Friend and Foe

For anyone who attended the University of Michigan in the early 1990s, there is one half of one basketball game that to this day remains exceptionally difficult to discuss openly. The year was 1992, and Michigan was playing the defending champs Duke in the NCAA national championship game. These were the halcyon years of the “Fab Five.” Chris Weber, Jalen Rose, Juwan Howard, Jimmy King, and Ray Jackson were matched up against Coach K’s Blue Devils: Bobby Hurley, Christian Laitner and Grant Hill. The score at the half was tight: 31-30, with Michigan ahead by just a point. I think I speak for all Michigan alumni present when I say that none of us were prepared for what would happen next. Duke came into the second half roaring. What had been a close game became an absolute blowout, and the Blue Devils trounced my beloved Wolverines by twenty. Final score: 71-51.

Painful as the memory is to recall, I share it with you this morning, not, God forbid, to darken this festive Shabbat morning, but because what happened in that game and games like it has become the subject of study as emblematic of a fascinating aspect of human behavior. In research conducted by Wharton professor Jonah Berger and University of Chicago professor Devin Pope, it turns out that what happened that night was not an anomaly. A study of over 18,000 basketball games between 1993 and 2009 reveals that there is a relationship between the score at halftime and the final outcome. When a team is trailing by one point at the half, that team is far more likely to win than the team that is ahead. The team trailing, the thinking goes, “stews with frustration” at the fact that they are so close and yet still behind, and they emerge from the locker room full of motivation, far more so than the team up by one. The intense social comparison serves to inspire the team that is behind to regain the lead, countless locker room speeches resulting in dramatic reversals of fortunes bringing both glory and heartache to sports fans throughout the ages.

This study and many others like it are cited in a terrific new book on the competitive nature of the human spirit by Wharton's Maurice Schweitzer and Columbia's Adam Galinsky titled Friend and Foe: When to Cooperate and When to Compete and How to Succeed at Both. Schweitzer begins with the twofold thesis that not only is social comparison inevitable, but that we assess our success by relative measures, never absolute ones. How we feel about our wealth, our wisdom, or even our waistline is determined by social comparison. Our lives are filled with spoken and unspoken mechanisms, like checking our Facebook pages, marathon results, or Bloomberg reports to see how we are doing relative to others. Our proclivity towards social comparisons, Schweitzer explains, is part of our hard wiring as human beings; unto itself it is neither good nor bad. It can be a great motivator, witness Kennedy’s announcing his intention to beat the Soviets by putting a man on the moon, Venus and Serena competing on the tennis court, or Duke beating Michigan in 1992. At the same time, Schweitzer explains, such comparisons can yield harmful and even toxic results. Be it Tonya Harding orchestrating the demise of her chief figure skating rival Nancy Kerrigan, two coworkers resorting to unsavory behavior to outshine one another, or teens struggling with body image, we need not look far to see the underbelly of the human tendency to social comparison.

Schweitzer goes on to explain that whether the comparisons are sources of motivation or destructive envy, they are most intense in self-relevant domains or categories; that is, we are most likely to compare ourselves to those with whom we share something in common. Lawyers measure themselves up against others in their graduating class; Larry Bird measures himself against Magic Johnson; Cantor Schwartz measures himself against . . . no one. The closer the point of reference, the more intense the comparison; the more intense the comparison, the greater the likelihood that the relationship will be one of either profound and mutual encouragement, or just the opposite, that such comparisons will bring out the very worst in us. Schweitzer and Galinsky's book seeks to provide the tools by which we can manage social comparisons towards success and not enmity, towards motivation and not frustration; in other words, how we can find the right balance between cooperation and competition in the relationships that mean the most to us.

The book is terrific, and I recommend it with only one reservation. The one thing Professor Schweitzer – or Maurice, as we used to call him growing up in Los Angeles – forgot to do was reference the book of Genesis as the primary source for all his findings. If nothing else, the book of Genesis is a series of case studies in the roller-coaster ride of that oh-so-delicate relationship with the people with whom we share more points of comparison than anyone else in the world: our siblings. Think about it. From Cain’s frustration that Abel’s sacrifice was accepted over his to Ishmael and Isaac competing for their father’s affection. From the competitive tension between Rachel and Leah over progeny and Jacob’s love to Joseph and his brothers contending with one another, the primary relationships of Genesis are not parent-child, nor husband-wife. The axis on which our people’s story is told is that of siblings: their rivalries, their ruptures, and in some cases, their reconciliations.

