I was a skinny kid. That’s my earliest memory. My parents regularly emphasized it. It makes sense, if I project back. They both struggled chronically with being overweight, so my skinniness would be more than incidental. It also makes sense that I was skinny, because I was heavily asthmatic and that made me what the classical authors would call “sickly.” I was in and out of the hospital due to severe asthma attacks. Bottom line, as current lexicon would convey it, I identified as skinny.
My parents were also from a generation of Eastern European Jews who remembered the Holocaust, and more broadly, World War II. My mother was born in Canada in 1940, and my father was born in Romania in 1938. Both had been lucky enough not to have faced the war directly, but nobody of that generation escaped the impact of it. That, and just the Eastern European mentality in general, translated into ideas surrounding food. You do not waste food. If your children are eating, it’s a blessing. If they are eating a lot, it’s wonderful.
When you’re the child in question, you learn that your parents love when you eat. It makes them happy to feed you, and it lights them up when you ask for more. Eating a lot becomes a way to make love surround the home. My asthma and maybe a speedy metabolism afforded me a lot of leeway in this endeavour. Skinny I stayed. For a while.
I remember the first time I noticed I was not skinny. It was my butt. Maybe I was 10? I have a clear mental image of looking at my profile in the mirror and noticing that my butt looked “like a girl’s.” I raised my concern with my dad. He looked me over and pronounced me fine. I trusted him. Sort of. Doubt had started to enter my mind. A kind of disconnect between external input and an observed reality. But that was likely quickly erased when my mother bought a bag of Halloween-sized Peanut Butter Cups after Halloween (reduced for clearance!), and I ate the whole bag reading Richie Rich comics. I still remember how pleased she was.
I was not a skinny teenager. We can fast-forward through that part. Through learning to wear loose shirts, to hold in my gut so much and so instinctively that to this day I have to consciously relax my core sometimes. Through plummeting down the social pole. Through learning that being invisible was much easier than having the Popular-Crowd-Eye-of-Sauron turn my way. Through becoming invisible so much and so instinctively that to this day I have to consciously decloak sometimes.
As an adult, I had some success with weight loss. I think the first time I thought I had Fat-Rich beat was in my early 30s. I had a rock-bottom moment when I carried my son upstairs to his change-table and could not immediately change his diaper because I was too out of breath to do anything but rest my head in my forearms on the pad and wait until my heart rate slowed. I just stood there with my hands resting on him so he wouldn’t accidentally launch himself off the table for about 10 minutes. A few days later I discovered The Zone. It worked. For a while. I went from 225 lbs and a size 40 waist to about 190 lbs and a size 32, as I recall. I felt really good. I felt like I had found the lane I would stay in for the rest of my life.
Turns out I had not.
We can fast-forward through this part. Through discovering the gym, learning that to gain muscle you need to be in a calorie surplus. Through being immersed in a culture that is simultaneously fitness-oriented and body-dysmorphic. Through dieting down for a bodybuilding competition so that I weighed in at 168 lbs and was wearing a size 28. Through “bulking” until I could no longer claim I had left 225 in my rear-view mirror.
Yeah, I was gaining muscle. That part’s a legitimate win. But the muscle-gaining food attitude layered on top of the child psyche that learned that eating is love was not really a recipe for overall health. I got up to 230 lbs.
Then I had a heart attack.
I was 45 years old. As myocardial infarctions go, I was lucky. It didn’t infarct me up as much as it might have. I was actually well enough to start the school year a week later, to the day, from when it happened, albeit sporting three shiny new stents (fun fact: stents aren’t actually shiny). My cardiologist (because I have a cardiologist now) said that I didn’t have any modifiable risk factors. As much as one might think to blame my weight, I wasn’t obese. I don’t drink or smoke. I am not diabetic. Just a genetic win that created an environment of turbulence where plaque could build up in my arteries. But now that we knew, with some light medication and the stents, there was no reason to think I was just waiting for the next one. And as of today, 12 years later, every visit to the cardiologist reassures us that this is the case. There is no permanent damage and no new blockages forming that we would want to address.
We can fast-forward through the next part. Through getting it through my dumb head that I may not have modifiable risk factors, but that doesn’t mean I should keep eating like an idiot. Through realizing that my heart doesn’t go on vacation, so there are no days off from eating properly. Through getting down to 190 lbs, feeling and looking great, and knowing, with absolute certainty, that I would never be fat again. That I could sit down to any meal and make the right choices, and sit in front of a plate of cookies or a bowl of chips and know I wasn’t going to have any, because even though they were right there, for me, they were not on the menu. Through travelling to Singapore for work in 2016 and finding myself alone at a restaurant and ordering a meal I should not have ordered, telling myself that if I was setting a precedent that every time I’m in Singapore alone at a restaurant it’s OK if I have an indulgent meal, I should be good.
Turns out that wasn’t precisely the precedent I was setting.
My brain may have thought so. Food-is-love-is-comfort-is-entertainment-is-experiencing-the-world-Rich learned the precedent was you can eat like an idiot and not die. That’s the Fat-Rich “free-pass” gambit. I have learned it’s an opening that Fat-Rich uses to start his sales pitch as he works his way in. Fat-Rich isn’t evil. Fat-Rich loves me. His issue is that he’s operating on a faulty signal that got embedded early. His warning signals light up when we’re not using food for love, or as a reward, or for comfort. And he is a hell of an ad man. When he tells me I deserve the fries, or that finishing the pizza will make tomorrow easier, or that I may as well eat the ice cream because I’m already fat, he isn’t trying to hurt me. When he says “You know what? Just let me drive”, he thinks he’s taking care of me. Apparently he is even more persuasive than a heart attack.
And he is me.
Bring on the slow crawl back up. Bring on a worldwide pandemic. Bring on learning to make potato chips and doughnuts at home. Bring on creating a recipe for deep-fried Wunderbar.
In November of 2025, I weighed 240 lbs. It wasn’t a number I got to without a fight. I saw it coming. I tried things that had worked in the past. I hired two different fitness/diet coaches. Spent thousands on them. The second one had me on a carnivore diet. “If it ran, swam, or flew, you can eat it. If not, you can’t.” Maybe that works for some people. It doesn’t work for me. Any kind of free pass will not work for me. I don’t get full. I’m like a pug whose gene for detecting satiation has been edited out. I can and will eat three bacon cheeseburgers with no bun and still have a bowl of cottage cheese because I see it in the fridge. Nothing would take. The scale kept climbing. I was buying size 40 again. XXL shirts. XXXL shirts. I was depressed. I was sure my metabolism had shifted to old-man mode. I resigned myself to being fat for the rest of my life. After all, my parents were. It was my destiny. I no longer believed anything would work.
But there was this little pilot light in my brain that would not extinguish. A small, tentative voice from the chasm that was crying. We have to do something! What, though? I’ve tried everything. And pizza and fries taste so good.
OK, yeah. But this can’t be it. I can’t be this guy. I can’t.
I searched “weight loss for middle-aged men.” I found a program that I already knew about in Toronto. My dad had tried it and had some success. I literally did not find a single other option that claimed to be specifically for middle-aged men. I filled out the intake form on their website. Answering the questions was an exercise in self-loathing. To make it worse, I knew that the owner of the program was a childhood friend of my son’s and that it was very likely he would read my submission. Fuck it. Who cares. Can’t get any worse than this. They contacted me, and I don’t remember how much it was to join, just that it was in the thousands and I couldn’t bear to throw yet more money at my hopeless cause. I didn’t join. My depression spiralled. I was watching myself from outside myself. I wasn’t the same guy in ways that transcended weight. I wasn’t the same teacher. Not the same friend. Not the same husband. Not the same father. I didn’t recognize me, even as I acknowledged, in open-mouthed horror, that in fact, I did. This was me. This was the me I was seeing. This was the me the world was seeing. And depression is a fun spiral—you’re depressed because you treat yourself like shit, so you treat yourself like shit because you’re depressed, and the whole thing is reinforced by the way you see the world seeing you.
I called the program back. Said take my money. I had no expectation that it would work. I just knew that doing nothing was not working.
We can fast-forward through this part. Through being so overwhelmed by the details of the meal plan that I created a one-day plan that fit the rules and just repeated it every day for the first week. Through attending Sunday morning meetings and feeling some kind of way about being in a room full of guys who had a relationship with food a lot like mine. Through slowly starting to resent the guy who led them because he would confidently make up demonstrably false facts to establish himself as an authority. Through realizing I could not sit through one more meeting listening to him explain that “jacked” came from Jack LaLanne, or enthusiastically nod while guys accepted that getting weaker in the gym was simply the price of eating healthy. Through briefly wondering whether OA might fill the same role and realizing that wasn’t my jam. Through finally stopping the meetings because they were making me angrier than they were helping me.
We can fast-forward through all that because here’s where I am today. I am still eating the exact same meals every day. Sure, I adjusted the macros almost right away. More than double the protein the plan allowed for. About twice the fat. The same level of carbs. I was literally starving. Every day felt like Yom Kippur. But that’s not important.
I EAT THE SAME THREE MEALS EVERY DAY.
And I love it. It’s liberating. Not one of the meals I eat is a chore. I look forward to them. I’m just slightly above 190 lbs and wearing size 32. That’s about 50 lbs of fat lost. My lean mass has stayed pretty constant. My strength is up in some areas and constant in others. I gave away about $5,000 in clothes. There are no “in case I get fat again” options in my closet.
I eat the same three meals every day.
I do not recommend this plan. I do not think it’s a terrible plan. It’s a great plan. For me. I’m a compulsive eater. Food for me is like booze for an alcoholic. Knowing what I am going to eat each day, and knowing that there is no room for choice or judgment, is why it works.
