Straight From The Pulpit (And Heart)
Shabbat Re'ah 2024: Maslow's Triangle Turned Upside Down
There's a brand of human experiences that are referred to as peak experiences. An example of peak experiences, I wouldn't recommend you try this by the way, but an example of peak experiences is, for example, what people call base jumping. Now from the look in your face, none of you know what that is, and that's a good thing. But base jumping is when people go to a very high mountain, plateau of sorts, and with a parachute on their back, or some other kind of wing apparatus, they jump off. And the base jumping is meant to recreate the experience of skydiving without having to take the unnecessary risks of going in a plane. Anyway, that having been said, you can certainly tease out from the idea of peak experiences. Experiences that human beings have that perhaps aren't quite as adventurous as base jumping might be, but also push people, so to speak, to the peak of what they would consider the adrenaline tingling experiences of human life. Now there are people who are peak experienced junkies, and usually their story ends quickly. They don't live long lives these people, people who scale mountains, and repeatedly try to summit Everest and things of that nature, it's a dangerous pursuit. But having been said, there are experiences that you have in your life that also could be termed peak experiences. An example of that would be the day that you had your wedding, or the day that your children or grandchildren get married, or you give birth to a child, or your child has their barra but mitzvah, you have a business success. These are all certainly not along the lines of base jumping, but they're all peak experiences in the sense that they tickle something deep, deep inside of ourselves. Now the alternate of peak experiences, I'm not going to go too deep to this, but the alternate of peak experiences is something called plateau experiences. If you think of a peak, something like this, and for people who are listening, I'm putting my hand up on pointing it to the sky, a peak experience, something like a mountain, a plateau experiences flat, and plateau experiences are the things that we call the day in, the day out in Hebrew, interestingly expressed so as the yom, yom, right, the day-to-day kind of grind of things, within the plateau experiences we can also find a great deal of satisfaction. For the record, the person who created the ideas that I'm explaining to you now is a person known as Abraham Maslow. Now Maslow was a child of Russian immigrants who came from Kiev. He grew up in abject poverty in Brooklyn. He displayed a pretty natural intelligence as a young child. He went to the prestigious public school called the Boy School in Brooklyn, and off he went to his career in psychology, psychotherapy, social psychology. But you know Maslow better. It's called Maslow's Triangle, and what does Maslow's Triangle say? He had, roughly, you should know, Maslow had about three, four, like really, really interesting ideas, and he lived, if he didn't live a long life either, he had a massive heart attack, I think it's 61 or 62, and it cut his career short. But Maslow's Triangle is what we call the Triangle of Needs, right, that you have the bottom, and then it becomes kind of peakish at the top, in other words, what's the most basic need, according to Maslow's Triangle, food, water, things like that, and what's at the very, very top, self-actualization, like all these really deep ideas, in other words, what is Maslow essentially saying, that Maslow and his Triangle is saying, if you're hungry and you're thirsty and you're starving to death, you can't think about, I don't know, you can't think about Freud or Gerta or Kant, right, all these great Socrates, Aristotle, in other words, if you're starving, you're not reading a book, what are you doing? You're hunting for food. The idea that once our base needs are met, that you can then pursue greater ideas and values, is obviously, I mean, it seems simple to us, but Maslow put it into an interesting theory to explain that once certain needs are met, that people can climb the Triangle to achieve more in their life. So once you have food, once you have water, then what do you do? You get shelter, and then after you have shelter, then you create some economic, I guess, predict the ability to your life. You plant some crops, you raise some animals, and then on the third level, Maslow coins it as saying, the bottom one is called personal safety, and the third one is called belonging. Once you have food and water, you have economic predictability. What's the next thing that people want? Belonging. I thought of Maslow this week, I'm not sure why, actually, I have to admit, it may have been a book that I was reading, and he was mentioned, I'm trying to retrace my week, but I asked myself a question that I wanted to share with you. And that is post-October the 7th. What does Israel's Maslow Triangle look like? So I'm going to frame the question with its particulars to you. If Maslow argued that you need food and water in order to even begin to assume your next steps on the triangle, in other words, as I said to you before, I mean oxygen also. If you're not breathing, you're not thinking about Mendelssohn's concerto, like you need basic things in life in order to begin thinking of other things. So in Israel, we always assumed on