Mistakes

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Kol Nidre - Wednesday, October 8, 2008

What do politicians guilty of taking bribes, and believers in alien abduction have in common?

According to Carol Tavris and Elliot Aaronson, authors of the book, Mistakes were Made (but not by me), what crooked politicians, and those who believe that aliens have come to earth have in common, and what they share with you and with me, is a propensity to justify our own actions and avoid acknowledging mistakes.

Most people, Tavris and Aaronson claim, when confronted by evidence they are wrong, don’t change their point of view, or plan of action, as we might expect, but instead justify it even more vigorously. Similarly, when we have stepped over some small line in our own moral code, we justify it to ourselves, and so we are more likely to take the next step and the next, eventually doing something, to which we never would have agreed initially.

This human tendency to need to see ourselves as right all the time has profound implications for the lives of our communities and our families, and for the ability of each of us to complete the task of atonement that we have in front of us on this special and holy day.

Self-justification is not all bad. It has a purpose. It allows us to live with ourselves. How many interactions do we have in a typical day? Do we always say just the right word, do just the right thing? Seeing ourselves as we truly are is harder even than listening to our voice on a recording. Instead our minds help soften the blow that a really true mirror would inflict, but there’s a downside to this as well. It sure makes it hard to learn from our mistakes if we can’t see that we made any. And it isn’t that we aren’t being honest. Typically, we are not lying or putting up a front, we really don’t believe we have made mistakes, or at least not any that are consequential.

Our memory helps us in mis-remembering, rewriting the past to better conform to the story we tell ourselves. In writing this book, Mistakes were Made, one of the author’s discovered that one of her favorite memories of her father, just wasn’t so. For years she had treasured a very vivid remembrance she had of her father, who died while she was still young, reading her James Thurber’s book The Wonderful O. She remembered laughing together at the thought of shy Ophelia Oliver saying her name without its O’s. She remembered her father’s teasing guesses at what the fourth special O word in the book might be, Oregon, Orangutan, Ophthalmologist. These memories were an important part of how she understood her childhood. Then one day she happened to glance at the publication date of the book. The book wasn’t published until a year after her father died. She wasn’t lying but her mind had innocently combined the warm memories of having that book read to her by someone else with her warm feelings towards her father. Looking at her own history more critically provided a new way for her to understand herself and the role that other adults had played in her growing up.

It’s not just about memory. Our mind “helps” us out in all kinds of ways. Once we make a decision, our minds bolster it with every supportive fact and story that comes our way. But if we hear information that conflicts with our view, we immediately conclude that it is biased or otherwise faulty. Some recent brain studies have even shown that when confronted with information that challenges our strongly held assumptions, the reasoning areas of our brains simply shut down. They don’t want to hear it. That’s part of why political campaigns, despite the constant calls for informed substantive discussion, lean towards sound bites and emotional appeals. That is why our Musar rabbis, the rabbis who focused on teaching self-improvement, urged us to listen twice as careful to someone with whom we disagree, and to keep asking ourselves, what can I learn from this? The Halachah is always according to the opinion of Hillel, the rabbis point out, but our tradition always quotes the opinion of Shammai first.

When our actions hurt someone else, our tendency is to minimize the pain we have inflicted, (it’s not really so bad, its just a small thing), or find reasons to justify our treatment of the people we have hurt (after all look at what they did, they deserve much worse). That is why we are taught in Avot de Rabbi Natan, a commentary on the well known Pirke Avot, to compensate for this human tendency: “ if you have done a little wrong to your neighbor, let if seem large in your eyes.”. Otherwise our minds start down these roads of self-justification with tiny steps, eventually relieving ourselves of all responsibility.

As a community, these tendencies of our minds allow the victimization of groups and move us towards polarization. To give the most extreme example, once the average German voted for the Nazis, perhaps for reasons that had nothing to do with anti-Semitism, or stood by while a Jew was victimized, even in some relatively minor way, they became personally  implicated in Hitler’s war against the Jews. Questions then bubbled up inside of them. I am a good person, they reflected to themselves, so why am I doing these things that seem wrong? Because of this cognitive dissonance, their predisposition to believe every negative piece of propaganda about the Jews was strengthened and their inclination to minimize in their own minds the horror of what was going on, for most was overwhelming.

I recognize the same tendency of mind in myself when I talk with individuals from Latin America about U.S. foreign policy. For them, 20th century US interventions, with their sometimes devastating effects, are what the United States is about. For me it’s different. Because of my loyalty to the United States, my mind helps me maintain my more complimentary views of our country by dismissing these negatives actions as aberrations of a basically good and caring country. I think something similar operates with regard to US policy concerning torture. Thinking about our nation’s culpability in this area creates dissonance with our positive picture of what our country stands for, and so unless forced to do otherwise, we ignore this issue.

Polarization can result on any issue because of these same processes of the mind. While at one point, we might have been undecided, on the edge on an issue, say of nuclear energy, or the death penalty in cases of murder or rape, once we decide toward one side or the other, we get pulled further and further in that direction. It’s as if we are initially on the point of a great pyramid. Once we decide on one side or another, we find ourselves sliding to the furthermost corner.

Think of the recent discussions around the bail-out now renamed economic rescue package. Over the initial weekend, many people were undecided, seeing many pro’s and con’s. But a week or two later, it was hard to convince those on either side, that they once saw arguments going the other way.

For families, the tendency to justify oneself and avoid admitting mistakes is also very unfortunate. In marriage, for example, or in other long term relationships, we often come to a point of dissonance. I love my partner, we say to ourselves. But we also realize, this person is driving me crazy.

