Neuroscience and Ritual
In his study of the science of human nature, The Social Animal, New York Times columnist David Brooks writes:
We are living in the middle of the revolution in consciousness. Over the past few years, geneticists, neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, anthropologists, and others have made great strides in understanding the building blocks of human flourishing. And a core finding of their work is that we are not primarily products of our conscious thinking. We are primarily the products of thinking that happens below the level of awareness.1David Brooks, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement (New York: Random House, 2011), x.
Too much takes place in the mind for us to be fully aware of it. Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia estimates that the human mind can absorb eleven million pieces of information at any given moment. We are conscious of only a tiny fraction of this. Most of what is going on mentally lies below the threshold of awareness.
One result of the new neuroscience is that we are becoming aware of the hugely significant part played by emotion in decision-making. The French Enlightenment emphasised the role of reason, and regarded emotion as a distraction and distortion. We now know scientifically how wrong this is.
Antonio Damasio, in his Descartes’ Error, tells the story of a man who, as the result of a tumour, suffered damage to the frontal lobes of his brain. He had a high IQ , was well informed, and had an excellent memory. But after surgery to remove the tumour, his life went into free-fall. He was unable to organise his time. He made bad investments that cost him his savings. He divorced his wife, married a second time, and rapidly divorced again. He could still reason perfectly but had lost the ability to feel emotion. As a result, he was unable to make sensible choices.2Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Avon Books, 1995).
Another man with a similar injury found it impossible to make decisions at all. At the end of one session, Damasio suggested two possible dates for their next meeting. The man then took out a notebook, began listing the pros and cons of each, talked about possible weather conditions, potential conflicts with other engagements, and so on for half an hour, until Damasio finally interrupted him, and made the decision for him. The man immediately said, “That’s fine,” and went away.
It is less reason than emotion that lies behind our choices, and it takes emotional intelligence to make good choices. The problem is that much of our emotional life lies beneath the surface of the conscious mind. This discovery allows us a new insight into the otherwise puzzling phenomenon of ḥukkim, the “statutes” of Judaism, laws that seem to make no sense in terms of rationality.
These include laws like the prohibition of sowing mixed seeds together (kilayim), wearing cloth of mixed wool and linen (shaatnez), and eating milk and meat together. A key example is the law of the red heifer with which Parashat Ḥukkat begins, described as the ḥok par excellence: “This is the statute of the Torah” (Num. 19:2). Jewish thinkers through the ages have developed different theories about the nature and purpose of these laws. Broadly speaking, there are four approaches.
First is the view expressed in the Midrash by R. Abba b. Eliashiv3Leviticus Rabba 35:6. that ḥukkim bring us to life in the World to Come. They exist, in other words, to give us spiritual reward. Rabbi Saadia Gaon in his philosophical treatise on Judaism, The Book of Beliefs and Opinions (written in 933),4Saadia Gaon, The Book of Beliefs and Opinions (Sefer Emunot VeDeot), book 3, trans. Samuel Rosenblatt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1948). distinguishes two kinds of commandments, sikhliyot, commands of reason, and shimiyot, commands of “hearing and obeying.” Commands of the first kind we might have arrived at ourselves because they have obvious human benefits. Those of the second kind, which include statutes, we know only through revelation, and they were given to us by God so that we could receive reward for our obedience.
The second view, found in the Midrash in the name of R. Ḥama b. R. Ḥanina, is that ḥukkim are an antidote to the “evil inclination.”5Numbers Rabba 35:5.
They are, as it were, an ongoing tutorial in impulse control. The fact that we may not have milk after meat, or eat certain kinds of food, or use certain types of cloth, means that we are constantly practising self-restraint in the pursuit of desire. The commands were given, said Rav, “to refine human character.”6Genesis Rabba 44:1.
Every civilisation, said Freud, depends on “coercion and the renunciation of instinct.”7Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (London: Hogarth Press: Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1928), 7. He gives a similar account in Civilization and Its Discontents.
The very fact that we do not understand a particular law means that when we obey it we are acknowledging an authority higher than ourselves, and this strengthens our capacity for self-control. In this view, ḥukkim are an important element in the development of character.
In both of these views, there is no particular significance as to the content of the commands. The Torah bans one thing but it could have banned another. The details make no difference to our reward or to the renunciation of desire. Maimonides strongly objected to this approach. His proof was a verse from Deuteronomy (4:6): “Safeguard and keep [these statutes], for this is your wisdom and understanding in the eyes of the nations. They will hear all these statutes and say, ‘This great nation is certainly a wise and understanding people.’” How, asked Maimonides, could statutes evoke the admiration of the nations if they were essentially irrational? His own theory, discussed in Guide for the Perplexed, is that ḥukkim are Judaism’s defence against idolatry.8Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, III:29–31. Maimonides gives his explanation for the law of the red heifer in Guide for the Perplexed, III:47.
Many of the practices banned by the Torah were key features of idolatrous rites and cultures.
The fourth view, set out in the thirteenth century by Nahmanides and in the nineteenth by Samson Raphael Hirsch, is that the ḥukkim are laws that teach respect for the integrity of the created world.9Nahmanides’ view is set out in his commentary to Lev. 19:19. Hirsch’s appears in the eleventh of the Nineteen Letters of Ben Uziel, trans. Bernard Drachman (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1899).
Nature, the Torah is telling us, has its own laws, domains, and boundaries, the crossing of which is an offence against the divinely appointed order. So we do not combine animal (wool) and vegetable (linen) textiles, or mix animal life (milk) and animal death (meat). Behind these and other such commands is the idea that God is the creator of bio-diversity rather than hybrid uniformity. As for the red heifer, Hirsch says that the ritual exists to cleanse humans from depression brought about by reminders of human mortality.10See Hirsch’s commentary to Num. 19.
