The (Honest) Truth About the Garden

To this day, I can recall the precise circumstances of the last time I took a puff on a cigarette. It was over seventeen years ago when Debbie and I were in Paris on our honeymoon. We had spent the day walking the streets of the City of Lights, going from museum to museum. Exhausted, we sat down in a café by the Tuileries Garden to catch our breath and people-watch. Surrounded by the smoke-filled continental spirit, a glass of red wine in front of me, and thousands of miles from anyone who knew me save my beautiful bride, I decided to do what everyone else was doing and bummed a cigarette off the Parisian gentleman sitting next to me. The experience was not a pleasant one. I breathed in, a violent fit of coughing ensued, and an unspoken smile of “I told you so,” appeared on Debbie’s face. Seventeen years have passed and I have experienced neither a cigarette nor the temptation to smoke ever since.

I share this confession not for the incident itself, but for what would happen about three months later. Newly married, I decided to sign up for a life insurance policy. My insurance broker found me the right company, I took the required blood test, and an insurance representative called me for the final phone screening. Her panel of questions was fairly straightforward, including, “In the last six months, have you smoked a cigarette?” Not really thinking about it, I responded honestly with a “yes.” She continued, “How many packs a day do you smoke?” To which I replied, “None.” She asked, “Would you say you smoke daily, often, or sometimes?” Sensing where things were headed I blurted out, “Ma’am, I don’t think you understand, in the last six months I have smoked one cigarette – total. And for that matter, I didn’t even finish it. I am not, by any definition, a smoker.” No matter my protestations, by then the die was cast. The agent was working off a script, my sin imputed, my status inputted, and it could not be undone. My profile listed me, “one-puff Cosgrove,” as a smoker with an inflated premium to reflect my risky lifestyle.

The coda to the story arrived when my insurance broker called trying to figure out how it was that I, an avowed non-smoker, was now listed and billed as a smoker. I explained what happened and my broker gave me advice that I still remember like yesterday: “Elliot, for the rest of your life, if an insurance agent, or anyone for that matter, ever asks you if you are a smoker, your answer is always ‘No!’” The incident is long behind me and my insurance premiums, thankfully, have been adjusted down. But the cycle of events – from the illicit cigarette to the insurance agent’s interrogation to the subsequent counsel from my insurance broker – has stuck with me. What I believed to be a surreptitious, momentary, and harmless indulgence transformed into a morality tale of lingering consequence.

Of all the things planted in the Garden of Eden, the most interesting by far is neither the tree nor the snake, but the window into the textured soul of every human being. After God’s creation of earth and Adam and Eve to till and tend it, our opening narrative deals not with a momentous journey, love story, or founding of a nation. Our introduction to Adam and Eve – and by extension, to humanity as a whole – comes by way of a mundane episode of desire, transgression, discovery, and rationalization leading up to eventual punishment. Eat anything you want of the Garden, instructs God, except for the fruit of the one tree – instructions seemingly as straightforward as they are generous. Whether the snake actually spoke or just represents the slippery slope leading to sin is almost beside the point. We know how the story will unfold. It was the heat of the day, defenses were down, and the fruit looked oh so good, so pleasing to the eye, and nobody, but nobody, seemed to be watching. And yet just as the deed was done, in came the voice of God: “Ayeka? Where are you? . . . Did you eat of the tree which I had forbidden you?” We can almost hear the gulp taken by Adam and Eve as they were caught. It was a yes-or-no question that, for the first but not last time in human history, would be parried away by passing the blame. “The woman that You put at my side” Adam prevaricated, “she gave me of the tree, and I ate.” So too Eve, when confronted, would pass the buck: “The serpent duped me, and I ate.” That the sin was relatively minor – just a harmless bite of the fruit – was beside the point. The punishment would be swift: our first couple – in possession of everything save the moral compass they so desperately needed – exiled from the Garden forever. We imagine the dialogue between the two, the first ever “he said/she said” as Adam and Eve sought to justify their actions to each other, to God and, no doubt, to themselves. Over the ages, the object of desire – a fruit, a cigarette, or whatever – has changed, but the contours and outcome of the tale have remained altogether consistent. A temptation, a trust broken, and acts of self-justification. Rinse, wash, and repeat – over and over again since time immemorial.

It is a rather humbling to consider the degree to which our first and most ancient text understood the nature of our human condition. This past week you may have read the piece in the New York Times entitled “Why Big Liars Often Start as Small Ones,” reporting on the latest research to explain the slippery slope by which “wayward politicians, corrupt financiers, unfaithful spouses and others” explain their conduct. Mention is made of one social scientist, Professor Dan Ariely of Duke University, whose book The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty and much-watched TED Talk are understood to best describe the moral climate of our age. Ariely’s thesis is that every human being, when left to his or her own devices, can fall prey to a degree of dishonesty. His book begins with an experiment in which a group is given a set time to answer a series of simple math questions, with a reward of one dollar for every correct answer. Time is called, the worksheets are handed in – with an average of four questions answered correctly. In the next group, the conditions, the questions, and the time limit are all the same, but this time, the participants are invited to shred their worksheets and self-report their results. Lo and behold, this group averages not four, but seven correct answers. In economic terms, Ariely explains the cost-benefit analysis at play in any act of dishonesty, be it golf, business, or our diets. First, the perceived probability of being caught; second, how much a person stands to gain from cheating; and third, the punishment one would receive were one to be caught.