But I’ve been here before. In this place where I thought I had Fat-Rich beat. He has shown me he doesn’t get beaten. He doesn’t go away. He is content to wait. He doesn’t have the wheel anymore, and maybe he’s not even in the front seat. But he’s there in the third-row bench seats. He’s content to wait. And I can’t promise he won’t make it to the driver’s seat again. He has before, and it would be naïve of me to assume it can’t happen again.
But he won’t make it there today.
I’m me again. My jokes are back. My smile is back.
I was not an adventurous child. My mother loved to tell the story about how, as a toddler, when I wanted to get off a chair I would turn around and slowly back off, turning my head at least twelve times to check and see how far from the floor my feet were. It’s an apt summary of my nature. Cautious to a fault.
As I got older, though, I realized that while caution is a valuable consideration, when it is the driving force behind all decisions it is really suffocation masking as prudence. So I learned to take risks. Heavily mitigated risks, propped on as many sides as possible by cautious supports, but risks nonetheless. Things that seem tame to many are fraught for me: Riding a roller coaster for the first time in my teens. Diving off the deck of a sailboat. Moving away from home to attend university. Travelling solo to Chicago for a business trip. Travelling to Africa for three weeks. The list continues. In every case, whether the risks seem large or small, I had to prep myself mentally with extensive research, physical preparation, and all sensible precautions taken. I grew accustomed to adventure. Gusseted by safety nets, admittedly, but still. Adventure.
There was one adventure that hovered above the others, though. A blur of colour and chrome that first caught my attention when I was about 17 years old. I was walking back to school from lunch with some friends and the guy flew by. It wasn’t the first time I had seen a motorcycle, obviously. But it was maybe the first time the vibration of the exhaust and the shine of the chrome strummed my nervous system like Clapton’s opening Layla riff. And the guy riding it just looked so fucking cool.
For 40 years I held that image and filled my mental motorcycle album with thousands more. Every year I thought this summer I’ll learn to ride. But summers are short, and life moves along. Stomping on the glass under the chuppah. Changing diapers. Hanging pictures. Negotiating mortgage rates. Road trips to PEI. Watching Sons of Anarchy …
40 years of picturing myself riding the back roads, noticing the way the temperature changes every few kilometres, and the way the smells change after every turn – or so I assumed.
40 Septembers of saying, “Ok. Next year.”
But life either happens or it doesn’t. So this year I made it happen. It’s not hard to get your M1 license. It’s a multiple choice test that is about 85% common sense and 15% studying. I studied for about a week in between sets in the gym, on a website I found that lets you take infinite practice tests. I studied until I was getting them all right every time. Then, sort of on a whim, I took the actual test and passed. It’s amazing. Having a G1 means you are allowed to drive a car as long as there is a licensed adult driver in the passenger seat. Motorcycles don’t have that kind of passenger seat. Pass that multiple choice test and now you are legally allowed to get onto a Harley Road King and ride on public roads. Not me though. Not Richie P. Cautious.
I messaged a bunch of friends who ride. What gear do I need? What course do you recommend? What bike makes sense for a beginner? I spent probably a hundred hours watching YouTube videos on everything from getting on a motorcycle for the first time, to recommendations for starter bikes, to what skills are the most important to master. I signed up for the M2 course and did not even want to attempt to ride a motorcycle until the first day of the course. But in the meantime, I went to 5 different dealerships to sit on bikes. I picked the bike I would buy and the seller agreed to wait until after I passed the M2 course before selling. Super nice guy. Turns out every rider I have met is super nice.
Instagram and Facebook figured out I was into motorcycles. The algorithms started supplying me with endless reels. I learned that there is at least a large subset of riders who are fascinated by falls. I also heard “Oh, you’re going to start riding a motorcycle? Be careful!” from pretty much every person I told. The entire culture, from within and without, has a built-in “this is dangerous” backdrop. Even the instructor of the M2 course, when I took it, said more than once “When it’s your time it’s your time, but we do everything we can to ride safe and smart.” Like you just have to accept that you’re probably going to die doing this.
That is not me. I don’t have that extreme-sport, adrenaline junkie, adventure seeker gene that causes people to think it would be fun to free-solo El Capitan. At the same time, every rider I spoke to, without exception, gets this unmistakable warm cast to their features when they talk about riding. And most people I know who ride have been doing it for years, and have been safe. And I know myself – if there’s a precaution, I’ll take it. When I went to buy the gear for the course, I bought the safer versions of everything. AAA-rated pants with armour. ECE 22.06 helmet. If the guy at the store said there was an extra safety advantage to something, I bought that version.
Finally, the day of the course comes around. They put me on a Honda Grom. And I immediately realized there’s a whole collection of things you need to learn and master, and none of them are automatically intuitive.
Friction zone. Did I turn off my signal. Rear brake. Pylons. Countersteering. Why did my horn honk. Down for first, up for second, third, etc. Why am I suddenly in neutral. Why won’t the bike go into first. Look through the turn.
Ok. I passed the course. I got my M2. But now I knew something I didn’t understand beforehand. Taking the course and getting your M2 does not mean you’re ready to ride on roads. It means you’re ready to learn how to. I was excited. I was nervous. I was anxious to start. I was afraid of making mistakes.
I bought my bike. A 2022 Kawasaki Versys 650. The seller was a very experienced rider who took great care of it. The bike looked new. It was stunning.
It was also about 480 lbs wet. The Grom is less than half that. But the Versys was one of the bikes that was repeatedly recommended to me as a sensible beginner bike. And when I sat on it, it felt right. Sport bikes and cruisers aren’t for me. Touring is how my body wants to sit.
I bought it on a Wednesday. I booked a private lesson for as soon as the instructor was available, which was the Friday morning. He would come to me so I didn’t have to ride the bike on any road with a speed limit over 40 km/h to get to a parking lot. In the meantime, I figured I could practice riding up and down the small residential streets near my house. During the work day. When there’s almost no traffic. Where the speed limit is 40 km/h. I took it out Wednesday afternoon for about 15 minutes. Nothing crazy. Got up to second gear a few times. Never stalled. Never dropped it. Never had a single problem. After 15 minutes I decided that was enough for day one and came home, and successfully parked it in the garage. It looked so good in there.
Thursday morning I figured I would do another 15 minutes of similar practice. No major roads. No roads that are even close to major. Just starting, stopping, turning, and changing gears. Getting used to the bike. To the height of it. To the idea of being on it. I got up to third gear a few times. Never stalled. Never dropped it. Never had a single problem. After about 15 minutes I decided to head home. That meant turning left from a stop sign at a small T-intersection. No biggie. I had proven I could manage that multiple times. Except this time, my brain made a new choice.
Why did it happen? Lots of reasons. My wrist was probably forward on the throttle so that a neutral wrist meant gas. I didn’t look through the turn. I released the clutch too fast. Then I saw I was going wide, and saw the curb coming. I target fixated. There were no cars around. There were no people around. Just me and my bike on a warm summer day. There are five or six things an experienced rider could have done to recover from my error. It wasn’t that I chose not to do them. It’s just that none of those skills were automatic for me yet.
I hit the curb.
Even still, that could have just meant an embarrassing fall. But physics decided to add special sauce. The front tire hit the curb at an angle and that caused the rear of the bike to swing right, and slam into my right leg. Then it threw me off hard into the ground. At least, that’s how I’ve reconstructed it, based on where the bike was, where I was, and what hurt. I don’t remember the fall. I just remember the curb.
My next memory is lying on my right side in the fetal position on someone’s driveway in front of their car, not able to breathe. The owner of the house came out to see if I was ok. I managed to take some breaths, get my helmet off, and answer him. I told him I was ok. No, I didn’t need an ambulance. Sorry this happened in front of your car. Yes, I could get out of the way of your car so you can take your wife to the doctor. So sorry about this. I can move.
Just need a sec.
No, I didn’t need an ambulance. I managed to slither sideways so he could get out of the driveway. I realized then I was not going to be able to get up easily. I still thought I was ok though.
Just needed a sec.
I called my wife. She came with my daughter. I was not ok. Yes, I needed an ambulance. I had suffered a mild concussion, heavily bruised ribs, and a badly bruised calf. My right kidney, it turns out, was also bruised, which we discovered at the hospital when they asked for a urine sample and instead I provided a blood sample. The next two nights were spent on a stretcher in the hallway of the ER so they could keep me under observation for the kidney. When I was discharged, I couldn’t take a single step because of the ribs. I had to take a private ambulance home. My wife had to go out and buy a urinal. We luckily have a medical recliner that we inherited from my mother-in-law. My world narrowed to that recliner and the tray of pain meds sitting next to it. I lived in fear of the first time I’d have to take a dump because I literally had no idea how I’d make it the 15 steps from the recliner to the bathroom. The first time I sneezed, I saw God – and I’m an atheist.
The bike is fine.
40 years of dreaming. 30 minutes of riding.
Ok. Maybe 40 years and 29 minutes. I made a mistake in minute 30. I have spent a career working to help students see that mistakes are only the end if you allow them to be. I thought I took enough precautions. I had all the gear. I wasn’t speeding. I wasn’t showing off. I wasn’t trying something I knew was beyond me. I was doing something I genuinely believed I had made reasonably safe. But I was wrong about how much competence I had yet to acquire.
Toddler Rich checked the floor a dozen times. At fifty-seven, after forty years of thinking about motorcycles and a hundred hours preparing, the floor found me. Hard.
A friend’s reaction after October 7 forced me to abandon comforting illusions about morality, progress, and Jewish identity. What looked like betrayal became clarity: civilization is thinner than I believed, old hatreds return under new moral language, and my atheism does not make my Jewishness any less real at all.
Dear Z,
I am writing to you today to express my gratitude. I will not use your name, because this is not really about your identity. It is about what you came to represent. You have been and continue to be a clear representative of the black fog that is consuming the left and right from the edges. I did not expect to thank you for this. But you have played a role in my evolution as a human being. As an atheist. As a Jew.
