we follow through on our resolutions? What might the two of these have in common? It might be all about willpower. Apparently, our prefrontal cortex is responsible for willpower, but it’s not the only thing that part of our brain handles. It also keeps us focused, handles short-term memory, and solves abstract problems. In an experiment at Stanford University, scientists discovered that people given seven-digit numbers to memorize were twice as likely to choose a slice of chocolate cake over a bowl of fruit salad, compared to people who were given two-digit numbers to memorize. Those extra digits overloaded the cognitive part of the brain making it harder to resist a decadent dessert! Our willpower is so weak that it can be overcome by an overload in our experiences. No wonder that extra cookie, another slice of pizza, or an extra helping of mashed potatoes are so tempting after a hard day at work.

Well, the Israelites’ experience was similar. According to Nahmanides, it’s not that the Israelites didn’t believe Moses when he came to tell them about God’s plan to save them. Instead, it’s that they were incapable of listening because of how crushed their spirits were because of their labor. They hardly wanted to live any longer, even though they knew that relief would come. Ibn Ezra agrees, saying that the Israelites were powerless to listen because of how dispirited they had become because of their exile and bondage.

So, how do they get past this moment? How do we see our resolutions come to fruition? It’s in our ability to distract ourselves from what’s attempting to set us off course. In an another experiment – you may have seen one like this – where four-year-olds were placed in front of a marshmallow and told if they could wait 20 minutes to eat it, they’d get another one, the children that could distract themselves from the marshmallow were the ones who succeeded. Some sang songs, others played with their shoelaces, some pretended the marshmallow was a cloud. They knew their willpower was weak, so instead of focusing on the marshmallow, they shifted the spotlight.

Ultimately, God helps the Israelites do the same thing. Moses and Aaron appear before Pharaoh demanding the Israelites’ freedom. But before they appear, God tells Moses that God will harden Pharaoh’s heart and make Pharaoh not want to let them go. This has always been a difficult moment in the text for me. Why would God make it harder for the Israelites to go? Well, if they tried to take it on all at once – like how we sometimes try to take on our resolutions with an all-or-nothing attitude – perhaps they would have quit before they’d reached the Sea of Reeds. Instead, God gets them out in small steps, one plague at a time, slowly motivating them and propelling them towards freedom with incremental progress. God teaches them, as we can learn about the resolutions we might put into place tomorrow morning, that when we are tempted to change course, hunkering down and convincing ourselves we can do it all at once isn’t the way to go. Instead, we have to shift our focus, reward the small victories, and keep our eye on the prize.