Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis Sermons

People of power, prestige, and privilege shuffling on the pavement with shackles on their ankles, on their way to house arrest or solitary confinement.   Smart people with high I.Q’s, and high S.A.T. scores, from highly endowed universities. Smart people with multiple degrees, fame and titles: senators, congressmen, governors, candidates for the highest offices of the law, financiers, moguls controlling world-wide media; educated people all drawn like moths to the flames of infidelity, mendacity, larceny and bribery.

How can so many smart people be so dumb? How can so many successful people fail in life?

It all depends on what you mean by “smart” and what you mean by “success.” It all depends upon what you define as intelligence, and what you means to you to live a successful life.

What is “smart”? Is it smart to use your mind to manipulate unsuspecting victims of Ponzi schemes, subprime mortgages and derivatives? Is it smart to raise your hand in a solemn oath before Congress and swear that you know nothing of the addictive and polluting products you produce, and that make customers and consumers deathly sick? Is it smart to hack the phones of innocent people, and use that illicit information to threaten, intimidate, and ruin the lives of unsuspecting victims of nefarious design? Does “smartness” mean “shrewdness”? Does shrewdness mean twisting and turning trusting souls who depend on my integrity, my honesty?

And success? What is success? Do I aspire to Gordon Gekko’s success? Do I want Gekko for my friend? Do I want my children to be successful in his manner — hard, shrewd, ruthless, “raw in tooth and claw”? Is success measured by profit? Is profit the bottom line on the spreadsheet of my life? Is success the end that justifies any means — no matter who is hurt or how many are crushed? Is profit the blood on my hands that brings out the sharks?

In the name of transparency, I must confess that my mother, when I was very young, thought that I was smart. Her proof: the largeness of my forehead. Mama was convinced “the larger the cranium, the brainier its owner.” So, she kissed my forehead and blessed me, “A lang leben oif dein kepele.” A long life on your head.  Mama had her own measure for “smart.” Hers was a sort of folk crainiology. With her eyes, she measured my bracycephalic index. By her measure, I was smart!   I accepted her science!

Mama —aleha ha-shalom — would be even prouder of me today, for as I grow balder, my forehead appears larger. I am an evolving intelligence!

And today? What is the measuring rod used today? The definitive measure is the score on your I.Q. I.Q. tests began during World War I, when 2 million American men were sorted out for serving in the Army.   The I.Q. was the first mass, paper-and-pencil test; the scientific divining rod: Who is smart and who is not smart? Who will be successful, or who will fail? Nothing you can really do about it. You’re born that way; it’s genetic. The I.Q. that measures your mathematic and verbal skills predicts your success. The I.Q. is our fate, our destiny.   I.Q. reflects how well you think.

But – irony of ironies – The I.Q. failed its own test. Only two decades ago, a scientific revolution in the field of behavioral science took place, neuroscience made possible by innovative technology (such as brain imaging) challenged the reliable predictability of the I.Q.

And scientific longitudinal studies raise many questions about the dogma of I.Q. predictability.

• How is it that so many people with high I.Q.s founder in life, while people with far more modest I.Q. scores do surprisingly well?
• Why are high I.Q. scorers not higher than lower I.Q. scorers in matters of salary, productivity, and status in their field?
• Why are so many I.Q.s of 160 … working for people with I.Q.s of 100?
• As to success in happiness, how is it that high I.Q.ers are not more successful in romantic love, friendship, and family relationships than those with far lower I.Q.s?

How is it that you can be great in algebra and calculus in school, and a failure in the marketplace? How can you be an academic success and an existential failure?

Once you get out of school, the I.Q. and the S.A.T. do not predict your success in life. If so, something then is wrong with the choice of our measuring rod, and therefore something is wrong with our idea of intelligence and success. What in the world are we measuring?