Your delusional rage, so righteously expressed, emerging from someone who had previously seemed well-grounded, shattered perceptions I would have deemed unassailable: The idea that morality could be absolute. The idea that civilization could evolve. The idea that Judaism is just a religion.
There is no sarcasm in my gratitude. Living under false perceptions is not something I will ever choose. Reality might suck, but delusion leaves one vulnerable to a kind of narrative-shear, where the fabric of your understanding can be violently rent by the force of truth bearing down on your fantasy. It is always better to know the truth. It is better to know you have cancer so that you can treat it, rather than to live as if you don’t as it kills you.
Here are some of the truths you, and the mob you embody, have helped me discover.
There may be something like absolute morality, but we are nowhere near orienting practical morality toward it.
I always believed that there is a Platonic ideal morality. Just as we can never actually see a perfect circle, yet can still recognize what prevents actual circles from being perfect, I believed we could also tell when something or someone was objectively immoral by comparing it to an ideal – which is to say an absolute – morality. In this way, I believed if we were being precisely and accurately honest, we could all agree when something is immoral. You have helped me see that this is not true. You have shown me in real time how morality is actually defined post hoc in order to justify a more basic instinct that may have been previously suppressed under a different moral framework. I see now that while the need to belong to the mob trumps any notion of an absolute morality, the need to feel moral must still be met. Therefore instinct precedes morality, and not the other way around, as I had believed. In other words, people will decide what they hate, and then assemble a moral framework that decrees that hate to be righteous.
Antisemitism sits squarely in the centre of this phenomenon. For reasons I can’t begin to claim to understand, Jew hatred appears to be one of the most durable cultural reflexes in human history. It is not biological, but it is culturally deep enough that, under the right conditions, it returns with astonishing speed. Since we can also be taught to suppress immoral instincts, there are times when Jew hatred is suppressed because it is deemed immoral. I thought that suppression was something else – I thought it was erasure. A progression toward a morality where hating Jews simply for being Jews was a relic of a less evolved humanity.
You have shown me how easy it is to transition from those times into the opposite. I have watched, through you, the mob simply reconstruct a morality that now requires that in order to be moral, you must dehumanize and then vilify Jews. All while you still claim not to be antisemitic, by redefining words like antisemitism, and even redefining the word Jew. It is fascinating to me that you don’t see the contradiction: I am not a Real Jew unless I agree with your vilification of Jews; and because I am not a Real Jew, hating me is, by your logic, not antisemitism. It is an interesting, and admittedly frightening, workaround: your new morality creates the loophole it needs to avoid looking like a betrayal of the one it replaced.
I thought humanity was on a progression toward absolute morality. I was incorrect. You helped me see that baser instincts are not erased by morality; they are temporarily suppressed by moral frameworks. Like dormant volcanoes, they remain quiet for a time, only to erupt when too much tension has built beneath the surface. When they erupt, new moral frameworks are constructed to make the eruption seem ethical. That is why you and so many like you seem to me to be behaving so poorly while believing yourselves righteous. I am still operating on the moral framework of my youth. You are not. And what is objectively most jarring is that you think you are, not noticing the diametric path you are now on.
Civilization does not evolve. It cycles.
History is not a story about the past. It’s a user’s manual for the future. The saying “history always repeats itself” tries to encapsulate that, but it’s not accurate enough. And for those of us lucky enough to be born at certain parts of the cycle, we can maybe be forgiven for thinking of history as something that happened before we evolved into something better. I certainly thought so. I was taught about pogroms. I was taught about Kristallnacht. I was taught about the Holocaust. I was taught “never forget.” But the lesson I did not take in was that these are not stories about terrible times we grew past. They are demonstrations of what humans can and will do. And they happen again and again and again. The point is not to learn from them because knowledge guarantees prevention. We are meant to learn from them so we can recognize the pattern when it returns, even if recognition does not grant us the power to stop it. I didn’t understand that.
If someone had told me when I was 12 that in my lifetime I would see people in Canada and the U.S. openly and publicly rejoice at the rape and murder of Jews in 2023, and be celebrated as righteous for rejoicing, I would have been certain they were wrong. If they had told me that the fringes of the political left and right would unite on any idea, let alone that Jews are the world’s most significant problem, I would have been certain they were insane. If they had said that people would blatantly and remorselessly rewrite history to the point of claiming that the Holocaust was fabricated, or that Jesus was Palestinian, I would have been certain that there was no way the society we live in would tolerate that level of absurdity. We had advanced past that, right? Past intolerance, past witch trials. Past pogroms.
Nope. You have taught me that we don’t get past anything. We just cycle.
Being an atheist Jew is not a contradiction.
This is the thing for which I am most warmly grateful to you. I am an atheist, but I did not grow up that way. It’s something I came to realize as I aged and studied and gave thought to things like God and religion. And I thought my atheism separated me from Judaism. That I had stepped away from my roots. Your behaviour has helped me see that my being an atheist does nothing whatsoever to alter my status as a Jew, or my belonging with Jews.
See, I was born to a Jewish mother. Therefore I am Jewish. That’s it. I can’t turn it off any more than you can turn off being born a person with brown hair. A brown-haired person who dyes their hair blond has not changed what grows from the root – they are just living in a way that the world can’t see that part of them … until the roots start to show. To be sure, some Jews dye their metaphorical hair so well and so often that nobody knows they are Jewish. In some cases, even they have forgotten. The hair-dyeing has become so much a part of their life that they have forgotten that it’s not something natural blondes have to do. But it doesn’t matter. If you are born Jewish then you are Jewish. You can opt in by converting, but you can’t opt out. History has shown us that even when some of us have believed we could opt out (or were forced to), we couldn’t. Judaism is immutable.
So how is it that you helped with this? When, after October 7, I found myself reflecting on, and sometimes explaining to you, Jewish ties to the land of Israel, I at first felt like I needed to qualify that I am not religious in any way, and am in fact an atheist, so as to distance myself from a religious viewpoint, as if that somehow coloured my perspective one way or another. Thanks to you, I was compelled to examine that deeply, and thus discover something profound. Jews are not bound together by a religion. Jews are a people. We don’t choose who is a Jew and who isn’t. We don’t proselytize, and we do not treat being (or not being) Jewish as a measure of human worth. Of course, there are religious Jews who follow their sect’s interpretation of the laws of the Torah – and there are many sects! But that’s only a subset of the Jewish people. A Jew can be religious, secular, atheist, observant, non-observant, culturally Jewish, historically Jewish, or some complicated mixture of all of these. None of that makes Jewishness less real. It makes it more obviously a peoplehood. Because it’s an immutable characteristic, you can layer whatever you like on top of it without changing it.
Because of you, dear Z, I feel secure again owning my Judaism, and no longer struggle with any inherent contradiction in the fact that I am also an atheist. I love my people. I love being with them. I love the traditions, the history, the unrelenting emphasis on learning and questioning and challenging and then learning more. I love our ties to Israel. I love Israel.
This has been your gift to me, even though you didn’t think you were giving me one.
Z, I am sincerely thankful. Your real-time metamorphosis, likely driven by the hope that somehow I would be shamed, remorseful, or even outraged, has instead brought me to a place of greater peace and acceptance. You did not shame me. You clarified me. You helped me understand that civilization is thinner than I believed, and that Jewishness cannot be explained simply as religion. I can see now that the world is not as I thought, and that is sad.
But continuing to believe otherwise would be sadder.
Reflecting on the unseen hands shaping our world, where influence is wildly disproportional, power unchecked, and the consequences cascade through lives unconnected to the actions.
A room. Or a table. Behind doors we don’t see.
A few people decide. Not you. And not me.
No one who will carry it sits in those chairs.
No voice from the thousands. We’re never there.
It spreads farther than clouds. Like oil on the ground,
We are in danger. Public discourse is almost dead, with important conversations being shut down by twisted logic resulting in false associations and cancellations. We need to step in and reclaim sanity. This article discusses some of the most glaring logical offenses that are sadly ubiquitous in the global conversation.
Anyone who voted for Trump is a white supremacist.
For many of you, reading that sparked a response charged with negative emotion. Some people probably got so angry they stopped reading and aren’t even here anymore.
Maybe you voted for Trump and took it as an attack. Maybe you hate Trump and got angry because you think the US has been overcome by white supremacists. Maybe you strongly agree with the statement. Maybe you vehemently disagree. There are lots of reactions that statement can instigate. But if it upset you, regardless of why, I offer my sincere apologies.
For the record, I disagree with the statement. In fact, I know it to be false. I’m Canadian, so I didn’t have a vote, but I have more than one personal acquaintance who did vote for Trump, and none of those people are white supremacists. That should be safe for me to say. Yet in many arenas, it isn’t. In many arenas, I would just have caused myself to be written off as a white supremacist too, among many other vile labels – guilt by association with a phantom assumption. And I haven’t even stated who would have gotten my vote if I had one which in any case is irrelevant. What is relevant though is how quickly and completely conversation gets shut down on critically important topics like this one that plague our collective discourse. This phenomenon demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding, or perhaps worse, a deliberate lack of honouring, some core principles that we study in formal logic, which has roots both in philosophy and in mathematics.
Let’s switch to a less charged example.
Anyone who drinks water is a marathon runner.
It’s silly right? Drinking water does not imply that you run marathons, and to make the claim that it does is clearly ridiculous. What’s less absurd though would be saying that anyone who runs marathons drinks water. But even there, be careful, because there’s an association that many people will make that has nothing to do with why that sentence is true. See, although distance running does require proper hydration, that’s not the reason that marathon runners drink water. A marathon runner is a marathon runner even when they are not running. And they drink water for the same reason non-marathon runners drink water. In fact marathon runners drink water for the same reason all humans, not to mention marine mammals, sea birds and even trees drink water. Because they need it to survive. So if you discover someone drinking water, it’s not likely you would jump to the conclusion that they are a marathon runner. The distinction between “If you are a marathon runner then you drink water” and “If you drink water then you are a marathon runner” highlights the difference between what formal logic calls implications and their converse. It’s important to understand this concept, so let’s work on a short lesson.
