145: Waking up from our rage-filled slumber

0:00Hi everybody. Welcome to Ask a Leave Anything. Thank you for being here. Today is going to be just a very short thought for Losh Hashanah, which begins tomorrow for the new year on the Jewish calendar, which begins 10 days of contemplation, atonement, asking for forgiveness, that ends in the crescendo of Yom Kippur. I know there's been a lot going on. I know there's a lot of stuff in the news. There's a lot of intensity in social media. It's just the new normal, but it's driving everybody crazy. There's all kinds of things having to do with an Israeli election, which many, many people feel is very fateful. There's the situation in Gaza, the situation in Lebanon, the situation in Iran and all of the knock-on effects that's having an American politics. A thousand things to worry about and endless platforms engineered to make you worry about them and to rage and to expend yourself endlessly.

1:05Over the course of the next two days, I'm going to put all of that on pause and you should too. Everything I'm going to say comes from the Jewish bookshelf, the Jewish tradition. It's not at all unique to Jews. This is useful to absolutely everybody living through this very strange moment in the history of humanity. L'Oshushana is the only major Jewish holiday on the calendar that begins in total darkness. That is one of the most important things to know about it. There are other Jewish holidays, major ones, pilgrimage, festivals, Pesach Shavuot Sukot, all of them take place with a shining moon in the sky. They take place either a week into the month, Pesach Shavuot Sukot or smack dab in the middle on the 15th of the month when the moon is full and it is really actually surprising how bright the night can shine. You can see the road under your feet, which is important for a pilgrimage holiday, obviously. This is something I first experienced in army training as a young man when we would trek

2:08out into the desert hills in the middle of the night and I was amazed at how bright the moon actually is in the middle of the night and how much darker it gets when it's gone. So many passages of the sages of the ancient world, of the Jewish calendar, they suddenly made sense to me. On L'Oshushana our tradition teaches, Rabiali Ezel teaches, the world was created or man was created, Adamalishan the first man. In Tractate L'Oshushana 11a, it's the day the Joseph comes out of Pharaoh's prison, out of that deep dungeon. This is the day the slavery in Egypt ended. L'Oshushana is the first kindling of the light and deepest dark of creation, of freedom, of purpose. I've been struggling lately to understand this moment in our history. In some ways it seems like the best time in human history, give or take. Maybe five years ago it seemed a little easier, but also somehow it seems to be unraveling.

3:10There are all these objective measures by which the condition of humanity is better than it's ever been. And yet you will be hard pressed to find optimistic people standing around you at the line in the supermarket. And a lot of that, a lot of it is objective reality. There's real suffering, real war, real pain, ideological conflict, ethnic conflict, goodness knows Israelis and Palestinians have experienced a little bit of that lately. But a lot of it has to do with our attention, with a new kind of industry that farms our attention for profit and that has become so good at farming our attention that it has developed the capacity to hack our brainstem. And so we have real suffering in our lives. That's not fake and you don't have to be Palestinian in Gaza right now or Israeli with family

4:11members either at a war or wounded soldier in your home to be feeling that that struggle. Everybody's lives are difficult. Life is difficult. But there's a level of anxiety, there's a level of fear, there's a level of polarization, there's a teen suicide rate. There's a desperate kind of loneliness that we keep finding in one study after another. And they're all on the rise, even in the most comfortable societies, even in the safest societies. And that has to do not with the real troubles, so to speak, in the sense that there are physical struggles external to ourselves. But it has something to do with our attention, our minds, our souls. Our attention has become the plaything of algorithms. The commodities of corporations and the AI revolution that is about to break on us or that has already broken upon us and we barely understand what's happening in real

5:12time is going to put a lot more wind in the sales of these changes of these trends of these technologies. They will become better at manipulating us, at holding our attention, at building our mental world for us in ways that keep us glued to that damn screen. This is not a self-help issue. This is not how do you turn off the screen a little bit more. This is not small. This is fundamentally changing how trust works in free societies, how the younger generation learns about its story and its history and its culture. We are becoming manipulable and all of it is optimization for attention because the attention is incredibly valuable to produce advertising profit and other kinds of profit. It's optimized not for usefulness, not for enriching our lives or passing on our culture, but for the opposite. Teenagers, I'm now the father of teenagers.