In happy couples, partners deal with this challenge in a way that promotes good will and future trust. They treat their partner as they unconsciously treat themselves. They forgive their partner easily as most of us forgive ourselves. They cut the other the kind of slack we give ourselves. One partner will make excuses for the other, saying that whatever blunder headed things their partner did this time, it was only because of some momentary situational pressure, he was rushed, she was stressed, its tax season, a new product is being released, the High holidays are coming. They will minimize the importance of the infraction: a missed birthday, well birthdays aren’t really that big a deal, a work conflict that trumps family plans, we can go away for a weekend at another time, general sloppiness, well cleanliness isn’t really next to godliness. They continue to believe that their partner is basically good, and therefore interpret whatever is wrong as fixable, something that can be worked out.

Unhappy couples take a different approach. Everything that goes wrong is interpreted as a purposeful attack and everything that goes right is minimized. The roses that were brought as a gift were on his way home anyway, but the letter that didn’t get dropped off at the post office, that was to sabotage all my hard work and important plans. They blame the other person’s unwillingness to change on a defect in their personality but see their own unwillingness to compromise as a virtue. She’s stubborn, but I am committed. When things get bad enough they start rewriting the history of their relationship, because if things are this bad now, how could they ever have been good. If they decide to divorce, that decision itself, will often lead to more vilification to justify the breaking apart of the marriage and the pain that everyone is experiencing. If this hurts so much, I must be doing it for a good reason, so that my marriage had to have been, not just problematic, but an abusive, destructive mess. Stories they used to tell about earlier happier times disappear from their repertoire and are replaced by different stories. Was it really so obvious from the day they met, that their partner was no good? Or does our mind act as an airbrush, touching up our photos of the past?

Some relationships are better than others, some are destructive and should be ended, but much of life is lived in the gray areas, where how we respond to what’s going on makes all the difference. Commenting to me once on the length of some second marriages, a counselor ruminated on whether people make better choices the second time around, or merely become better partners. Maggie Scarf, who recently published a study of long married people, called September Songs, The Good News About Marriage in the Later Years, suggests that the longtime married have simply learned to live with the background hum of some imperfections and to focus on what really matters. If I can admit some of my own mistakes, and if I am willing to judge my partner lekaf zechut, on the side of merit, we can make it through hard times and experience more good times. That is why the rabbis said, where love is strong a couple can live on the edge of a sword’s blade, but where love is gone and there is blaming, a bed of 60 cubits is not large enough.

To prepare this past winter for the marriage check up workshop that Susan Fredkin and I lead together, I studied some of the work of Jon Gottman.  I felt I learned a lot that was useful to me in everyday life. We can become more aware of the tendencies of our minds, and learn to act less automatically and in more considered ways. If we adopt better practices with our spouse, we can take them with us also into other relationships, with our children and parents, friends and those we encounter in our everyday lives. Once we get over the idea that admitting a mistake puts us in a one down position, our flexibility can really enhance our relationships.

Even though our tendency to justify ourselves in all circumstances, makes it difficult, admitting mistakes is a good thing. It’s a big part of why we are here today. The first stage of Teshuvah is of necessity acknowledging where we missed the mark.

In addition to being a religious duty, admitting our lapses is prudent, as denial only goes so far. Others may see us more clearly than we see ourselves and often the mistakes will come out anyway.

Admitting mistakes is also useful to others, especially children who will learn that it’s ok if you mess up sometimes. This is a really helpful lesson as children are constantly corrected by teachers, parents, and other adult eager to point out their mistakes. Children who think that only perfection is acceptable carry a heavy burden.

Acknowledging mistakes allows learning to take place. Charles Bosk, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, studied neurosurgeons in training in an effort to figure out what distinguished later successful physicians. What he found was that those who insisted they hadn’t made mistakes or that their bad outcomes were the result of things outside of their control, were the worst candidates. The residents who said: “I make mistakes all the time. There was this horrible things that happened just yesterday and here’s what we did,” - they were the best. They had the ability to rethink everything that they had done and imagine how they might have done it differently. More important than technical skill or even intelligence, was what Bosk called, “a practical minded obsession with the possibility of failure.”

Admitting a mistake at the beginning helps keep the damage limited - fighting the admission of a mistake, can turn a little acorn of a problem into a tree with deep and wide ranging roots. Think of Watergate and of other more recent situations where politicians and other public figures compounded their problems by not admitting their wrongdoing right off the bat. Perhaps you too have been in a situation where one small mistake or misunderstanding set off a chain reaction that led to a much greater problem.

As Jews we get community support to help us take this important step of admitting to ourselves that we have done wrong. We recite our confessions together, in the plural, minimizing our dissonance by reminding ourselves, even in the act of confessing, that everyone makes mistakes.

We also have a great role model, none other than God, who on several occasions in the Bible, repents of what he has done, recognizing that it was a mistake. Just a few chapters into the book of Genesis, God reflects that he really messed up on the work of creation. Later, after another big move, God regrets anointing Saul as Israel’s first king. The rabbis of the Talmud extend these Biblical texts and say that God regretted making the Exile, The Babylonians, who destroyed the First Temple , The Ishmaelites ( a rabbinic code word for the Roman Empire which destroyed the Second Temple) and the evil inclination.

The idea that God acknowledges making mistakes outraged some of the non-Jewish readers of the Bible. After all if God is omnipotent and omniscient, how can God make mistakes? But the rabbis took it in stride. God is the ultimate learner, and in our tradition, moving forward is even better than being at the top already.

There is a lot in our world and in ourselves that needs fixing, and it all starts with being able to acknowledge that something is wrong. That acknowledgement needs to begin with the words: mistakes were made, they were made by me.