First, we need to understand what we mean in formal logic by a statement.
Definition of “Statement“
In formal logic, a statement is a sentence that has a definite state of true or false. Some examples:
“Justin Timberlake is older than Justin Bieber.” (provably TRUE statement)
“5 is an even number.” (provably FALSE statement)
“‘5 is an even number’ is a statement.” (humorously constructed TRUE statement)
“There is sentient life on other planets.” (Definitely either TRUE or FALSE, but although I have a guess, I have no proof that I’m right)
We can not always tell if a statement is true.
Although it’s fairly easy to tell if a sentence is a statement, it’s often difficult or even impossible to tell if it’s true or if it’s false. The statement “There is sentient life on other planets” does have a definite truth value, though we can only guess at what that value might be. And that’s where opinion enters the arena. Now consider this much more highly charged statement: “An unborn fetus is not a living human.” I bet that one sparked some intense emotion in many readers. And I’d also be willing to bet that the emotion it sparked is tied to your opinion about whether or not it is true.
That’s just your opinion
Guessing at the truth value of a statement is my preferred way to define opinion. We can argue over what we think about aliens from other worlds, or when human life begins, but until we have evidence that proves or disproves our position, all we are doing is voicing opinion. Isaac Newton said it well:
(We) may imagine things that are false, but (we) can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding.
Isaac Newton
So we can apprehend (consider in our thoughts) beliefs and opinions, but false is false, so any belief attached to a false thing is not true understanding. Compounding the problem this highlights is that it is human nature that purging a disproven belief requires a deliberate and often painful reorientation, so often what we see is denial, and a loyalty to a false opinion. It might be human nature, but it’s dangerous.
Consider this thought experiment: Suppose you are pro-choice, because you indisputably support the right of a human to make decisions about their own body. It would likely (but admittedly not certainly) then be the case that you also believe that the fetus is not a human, and so there is no conflict between the rights of the mother and the rights of another human. Then suppose you learned, conclusively, that a fetus is a human baby, effectively equating abortion with homicide. How would that make you feel? Would it be easy to change your position? In this thought experiment, where the premise is that it has been proven that a fetus is a baby, would you choose to deny that truth?
It’s an extremely difficult thing to think about dispassionately. But beware when asserting opinions as facts, and be prepared to understand that until a fact is known/proven, your opinion will differ from that of others, and arguing with them without establishing that both arguments are predicated on opinion is more of an exercise in charisma than debate.
Opinion Vanishes in the Face of Proof
Once the truth value of a statement is established via proof, opinions are rendered irrelevant, and they only persist as the result of deliberate obstinacy, miseducation/delusion, or in many cases, indoctrination. Interestingly, this applies even if your opinion happens to align with the truth. If it is your opinion that there is sentient life on other planets because you believe Star Trek is a documentary, then even if there is sentient life on other planets your opinion is based on delusion, and the fact that you are correct is coincidental. Think of it this way: If you’ve been maintaining that there is life on other planets because Captain Kirk fought a Gorn, and one day life is discovered on another planet, you would look pretty foolish proclaiming that you were right all along. So whether “correct” or not, opinions are just opinions. It is interesting to consider the ramifications of using miseducation to deliberately delude uneducated people into having an opinion that aligns with the truth, but maybe that’s a topic for a different article.
Ok, so hopefully we understand now that a statement is either true or false, and that we can’t always know which it is. Furthermore, if we guess, then we are forming opinions. This gets even more interesting (if that is the word for it) when we create compound statements by linking statements conditionally. Like saying “Ifyou voted for Trumpthenyou are a Nazi.” Using If/then to link statements is called implication. We use them a lot.
Definition of “Implication“
“If you are reading this article, then you understand English.”
Is that true? I think so. In any case, that statement is an example of an implication – a compound statement that conditionally links two statements. Implications claim that if we know that one statement (called the predicate) is true, then we can conclude that a second statement (called the conclusion) is also true. Even though implications don’t always present the same way, they can always be formulated using “if/then”.
Because implications are statements, they will either be true or false. For example:
Predicate: I was born before 1970 Conclusion: I am older than 30 “If I was born before 1970 then I am older than 30” True – based on arithmetic
Predicate: A person is wearing pants Conclusion: That person is hungry “If a person is wearing pants, then that person is hungry” False – a person who was wearing pants and was hungry, who has just eaten their fill, will still be wearing pants (though they may have unbuttoned them!)
Any statement that can take the form “If A, then B“, which is to say “A implies B“, is an implication. For example:
“All football players use steroids”
can be reformulated as
“If you are a football player then you use steroids.”
It is worth noting that the above statement about football players is an example of a false implication, even though it is the opinion of many. Unlike opinion, truth is not ascertained or even swayed by consensus.
It’s also important to distinguish between the truth of an implication, and the truth of the conclusion. For example, “If I win a hundred million dollars in the lottery then I will buy a Lear Jet.” is a true implication (ask my wife – we’ve discussed it), but it does not mean I am going to be buying a Lear Jet. When “A implies B” is true, it doesn’t mean B is true, or even that B could ever be true. It just means that if you observe that A is true, then you can conclude that B is also true. This connection actually has a cool Latin name in formal logic. It’s called Modus Ponens.
Modus Ponens
Modus Ponens is a special implication that we use to make deductions by citing established implications. It says “If A implies B, and A is true, then B must also be true.” A very common error is when people pervert modus ponens into “If A implies B, and B is true, then A must be true.” This is faulty. Consider this example:
“If you stick your hand into a toaster while it’s on, you will burn your hand.” This is true.
Now consider these two arguments:
Modus Ponens “I see you stuck your hand into a toaster while it was on. You must have burned your hand.”
Faulty Deduction (perverted Modus Ponens) “I see you burned your hand. You must have stuck it into a toaster that was on.”
This perversion of modus ponens can also be dangerous. Imagine the implication “If you are racist then you supported Trump” is true. Now consider this faulty deduction: “I see you supported Trump. You must be a racist.” This is precisely the sort of perverted logic that divides and fragments society, potentially irreparably.
This leads us to the notion of the converse of an implication, and the contrapositive.
“Converse” and “Contrapositive”
Every implication has a converse and a contrapositive. The converse switches the predicate and the conclusion, so the converse of “A implies B” is “B implies A“. On the other hand, the contrapositive of “A implies B” is “not B implies not A“. The contrapositive means that if you know the conclusion is false, then you can conclude that the predicate is false. It’s essentially saying the same thing as the implication, in a different way. That argument has another cool Latin name: Modus Tollens:
Modus Tollens
Like Modus Ponens, Modus Tollens is used to make deductions using established implications. It says “If A implies B, and B is not true, then A must also not be true.”
Consider this example, which demonstrates the ideas of implication, contrapositive, and converse. Suppose you took a Spanish course where students who fail earn a grade of F:
Implication: “If I got a C, then I passed the course.” (True – A credit is awarded for any grade other than F) Modus Ponens: ” I see that you got a C, so you must have passed the course”
Contrapositive: “If I didn’t pass the course, then I didn’t get a C.” (True – not passing – i.e., failing the course, means you got an F) Modus Tollens: “I see that you failed the course, so there’s no way you got a C.”
Converse: “If I passed the course, then I got a C.” (False – You may have gotten an A, B, C or D.) Faulty logic: “I see you passed the course, so you must have gotten a C.”
Notice that the implication is true, the contrapositive is also true, but the converse is false.
Sometimes the converse is true, and sometimes it is false
For true implications sometimes the converse is true:
“If we have a common biological parent then we are biological siblings.” has the converse “If we are biological siblings then we have a common biological parent.”
and sometimes it isn’t:
“If our fathers are brothers then we are cousins.” has the converse “If we are cousins then our fathers are brothers.”
So knowing an implication is true does absolutely nothing to tell you if the converse is true – or false. Yet there is a strange insistence in public discourse that true implications always have true converses. This is glaringly demonstrated in political discourse.
How would anti-immigration voters have voted?
Consider this implication, which may or may not be true (probably is), but many readers will definitely have an opinion about it:
“If you are racist then you will not hire a black candidate.”
Now consider the converse:
“If you did not hire a black candidate then you are racist.”
I have heard this claimed countless times. And there’s no logical foundation for it. This highlights another common error people make. Implications create links (being racist links to not hiring black people), and people then use those links to try and reverse-engineer a converse (not hiring a black person links to being racist). This can be attributed to the notion of ruling out. Suppose that all immigrant-haters voted for Trump, and that you did not vote for Trump. Then using Modus Tollens I can rule you out as an immigrant-hater (you did not vote for Trump, so you must not hate immigrants).
However if you did vote for Trump, then I can’t use Modus Tollens or Modus Ponens to disprove (rule out) the possibility that you hate immigrants, because in the implication we are citing, hating immigrants is the predicate, not the conclusion, and all I have observed is the conclusion. So your position on immigrants is something I’d have to look at other factors to determine.
Not being able to disprove a statement does not mean it’s true
True: “If you get a D in Spanish, then you earn a credit.”
