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Ki Sisa- Subconscious Biases
For this year’s Parsha Lesson I will be applying the lesson that can be derived from the Dvar Torah to the world as we know it today.
Background
In this week’s parsha we have the tragic story of the Jewish people making, and then serving, the infamous golden calf.
After the Jewish people received the Torah on Har Sinai, Moshe remained on top of the mountain for 40 days in order to learn the Oral Torah from Hashem. Moshe told the Jewish people that he would be back in 40 day’s time. The Jewish people made a mistake in their counting by one day and, along with a display in the heavens which was orchestrated by the satan, were led to believe that Moshe had died on top of the mountain. The Jewish people were thrown into a frenzy and in the ensuing despair the idea to construct an idol was hatched. They quickly pulled together enough gold to melt and with the assistance of some form of ‘black magic’ constructed a golden calf that was able to move and talk.
R’ Henoch Leibowitz z”l, in quoting from the Daas Zekainim, explains that the Jewish people were taken to task by Hashem for both: 1) serving an idol, as they had been commanded not to, and 2) for having betrayed their dear leader, Moshe, who Hashem had so graciously arranged to lead them out of Egypt and into Eretz Yisroel (Israel).
Question
R’ Leibowitz asked- in what way did the Jewish people betray Moshe!? They were under the impression that he had died! As such, they needed a leader to take his place. Choosing an idol was certainly a problem, but in what way did they betray their leader Moshe?
Answer
R’ Leibowitz explains that if the Jewish people had been properly faithful to Moshe, they wouldn’t have so quickly concluded that Moshe had died. Their being mistaken that Moshe died, was itself a manifestation of their lack of proper feeling towards Moshe and a lack of faithfulness.
Perhaps, an analogy to understand this could be a wife whose husband goes out to war. When the husband returns he finds that his wife has married someone else. ‘How could you have done such a thing!?’ he asks in dismay. The wife responds- I had heard that most of your unit had been wiped out and I thought that you had died.
Such an ‘innocent’ mistake we can readily understand is only enabled by a lack of faithfulness. A truly faithful wife would make sure to fully and completely research and check into her dear husband’s well being and what had happened to him personally and not be satisfied with clues and guesses. So too the Jewish people. If they had been properly faithful and appreciative of Moshe they would not have been so quick to conclude that he had passed on.
Lesson for our world
How important it is for us to realize and be aware of the inner workings of our subconscious and how much it affects our perceptions and our ‘conclusions’ and ‘mistakes’. We must be circumspect and challenge that which we ‘know’ and our decision-making. If we don’t, the chances are that our ‘knowledge’ and our decisions will just be ‘yes men’, an echo chamber of sorts, for our strongly biased sub-conscious.
It is truly a wonder that in a world which is so aware of subconscious biases, and the frailty of people to truly arrive at the truth, that there is such widespread naivety and a dearth of basic critical thinking and questioning and challenging of new theories and ideas. On the one hand the modern man relegates others and the giants of yesteryear to the scrutiny of his newfound skills of understanding psychology (which are, in truth, much less applicable to the more rigorous and well-developed giants of history that they critique) while turning a blind eye to his own biases and those of the pop-philosophers of his ideological camp.
As the famous depth psychologist Carl Jung famously said ‘if you do not understand why someone has done something, look at the consequences and infer the intent.’ I would go one step further and advise one who is searching for the truth to always look at the consequences and be suspicious of intent. Particularly of one’s own.
Wishing you a wonderful Shabbos,
Rabbi Eli Meir Kramer
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