Menu
Menu
December 18, 2021
Author(s): Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz,
Parshat Vayechi
December 18, 2021 — 14 Tevet 5782
Joyfully Wrong
by Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
Adam Grant, the teacher of organizational psychology at Penn, a noted Ted Talk speaker, and the author of best-selling books, was recently on NPR sharing two very different takes on the phenomenon of being wrong.
The first take concerned Adam himself when he was a teen-ager. He and a friend disagreed about a particular song in a Broadway musical. Each thought he was right. Eventually his friend summoned proof that he, the friend, was right. Adam was wrong. Adam could see the proof. Knew the proof was irrefutable. But could not get himself to acknowledge the error of his ways. His friend said: Adam, admit you are wrong. Adam could not bring himself to do it.
Roll the film forward for the second take. Adam is now a professor at Penn. One day he is giving a lecture, and he sees in the crowd Daniel Kahneman, Israel’s Nobel-Prize winner in behavioral economics. As Adam Grant is lecturing, he can see that Daniel Kahneman’s face light up. There is a gleam in his eye. A smile on his face. Kahneman is alive to what Adam Grant is saying. As soon as the lecture is over, Kahneman bounds up on to the stage and says to Adam Grant: I loved your lecture. Thank you. Adam Grant says thank you, can I ask you what you loved about it? Kahneman says: I loved that you showed me I was wrong. Adam Grant says: you loved that I showed you you were wrong? Why did you love that? Kahneman answers: because now that I know I am wrong, I can get better and wiser.
Daniel Kahneman was not just wrong. He was joyfully wrong. He knew he was wrong. And he was joyful about it because he was able to learn and grow.
When was the last time you were joyfully wrong? When was the last time you did your own version of Daniel Kahneman, when you realized you were wrong, and you were joyful about it because it meant you could become a better version of you?
What gets in our way of being joyfully wrong? To err is human. We are all wrong from time to time. What prevents us from acknowledging the error of our ways and growing?
If you want to see a picture of the opposite of joyfully wrong, the opposite of Daniel Kahneman’s move, look no further than Jacob in our reading this morning. Jacob is to bless his grandsons Manasseh and Ephraim. As Joseph himself points out, Manasseh, as the older son, should be blessed with Jacob’s right hand; Ephraim as the younger son should be blessed with Jacob’s left hand. But Jacob intentionally subverts things. He places his right hand on the younger and his left hand on the older, flouting convention. When Joseph tells Jacob he is doing it wrong, instead of being open to new wisdom, Jacob responds: “I know, my son, I know. Manasseh too shall become a people, and Manasseh too shall be great. But his younger brother Ephraim shall be greater than he…” (Gen. 48: 19). Jacob refuses to budge.
I was talking about this moment with my sister Jill, who put it so well. She asked: Has Jacob learned nothing? All these years later, has he learned nothing? All these years later, why repeat the mistakes that have destroyed family life both for his family of origin and the family he created as an adult. After all, was it not the virus of favoritism—Rebecca favored Jacob, Isaac favored Esau—that led to the implosion of that family unit? And then, having been infected with the virus of favoritism, Jacob repeats the mistake and the trauma on the family he creates, favoring Joseph, giving him the coat of many colors, asking him to spy on his brothers. The first case of favoritism results in Jacob never seeing his parents again and not seeing Esau for twenty years, and it left a lasting residue of discord and distrust between the brothers. The second case of favoritism results in Joseph being separated from his father and brothers for, you guessed it, twenty years, and it also left a lasting residue of discord and distrust between the brothers.
Jacob has seen two families ruined by the virus of favoritism. Here is his chance to stop. Here is his chance to say the trauma stops with me, and it stop now. But no. Jacob repeats his mistake. Has he learned nothing?
Jacob is a case study of what happens when your identity becomes wrapped up in your ideas. When your view becomes you. When you become your view. After all, Jacob’s very name is supplanter. He is the one who supplants. His whole childhood was about being born second, to his older brother Esau, and then resisting it. His whole life is about ousting the older. He lived it himself, he transmitted it to his children, and now he is going to transmit it to his grandchildren. Has he learned nothing? Of course not! A supplanter will supplant.