Suppose you believe that I got a D in Spanish. Now suppose that in an attempt to prove that you are correct, you do some digging into the school records and discover that I did take Spanish, and that I earned a credit. Does that mean I got a D? You can’t tell. All you know for certain is that I am in the group of people who earned a credit. You hopefully also know that anyone who earned an A is in that group. Me being in the same group of people who earned a D is not proof that I earned a D, because all the credit-earners are in that group, and they did not all earn D’s. You could say that you have gathered some evidence that I earned a D, but you can not say that you have proven it. So you have neither proven nor disproven your belief. On the other hand, if your digging showed that I took the course but did not earn the credit, Modus Tollens rules out the possibility that I got a D, and your opinion is false. Which is to say, “You did not earn a credit, therefore you did not get a D”.
So then if it’s true to say that immigrant-haters voted for Trump, and you know your coworker voted for Trump, then all you know is that your coworker is in the same group as immigrant-haters. Now even though you can’t rule it out, you can not conclude that your coworker hates immigrants. So if you start a conversation with them by accusing them of hating immigrants, that’s bound to go poorly.
Implication does not imply causation
We also need to think about a common misconception, which is that true implications are therefore causations. That’s the false belief that if we know that “A implies B” is true, it must mean that “A causes B”. This is actually just another example of mistakenly believing a converse:
“If A causes B then A implies B” is an implication where the conclusion is also an implication, and it’s true.
The converse, “If A implies B then A causes B” is false.
Consider this example, which has embedded causation:
Let A be the statement “Your car has no fuel” and Let B be the statement “Your car won’t start.”
So: not A is the statement “Your car has fuel” and not B is the statement “Your car will start.”
Implication (If A then B): “If your car has no fuel then it won’t start.” (True – Cars with no fuel won’t start, and even if there are other things wrong with the car that we don’t know about, knowing it has no fuel allows us to invoke causation to conclude it won’t start)
Contrapositive (If not B then not A): “If your car will start then it has fuel.” (True – You can’t start a car if it has no fuel)
Converse (If B then A): “If your car won’t start then it has no fuel.” (False – there are lots of reasons why a car won’t start and being out of fuel is only one of them)
… which brings me to strength-training.
What Does This Have To Do With Strength Training?
The car example shows that even when causation is the reason an implication is true, we still don’t get the converse. But sometimes the example in question is less clear, and people jump to conclusions.
For example:
Truth Due to Causation: “If I participate in a strength-training regimen at the gym, then I will get stronger” (True because of the causal relationship between strength-training and getting stronger)
So we have an implication that is true because of causation. The converse is “If I got stronger, then I participated in strength-training at the gym”. That’s a conclusion people jump to all the time. “Oh, you have gotten stronger – you must have been working out!” False. Lifting weights in the gym is not the only way to get stronger. Someone who gets a job that requires heavy lifting will also get stronger. Children get stronger just by growing. So if you find someone who has “gotten stronger” you cannot automatically conclude that they started a strength-training program at the gym. Again, even when there is causation, a true implication is not proof that we have a true converse.
It’s time to bring this back to public discourse. It’s crazy-making to see how many people seem to think that the converse is always true. Or if not, they pretend they do, to fool others into buying an argument. Let’s look at an extremely charged example: rape.
All rapists are men
This isn’t technically true, but while a very small percentage of rapes are not perpetrated by men, the vast majority are. This is a horrible truth. One that has troubled me since I was old enough to have learned it. As a thought experiment, let’s simplify this and for a moment assume that all rapes are committed by men. So then we would have this implication:
“If you are a rapist, then you are male.”
But consider the converse:
“If you are male, then you are a rapist.”
I hope we can clearly see that the converse is false. Sadly, I have heard this converse claimed (or implied) many times, and it does nothing at all to help the real issue of rape. Good people want to eradicate rape, because rape is monstrous, and good people want to reduce suffering. Taking good men and lumping them in with bad ones by claiming masculinity as the driving force behind the desire to rape, creates extra suffering. It makes no sense.
There are many other places where we see the converse invoked dangerously. One chilling example is when someone asserts that an implication is true, but then get accused of having supported the converse. This then changes the conversation about a potentially difficult issue into one of accusation and defense.
I will list some examples of implications I have heard claimed, where an immediate switch to the converse then changes conversation to the wrong topic. As an exercise, in each case, state the converse of the implication in your mind and ask yourself what trouble that might cause, and how it would poison the (potentially difficult) conversation. As I said, these are heavily charged statements. In many, if not all cases, the reason they are heavily charged is probably not the implication, but what the converse would mean, if it were true.
I feel that I have to repeat that I am not claiming the implications in the examples are true, though I know they are the opinion of many. But if they are true, it’s because they are, and if they are not, it’s because they are not. Opinion vanishes in the face of knowledge. Still, arguing about the converse has nothing to do with either of those cases and changes the dialogue into something irrelevant. It’s important, as you read, to keep the dispassion of viewing claims through the lens of formal logic. For each implication, consider what it would mean if it were true, and whether the converse would then also apply.
Do you think any of these are true? Do you think their converse is true?
If a person is a white supremacist, then that person would have supported Trump over Harris.
If a person is a mass killer, then that person is a gun owner.
If a person is a member of Hamas, then that person is Muslim.
If a person is misogynist, then that person is male.
If a person is a stalker, then they will like all your photos on Instagram.
If someone wants to rob you, then they will walk behind you at night.
Do you think any of these are true? If so, do you also think the converse is true? If you think the converse is true, is your evidence of this that the original claim is true? If so, you have no foundation to back the claim to the converse. Seriously. None. Hopefully this article has made that clear.
Just because an implication is true, it does not mean its converse is also true.
And yet there seem to be a huge number of people out there who think that it is impossible to hold to a claim and not hold to the converse. For example they think that if you talk about mass killers being gun owners then you want to paint all gun owners as mass killers – which is a ridiculous notion on so many levels, perhaps the most obvious being the staggering number of gun owners who are not killing anyone with them – and they label you as ignorant, or as a fear-mongering anti-freedom fanatic with a hidden agenda. But there is simply no logical foundation for this connection. What they are doing, from a logical perspective, is saying that since you believe an implication is true, you also believe the converse, and so you are pushing a hidden agenda. And I just can’t say how many ways this is wrong, and dangerous.
“But wait!” some say, “fear-mongering anti-freedom fanatics pushing a hidden agenda DO say that most mass killers are gun owners! So by saying that aren’t you one of them?”
Once again, they are invoking the converse of an implication, possibly without realizing it – though I suspect in some cases fully realizing it and doing so anyway to redirect away from rational discourse. “If you have a hidden agenda then you will say that most mass killers are gun owners” is not the same as “If you say that most mass killers are gun owners then you have a hidden agenda”.
To illustrate just how silly all of this is, I’ll talk a little about probability, using Venn Diagrams. This time we’ll talk about serial killers.
Most Serial Killers Eat Breakfast
This is an implication, but what’s not immediately obvious is that it invokes a probability statement due to the word “most”. It means that if you encounter a serial killer, then they probably eat breakfast.
Because of how we use the word most, it arguably means anywhere between 50% and 100%, so for the sake of argument, let’s suppose that 80% of serial killers eat breakfast. I’m sure that number is low, but I’m thinking that if I attempt to consult studies on the eating habits of sociopathic murderers, I may find limited data has been collected. In any case, assuming 80%, a visual representation might look like this:
So if you want to bet on whether a particular serial killer eats breakfast, and you don’t know ahead of time, you should make the bet, because you will probably win.
Now consider this Venn Diagram: Even though the green circle isn’t nearly large enough (if it were, we wouldn’t even see the yellow part), this still demonstrates that most people who eat breakfast are not serial killers. Think about how much green there is compared to how much yellow. So if you came upon someone eating breakfast, you should be pretty confident that they are not a serial killer, keeping in mind that it doesn’t constitute proof that they are or that they are not. I’m thinking that is probably the case for you – that you don’t consider breakfast-eating to be compelling evidence of evil.
Being in the same group as someone does not mean you share all the same qualities
When someone says or does something that a serial killer, (or a racist, a rapist, a transphobe, a misogynist …) might do, it is false and dangerous to conclude that that person is one of those evil things. Notice the italics on the word might. That’s a probability word. A rapist might have eaten breakfast today. So might a non-rapist. And there are way more of those. To call someone a rapist, you would hopefully be using evidence they had raped someone, not evidence that they had eaten breakfast.
Or evidence that they are male.
Bad People Can Say True Things
It’s true. Truth is not the sole domain of the virtuous. Truth, in fact, like justice (purportedly) is blind. And it’s critical that we do not devalue the truth of a statement just because it aligns with the opinion of someone nefarious.
For example, someone who hates Muslims would be willing to assert that most suicide bombers have been Muslim, because it would further their agenda of hate, especially for those who immediately jump on the converse, which is clearly absurd. But if the claim is true, then a rational thinking non-racist could also say it. To then say “well islamaphobes say that, therefore you are islamaphobic” is to claim a converse that isn’t true. What’s far worse is that the label shuts down conversation. And if we can’t talk about things that are problematic, like racism, mass shootings, terrorism, sexual assault, or a myriad of other difficulties we face in modern society, how can we make things better? We can’t.
Good People Should Say True Things
Especially when it is hard, and even if it coincidentally aligns with the opinions of assholes, it is critical to acknowledge true things as true. Good people want to reduce misery in the world. Good people want to increase happiness in the world. Please don’t use the trick of claiming the converse to stand in their way. Let’s allow honest discussion to flow.
On the first two nights of Passover (or just the first night in Israel) Jewish people gather for a ceremonial dinner called a Seder, where the story of Exodus is retold. The centerpiece of the Seder table is a special plate, on which is placed six symbolic foods, each meant to represent an aspect of the Jewish people’s suffering as slaves in Egypt, and the way they gained their freedom. One of the items on the plate is an egg, and oddly, the egg is not a formal part of the dinner, so the symbolism of it is not directly addressed as part of the stages of the Seder. As a child, I always wondered what the egg was about, and asked a teacher of mine about it. Even though I learned later that his answer is not the official explanation, it resonated with me.