While all this analysis explains a lot about human behavior, the real insight of Ariely’s book is that important as these variables may be in contributing to dishonesty, the most important factor is what he calls the personal “fudge factor,” the manner by which we self-justify our behaviors. Everybody, at the end of the day, would like to think of him or herself as righteous. In Ariely’s words “We cheat up to the level that allows us to retain our self-image as reasonably honest individuals…” ever “seeking to identify that line where we can benefit from dishonesty without damaging our own self image.” (pp. 23, 28) So for instance, while I would never steal from the synagogue’s petty cash, I may very well take a ream of paper, having rationalized to myself that I am, after all, printing my sermons from my home computer. The golfer may take a mulligan, shaking off that first swing as an infraction that is, after all, part of the game. Or, to raise the stakes a little, the would-be adulterer need only reference his or her loveless marriage to explain away whatever misdeeds have been committed. People, generally speaking, are not dishonest, nor for that matter, would they ever wish to be categorized as dishonest. Like beauty itself, morality is often measured in the eye of the beholder, the problem being that at a certain point one’s moral compass deteriorates to the point of irrelevance. Ariely’s thesis is one and the same as the Garden of Eden: we all possess the instinct to do good and bad. In rabbinic language: Each one of us is created with a yetzer ha-tov, a good inclination, and a yetzer ha-ra, an evil inclination. Be it Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, or each of us in our own lives, the moral battleground is one the same – the two impulses of our souls pitted up against each other.

And it is here, where Ariely’s work concludes, that our work as a religious community begins. Because if Ariely is correct, if each one of us is but an arm’s length away from an act of dishonesty that can be justified away, then we need to do everything in our power to make sure our absolute moral health is maintained. And it is here, I believe, that our tradition provides three tried-and-true methods to help us win out in the moral dramas of our lives.

First and foremost, we need to establish and immerse ourselves in communities bound together by expectations of moral conduct. Over Yom Kippur, a congregant pulled me aside asking if he needed to recite every al het, every chest-beating sin, even if he knew that he had not committed them all. My answer to him is that the power of group confession is not merely to identify our personal shortcomings, but to publicly and communally agree to norms of behavior. We don’t cheat, we don’t lie, we treat people with kindness. In a follow-up to the math experiment, prior to handing out the worksheet, Ariely asked one group to try to list the last ten books they had read and another group to try to list the Ten Commandments. Every time, the group who had their moral memory jogged by way of the Ten Commandments displayed more integrity. Of all the reasons to be actively involved in a religious community, one good reason may just be that it places our imperfect souls in a community that aspires to moral behavior. Left to our own devices, all of us can be fall prey to dishonesty, so why wouldn’t we, the thinking goes, lean on each other to strengthen our resolve?

The second avenue goes beyond just being engaged in a religious community, to being engaged in religious practice – in Jewish terms, a life of mitzvot. It is by no means foolproof, but there is something about religious practice that bears the possibility of promoting moral health. My family is, not surprisingly, observant of Jewish law. The other day, one of my children, who shall remain nameless, broke a Jewish law about which they knew better. My concern was not the particular lapse, which unto itself was rather inconsequential, nor for that matter any belief that my kid would suffer some theological consequence resulting from the infraction. My concern, rather, was whether that lapse signaled a lack of self-discipline that could rear its head in far more consequential moments. You may or may not believe religious observance to be theologically compelling – that is a sermon for another day. But one undeniable dividend of living a life of mitzvot, how one eats, allocates time, dresses, and so on, is an intention-filled life in which every moment, every action, every decision can be understood as an opportunity for higher living, religiously and morally. No differently than regular gym attendance provides a regimen towards personal health, a life of mitzvot is a regimen for self-discipline, strengthening the muscle group of our yetzer ha-tov, our good inclination.

Finally, if we so choose, living a religious life provides a context in which our misdeeds, be they public or private, are ultimately, as the commercial goes, answerable to a higher authority. I remember in high school my parents once telling me that I should always act in a way that were they to be in the room, I would be completely comfortable. As people of faith, our moral compass is guided by the belief that our actions are both known and judged on high. We are never alone in the garden. My grandfather of blessed memory once preached a sermon asking, if Jewish morality could be distilled into one verse, what would it be? Perhaps “love your neighbor as yourself,” or maybe “remember that you were once a stranger in a strange land.” My grandfather’s answer to his own question was shiviti Hashem l’negdi tamid, “I have placed God before me always.” (Psalms 16:8) To live a life of shiviti is not to live with the fear of some big brother watching. Rather, to live a life of shiviti, of God-consciousness, means that even when all alone, be it on the streets of Paris or anywhere, we are never morally anonymous. We are all created in the image of God and as such, can and must live lives that aspire to the high moral possibilities of our existence.

Communal norms of behavior, a life of mitzvot, living lives with a sense of the divine presence. Once again, it is not foolproof; after all, religious communities do not lack for sinners. But it is a start, and we all need someplace to begin, especially on this Shabbat of new beginnings. Each and every one of us stands daily in the Garden of God, hearing that first question of the Bible, the question that still resonates today, the question of “Ayeka, where are you?” Neither then nor now is it a merely a question of geography. It is a question of morality: Where are you? Are you where you need to be, and if not, then how exactly will you get there? We know the tricks of self-justification, the self-deceptions of rationalization; we know lines exist and we vow to be vigilant not to cross them. It is not easy, not for Adam and Eve and not for us today. So let’s use all the tools at our disposal, leaning on each other, leaning on our tradition and yes, even leaning a little on God, and maybe, just maybe, in the year ahead our moral selves will prove able to weather the elements of the stormy world in which we live.