a national level that there were certain things that were essential to what it needed, that Israel needed to be a regional superpower. It needed a mighty armed force, and that Israel also needed to be an economic superpower as well. I mean, I don't need to remind you, but excuse me if I will, that Israel has been only second to the United States and the inflow of venture capital, of companies being listed on the NASDAQ. It is routinely in the top five of commercial patents with engineering and science and things like that. In other words, for Israel in order to survive, it needed to be a military superpower, regional superpower, and it needed to be a worldwide economic powerhouse. And those were the assumptions that were made as to be the baseline of the Maslow triangle for Israel to begin to consider to be other things. In other words, we needed to be economically strong, and we needed to be militarily strong, and only then could we then begin to pursue aspirational ideas, democracy, Jewish culture, Yisraeli, what they call Israeli culture, all these other things. But you have to at least agree, and I don't know what to what to agree or not. You will agree with me, but I think that it's worthy to say that some of the assumptions that were made about what Israel needed from Maslow's triangle, post-October the 7th, were mistaken, or if not mistaken actually, we overlook something. You see, in Canada and the United States, in France and in Germany and in England, they can live in societies that are not cohesive. People don't have to get along in Canada. People can be angry at the government and angry at their neighbors. You can don't like the people in Quebec and not like the people in, I don't want to say Winnipeg, my wife's from Winnipeg, so in case she's listening, you know, Alberta, whatever. It doesn't make a difference in Canada. You could literally despise the Canadian way of life, and in America, you could despise the American dream, and it wouldn't make a difference to the existence and the ongoing perpetuity of those countries, because none of those countries are facing existential threats on a continual basis on every border that they exist on. But it seems to me that what maybe we overlooked on the assumptions of the basic needs that Israel requires is not just economic prosperity and military strength, but social cohesion. Does anybody actually think that October 7th would not have been possible, that October 7th would have happened if the events from January the 4th of that year hadn't happened? What happened on January the 4th, 2024? The Minister of Justice of the State of Israel stood on a Saturday night and announced for the whole country to listen about his plan to overhaul the judicial system of the country, which ignited a massive series of protests that you saw and heard. And does anybody think that October the 7th would have happened if the country had not been burning itself internally over those months? Now, you could say, well, maybe yes and maybe no, but make no mistake, anybody who followed the headlines from January the 4th until October the 6th, well know that both on an official statement basis and leaks that repeatedly came out, both from military intelligence and from senior army officials, was that the country was placing itself into grave danger. That people refusing to show up for the reserve duty and kick back internally from the professional ranks of the office accord, all these things were taking a severe toll on the cohesion of the country and the ability of the country to function with some form of unity. And so when we think about Israel and our existence and Israel's strength, I want you not only to consider its remarkable economic engine and as we've seen over the past months, its impressive military ability to strike where and when it's needed, but no less you should be thinking about the cohesion of the country because the economic success and the military power mean little if the country cannot unite itself with some common values that can hold it together. This morning, the Torah portion, Pashat Reh, has a very famous scene to it that the children of Israel are divided in a valley, there's Mount Grazim, and Mount Eval, and the curses and blessings that come the way of the Israelites, unlike the Ten Commandments, which are all in singular, it's all in the plural. In other words, reminding the people that while we all live our individual story, as one person famously said, we all live as if we're living in a movie and you're the star. That's how you all live your life. Everything focuses on me, where I'm going, I'm stuck in a traffic jam, how dare the traffic like not work, how dare that person got into a car accident in front of me, like everything revolves around us. But this morning, the Torah opens itself up to reminding us that there is no me without the we. Jews only exist because there's a Jewish people. And as an echo of this, we are told that when the Beit in Midash, when the temple was built, there was a tax that was placed on the head of every Jew to support its function functioning. Does anybody know what that tax was? It was called the tax of the Chatsi Shekel, of a half Shekel, to which the rabbi famously asked, why was it a half a Shekel? Why not a whole? And of course, you know the answer because we're only half of the answer. The other half is all of you, Shabbat Shalom. [BLANK_AUDIO]