Rosh Hashanah: MicroMitzvot

MicroMitzvot

Rosh Hashanah 5783/2022 Day 1[1]

Rabbi Noah Gradofsky

(singing) הנני העני ממעש (Hinneni he’ani mi-ma’as).  Here I am, poor of deed!  There’s a certain irony that this humble prayer which begins the Musaf service tends to be a musical highlight of the high holiday season, often “performed” with musical complexity and a certain cantorial swagger.  In fact, a dear friend of mine, Rabbi David Cavill, once paraphrased many a Hinneni experience as the cantor saying (in sing-songy show-offy tone) “LOOK AT ME, I’M HUMBLE!”

The truth is, in a way, maybe some of the cantorial swagger is actually called for.  Although the Hinneni prayer has a strong sense of humility, in it the Hazan also asks היה-נא מצליח דרכי … קבל תפלתי כתפלת זקן ורגיל …  cause my efforts to be successful … accept my prayer as the prayer of one who is wise and experienced, expressing the hope that with good intentions the Hazan’s impact can exceed his own expectations.

As it happens, although we often have a sense of ourselves as העני ממעש, poor of deed, the fact is that the impact of our deeds often do exceed our own expectations.  In fact, even the smallest gestures we make can have outsized impact.  For instance, a team of psychologists conducted thirteen separate experiments involving people “reaching out” to other people in a small way, for instance, by sending a text message.  Across all thirteen experiments, the researchers found that people significantly underestimated the impact of their reaching out, versus the impact reported by those who received the contact.[2]  Interestingly, the difference between the predicted and actual impact of the “reaching out” was largest when people contacted mere acquaintances, rather than when they contacted closer friends.[3]  Similarly, studies have found that people consistently underestimate how positively friends, family, or strangers would respond to receiving their thanks or a compliment from them.[4]

This demonstrates that people tend to underestimate the impact of their interaction with others.  Many other studies show the same thing.  Quite a few studies show that people’s expectations for conversations with strangers are consistently pessimistic versus reality.[5]  For instance, one study showed that although those who travel on mass transportation in Chicago consistently expected their commute to be less pleasant if they tried to connect with fellow travelers, the exact opposite turned out to be true, with people randomly assigned to connect in conversation with a new person during their travel reporting a more positive experience than others.[6]  In another study, people who did not usually talk to their taxi drivers had a significantly more positive experience than they expected when they did.[7]  Finally, in my favorite experiments, since it involved chocolate, visitors at a skating rink were given coupons for a free cup of hot chocolate and asked to give the coupons away to a random person.  Of course, people realized that the recipients of the free hot chocolate would be happy, but they significantly underestimated the positive mood that the recipient would experience.[8]

To me, the important lesson to be learned here is not to underestimate the positive impact we can have, even with small gestures, and even – and maybe especially – when interacting with people we are not particularly close to.  The study about reaching out to others showed that people underestimated their impact the most when it came to reaching out to semi-strangers, which the authors surmise likely has something to do with the gesture being more unexpected.[9]  My personal experience as a rabbi bears this out.  I’ve heard from congregants, for instance, who were touched just as much, or even more, by a shiva visit or a “get well” call from the casual acquaintance whom they recognized from shul as from similar gestures from their closer friends.

The social scientists who study these phenomena note that we tend to engage in less interactive social behavior and fewer caring gestures for others because we underestimate how welcome and impactful those deeds are.  All of this relates to an important teaching of Rabbi Judah the Prince in פרקי אבות (Ethics of the Fathers).

והוי זהיר במצוה קלה כבחמורה שאין אתה יודע מתן שכרן של מצות והוי מחשב הפסד מצוה כנגד שכרה ושכר עבירה כנגד הפסדה

Be as careful with easy mitzvot as with difficult ones, for you do not know the reward of mitzvot, and consider the cost of the mitzvah against its reward and the benefit of the sin against its cost.[10]

Perhaps Rabbi Judah the Prince wasn’t talking about the divine reward of mitzvot.  Or maybe he was thinking about divine reward.  Either way, what he says about the reward of a mitzvah is certainly true about the impact of our mitzvot.  We should consider the effort it takes, for instance, to make a social connection, against its true impact, which we now know we have probably been underestimating all along!