6:12Don't dance anymore because they're afraid to be filmed. They don't date as much as they used to. There's data on this. When they get a little older, they're not having kids like they used to because it's also hard to date. There are knock-on effects here that are profound, that are foundational to how we experience the world. And the strangest part of it is that it's happening to everyone everywhere. It's happening in Britain and it's happening in California and it's happening in Chile and it's happening in Pakistan, all at once. And everybody everywhere seems more miserable than ever. And objectively, our conditions are not as bad as they have been in other times in the past, writ large. These little screens have taken hold of what is possibly our most precious possession, our attention. If you hold my attention in the palm of your hand, you hold my mind in the palm of your hand, my awareness of this moment.

7:16It's as good a definition as any for my soul. And here's the thing about the feed that these little devices, these little algorithms are feeding me. They're not selling me information. Feed is the right word. Information is easy to find. It's cheap. It's available. But it's not profitable. So what the feed sells me is a rousal. Outrage, fear, lust, disgust, vindication, cruelty. Which we are learning online just how pleasurable it can be. A virtual kind of cruelty. Shot in for it. Enjoying that others are a proven wrong, be suffering. And all of it delivered in a carefully calibrated drip. Designed to make the next 30 seconds feel unmissible. And we're all in it. It isn't a side effect of the product. It isn't a knock on effect that nobody expected.

8:18It is the product. It is what holds your eyes on the ad. And Judaism has a lot to say about it. Literally from the biblical Psalms through the sages of the Talmud to my mononies, Te ram al Khal in the 18th century, Ramosh al-Han-Luzato, to present day rabbis, your attention they believed. They wrote, they discussed, is the foundation for everything. It is functionally synonymous to your soul. It is how your soul is shaped. How your mind is shaped. By what it consumes through your eyes, through your ears. We are constantly exalted. We are begged, literally begged, to guard and preserve and protect our attention, to curate what we see and hear and learn and think. We become what it is that we take in. That's so foundational to Jewish law.

9:19It's so much of Jewish law and Jewish ritual. Is that effort to curate what enters our bodies and what enters our minds, to be intentional. From kosher food to the prohibition against Lishonara, the evil tongue, which is gossip. Is anything embarrassing about anyone else? If you listen to embarrassing gossip, you train yourself to enjoy another person's humiliation. If you tell embarrassing gossip, you train yourself to think of others as instruments for your entertainment. And you come to believe that others are gossiping and shaming you behind your back. A thief is absolutely convinced that everyone around them is stealing. These are sins that don't get much press. There are no TV shows about them, but they're a soft unraveling of your ethical world, of your sense of self, of your social world. In Judaism, attention is a religious category.

10:19Proverbs 4.23. More than all that you guard. Guard your mind. Libyecha means your heart, your core. It's translated your mind in Sepharya by some of the great translators. More than all that you guard, guard your mind. For from it is the issue of life. The surrounding passage around that verse talks about what we listen to, how we speak, where we direct our eyes, the path we walk. Your inner life is part and parcel of your outward conduct. You're not going to be able to separate them, not for very long. And your inner life has to be curated. You choose in advance what your mind takes in, on purpose, before the encounter with the world, while you're still yourself and nothing is manipulating you. Rambaam is writing in Cairo around the year 1180 or so in his great Mishnathura, his great

11:22codex of Jewish law. He explains there the message of the Shofar, blast, and Rosasana, the blast of the ram's horn to usher in the new year. The Shofar interrupts the life spent on distraction. It interrupts the distractions of daily life and of chasing after our hungars, chasing after that dopamine hit, in chapter 3 of the laws of repentance in the great codex of Mishnathura. He writes, The Shofar blast is as if saying, Wake up, you sleepy ones from your sleep, and you who slumber arise. Inspect your deeds, repent, remember your creator. Those who forget the truth in the vanities of time and are in error throughout the entire year devote their energies to vanity and emptiness which will not benefit them. The purpose of the Shofar blast is to say, I have been asleep. I have been distracted by vanities.

