Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis Sermons

Rosh Hashana, 1996

by Harold M. Schulweis

The zodiac sign for the month of Tishri is scales, Libra, maznayim. It is a symbol of measurement. We are measured and we measure. It is important to remember the injunction from the Bible, "You shall have honest scales, honest weights, honest measures in your homes" (Deuteronomy 25).

From the cutting of our umbilical cord to our interment in the ground, we are measured. From the cradle, we are measured: our size, our weight, the imprint of our hands and feet are recorded. We are tagged and tabulated.

And throughout our school career, from K through graduate school we are graded, we are scored, we are given marks: silver stars, gold stars. We are sorted out: 3.6, 3.8, SAT, GRE.

And the holy divining rod, the IQ, Intelligence Quotient. Nothing is more fateful than that single number that ranks us, that holds in its hands the measure of our mental worth and holds the secret of our future. The IQ is our life's verdict, our "netaneh tokef.” Who will succeed and who will fail? Who will be enriched and who will be impoverished? Who will be elevated and who will be depressed? All of this is written and sealed in the numeric decree. The seal of everyone's hand is set there too. We are like sheep who pass beneath the measuring staff.

Recorded, counted, the measure that signs our destiny – gzar dinam.

In my day I knew that the IQ was whispered. It held the secret of my destiny. It still retains that mystique.  The IQ: one singular computation, the number that ranks me on a linear scale of intrinsic and unalterable mental worth.

Who am I? Who am I destined to become? Albert Einstein or Forrest Gump?

It is a biological prognosticator. The IQ determines the order among us. Alexander Pope, in his Essay on Man, wrote, "Order is heaven's first law, and this confessed, some are and must be greater than the rest."

Protagoras declared that "Man is the measure of all things." In truth, man himself is measured for all things.

A century ago the measuring rod, scientific and objective was called "phrenology.” Related to craniometry it measured the shape and the size of the head.

In my family, they also practiced folk phrenology. They felt the bumps on my head and they were convinced that I was a genius because I had a large forehead. A large forehead clearly meant that my brain was so large that it needed a large container. The larger the brain, the larger the intellect. Mama and Papa would be proud of me. In the last years I have lost so much hair that the bands of my head tefillin have been widened and my forehead appears larger.

The IQ is the phrenology of the 20th century. The IQ has oracular powers and we worship at its shrine. Its numbers give us the confidence that this is objective, reliable, predictive, and scientific. Tests that give us numbers dominate our life. They tyrannize us.

I have, for two and a half decades, taught our Confirmation classes, our Midrasha. Students come and students go. But one thing remains the same:  the terror of the SAT, the Scholastic Aptitude Test. Who will live and who will die? Who will get into the favored college and who will not? Who will succeed and who will fail in life? They say you cannot prepare for the SAT, but the apprehension is so great that there are classes and schools for the SAT.

We are measured, but who measures us and by what criterion? The IQ - SAT mentality is a metaphor for the mismeasurement of our lives in our society.

We have allowed ourselves to be measured by crooked scales, by a pseudo-scientific numerology that has distorted our understanding of our children and our understanding of ourselves. It's not the measure of our children. For how I measure my child is the way in which I measure myself. The tree does not fall far from the apple.  How did the rabbis put it? (Sanhedrin 100a) "With whatever measure you measure others you yourself are measured." We are mimics. We mimic each other's measurements.

So before we enter the awesome season of judgment, let us examine the scales which weigh our worth.  In the last years, psychologists and social scientists have challenged the meaning of our IQ - SAT measuring rods. And this new evidence has deep implications for our spiritual understanding of ourselves. We have bought into the dangerous myth that tests and academic achievement are the reliable predictors and the guides for our future.

Increasingly, a variety of scientific studies have shown that for example the students with the highest scores in college were not particularly successful in comparison with the low scorers. And by “successful,” even in terms of salary, productivity, or status in their field. If I were to add by successful life satisfaction, then those who test high academically, with enviable IQ's and SAT's and GRE's tell us nothing about their relationships with husbands and wives, with parents and children, with family and friends, or their romantic relationships.

One study of valedictorians and salutatorians in graduating classes, traditionally chosen for their academic achievement, indicate that they were not more successful in life's satisfaction.  The IQ may tell you that those people who know how to achieve within the academic system as measured by grades will tell you nothing about how they react to the vicissitudes and opportunities of life.

In longitudinal studies, it came as a shock to those who relied on Lewis Terman, the inventor of modern day IQ, that those who relied on the IQ as the predictor of success found that the brightest were certainly not successful when the scientists followed up on their divorces, addictions to drugs and alcohol, and the number of suicides recorded. As many of the scientists agree, at best the IQ contributes about 20% to the factors that determine life success. What then are the 80%, the non-IQ factors that contribute to life success? And why are they ignored?

Why is there such surprise that being able to state Kepler's Laws does not prepare one for life?  We are surprised, parents like myself so anxious to have the child read, write, and compute early – the earlier the better. We would have if we could, a prenatal Head-Start school for our children. Now we read in the reports for the National Center for Clinical Infant Programs that the child's fund of facts and his precocious ability to read are not predictions of academic success. Faster, sooner, quicker are the conceits of ambitious parents. Already five, and can't do calculus.