The news has hit the popular media. This past summer, on Monday, July 11th , on the front page of the New York Times, an article written by Gardiner Harris. He reports that medical schools are trying to “weed out” students who look great on paper but haven’t developed “people communication skills.” The medical schools, including some in our state, have decided not to rely solely on grades and test scores. They want to weed out the smart doctoral candidates who bully nurses, the competent medical students who do not listen to patients. They are looking for “collaborative intelligence,” for physicians who have the willingness and ability to work in teams, for those who know how to relate to their colleagues, and who can establish trust with patients. More than technological competence, medical schools are looking for social intelligence, for empathic intelligence, for emotional intelligence.

(Now, the truth is … I love doctors. “Some” of my best friends are doctors. In these last years, all of my best friends are doctors.)

All of this recent spate of literature on emotional intelligence means that the I.Q. measure is too small and, moreover, that it describes an image of ourselves that is too small. I.Q. thinking is too narrow, too constricting, too insulating, misleading, to embrace the different kinds of intelligences, aptitudes, talents and frames of mind — besides the academic.

From history classes, from philosophy, we learn that I.Q. thinking has a long history. Classical Greek and Roman teaching saw reason and feeling, the head and the heart, as opposing faculties, each pulling against the other. Reason must be in the driver’s seat. Emotions are wild.

As I look back at my own education, both in the secular and the religious day schools, universities, yeshivas and seminaries, I recognize that the I.Q. focus was myopic, split between reason and feeling. The bias was philosophy over poetry; law over lore; Halacha over aggadah; logic over passion. I was caught in the tug-of-war between head and heart, the cerebellum over the cardiac — but not without serious loss.

There is a new wind blowing in the air: social scientists now increasingly refer with new respect to what the seventeenth century philosopher Blaise Pascal called “the reason of the heart” — Le coeur a ses raisons. “The heart has its reasons that reason cannot understand.” What is the reason of the heart?

It discovers a different kind of literacy in us: Not the ability to read the small print of a contract or italicized footnotes, but the intuition to read the non-verbal text that makes human relationship possible. The listening ear that hears the silent scream of the other, the muffled cry of the hurt; the caring to decipher the tone of voice of the other — is it anger, or sadness, or jealousy; the empathic intelligence that can engage in authentic conversations — dialogue that does not quickly turn into “put-down” arguments, in insults that end in “vengeful silence.” Emotional intelligence means, for example, to know when to speak and when to be silent, when to criticize and when to overlook; when to answer and when to hold your tongue. Emotional intelligence entails a new appreciation for mentschlechkeit — Latin, “compassion,” cum passio, is to “suffer together.” “Empathy,” in Greek, is empathia -- “feeling into.”

Emotional intelligence is not registered on the I.Q. score. But emotion today is increasingly recognized as indispensible for living a healthy life.

Your heart has wisdom. The heart can teach. What can you learn from emotion, intuition, feelings, temperament? Nothing except that some of the most important decisions of your life and mine are matters of the heart: Whether to marry, whom to marry, and when to marry; what kind of friends to cultivate and learn to keep, and what kind to avoid; what vocation and what profession to pursue and what not to seek; what kind of life, what meaning, what purpose, do we choose? How much Judaism to put into your home? All matters of the heart and wisdom.

The new attention to emotional intelligence takes us back to neglected, overlooked Jewish understanding of wisdom: The sages in the Talmud asked, “Who is wise? Who is a chacham”? And they answer, “Those who learn from everyone.” Note: The wise learn not only from an academic text, but experientially from an authentic human relationship with one another.

Let me illustrate. Take a section from the Mishnah of the 3rd century in the Common Era, which has guided my rabbinic life and my personal life. The Talmudic sages counsel five illustration of chachma:

“Do not pacify another when his anger is rising.
 Do not comfort another when his dead lies before him.
 Do not challenge him at the time that he makes his vow.
 Do not intrude on him at the time of his disgrace.
 Do not judge him until you have been in his place."

To “pacify,” “comfort,” “challenge,” “judge,” are all arts of the heart, of emotional ethics. It’s not enough to have the information, but to know when, where and how to respond calls for emotional intelligence. To know how to respond to the pain of another.

Emotional intelligence is found in the ability to jump out of your own skin into that of another, to know how, when, and where to comfort and console another— and yourself. How to recognize the anxiety of others and yourself, how to soothe others and yourself.