12:25I have chased hungars. I have not noticed. This is a distinction between stimulation and wakefulness. Being provoked continuously is not being awake. It's a kind of sleep. It's chasing after a kind of hunger. Judging others, okay, raging on social media, is sleep, not wakefulness. The Shofar doesn't ask you if you've noticed everyone else's failures. It asks you if you've noticed your own. Rabimosh Hain-Nutsator, the Ramchal, was an Italian rabbi mystic thinker who settled in Akko eventually near Haifa in northern Israel in the 1700s. I think he writes, Silatius Sharim, his famous work, around 1730. Mes Silatius Sharim, which translates to the path of the just,

13:27is one of the great classics of Jewish ethics. And it's a book that talks about cultivating your character, your self-awareness, and building for yourself a disciplined spiritual life. And he opens it by asking a question, how does a person become lost? Not exactly how do we sin, but how do we forget, not notice, who and what we are. How does a person spend a whole life without looking up? And his answer, the first sentence of Mes Silatius Sharim, the foundation of piety, he writes, is for a man to clarify, to consider, uncover, to discover, and to realize his truth, emate, what his obligations and duties are in this world, and to what he needs to direct his gaze. That is his words, to direct his gaze and his aspirations

14:27in all that he toils all the days of his life. The foundation of piety is to know your obligations and duties in this world and where to direct your gaze. In chapter two, Ramchael explains, one who walks along in his world without contemplating, whether his ways are good or evil, is similar to a blind man walking on the bank of a river. He then describes that this person is closer to disaster than to any kind of rescue, like that blind man on the bank of a river. He draws from a verse in Jeremiah, where Jeremiah describes the people of his generation becoming evil, and he says they become evil by the momentum of habit and behavior, without leaving themselves time to consider their deeds and ways, they fail into evil, the Ramchael writes, without even seeing it. In truth, he writes, this is one of the cunning strategies of the evil inclination,

15:29the Yetz-e-R-Hala, the tendency to the bad are appetites. In truth, this is one of the cunning strategies of the evil inclination, to relentlessly burden people's hearts in service to him, to the evil inclination. The evil inclination is relentless. It constantly chases, it constantly comes after you, and it nudges and nudges to chase your hunger, to chase the dopamine hit. And Al-Hal says, so as to leave no room to reflect and consider which road you are taking. And this inattention to our lives, he explains, is slavery. This is similar to the wicked Pharaoh's advice, writes the Ramchael, when he said in Exodus 5.9, intensify the men's labor, intensify the labor of the slaves. His intention was to leave them no time whatsoever to oppose him or plot against him.

16:31He strove to confound their hearts or levavot also minds of all reflection by means of constant incessant labor. Pharaoh's innovation, according to Ramchael, wasn't cruelty, physical cruelty. It was saturation. Keep them so occupied, they never have the stillness to notice where they are. This is slavery, to hold someone's attention, incessantly, until they are blind and lost and haven't looked up for so long that they've forgotten how. Missilatia Shalim goes on, this is precisely the ploy employed by the evil inclination on human beings, for he is a skilled warrior expert in the art of cunning. Your need for dopamine is going to win. It is impossible to escape from him without great wisdom and far-reaching vision. This is what the Prophet screamed out, give heed to your ways,

17:33Simu Lev of Khem al-Dakehem, that's the Prophet Khagai, chapter 1, verse 7. Simu Lev is literally the modern Hebrew term, pay attention. That every teacher uses when a student starts looking at a window. We live in a weird time. When our attention, our power to curate our mental world, to build it ourselves, has become the most valuable commodity in the world. And because of that, it has been taken out of our hands and out of the hands of our parents. And it has been taken out of the hands of our communities. And it has been transferred. Because it's the most profitable business in the world, to hold us enslaved in that way. And so it has been transferred by these algorithms that hack our brainstem, hold our dopamine in their hands. And we feel more lost than we've ever felt.

18:35And An-Ashsh-Shanam, Imonides instructs us to awaken the shafal blast, is to awaken you sleepy ones from your sleep, from our inattention that is the source of our misdeeds. And this, Ramchal teaches, is the foundation of piety, awakening to our duties in this life by paying attention to the world around us. Those who enslave us also confuse us about our obligations and duties in this world. Part of the dopamine hits that they give us, is the sense of righteousness, through the clicking and the sharing and the raging and the cursing online. They make us believe that that is almost what action is, is real, is moving a needle. It's not about online versus offline. There is a test for whether or not, our sense of righteousness, our sense of moral indignation,

19:35our desire to go fight the good fight, whoever the heck you are out there and whatever your fight is. There is a test for whether you can trust it. In the Mishnah and Pylkea votes, the ethics of our fathers, the chapters of our fathers, chapter 1 verse 17, all my days I grew up among the sages. One of the sages says, and I have found nothing better for a person than silence. Study is not the most important thing, but actions, whoever indulges in too many words, brings about sin. Now, for the sages of the Talmud to say that, is a little bit ironic, obviously, but they're also saying it about themselves, and they had a sense of humor believe me. Read some of the stories out of the Talmud, there's people sitting around laughing, 1800 years ago. The problem with the reshare, the retweet, the repost, is not that it's digital. That could be very effective,