What he said is that the egg is not like other foods. When you heat an egg, it gets harder, and stronger. He said that this represents the Jewish people who were slaves in Egypt. I see now that his explanation was a variation of the saying “The same boiling water than softens the potato hardens the egg.” Pharaoh thought to soften the potato by working the Jewish slaves harder, and subjecting them to increasingly more cruel and harsh conditions. It didn’t soften them though. Like the egg, it made them stronger.
Another fixture on the Seder table is a bowl of saltwater, and in many families the egg is dipped in it prior to eating. The saltwater symbolism is pretty direct, representing tears. The symbolism, my teacher explained, is that the oppression-hardened egg is not the final lesson. Enduring slavery and Pharaoh’s hell would not be anyone’s choice as a way to become strong. Under the weight of this misery, the tears of suffering are the salt that layers over all aspects of life.
The metaphor applies just as well today as it did in biblical times. It has been said that many in the world apply impossible standards to the modern state of Israel, and that this is by design. It’s meant to trap Israel into an unwinnable game with eradication as the price of losing, said eradication being the clearly stated endgame of those who have opposed her existence since the beginning. It’s not hard to see the parallel to Pharaoh’s strategy here. Apply increasing pressure on Israel – pressure not applied to any other country – and eventually, she must break. We are seeing it in real time, right now.
As a consequence, by extension this increasingly impossible standard is then applied to all Jewish people across the globe. All 0.2% of us. This is not a new phenomenon. Jewish people have been subjected to impossible standards for thousands of years. With respect to anti-Jewish sentiment, the current situation in the middle east is the latest excuse. But what the people who do this don’t understand is the actual impact that has on people who are born Jewish. They don’t understand why that forces us to excel, which must certainly be maddening to those that wish to see Jewish people suffer. Before I explain my thoughts on why this happens, I want to make clear that I don’t think it’s Judaism as religion that does this, per se, although it is difficult to measure and potentially unweave from Jewish culture the effects of being held to impossible standards over millennia. Rather this drive to excel is the effect on a group of human beings born into a world that continually ups the ante on what will be tolerated. A world that from the outset seems to never afford them the same tolerance for humanity afforded to others. For context, let me give you some personal background.
I have been a high school math teacher for almost 25 years, with the exception of two years I spent on secondment, lecturing mathematics at The University of Waterloo. At the start of my career I worked in three different public schools in in the Greater Toronto Area, in neighborhoods with very different demographics from each other. Then I transitioned to teaching at a Jewish high school. As part of my ongoing work with Waterloo, I also have had the pleasure of working with thousands of students across Canada, as well as internationally in India, Singapore, Malaysia, China, and Ghana. These days I do a great deal of tutoring and mentoring, so I have the opportunity to work one-on-one with hundreds of high school and university students. As a result of these experiences, I’ve encountered students from a wide spectrum of countries, cultures, races, religions, and financial backgrounds. And there is one comforting and beautiful lesson I’ve learned:
Teenagers are fundamentally awesome people.
Despite cultural, geopolitical, and socioeconomic differences, the brilliance, goofiness, and awkwardness is universal. So too are occasional bouts of acting like an idiot. And the ability to be able to turn these characteristics on and off when the situation really warrants it is also universal. They’re ultra cool adults-in-training who still have the little kid in them but are learning how to manifest the grown-ups they will become. All while learning about and exercising their inevitable independence from older generations. They score huge victories. They make huge mistakes. If the child is the raw material, then the adolescent is the forge from which the ultimate adult emerges, tempered into that special alloy of perfection and flaws that we experienced adults all know we are. Witnessing this blossoming is an honour, and is what makes me so grateful to be an educator. For a teacher, students are like your kids, and when I witness them just being teens, I feel legitimate happiness. Even when they’re acting like idiots.
Take for example, school excursions like field trips and sporting events. Any teacher will tell you what a mixed blessing it is to supervise these, especially overnight trips. Those overnighters! There’s nothing quite as stressful as being responsible for dozens or even hundred of other people’s children out in the wild. Responsible for their safety, and also for their behaviour. The blessing is to be there to watch them experience and interact with the world outside the classroom. You see them behave respectfully to strangers. You see their curiosity. You see their enjoyment of each other. You also sometimes see them act like fools, and these are the times when you have to intervene. I have supervised more excursions than I can count, and many of them were multi-day trips to a different country. It’s stressful, but it is incredibly worth it.
So when I prepare a group of teens for an excursion I always tell them that I want them to have the best experience. I tell them how much I love that I get to be a part of it. And I make sure they understand the behaviours we expect, even while knowing that they often have slightly different plans of their own. But when I’m preparing a group of Jewish students, my presentation always has an extra request:
Hold yourselves to a higher standard.
See, if a stranger sees a large group of teens outside of school, they often have certain ideas about what they can expect, and some of that is negative. For example, if a large group of teens was eating lunch in a public space, and left a lot of litter, many people would disgustedly react with a thought more or less like damn teenagers – don’t their parents teach them to pick up after themselves? If the teens are being overly boisterous, you will often see strangers shaking their heads or looking at them angrily. In these situations, you will even sometimes see strangers intervene and try to modify the behaviour. Hopefully it doesn’t get to that stage, and as a chaperone you always do your best to make sure you are the one intervening, but people will be people. This is all normal.
It all changes though, if the group of teens is identifiably Jewish, say, because the boys are wearing kippot (aka yarmulkes or skullcaps). When it’s Jewish kids, the perception is no longer that it’s a group of annoying teenagers. It’s now a group of annoying Jews. The mutterings change from damn teenagers to damn Jews. Their Jewishness trumps their adolescence as the attributable factor for their unwelcome – albeit normal – behaviour. It’s not fair, but it is true.
That’s why I always tell my Jewish students that they must hold themselves to a higher standard. Not because of me, or because of arbitrary rules, and certainly not because it’s fair, but because whether they like it or not, they are ambassadors for all Jewish people. So be extra respectful, extra courteous, and keep that adult switch flicked to the on position. Because the world might cut you some slack knowing that you’re a teenager, but that slack gets gathered right up if you’re a Jewish teenager. And you know what? The kids always do it. They do hold themselves to a higher standard. We inevitably get comments from bus drivers, tour guides, other coaches, and even just regular people interacting with the group that the kids are so polite and respectful, and so nice to deal with – much more so than most groups of teens. This ability to live up to impossibly high standards has nothing to do with being Jewish, but the need to tap into that ability – and thus discover that you can – has everything to do with it.
Being judged more harshly than other teens because you’re Jewish isn’t fair. It’s not a choice anyone would make or a preferred strategy to learn how to rise above. It’s just reality. The reality that says to the sports teams from Jewish high schools that when you are playing at non-Jewish schools, kids will throw pennies at you. And if one of your basketball players commits a foul, the spectators will shout about dirty jews and their dirty play, so keep the fouls to the barest minimum. It’s an impossible standard.
The lesson in this runs deep and lasts a lifetime. First, it teaches the kids that they have the inherent power to be better – better than they even need to be. It teaches them that to be Jewish often means not giving bigotry and hatred an excuse, even and especially when that means behaving better than others. It teaches them that as much as we might wish otherwise, the world is not a fair place, and never will be, so play the hand you’ve been dealt instead of the one you wish you had. It teaches them that the best way to fight antisemitism is to act with honour, grace, and excellence. It also teaches them that you can let down that guard and be “normal”, but only when you’re amongst your own, and that breeds a strong sense of community. Ultimately, this lesson remains with the kids as they grow in to adults. They learn that they have the power to hold themselves to impossibly high standards. They achieve greatness as a result.
It’s ironic really. That impossible standards can make you impossibly great. But there it is.
As we get closer to the American elections, and then moving into the Canadian elections next year, I find it more and more imperative that we work to effect a fundamental change in the way we interact with social media and, by extension, how we interact in real life. Over the last ten years or so my concern over the culture has grown from mild alarm at some people’s online behaviour, to something approaching real fear that we are at a tipping point into another real-world dark age, specifically with respect to intellectual and cultural decline. And violence.
It’s not all bleak though. Thanks to many private conversations, I know I am not alone in my concern, and I do see signs that there are public figures with a legitimate desire to change this trajectory, as opposed to leveraging the culture for their own personal gain. And considering the magnitude of people who, exclusively through social media, get their news, form their opinions, and – maybe most troubling – learn how to communicate, social media is where it has to start.
If we can do it, it won’t be through any kind of censorship or similar attempts to control how people use their favourite platform though. It has to be you and me. We have to change the nature of our posts. And so I had this idea of a filter, or sieve, that we can apply to our more meaningful posts to both increase their effectiveness, and also combat the culture that is propelling us toward a precipice.
Consider this. If you want to engage in political posts on social media, that is your choice, and I support it. Keep in mind though that these posts are, by nature, argumentative, in that political posts always argue for or against some candidate or issue. Which on its own is not a problem. Argument (or debate) is not a fight. The idea that arguing equals fighting is something that’s manifested because people like getting attention and scoring points. True argument is not a contest, but a means to pursue truth and, conducted properly, is how we progress. Because the acquisition of truth can never be considered a loss, proper arguments have no losers, and in that sense they have no winners either, because to win an argument someone would have to lose.
But many people argue poorly, because they argue for points.
In the philosophical study of argument there are many identified fallacies. If you’re not familiar with the idea of a logical fallacy, think of these as techniques or strategies that falsely trick you into thinking they are effective. When you employ them you or your audience may think you’re “winning” but you have not made a true case. To avoid this, and hopefully steer us away from the precipice, I ask that you apply what I’m calling an effectiveness sieve to your words before you click that post button.
Run your post through the following sieve. If you can’t answer yes to all three sieve questions, refine your thoughts until it passes them all, then go ahead and put it out there.