Contemporary neuroscience, however, suggests a fifth approach. Recall Damasio’s conclusion that much of our behaviour is driven by instincts that lie beneath conscious awareness and the rational, reflective part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex. The question then arises: How, if our instincts are largely unconscious, can we change them? The short answer is ritual. Ritual is behaviour that bypasses the prefrontal cortex. It is action based not on a rational decision that this is how we should act. Rather, it is behaviour that follows a precise set of rules, a fixed choreography. Doing certain acts repeatedly, we form new “habits of the heart” that work at an unconscious level to form new patterns of instinctual behaviour.
Virtually all great artists, writers, and composers practise rituals.11See Mason Currey, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work (New York: Knopf, 2013).
So do chess masters and outstanding sports stars.12See Daniel Coyle, The Talent Code (New York: Bantam, 2009).
Repeated behaviour creates new neural pathways. It reconfigures our character so that there are certain things we do and feel differently. We are no longer the people we once were. We have engraved into our instincts, the way certain strokes are engraved in the minds of tennis champions or moves in the minds of chess masters, automatic responses to circumstance. Prayer engenders gratitude. Daily charitable giving makes us generous. The “Thou shalt nots” of religion teach us self-control. Ritual changes the world by changing us.
This would not have surprised Aristotle or Maimonides because that is how they believed virtue is acquired, by constantly repeating virtuous acts. “Habit becomes second nature,” as the medieval thinkers put it.13See, for example, Abrabanel’s commentary to Ex. 32.
“The heart follows the deed,” says Sefer HaḤinnukh.14Sefer HaḤinnukh, command 16.
Though they lacked the neuroscience, philosophers and sages knew this through experience and observation. The mistake – Descartes’ error – was born at the start of the Enlightenment, one of the great ages of rationalism. We now know, however, that we are not rational animals. Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in economics for inventing, together with Amos Tversky, the field of behavioural economics, which shows that even when we make economic choices we do so on the basis of irrational instincts.15See Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (London: Penguin, 2012).
The entire model on which much of modern thought is based – the so-called “rational actor” – fails to get to grips with the emotional side of human character, which can sometimes be very destructive indeed.
Today the principle of the Sefer HaḤinnukh, that the heart follows the deed, has been reinvented as “fake it until you feel it.” Brain scans have shown that when people hold a pencil sideways in their mouth, forcing them to smile, they show the same pattern of brain activity as people who are happy. It follows that if you want to change the way you feel, you can do so by repeatedly performing the act associated with a particular emotion. Ritual allows us to reconfigure the brain, transforming our emotional life and allowing us to control our more destructive instincts.
We know for example – Jared Diamond has chronicled this in his book Collapse16Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (London: Penguin, 2011). – that wherever humans have settled throughout history they have left behind them a trail of environmental disaster, wiping out whole species of animals and birds, destroying forests, damaging the soil by over-farming, and so on. So the prohibitions against sowing mixed seeds, mixing meat and milk or wool and linen, and so on, create an instinctual respect for the integrity of nature. They establish boundaries. They set limits. They inculcate the feeling that we may not do to our animal and plant environment everything we wish. Some things are forbidden – like the fruit of the tree in the middle of the Garden of Eden. The whole Eden story, set at the dawn of human history, is a parable whose message we can understand today better than any previous generation: without a sense of limits, we will destroy our ecology and discover that we have lost paradise.
As for the ritual of the red heifer, it is directed at the most destructive irrational instinct of all: what Sigmund Freud called Thanatos, the death instinct. He described it as something “more primitive, more elementary, more instinctual than the pleasure principle which it over-rides.”17Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in On Metapsychology (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 294.
In Civilization and Its Discontents, he wrote that “a portion of the [death] instinct is diverted towards the external world and comes to light as an instinct of aggressiveness,” which he saw as “the greatest impediment to civilization.”18Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 78, 81.
The red heifer ritual told all those who saw it or underwent it that the holy is to be found in life, not death. Anyone who had been in contact with a dead body needed purification before entering the Temple. Priests, whose life was lived in the precincts of the holy, had to avoid, as far as possible, contact with or close proximity to a corpse. Judaism has, from the beginning, refused to consecrate death. It was almost certainly to avoid the tomb of Moses becoming a holy site that the Torah says, “To this day, no one knows where his grave is” (Deut. 34:6). God and the holy are to be found in life, not death.
What recent neuroscience has made eminently clear is that changes of attitude, when they are associated with deep emotion, cannot be achieved by reason or conscious deliberation alone. Freud was right to suggest that the death instinct is powerful and largely unconscious, yet under certain conditions it can be utterly devastating in what it leads people to do.
The Hebrew word ḥok, as we saw, comes from the verb meaning, “to engrave.” Just as a statute is carved into stone, so a behavioural habit is carved deeply into our unconscious mind and alters our instinctual responses. The result is a personality trained to see death and holiness as two utterly opposed states – just as meat (death) and milk (life) are.
Ḥukkim are Judaism’s way of reconfiguring the limbic system, the emotional brain, by way of acts that bypass the prefrontal cortex, the rational brain. Contemporary neuroscience has shown us how this works, and why. Rationality, vitally important in its own right, is only half the story of why we do what we do. The “rational actor” model that dominated Western thought in recent centuries turns out to be radically inadequate to understanding some of humanity’s most self-destructive tendencies. The Torah’s ancient wisdom may help us confront the instinct to violence and death that still lurks beneath the surface of the conscious mind.