40
AcAdemic SympoSium:
now, improvise, get it done, immedi-
ately. And that skill is very important.
It’s necessary. But it’s not sufficient on
its own. In every learning milieu – home,
day school, early childhood center,
youth group, camp, congregation,
senior adult community – we need
to have some people who slow things
down. They are thinking at a different
speed, refusing to be sucked into the
vortex of instant gratification, insisting
on reflection and the weighing of
consequences.
What Kahneman claims (and he was
the Nobel Prize winner in Economics
2002),
is that he and his
havruta
partner, Amos Twerski, brought out
the best in each other. They knew they
needed each other. They knew they
needed to fail many times before they
made seminal discoveries in the social
sciences, in particular in the field of
decision-making, which bridged the
disciplines of economics and psychology.
It is important to recognize that each
one of us apparently has access to two
interdependent systems of thought.
We determine how they interact. At
times, we use that automatic, intuitive,
emotional, visceral responsiveness,
and at other times, we consciously are
deliberate, logical, algorithmic, and
cogitative. Jewish learning is in the
balance, and currently we are off-
balance. Sometimes, thinking slow
is as courageous as it is rare.
Limerance is a term david Brooks
uses to describe a passion, an
inspiring attraction, and a love
for learning that transcends logic.
In Brooks’ own words, “Limerance:
This isn’t a talent as much as a motiva-
tion. The conscious mind hungers for
money and success. But the uncon-
scious mind hungers for those mo-
ments of transcendence when the skull
line falls away and we are lost in love
for another, the challenge of a task,
or the love of God.”
Limerance can take place in an early
childhood center just as much as at
HUC-JIR. People have access to tran-
scendence, and Jewish learning cries
out for the holy, addressing the soul
as well as the heart, the mind, and
the hands.
What can, people like Daniel Kahneman
and David Brooks teach us? They
remind us that Judaism at its best is
eclectic: ready to learn from Torah, the
unique story of the Jewish people as
well as from
hochma,
the universal
narrative that speaks from global
wisdom. It is not a coincidence that
this event was called a Symposium,
because Plato’s
Symposium
was about
love and so is this one. Jewish learning
is rooted in love – of Judaism, of Jews,
of Israel, of people, and of God.
Jewish learning, like Jewish living,
is a lesson in humility, wholly and
sometimes holy unpredictable.
The essayist, scholar, and statistician
Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote
The Black
Swan: The Impact of the Highly Im-
probable
,
which presents a fascinating,
compelling argument. We must always
be ready to admit that we could be
wrong. The unimaginable can and does
happen. There are events, catastrophic
and wondrous, that change the world
forever, events that were unprecedent-
ed and unpredicted, events that keep
happening. We did not foresee the
Holocaust. We did not foresee the Six-
Day War in 1967. We did not foresee
09/11/2001.
Perhaps the Jewish people
are living proof of the Black Swan.
This coming week in the Torah we
will learn about the twelve scouts that
Moses dispatched to bring back a re-
port about the land of Israel. Ten of the
twelve saw insurmountable obstacles.
Only two acknowledged the obstacles
and yet expressed the belief that they
could be overcome. In the last four
millennia, I am not sure the propor-
tions have changed materially. There
are obstacles in the paths of Jewish
learning: ignorance and indifference
among them. I choose to align myself
with the Joshuas and Calebs of our
time and claim that we are capable
of overcoming them.
As a people, we have defied logic
practically since our inception and
the main reason why we are still here
inheres in Jewish learning. We may
not all be learned Jews, but we have
a legacy of being learning Jews. May
Jewish learning also be our destiny,
since Jewish life is in the balance.
Good teaching comes from
the identity and integrity of the
teacher.
(
Parker Palmer:
The Courage to Teach
)
Jewish learning involves excellence
in Judaism and in learning,
excellence that begins with the most
important learner in every learning
environment, the teacher.
who are the best teachers in your
learning community and how are
you supporting them?
זהות, שלמות, וקהילה
identity, integrity,
and community