This mismeasurement of our children reflects our own mismeasurement. It is our modern idolatry. The Bible and rabbinic tradition have long inveighed against idolatry as a belief that is untrue to reality and it is harmful to our morality.

Idolatry means the worship of a part of the universe as if it were the whole. It is the notion that God can be isolated, located in a tree in a stone in a mountain in a river. In terms of assessing the human being, idolatry is the isolation of a part of the talents of human beings, the IQ, as if it were the whole of the human being. Idolatry sees the human being in the image of a machine – a smart machine, a sophisticated quick computer, a calculator with electronic devices that can store, retrieve, and process data.

But that is not my child, and that is not my wife, and that is not my family, that is not my friend. What is missing is the way we measure and are measured, and it is the profound conviction articulated in the opening chapter of the Book of Genesis. I, my son, my daughter, and my wife, and you, are created in the image of God. And God is not a machine. God is not measurable nor are we.

What is missing in this IQ - SAT orientation to the human psyche is the totality of the child and of the adult who cannot be reduced to a singular number that reflects mathematical or verbal intelligence. What is missing is an appreciation of an individual's emotional intelligence, of a person's spiritual intelligence that makes for our humanity.

In our myopia, our society has ignored those multiple intelligences that are indispensable for a healthy, meaningful life-intelligence, such as the capacity to feel, the talent to know how to identify one's own emotions and how to read the emotions of others. The genius of empathic intelligence so essential to our own lives and to relating to the world, is essential to our careers as well. Empathic intelligence is the ability to hear with another's ears, see with another's eyes, and feel with another's heart.

There are talents and intelligences indispensable for success: the capacity to soothe oneself, the capacity not to be overwhelmed by adversities, the capacity to overcome defeat, to rise again and to begin again, the capacity to correct the past.

It came as something of a surprise for social scientists, locked into the straight jacket of IQ, that far more important than IQ was the emotional intelligence of students to hope. That capacity to hope was a better predictor of their first semester grades in college than the SAT scores. It came as a surprise that an optimistic outlook has a powerful effect upon the ability of youngsters and adults to achieve. That shock came to those who were tied to the notion that abilities are fixed properties to be scored, measured, and quantified. They overlooked spiritual intelligence, the talent to understand our own emotions and the emotions of others, the ability to deal with sense and sensitivity to others and our own angers, anxieties and depressions. In one celebrated study, the ability of four year old children to control their impulses, to delay their instant gratification predicted a two hundred and ten point advantage in their SAT scores fourteen later. But let me not fall into the same SAT trap.

Far more is at stake than the scientific accuracy of IQ predictions. The idolatry of IQ has deep religious and emotional implications.   I have witnessed in my study for over two and a half decades now the pain of young people and of older people, whose parents without malice have placed a cruel straight-jacket of achievement on themselves and their children, who can see nothing in themselves or in their children but high marks and high achievement.   I hear the muffled cry of children who, like Esau, feel robbed out of parental blessings because he/she did not measure up to some imaginary brother. "Bless me, even me my father. Have you not saved even one blessing for me?" It is a devastating question. Have we only one blessing for ourselves and for our children? Has the child only one talent and one virtue and one intelligence, one measure? This thinking turns the child into an idol and ignores the beauty, the splendor, the varieties of intelligences. Pay attention to the cry of the child, because it is our cry. We may have substituted M.Q. – material quotient – for I.Q. How much possession, how many silver or gold star bonds measure what I am worth? Free the child, free the parent. Free the child, free the adult. "The real child will come to life only when the illusory child dies." I said "dies.”

In the course of my readings of Howard Gardner and Steven Jay Gould and Daniel Goleman this summer, I came across a stunning article four months ago that appeared by Dr. Daniel Goleman, who covers the behavioral and brain science for the New York Times.

I use this as an illustration, perhaps an extreme one, of IQ idolatry in our society. The article begins with the report of a Professor Alasdair Clayre, a brilliant high achiever, brilliant enough to be compared with Sir Isaiah Berlin. As a philosophy undergraduate at Oxford, he was a recipient of the prize fellowship of All Souls College. He wrote novels and produced award-winning television programs. Yet, the day a book he had worked on for years was to be published, the young Alasdair Clayre ended his life by jumping into the path of a train at an underground station in north London. According to close friends, he had been mortally fearful of what the reviewers may say about the book.

The article would have been dismissed by me as an isolated case but it continued, "scientists and psychologists such as Dr. Sidney Blatt at Yale University who cite this suicide along with those like Vincent Foster Jr., the Deputy White House Counsel, who was a perfectionist, as testimony to the dark side of unrelenting standards for achievement." A growing number of experts see this idolatrous achievement perfectionism as both a blessing and a curse.

Certainly it prompts high achievers, but it makes the achievers vulnerable to over-reacting to what they perceive as failure, often to the point of depression. And once such a person is depressed, new data shows that this perfection increases the risk of suicide more than hopelessness.