What is true about interpersonal mitzvot is also true about our ritual mitzvot.  We can’t often fathom how much such mitzvot can inspire us and those around us.  As my teacher, Rabbi David Weiss Halivni, of blessed memory, wrote:

How does a mitzvah catapult one into such religious heights?  What is prayer?  Nobody knows, any more than we know when looking at the sunset, or at a smiling child, how and why we are gripped, riveted to the scene, transformed in a foretaste of the world to come.  Our religious and aesthetic experiences are shrouded in mystery.  We are put on fire, but do not know how the fire is being kindled.[11]

Relatedly, Ben Azai teaches:

הוי רץ למצוה קלה כבחמורה ובורח מן העבירה שמצוה גוררת מצוה ועבירה גוררת עבירה ששכר מצוה מצוה ושכר עבירה עבירה:

Run toward an easy mitzvah as a difficult one, and flee from sin, for one mitzvah leads to another and one sin leads to another, for the reward of a mitzvah is a mitzvah and the reward of one sin is another.[12]

In other words, mitzvot are force multipliers!  The more we do them, the more we will be inspired to do more of them.  And so, the impact of any mitzvah is not to be measured merely by its direct impact, but by the greater good it leads us to do in the future.

In the world of assisting people with financial needs, one of the latest buzzwords is the term “microloan,” small loans designed to help people get on their feet and spark their economic potential.  Today, I am advocating for a new idea – the micromitzvah, which, sadly, through googling I learned I am not the first person to come up with.  Taking on a great task can seem daunting – hence our Hazan’s cry of הנני העני ממעש against the awesome responsibility of representing the congregation in its high holiday prayers.  Smaller tasks are more achievable, and still can have a great deal of impact.  As Mother Theresa said, “Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.”  And so I challenge us this year to find new small ways to express our love and caring for those around us and our concern for our own spiritual well-being.  Reach out to a friend or neighbor in need.  Take a minute to actually speak to your Uber driver, or the person checking you out at the store, or the person sitting next to you on the train.  Call – or even text – someone you haven’t spoken to in a while or someone you’re not even that close with.  Find new ways – even seemingly small ways – to connect with Judaism: study some Torah, find spiritual renewal in Shabbat, strengthen your connection with your synagogue.  Through these small deeds, our lives will be enrichened and our impact on the world will be improved even more than we imagine.

In Unetane Tokef the Hazan says “ובשופר גדול יתקע, וקול דממה דקה ישמע a great shofar is sounded, but a still small voice is heard.”  The reference is to 1 Kings 19:11-12.  Elijah experienced winds splitting mountains followed by earthquakes and fire, but God was not in any of those phenomena.  Rather, God was to be found in the קול דממה דקה – the still small voice.  To use a sports metaphor, we all want to hit the home run.  But the true “shot heard ‘round the world” is not the home run, but the small voice inside us, bidding us to follow God’s instructions, asking us to find the sparks of holiness that can be contained in our small but wonderful contributions to the fabric of the universe.  May our connection to God and Torah that we renew today, and the mitzvot it inspires us to fulfill in the future, allow us to, in our small way, contribute to the clarion call of God’s will in this world.

[1] Although I don’t reference these articles directly, I first learned of much of the social science material referenced in this sermon from two articles by David Brooks in the New York Times, “Why Your Social Life Is Not What It Should Be” and “The Power of a Casual Check-in Text.”

[2] Liu, P. J., Rim, S., Min, L., & Min, K. E. (2022). “The surprise of reaching out: Appreciated more than we think.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

[3] Id, see particularly figure 3 on page 14.

[4] See footnotes 38-40 and accompanying text in Nicholas Epley,Michael Kardas,Xuan Zhao,Stav Atir,Juliana Schroeder (2022) “Undersociality: Miscalibrated Social Cognition Can Inhibit Social Connection.”  Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[5] See Id., particularly the subsection “Conversation” in the section titled “Miscalibrated expectations of sociality.”

[6] See Id. footnote 28 and accompanying text on page 3.

[7] Id. footnote 28 and accompanying text on page 10.

[8] See Id., footnote 45 and accompanying text.

[9] See footnote 2 and 3 above and accompanying text.

[10] Avot 2:1.

[11] This quotation is from Rabbi Halivni’s letter to the JTS faculty regarding the vote on ordaining women, reproduced in The Book and The Sword: A Life of Learning In the Shadow of Destruction, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996, p. 112-113.

[12] Avot 4:2.