20:35very useful, attention matters. The whole point here is that it matters. That it's free. It causes nothing, it risks nothing. It gives up nothing. But it still returns a full dose of feeling that you've acted. It's exposition without action. It's the multiplication of words. We pay attention. Then we act. We awaken from our slumber to deeds that actually serve the people who we see who need our help. This is very explicit from the prophets onward. Isaiah 58 verse 3 on. This is one of the most famous passages in the prophets. The people complain that God hasn't acknowledged their fasting. And God explains to them that the fast that He wants is undoing oppression, feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, clothing those who are naked.

21:35And then He says this promise, if you banish the yoke from your midst, the menacing hand, the evil speech, and you offer your compassion to the hungry and satisfy the famished creature, then shall your light shine in darkness, and your gloom shall be like noon day. These people are fasting. They are making a sacrifice. They're doing something. But it's not that they're not doing it with enough intensity. It's not that they're not doing it with enough discomfort. It's that their religious effort is themselves for themselves to feel as other acting. It's detached from actual justice and actual care in the world. It's not about how deeply I have felt in other persons suffering or how visibly I announce my feelings. It isn't the rage clicking and rage sharing that feels so righteous.

22:35It's what my response has actually done for that person. You could lead a campaign online to raise awareness for a problem that is absolute righteousness and definitely in the realm of action. But the vast majority of the feed as you scroll is the opposite. It's all the feeling with no action whatsoever. Now, we're not meant to fix ourselves first before we can fix the world. If we had to wait to be perfect before we go out there and do something in the world, nobody would ever do anything useful at all. Birkehavod says the deed comes first. That's a demand for action. It's not permission to postpone action. If not now, when demands heal out. You aren't obligated to finish the task, but neither are you free to avoid it when the most famous verses from the Mishnah. You get to work. But a person whose attention has been farmed for profit? Who's learned about the world?

23:36Only through the lens of an algorithm whose sole purpose and optimization is to hold their attention for the next 30 seconds and then the next and then the next. Such a person can't act well in the world. Can't do the things that need doing. Because they can't tell the difference between what they think and know and feel and what they're being fed by an indifferent algorithm whose sole purpose is to hold on to that dopamine hits again and again and again and never let it stop. Fixing your attention, paying good, close, serious attention to the problem, to the people, that's the mental toolkit. You need to actually get started to actually fix something, to actually do real things. It's no longer you stuck in that loop built for you by the algorithm. It's you stepping out into a real world and fixing real things. The sages say that, well, Shoshana is the day the first human was made

24:38and the first human was sent down in a world without names, without definitions, without categories. And the first person was given the task of standing in front of the things of the world, the animals, the plants, the stars, and naming them, giving the names, questioning them, making meaning out of the darkness and out of the chaos. That's the original human act was ordering the darkness to name a thing, is this powerful thing given to human beings, to give things meaning, but to name a thing, to give meaning to a thing, you have to first be able to see it and you can't see it if your gaze is the raw material in somebody else's supply chain. And Shoshana, close your apps, turn off your screens, sever the threads of the never-ending rage-bait, of the never-ending attention-grabbing,

25:41go and sit and think and learn, and the maddening boredom will surely come, let it wash over you, without a screen, without any way to save yourself from it, because the maddening boredom is an awakening, a struggle of a soul trying to look up, but whose neck is so bent, it hurts. Enjoy that struggle. Become again the guardian of what enters the gate to your soul and your mind. You decide what comes in and nobody else. Not because the world doesn't need fixing, it desperately needs fixing, but it needs your hands, and doesn't need your hot takes. It needs you in the dirt, doing the thing, locally, the world, a person's attention has been sold to a rage algorithm,

26:42can't see any problem clearly enough to actually do the fixing that's required. It's a moonless night. It's the hour when things pivot, when the light kindles, when the dungeon door can open, when slavery can be lifted, if we only wake up, if we take that step, if we take that moment primed for our awakening, and walk through that door, to that freedom. Don't waste this Lushashana. Go out and seek out the prayer, the contemplation, the awakening, and may this time of darkness be that pivot, the birth of new light, in a beautiful and sweet and safer, and if we dare even to hope more peaceful, New Year. I'll see you all next year.