The Crisis of Honesty

There is a fascinating principle in Judaism called achrei hamaasim nimshachim ha’levavot, the assertion that our actions eventually influence our hearts and emotions. The other formulation of this is the principle of mitoch she’lo lishmah ba’ah lish’ma’ah, from disingenuous action one will come to genuine sincerity.

So for example, the Talmud says to learn Torah and do mitzvot even though one has ulterior motives, since one will eventually gravitate towards sincerity. This in turn is because our actions are not just recipients of our thought and emotions, but in fact our hearts and minds can be recipients of our actions. There is a power and depth to, even superficial, action that eludes us. We instinctively feel that “faking it till you make it” is, at the end of the day, just that; Faking it. You’ve made it but you’ve also faked it. You don’t really own your success. Yet Judaism combats this perception, assuring us that, even if we have less than honorable intentions in our actions, they are of secondary importance to the supreme value, which is the action itself.

What’s increasingly astonishing is the underlying conception of religion embedded in this principle. Can you imagine a religion that says belief in the salvation of the Lord is everything (Christianity), saying concurrently that actions trump beliefs and emotions? Or a religion that stresses out of body experience and the spiritual supremacy of meditation (Buddhism and Hinduism), asserting that actions are of greater value? Even a religion that is more grounded in physicality, such as Islam, which does place emphasis on action, doesn’t commit to saying that an insincere action is far better than a sincere emotion.

To be sure, there is nuance here that complicates the issue. Judaism also says rachmana  liba bai, “God desires the heart”, and Buddhism and Hinduism also have a large element of engagement with the body, namely yoga. Christianity as well has some color on the issue and it is not all black and white.Yet the nuance merely tells us that we must be careful about placing these ideas in their proper context. The essential attitude however, is the same.

Recently, there has been much research in this field as psychologists and sociologists have become increasingly interested in how human behavior influences people. In a recent TED talk, Amy Cuddy 

gave a great brief synopsis of the research done in this field. She brought several examples of this astonishing phenomenon. For example, people who hold a pen in their mouth, thus forcing a smile to appear, actually become happier just from the superficial action.  Also, people who are forced to adopt leadership roles become influenced on the molecular level to change their behavior. As she says:

“So we know that in primate hierarchies, if an alpha needs to take over, if an individual needs to take over an alpha role sort of suddenly, within a few days, that individual's testosterone has gone up significantly and his cortisol (hormone that deals with stress response) has dropped significantly. So we have this evidence, both that the body can shape the mind, at least at the facial level, and also that role changes can shape the mind.”

Amazing. The two thousand year old Jewish concept of “actions influence the mind and heart”, getting a shout-out at a TED conference. Another great example she brings is that just assuming a certain pose can actually tangibly boost your confidence and performance. As she says:

“So we bring people into a lab, and they do either high-power poses (arms folded confidently in front of you, or wide stance with hands out to the sky) or low-power poses (hunched up, arms hugging the chest, touching your neck or face) they go through a very stressful job interview. It's five minutes long. They are being recorded. They're being judged also, and the judges are trained to give no nonverbal feedback, so they look like this.

Like, imagine this is the person interviewing you. So for five minutes, nothing, you get no cue what they're thinking and this is worse than being heckled. People hate this. It's what Marianne LaFrance calls "standing in social quicksand." So this really spikes your cortisol. So this is the job interview we put them through, because we really wanted to see what happened. We then have these coders look at these tapes, four of them. They're blind to the hypothesis. They're blind to the conditions. They have no idea who's been posing in what pose, and they end up looking at these sets of tapes, and they say, "Oh, we want to hire these people," -- all the high-power posers -- "we don't want to hire these people. We also evaluate these people much more positively overall." But what's driving it? It's not about the content of the speech. It's about the presence that they're bringing to the speech.

I tell people about this, that our bodies change our minds and our minds can change our behavior, and our behavior can change our outcomes.”

Cuddy then goes on to say that she always felt like this was cheating, its just faking it but not really owning the success. until one day she realized that she had faked it ‘till she became it. She had integrated internally her success and it wasn't just some gimmick that helped her reach a place she wouldn't have reached without it. It was part of her now.

This is our challenge, our struggle. All too often in a world that says ‘if it feels good, do it!’, we tend to think that if we go through the motions and perform a good deed without real enthusiasm, its second class Judaism. Its not real, its not genuine. When instead we should be thinking, this is right, this is real, this has the power to become my passion.

This is all just from our perspective. From God’s perspective, something we struggle with and lack enthusiasm in, and that we nonetheless stay true to and do, is incredibly more precious then what we naturally enjoy. There is a famous story of a man who came to the Tzemach Tzedek, the third Lubavitcher Rebbe and complained that he has no interest and passion in learning Torah. The Tzemach Tzedek famously replied “And what should I do. I always feel passion in learning!”. In other words if he always had a desire to learn, then he was never afforded the oppurtunity to  do something for God that he struggled with, that he lacked enthusiasm for, and that he had to really push himself to overcome. Chassidic thought asserts that, the act we struggle to do for God, is so much more precious to the Allmighty then the act we naturally run to do and enjoy.