Do my words avoid belittling, shaming, or otherwise personally attacking someone who doesn’t agree with my position?
Does my post allow for (and even maybe invite) respectful discourse with someone who disagrees with it?
Does my post offer information/education that someone who disagrees with me might not have considered?
You can actually stop reading here, if you like. The value of each question is probably self-explanatory. But if you want to dive a little deeper into the reasoning behind these criteria and their relationship to common fallacies, or to reflect a little more deeply on whether or not your own posts are effective, read on.
(A word of warning though: I use examples below to illustrate the points and a lot of them are, by design, inflammatory in concept and language. I am not expressing my views in any of them – I am parroting posts I have seen in my social media feeds.)
Sieve Question One “Do my words avoid belittling, shaming, or otherwise personally attacking someone who doesn’t agree with my position?“
Fallacy This Helps Avoid:Ad Hominem (Attacking the person) This occurs when instead of challenging an idea or position, you irrelevantly attack the person or some aspect of the person who is making the argument. The fallacious attack can also be aimed at a person’s membership in a group or institution.1
How to tell Imagine that someone who holds an opposite position made a post worded like yours. Would you take it as a personal attack, or would you view it as someone simply supporting ideas that you disagree with? Keep in mind that we can challenge ideas without attacking the people who embrace them. In fact, this is the only way to dismantle dangerous ideologies. In democratic societies where change essentially requires consensus, attacking opponents instead of ideas is possibly the worst way to stimulate progress. Consider this example:
Example 1 “Considering the unbelievable depths of stupidity you display in believing that climate change is a hoax, it would obviously be a waste of time explaining the facts to your fascist republican ass.”
Example 2 “You have been duped by the lamestream media, so I will leave you to your weak-minded, sheeple liberal delusions about how solar power will ‘save the planet'”
Example 3 “I read conflicting views on whether climate change is real, if it is a concern, and if it is totally caused by human factors. I am not an expert, and it’s not always easy to filter out the real experts from the ones who claim to be. And even then, it’s not always easy to filter out which experts, if any, are twisting their analyses to suit some underlying agenda. However, the scientific consensus points at climate change being a real danger, and being attributable to human factors. The recommendations to address it seem to be a net good, even if the premise that we are the problem isn’t totally correct.”
It should be obvious what’s happening in the first two examples. There is no attempt to change anyone’s mind. It’s just mud-slinging peppered with tired insults engineered to pump up the audience members who agree. Neither post does anything to address the issue of climate change itself, and just drives a wedge between people who hold opposing views.
Meanwhile, if I’ve crafted the third example well enough, hopefully you can see that there is no evidence of ad hominem at all, and even though the poster is leaning toward one “side”, they have not shut down engagement.
Sieve Question Two “Does my post allow for (and even maybe invite) respectful discourse with someone who disagrees with it?“
Fallacy This Helps Avoid:Straw Person This occurs when, in refuting an argument or idea, you address only a weak or distorted version of it. It is characterized by the misrepresentation of an opponent’s position to make yours superior. The tactic involves attacking the weakest version of an argument while ignoring stronger ones.2
How to Tell This is often used in conjunction with the ad hominem fallacy because it adds even more punch. After all, only moron would believe a weak argument. Most people have no desire to engage in discourse with someone who starts off with the premise that “Your position is weak, because it supports x so I am right and you are wrong and unless you can see that you are an idiot.” Consider the contentious example of abortion:
Example 1 “Pro-choice? So you think that murdering babies is ok!?! I guess you don’t care about the lives of the babies who get killed.”
Example 2 “Pro-life? So women should have no say over what happens to their own bodies?!? I guess you don’t care about the 13-year old girl who was brutally raped and is now forced to carry and give birth to the child of the man who scarred her forever.”
Example 3 “I struggle with the abortion issue. I believe it is a clear and terrible breach of fundamental human rights to tell someone else what they can or can’t do with their own bodies, regardless of the circumstances but especially when there is physical/psychological trauma involved that can be addressed with an abortion. But I am also really troubled by the fact that I am in no position to decide whether a viable fetus, at any stage of development, is a human life, and I don’t see how anyone could be, really. The issue feels like being offered only two choices where each choice is loaded with ethical downsides, and there is no option to not choose. I worry that in order to alleviate the moral weight of each choice, people downplay or even outright lie about the consequences of their position. So although I land on the side of pro-choice, I do not do so lightly, and I am aware that it feels like I have made a moral choice to prioritize the essential rights of the mother over the potential rights of the unborn child. I hope this choice is correct.”
Consider the first two examples. Will a pro-choice person who just got told they murder babies want to engage in anything other than hurling insults with this person? Will a pro-life person who just got told they don’t care about the effects of rape on a 13 year-old girl want to engage in anything other than hurling insults with this person? By attacking a weak/distorted version of the other side, each has set it up so that any engagement by someone with an opposing view will manifest as some level of support for the weak/distorted claim.
Meanwhile, in the third example, the author has ultimately stated a position. Would a pro-x person be open to understanding the author’s struggle? Would a pro-life person feel safe to engage in discourse? Does it seem that there is the possibility that anyone who engages – including the author – might change their minds about anything surrounding the issue, including about people themselves who hold the opposite position?
Sieve Question Three “Does my post offer information/education that someone who disagrees with me might not have considered?“
Fallacy This Helps Avoid: Irrelevant Authority This is committed when you accept, without proper support for an alleged authority, a person’s claim or proposition as true (and that alleged authority is often the person employing the fallacy). Alleged authorities should only be referenced when:
the authority is reporting on their field of expertise,
the authority is reporting on facts about which there is some agreement in their field, and
you have reason to believe they can be trusted.
Alleged authorities can be individuals or groups. The attempt to appeal to the majority or the masses is a form of irrelevant authority. The attempt to appeal to an elite or select group is also a form of irrelevant authority.3
How to Tell Are you claiming that some position is wrong? If so, have you explained how you know this? What authority are you citing? Or are you claiming expertise and asserting “Thinking x is wrong!”
Example 1 “Jordan Peterson says switching to a meat-only diet literally saved his life. Vegans are slowly killing themselves.”
Example 2 “I lost 30 pounds when I went vegan and feel so much better. Eating meat is asking for heart disease and dementia.”
Example 3 “It makes sense to at least consider evolution when determining what a ‘healthy’ diet looks like. Before humans had access to foods not native to our geography, the only people that would have survived would be the ones who thrived on what was available. So if your ancestors evolved in warmer climates, it would make sense that your constitution would welcome more grains and vegetables, whereas ancestors in colder climates would have evolved to thrive off meats.”
Consider the first two examples. Jordan Peterson is not an authority on nutrition (he actually takes great pains to make that clear whenever he talks about his diet). So while he has said that a carnivore diet works for him, it is not evidence that the carnivore diet is better than others. In the second example, the author is actually setting themselves as the authority. Neither example offers any warranted expertise or education and are strictly anecdotal claims.
In the third example the author poses an idea that promotes questioning and further research. They are not claiming any personal authority, or even choosing a side, even though they may have a preference. They are presenting an hypothesis that can be (and probably has been) analyzed by experts.
If you’d like to read more about informal fallacies often used in argument, I recommend this link from Texas State University. It lists the common ones and provides explanations and examples. One of my favourites is Begging the Question, which I always laugh about because it’s a phrase that gets used so often, and almost always incorrectly, while at the same time the real fallacy gets used regularly in arguments.
In any case, I hope we can all change the way we interact on social media and beyond. I really do believe we need that flavour of revolution.
Wow. An alliterative title that I didn’t even plan. I feel so clever. Which is ironic…
I’m 55 years old. By all accounts an adult. 55 is to human age as medium-well is to steak doneness, so I guess I’m the right side of middle-aged. Yet it seems nobody has informed my psyche. The child never left, and I don’t imagine it ever will – nor do I want it to. The only thing I can claim as I’ve aged is that I recognize the child in me, and I have no desire to evict that element of my psychological makeup. I simply want to work to understand its complexities and nuances, and see when my behaviour is more strongly guided by its influence. One aspect of this, and perhaps the only aspect that matters, if you dig deep enough, is the lasting effects of what I call Parental Promotion.
I have come to realize more and more clearly that my path in life has been strongly guided by what I think of as my parents’ promotional campaign, specifically about me. My parents, my mother primarily, never missed an opportunity to tell me and anyone who would listen that I was amazing. For example, according to my mother I was, among many other things:
The smartest kid.
A true mensch (this is a Yiddish word that essentially means a decent person).
The most talented singer. This is minor but illustrative, as I will discuss shortly.
They were also able to find ways to go on about my amazing “deficiencies” too, as though they were miraculous. I was, for example, among many other things:
The most intensely shy kid anyone ever met.
Exquisitely careful. I would come home from a day of playing outside with my friends and my clothes would be as clean as when they came out of the dryer.
Deeply quiet. While other kids would be talking, shouting and making noise, I’d be silently observing.
I believed all of it. Not “believed” as in they had to convince me away from a different opinion. Believed at my very core, without even the thought of questioning. I took it all as generally accepted fact. I was the smartest. I was the best singer. I was intensely shy. To be explicitly clear here, I’m not listing these as my own evaluations. They were not observations I made about myself. I didn’t decide these were true based on judgment or comparison. I am saying that because my parents told me they were true it meant they were axiomatic, and thus everyone would know it. It was my childlike perspective that if a fact is a fact then it must be universally known. Like the sky being blue. You don’t have to talk about it – it’s given. You assume everyone knows it. And if it comes up in any context, you don’t consider that it might be contentious or a matter of opinion because, well, look at the sky. It’s blue. Certainly, you don’t stop to consider how it will make you look to others when you act like it’s true.
From my earliest memories, and stretching even until today, this had objectively interesting effects on my interactions with people. Here are just a few (possibly obvious) results.