How to pray and not only read the liturgical texts, but how to engage in a conversation between mind and heart.

Emotional intelligence is not the smartness of Mr. Spock of “Star Trek” fame. Spock will do great on his I.Q. tests. He knows facts, information, data. He is analytical, objective, calculating, skeptical. He scores high, but Spock will not, maybe cannot, be moved. Mr. Spock is laughless, tearless, loveless, passionless. In life, he is forever a bystander, locked in neutral gear. Spock does not engage. Are we becoming “Spock”?

Spock’s I.Q. “thinking” is not just at the work place. It follows us in the kitchen, bedroom, dining room, marketplace and social arenas. Spock is “super-efficient”, super-smart, judgmental, unforgiving with others and with himself.

There is, I suspect, in every adult a child who has felt the severity of I.Q. thinking and judgment, and the insatiable stress to succeed according to the grinding judgment of others. At quiet moments, the child-adult rebels against that obsessive drivenness, whatever its origin, that fuels the fire of self-judgment may be.

“Come! Have you no blessing for me? Do you see nothing in me but the extrinsic academic marks of ratings or material assets, the bottomless bottom-line? Don’t you see in me my softness, my kindness, my idealism, my altruism? Do you see in me only the score?”

And, in a quiet prayer, he whispers, “God, measure me whole. Measure me entire. Enlarge me in my own eyes.”

The enlargement of self was argued for by scientists such as Howard Gardner, in 1983. What do you count as “smart”? Does “I.Q. smart” include talents such as musical intelligence; kinesthetic intelligence, the sense of timing and grace we see in athletes, dancers, surgeons, craftspeople; spatial intelligence; linguistic intelligence; intra-personal intelligence; ethical, spiritual intelligence?

The emergence of sense in emotional intelligence is a cry against the reduction of the dignity of the human being into a “money machine,” into a profit-making commodity.

A cry for respect is heard. “Respect” from the Latin, respicere, — “look again!” Look again at yourself. Look again at the members of your family, at your friends, at your children.

Look again with a deeper measuring rod. At whom do you look?

(Psalm 8:5) We are created “but little lower than God.” I know of no faith that urges self-respect more than ours.

Respect yourself. Love the holy in yourself. Do not allow the world to monetize you, to turn your mind into currency, covered over with green paint.

Like you, I worry about the moral dumbing-down of cultures and the commercialization of education. How do we measure the value of culture? How much a B.A. is worth in the marketplace, how much more an M.B.A gets you on Wall Street. When our culture turns increasingly materialistic we not only “teach to the test,” we “teach to the buck.” That is the threat to our dignity, freedom, potentiality. What of our children, and ourselves? What of the artist, the poet, the philosopher, the social worker, the nurse, the teacher, the postman, the fireman, in them and us? What of our excitement, our creative juices, our thirst for meaning, our hunger for purpose?

We Jews venerate the book, the Torah. When a sacred book falls, we pick it up and kiss it. When the book is worn, we bury it. But the Torah and the study of the Torah in Judaism is not, and has not ever been, an end in itself. So, when the rabbis in the Talmud are asked, “May a Sefer Torah be sold?” They answer: “The Sefer Torah is Holy. But we may sell a Sefer Torah to redeem captives held in hostage. We may sell a Sefer Torah to raise money for the dowry of a poor orphan girl without which she cannot marry.” Intelligence is for the sake of refining our character.

“Smart” is not ability to quote. When the Yeshiva bochur ran to the rabbi boasting, “I have gone through the Talmud five times,” the rabbi asked him, “And how many times has the Talmud gone through you?”

How is it that so many who are smart appear to be dumb? It is not that they are stupid; but that they have outsmarted themselves. Look about you. Without the dreams of the heart smartness turns suicidal, addicted to greed and arrogance.

Either smart, or good? It is a false choice. Smart without good is dumb. Good without smart is folly.  

There are 2 sanctuaries in us: mind and heart.   When they are split apart, the twin tablets are shattered. When they are united, mind and heart give birth to wisdom.  It is a Jewish wisdom.

Give us a mind that feels and a heart that knows. L’shanah tovah. For a year of goodness.