The analysis of data from a National Health study of 155 patients being treated for clinical depression revealed that those with the highest scores on scales of perfectionism and achievement did more poorly than other patients in treatment whether medication or psychotherapy.

How can the very smart be so dumb? How is it that those rated so high on the curve can be so emotionally ignorant, unable to distinguish their anger from their fear, their friendlessness from their insecurity?

The patients misinterpreted even small successes as failures. They feared that the people in their lives demand a level of performance that they are unable to meet. Harsh parental standards are a frequent source of this perfectionism. And the message sent to the child and to the self is that whatever he or she does is not good enough.

Have we not seen it in our own lives, outside the laboratory? Bright, credentialed, achievers who are as human as Spock – calculating, efficient, automatons, machines like the Tin Man in "The Wizard of Oz.” Cold, analytic, compulsive, full of technical skills but loveless, unloving, passionless. On the evening before the funeral, I often hear from children the dark resonances of a memory of smart fools and successful ones. Where was the intelligence of compassion and the wisdom of human warmth so thoroughly buried? Those smart and successful who learn in their wake "dark darkness,” those for whom rebuke comes easily but praise obliquely, barely muttered, stingy with emotion, laconic, those for whom love remained a covert action. How are they so smart and so emotionally illiterate?

It is a mark of intelligence to build a machine. Is it less a mark of intelligence to build a family? It is a mark of intelligence to balance a check book. Is it less a mark of intelligence to balance a life? It is a mark of intelligence to read the Wall Street Journal. Is it less a mark of intelligence to read the Book of Torah? When a Chasid reported with wonder that he knew someone who claimed he could build a robot, the Rabbi replied "That is not so great a feat. Let him make a mentsch."

Pay attention to the measure that we use. It is not the measure of God who created us in His image but the measure of Sodom of Gomorrah that stretches and amputates the wholeness of ourselves. On this day of judgment, I appeal for a respect for yourself, for your children and for each other. Pay attention to the multiple talents and spiritual intelligences.

The news in all of this is that spiritual intelligence, emotional intelligence, intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligence—so critical for the sanity of society and the health of the individual—is teachable. Unlike the tyranny of the IQ, with its fateful genetic determinism that burns its number into my psyche that is the measure of my worth, spiritual intelligence can be taught and it is here that faith, religion, and character education are so important. No person can or need write his/her autobiography in advance. That is why we are here. To confront not your I.Q. or M.Q. but the wisdom of your neshamah.

THE NESHAMAH

The neshamah is not a computer. It is malleable and flexible, because spiritual intelligence is not quantifiable, it is not a number. Spiritual intelligence grows. Emotional intelligence is profoundly connected to spiritual intelligence. Faith, hope, the respect for oneself are measured not by Simon-Binet or Lewis Theuman, but as mirrored in the image of God. They are teachable. You can change the way you feel and the way you act by the way you think and the way you believe. It lies at the foundation of Jewish wisdom and literature and it is captured in the Book of Proverbs (23:7) – "As one thinks in his heart, so one is."

During this year, I will be dealing with the relationship of Judaism and the emotional life. I will be teaching classes in the MID, Adult Education, and speaking of it from the pulpit. I will be involved in a series of seminars with the faculties of our Hebrew School and Day School because I believe that that is the unique advantage and the genius of a Jewish religious education. A religious education is not simply a memorization of facts, it is a transmission of wisdom that is reflected in our thirty-five hundred years of experience. It is the education of character and the emotions. The culture of character, the mastery of the emotions, has much to do with avoiding in our lives violence, depression, anger, anxiety. This is the material from the Bible and from the Ethics of the Fathers that we will be transmitted to our children.

Permit me to make not a digression, but an important point. I believe in Judaism, in Jewish education and in character education. I believe in our schools. We have assembled some of the finest teachers in the community. But is saddening and frustrating that so many Jewish parents simply cannot afford to expose their children to the finest Jewish education. It is not a matter of priorities, it is an economic reality that these days especially, two people working very hard cannot afford to pay the full scholarship in our Day School and in our Hebrew School. It is an empirical fact that when this Congregation raised some monies from individuals to offer free tuition in our Hebrew School, that our Hebrew School doubled its student census in one year. I have spoken to many of these parents and have heard from them, and I know that without this assistance their children would not be the recipients of this kind of education.

I believe that every Jewish child should be entitled to an education. I know that we cannot pay for the tuition in its entirety but I know that we can help young people who are struggling to find themselves to send their children to our schools. There is no point my talking abstractly about Judaism and Jewish life and the importance of creative survival and continuity. For many, we have placed such education out of their reach. Without investing in children we will not be able to perpetuate the highest and finest ideals. I plead with you therefore, to make a contribution not to the building fund, not to the material culture of our Synagogue. That has its place. But to invest in our children to see to it that we do not turn away any Jewish parent, any Jewish child who comes to us and any parent who wants to share to the best of their ability their responsibility in supporting the school.

How we invest, in whom we invest, depends on the measure we use, on the scales we set before us. Our character needs a heart-start.

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