One, believing I was great (again, I stress, this was not a judgment of myself but taken as fact since it was what my parents told me), and believing that everyone knew this, and also believing that I was quiet and shy and that everyone knew that, I was most commonly seen by others to be snobby and aloof. As I aged this morphed into snobby, aloof and intimidating. Because none of these are internally true about me, and not remotely what motivated my behaviours, I was constantly taken by surprise by people’s reactions to me, which were consistent with their perception of me but so totally dissonant with my inner thoughts and motivations. I really never understood how I could be so misunderstood.
One immediate and persistent impact this had was to make me even more quiet and withdrawn, socially. That may have amplified some incorrect assumptions, but at least it didn’t create openings for discordant reactions to me, which I never learned how to reconcile.
To this point, I grant that I’ve certainly painted an unpleasant picture of the effects of my parents promotional campaign. But it’s not as simple as that. For example, believing that I was smart, I just assumed I could always figure something out. That if I was confused, or frustrated, then it was temporary and just meant I wasn’t thinking hard enough, or more likely was approaching a problem from the wrong direction. This attitude is self-fulfilling. It’s not news to anyone that confidence is a key – maybe even the most important – ingredient to success. Taking your innate ability as axiomatically true is a clear manifestation of confidence. It has led me to success professionally as a math teacher, and in many side pursuits such as visual arts, weightlifting, and sometimes, writing.
That’s not ego, although it can be perceived that way. I am reminded of a Bruce Lee quote: “If I tell you I’m good, probably you will say I’m boasting. But if I tell you I’m not good, you’ll know I’m lying.”
In any event, what I mean is that it’s just an understanding of your own capability and what that means you can do. For my whole life, to this very moment, I have always believed that I can excel at something if I want to. And often, but not always, I prove myself right. I no longer believe this is simply how I was born though. Now I recognize that my parents made me believe it was, and that is enough. When I don’t succeed, I have also realized that my confusion about that was a result of it being in conflict with the notion that it could never happen. I will illustrate with an example that often comes to my mind often. It was the first time I auditioned for a part in a musical.
For background, I was about 40 years old. I hadn’t been on a stage since school plays. Through a friend I discovered a local theatre program that put on amateur musical productions. The way it worked was you paid a fee for the program, and anyone could join. It was a way for adults to experience the fun of performing in musical theatre. Rehearsals happened once a week, and for the first two rehearsals parts were not yet assigned, although you can bet that everyone was assessing everyone else, and how they stacked up against the others, and people were making it clear which parts they were aiming for. The third rehearsal was auditions, and everyone would audition in front of everyone else. The director would let you sing whatever song from the show that you wanted to sing, and then usually ask you to sing and perform a few other numbers. Later that week he would send out the casting, and from then on the rehearsals were more focused. The experience culminated in two performances that were always well attended by family and friends. It was a lot of fun. I did many plays with this company, but that first one was Les Misérables.
After the first two rehearsals, it was clear (to me) that I was one of the best males in the room. It is clear to me now that I was not. But even at 40, that belief that I was great still guided much of my self-evaluation. I was hoping that I would get the part of Javert. And after the audition, I felt sure that I would. There were other cast members who told me they thought I had done well, and the feedback I was getting after each of my songs seemed to confirm that too. What I wasn’t able to filter though, was that people in that environment, wanting to be nice and supportive, compliment everything. Which incidentally is something I have learned not to do, because then the genuine, deserved compliments get lost in the sea of politeness, but that’s another story.
The point of this example is to tell you that I did not get cast as Javert, or any male lead. I was cast as sailor #3, prisoner #1, policeman #2, and a few other similar roles. I wasn’t devastated when we got the casting. I was confused. I also never resented any of the other cast members, because why would I? They didn’t make any mistakes, the director did, although because my parents emphasized being a mensch, I wasn’t angry with him, only grateful for the process he had created. However throughout the rest of the rehearsals, and for a very long time afterwards, I wondered what went wrong. And I started to realize this was a manifestation of the long-term impact of my parents’ promotional campaign. Eventually, after many, many more shows, I developed a more realistic understanding of my abilities as a singer. I am decent. That’s it. No more, no less. Nobody is going to think I have a great voice, but they won’t complain about it either, and that’s fine. But it took a while to see through the filter of the lens of my parents’ praise.
If I can simplify a very complicated concept, what I’ve learned is that believing what my parents told me has been at times a good thing, and at other times a difficult thing. It has led me to excel in many ways, and also led me to confusion and hurt when it conflicted with a more austere reality. But truly, the lasting gift is that at my core, I always believe I’m worthy.
It has been said, by people wiser than me, that the way we talk to our children becomes their inner voice (a quick google search tells me that this sentence may have originated with Becky Mansfield). My parents’ campaign became my inner voice, and my inner voice is kind. That’s powerful. It has brought me great things, and hard things. In my case, it’s been a net good, and I am grateful for it. But I have seen the results of more destructive campaigns on many of my adult friends, and on many of my students (as I alluded to above, I am a high school teacher and tutor). So my final message is this:
To children (and that means all of us). Reflect on how your parents’ campaign has guided your path. Try to see it clearly. Tease out the good it has brought, and work to understand the bad. The process is very healing.
To parents. Think deeply about your campaign. Remember that your children do not have the context of a lived life to apply to what you tell them about themselves. They may believe high praise, or they may wonder why what seems ordinary to them is generating high praise. They will believe harsh criticism. Tearing them down does not “build character”. It builds a cruel inner voice that it will take them years (if ever) to understand is not their own, and does not speak truth.
In the Jewish faith when a person dies, there is a formal grieving process that includes something called sitting shiva. The general idea is that the immediate family of the deceased ((children, spouse, siblings, parents) gather in one place and mourn intensely for seven days. The ritual comes from the Hebrew word for seven, which is sheva. During this time the mourners are visited by anyone who wishes to pay respects. Mourners are expected to be uncomfortable in their grief, so you will often see them sitting on low chairs. You will also often see them wearing torn clothing (or symbols of torn clothing), and in order to avoid vanity, you will often see reflective surfaces in the shiva house obscured somehow. Sitting shiva is not hosting, so mourners are also not expected to entertain, clean the house in preparation, or arrange for any food/refreshments for themselves or others. They are not really even supposed to get up when someone arrives, so you will often see the door unlocked or even slightly open, as people arriving are meant to let themselves in. I am not an expert in the strict rules regarding shiva, so I will not attempt to explain it further than that, and I apologize if even in that short explanation I have gotten something wrong. If you want to learn more, this link has some good articles: https://www.shiva.com/learning-center/sitting-shiva.
I will add that the observance of shiva varies quite a bit, from number of days to how many hours/day visitors are expected, but the theme of it is consistent: mourners gather to grieve, and the community gathers to support them. The grief and shock of losing someone so close to you that you are in a position of having to sit shiva is more than disorienting. It can be completely destabilizing. You don’t even know what you need, and you’re often not in a position to take care of even the smallest details. Your world is splintered, and there is a sort of terrible tide that carries you forward that you are helpless to resist. It’s awful. But sitting shiva is a very deep and meaningful way to begin the healing process. Personally, having lost both my parents, I have sat shiva twice. And I found that it was like that trust exercise where you close your eyes and fall backwards. When you sit shiva, it is like falling backwards into the arms of the community. And right there standing at the front of them all, is the person (or persons) I call the Shiva Friend.
At my age, in addition to the times I have sat, there have been quite a few shiva houses for me to visit. In almost all cases – definitely mine – I have seen a Shiva Friend at work. It is one of the most beautiful and selfless acts of friendship that manifests. I was moved to try and write about this at a recent shiva of some close friends of ours, whose mother had passed away.
In Jewish tradition the funeral is supposed to happen within 24 hours of the death, although sometimes it takes a bit longer, and shiva starts right after the funeral, so there is not much time. The Shiva Friend doesn’t ask if there’s something they can do. They don’t say “if you need anything, anything at all, call me,” although there’s nothing wrong with those sentiments. The Shiva Friend is next-level though, and it takes a very special kind of heart.
The Shiva Friend shows up at the shiva house as soon as they find out someone has passed. They know that soon there will be many people coming and going, and even though the mourners are not supposed to be hosts, everyone knows that you want the place to look nice. I have witnessed these friends cleaning houses so thoroughly that they were dusting baseboards in the bathroom, and cleaning the crumbs out of the toaster. But that’s just the first stage. They also know that it is tradition for there to be food for the mourners and the visitors, and that the community will also want to show their support by providing meals. The Shiva Friend will usually arrange for the food on the first night, and make sure it is all set up before people arrive. They will coordinate with people who want to contribute a meal to make sure that it is organized and that food arrives and is ready on time. They are at the shiva every day, supervising, cleaning, making sure the mourners are comfortable and not troubled by the things that would normally trouble a person who has crowds of people arriving at their home. They stay at night after everyone has gone and make sure the leftovers (and there are so many leftovers!) are wrapped up and refrigerated, and that the place is clean.
Nobody asks them to do this. It is not an occupation. They simply take that burden. They don’t even think about whether they should. They just do it. And what’s even more special, is that it’s often not the person you would think of as your closest friend. But when you see it happening, you realize just how special of a friend they are, and how you need to make sure they understand how much it means to you.
You don’t have to be Jewish to be a Shiva Friend. I have often seen this act performed by non-Jewish friends. In fact, you don’t even need a shiva to be a Shiva Friend. It’s a manifestation of friendship that says:
“You don’t have to ask. You don’t have to repay me. There is no ledger to be balanced. I see your need. I am in a position to help. And I will help. That is all.”
I don’t think everyone is capable of this, and I think that’s ok. But I do know that if you have someone like that in your life, you know how blessed you are. And if you are that person, I see you. I appreciate you. I thank you.