The story of America today is the story of too many Jacobs. Too many Americans equate their identity as a human being with their ideas on the contentious issues of the day. When our ideas become our identity, we close ourselves off from the possibility of being joyfully wrong.
Let me tell you a story about what good things can happen to us, and to our world, when we disentangle what we think about issues of the day from who we are. It is a story about the life-changing potential of being joyfully wrong.
On Monday, September 1, 1986, a 35-year old woman named Laura Schroff, a successful ad executive, was in a hurry when she hears a young boy on a street corner at 56th Street and Broadway in New York City call out to her and say: “Excuse me, lady, do you have any spare change? I am hungry.” She observes: “When I heard him, I didn’t really hear him. His words were part of the clatter, like a car horn or someone yelling for a cab. They were, you could say, just noise—the kind of nuisance New Yorkers learn to tune out. So I walked right by him, as if he wasn’t there… And then—and I’m still not sure why I did this—I came back.”
Why did Laura not hear him initially? She offers two reasons. “I am a woman whose life runs on schedules. I make appointments, I fill slots, I micromanage the clock. I bounce around from meeting to meeting, ticking things off a list. I am not merely punctual; I am fifteen minutes early for any and every engagement. This is how I live; it is who I am.” She ignored this young boy initially, as she put it, “very simply, because he wasn’t in my schedule.”
But there is another reason as well. There are a lot of panhandlers. She notes: “After a while you got used to them—hard, gaunt men and sad, haunted women, wearing rags, camped on corners, sleeping on grates, asking for change…They were just so prevalent that most people made an almost subconscious decision to simply look the other way—to, basically, ignore them. The problem seemed so vast, so endemic, that stopping to help a single panhandler could feel all but pointless.”
Laura can explain why she walked past him. But why did she go back? To this day she cannot totally answer that question, but somehow, out of the corner of her eye, she saw him in a way that made a claim on her heart: “I saw that he was a child—tiny body, sticks for arms, big round eyes. He wore a burgundy sweatshirt that was smudged and frayed and ratty burgundy sweatpants to match. He had scuffed white sneakers with untied laces, and his fingernails were dirty. But his eyes were bright and there was a general sweetness about him. He was, I would soon learn, eleven years old.”
Laura took this young boy to McDonald’s. He was starving. He could not remember the last meal he had eaten. He got a Big Mac, a cheeseburger, a Diet Coke, French fries and a thick chocolate shake. His name was Maurice Mazyck, and she learned his story, which was beyond her capacity even to imagine. His father was a gang member and left when Maurice was six. His mother was a heroin and crack addict. He did not know an adult who held down a full-time job. He had received a total of two presents in his first eleven years: a toy truck, and a joint.
Following that first lunch at McDonald’s, they started meeting every Monday for lunch, for the next 150 Mondays. At first, they would meet at McDonald’s. But soon enough Laura would take Maurice to her luxury condo and feed him a home-cooked meal. It was the first time he had ever sat down to a home-cooked meal. Laura offered to make Maurice lunch for school, and he asked that she put his lunch in a brown paper bag. Why do you care about a brown paper bag? Because, he answered: “When kids see you walk in with a brown paper bag, they know someone cares about you.”
Roll the film forward. Today Maurice is a husband and father, and he and his wife have seven children. He and Laura continue to see one another once a month. His children call her Aunt Laurie. For her part, Laura has shared that “Of all the achievements in my life, there is nothing that makes me prouder than to call Maurice my friend.”
Laura ended up writing a book about her decades-long relationship with Maurice called An Invisible Thread. Who would know that a 35-year old business woman and an 11-year old boy trapped in poverty could become lifelong friends in ways that would lift both of them up?
Before Laura met Maurice, she had her busy schedule to keep, and she had her rationale for not responding to the endless poverty and desperation on New York City streets. But it turns out she was joyfully wrong. And when she realized it, she discovered an invisible thread connecting her not only to Maurice but to a larger mission of repair.
Where might you be joyfully wrong, and what invisible thread of purpose and meaning might you discover? One moment of being joyfully wrong can create a lifetime of being joyfully right. Shabbat shalom.