And there is no set of siblings more fraught with tension than the two antagonists of this week’s Torah reading, Jacob and Esau. Not just siblings, but the most self-relevant domain of all – twins. Jacob born literally with Esau’s heel in hand, the two would go through life in a perpetual state of social comparison. One smooth-skinned, the other ruddy; one a man of the tents, the other an outdoorsman. The brothers lived in constant tension, not just in terms of their external attributes and demeanor but in their ongoing effort to receive the most valuable resource of all – the blessings, birthrights, and affections of their parents. It is a tale laced with what the late French philosopher René Girard called “mimetic desire,” the act of “wanting what someone else has because they have it.” (Cited in Jonathan Sacks, Not in God’s Name, p. 87). Through shrewd negotiation and deceit, Jacob usurps his older brother’s birthright and then blessing, a pyrrhic victory in that whatever he gained was more than lost in his immediate and long-term flight from home. Long before the Milliband brothers, Jacob and Esau are a case study in the invidious effects of what happens when two siblings can only understand themselves in relation to one another, a corrosive no-win dynamic producing nothing but years of heartache and misery.

It is only in this morning’s Torah reading that the text shows the path by which the brothers will find peace with each other, and perhaps by extension, we will find peace in our relationships. Long estranged from Esau, Jacob sleeps on the banks of the Jabbok river, nervously anticipating his dawn meeting with his brother. Nobody knows for certain with whom Jacob wrestled that night, his previous wrestling match having been with Esau in utero. Whoever it was, my teacher Michael Fishbane explains, it was by way of that wrestling match that Jacob “works through” his past and “wrestles with the Esau within him.” (Text and Texture, pp. 52-53) Although we are never told where and how Esau spent that same night, we do know that the brothers would greet each other the next morning with unprecedented warmth and kindness. “Accept from me this offering,” Jacob pleads to Esau, “Take back the brakhah, the blessing.” It is almost as if, perhaps exactly as if, Jacob finally returns the very thing of Esau’s which he stole so many years before. As for Esau, he too has come a long way. “I have enough, my brother,” he tells Jacob, “let what you have remain yours.” (9:9) The mimetic desire has dissipated; neither brother is measuring his self worth by way of the other. At long last, the two siblings find a healthier way to relate, each one understanding that his happiness need not come at the expense of the other, each one realizing that he can and should rejoice at the very blessings unique to the other. The relationship mended, the brothers take leave of each other ready to meet their futures on their own terms. Indeed the text tells us that Jacob arrives next at a place called Shalem, the Hebrew word for “whole” or “complete.” For the first time in his life – and I would like to think for the first time in Esau’s life – both men, both brothers are complete, each wholly satisfied with his lot in life and altogether at ease with the blessings possessed by the other.

From that first human being eyeing the fruit of the garden, to be human is to desire that which we don’t have. It is a feeling as natural as it is inevitable. No matter who we are, there will always be someone else who possesses a valued commodity in greater abundance: wealth, health, wisdom, youth, beauty, family, love, nachas, and more. When those people are as close to us as, say, those folks sitting around our Thanksgiving tables, there is no question, it can get tricky along the way. It is not easy, not in the Bible and not for any of us, to see another in possession of that which we desire. But as I said to someone I love very much the other day, the measure of who we are is not based on those times we get what we want, but rather how we handle ourselves in those moments that we don’t. If we must compare, let us do so in a way that impels us towards healthy competition and achievement, ever roaring into the second half. If we know our world to be one in which comparisons will be made, then let us always comport ourselves with great modesty, ever aware that we ourselves may be the object of envy without even knowing it. If we are fortunate enough to find ourselves in blessed circumstances, then let us leverage our circumstances towards the betterment of those individuals and institutions deserving of our support, for in doing so we prove ourselves worthy of our blessings. Finally, and most importantly, let us never ever fall so far into the trap of social comparison that we are blinded to those aspects of our own lives which we should never take for granted and for which we should give thanks. As Jacob and Esau learned, we can, every one of us, live to enjoy our own blessings. Whether we do or don’t is a choice that is ultimately for each one of us to decide.