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.

Chinese Food on Christmas, an Age-Old Tradition

Do you know what you get if you subtract the Chinese year, 4708, from the Jewish year, 5771?

No, not 1063. You get the number of years Jews had to go without Chinese food.

This year will be the first Christmas in many, many years that I will not be having a traditional Jewish Christmas dinner: Chinese food. I even tried to have Chinese food for lunch today, but the place I'd chosen had gone out of business.

So, where'd all this Chinese food on Christmas come from? In reading Galit Breen's Minnesota Mamaleh: So What DO Jews Do On Christmas?, I found a link to Hanna Raskin's So, Why Do Jews Eat Chinese Food at Christmas? Hanna Raskin wrote her Master's thesis on the relationship between Jews and Chinese food. I was surprised to learn that Jews' eating Chinese food (not only on Christmas, but in general), was not an experience of our affinity for Asian cuisine, but rather because of our proximity to the Chinese community. Not in Biblical times, but in New York. Thinking about it, I realized Raskin was totally right. The Lower East Side, the quintessential Jewish neighborhood of the last two centuries in New York, the place where so many of us can trace our Jewish roots, borders Chinatown. While I don't agree with Raskin's point that Chinese food is kosher-ish, because the meat is so finely chopped that it's hardly recognizable at treif, I do agree with the rest of her points.

She points out that chop suey was a sophisticated dish in its heyday. Eating it meant you were part of American culture. Also, in Chinese restaurants, Jews look like white people; so, while there was persecution of Jewish communities elsewhere, in a Chinese restaurant, Jews got to be just like everyone else. As New York Jewish culture spread throughout the rest of the country, so did the custom of eating Chinese food, especially on Christmas, even for those Jews who didn't have ancestors who'd lived on the Lower East Side.

So, whether or not you choose to celebrate Jewish Christmas with a traditional meal of Chinese food, have a Shabbat Shalom/Merry Christmas and remember, pork isn't kosher, unless it's in Chinese food.

Is God a Bully?

I am on my way to NFTY CANOe's Winter Kallah, where this year's theme is bullying. The regional boards, teens from Illinois, Minnesota and Wisconsin, have decided in response to the heightened awareness of bullying in our society, to provide their peers with appropriate Jewish responses to bullying and ways to be more inclusive. As I've been thinking about the theme, I began wondering, "Is God a bully?"

According to Norwegian researcher Dan Olweus, bullying is the repeated behavior of intentionally inflicting "injury or discomfort upon another person, through physical contact, through words or in other ways." This definitely sounds like God's reaction to the Israelites' and others' behavior throughout Torah: following the incident with the golden calf, when the Israelites complain about having left Egypt, and God's reaction to Sodom and Gomorrah, to name a few. In each of these three moments, humankind has to intercede to stop God's behavior. Moses steps in at the first two and Abraham in the third.

In the narrative of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham begs God not to destroy the cities if there are even 50 righteous people present. God agrees, but the cities lack even 50 righteous people. Abraham bargains God down to 45, to 40, 30, 20, and even to 10. Still, God destroys the cities. Why does Abraham stop before getting to 1 and why is God still willing to destroy the cities?

According to a midrash in Tractate Sanhedrin 109b, the people of Sodom had a bed on which the would make visitors lie down. Anyone too tall for the bed would have his limbs cut off to fit the bed. Anyone who was too short for the bed would be stretched, breaking his limbs to make him fit. The people of Sodom refused to tolerate anyone who was different from them. God, we see, is not the bully, but instead stands up to bullies to defend the victims, those who are bullied for not being just like everyone else.

In this week's Torah portion, Vayechi, Joseph's brothers become fearful following their father Jacob's death. They are afraid that now Joseph will seek revenge on them for all the wrong they did to him and their father won't be there to protect them. In the end, Joseph tells them that though they meant him harm, God was looking out for Joseph and made sure things turned out well. We might wish God would have interceded and stopped Joseph's brothers, but we can find comfort in Joseph's confidence in God's presence on his behalf.

So, is God a bully? In short, no. Sometimes God steps in to actively protect the bullied. Sometimes the bullied can sense God's presence in the midst of tragedy. We have the power - and the sacred obligation - to bridge the gap.

A Time for Trust and Belonging

While listening to MPR the other day, I heard the newscaster share the notion that we sing the same songs at various times of the year - holidays, birthdays, celebrations, even funerals - and that this repetition, year after year, of the same melodies, gives us a sense of trust and belonging. The comment was part of an introduction to a story on Christmas carols. I was feeling lucky to have been arriving at my destination at that moment so that I wouldn't have to listen to the Christmas carols in the segment. I immediately began thinking, though, why it is that I find Christmas carols, of all the Christmas-related onslaught, to be the most irritating. Then, I thought about the newscaster's comment. Christmas carols provide a sense of trust and belonging - that is, if you belong. That was it. The carols, the garland, the sparkling trees in the center of every shopping mall across America, the commercials, all evoke a sense of belonging if you belong to the tradition they represent. But I don't. I am grateful, as I blogged last year, that during the days of Chanukah, XM radio provides us with Radio Hanukkah as an escape from Christmas carols.

But worse than being surrounded by Christmas carols was the article that my friend Rory shared with me. In his piece for SmartMoney, Kelli Grant suggests that, "Even if you’re not celebrating Hannukah, there’s a good reason to wrap up your holiday shopping before the last light on the menorah goes out." Her thesis is that because the American population that celebrates Chanukah (She claims it's 5%, though most statistics argue that the Jewish population in the United States is a mere 2%.) will boost stores' November sales by 3% to 4%, "retail analysts say an early Hanukkah could spell trouble for Christmas shoppers: Thanks to consumers’ extra holiday spending in late November, retailers may cut back on big discounts in December."

You read that correctly: Because of the Jewish population in America (you decide if it's 5% or 2%), Christmas shoppers will suffer. The Jewish population will cause the Christmas shoppers' sales to be cut short, costing non-Jews more money. At least, that's what Grant argues.

Both Chanukah and Christmas are holidays connected to the winter solstice, a time when the days are at their shortest, light is diminished, and we need greater hope and greater light. Perhaps we can accomplish this best by seeing how our celebrations help one another, creating trust and belonging, not by cutting one another down.

Chag urim samei'ach! Happy Chanukah!