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Accompanying his father the rabbi to attend the funeral of a close family friend, young Abraham Twerski, a former JWR contributor, felt moved by the eulogies, the ritual rending of garments and the tear-soaked recitation of the mourner's kaddish.
A few hours later, the boy headed off with his father again, this time to synagogue to celebrate the Festival of Simchas Torah with a night of singing and dancing. But here Abraham felt confused and angry. After laying to rest their beloved neighbor, how could the community so quickly and easily turn aside from sorrow to engage in revelry and joy?
If you've raised a teenager, you know how little tolerance they have for adult inconsistencies. Upon perceiving the slightest appearance of double-standards, adolescents passionately trumpet their signature charge: Hypocrisy! Too often, they're right.
There is a profound difference, however, between failing to practice what we preach and falling short of the ideals to which we aspire. In a world of bewildering complexity, only with intellectual maturity can we navigate life's many contradictions and prioritize endlessly competing values. Conceding the inescapable tension between conflicting principles may feel hypocritical; but it is part of being human.
So how do we manage the paradoxes of life without abandoning any defensible claim to moral conviction? By employing the current addition to the Ethical Lexicon:
Compartmentalization (com*part*men*tal*i*za*tion/ kuhm-pahrt-men-tl-ahy-zey-shuhn) noun
The psychological defense mechanism of mentally separating incompatible ideas or feelings into distinct compartments.
Moral paradoxes strain our commitment to ethical coherence. We go to war to preserve peace. We destroy in order to build. We appear cruel to practice compassion. We conceal the truth to protect the innocent. We accept short-term losses to achieve long-term victory.
Compartmentalization is part of the essential structure of the physical world as well as the psychological world. The operating system that governs the movement of subatomic particles seems to violate the laws of the observable universe. The irrefutable existence of life defies the impossibility of spontaneous generation. The selflessness we witness in acts of genuine heroism belies the self-interest implicit in Darwinian survival.
To deny the paradox of our existence is irrational. To demand explanations for the inexplicable is counterproductive. Between these extremes lies the path of intellectual humility, which calls on us to accept our inability to answer unsolvable questions by relegating them to different boxes in our minds. Belief in contradictory truths is not hypocritical. It acknowledges the observation of evolutionary scientist J.B.S. Haldane that "the world is not only queerer than we imagine, but queerer than we can imagine."
Rabbi Abraham Twerski's remembrance of a young boy discovering compartmentalization illuminates the plight of the Jewish community since Oct. 7. Confronted with monstrous acts of inhumanity calculated to disrupt our lives, Israelis in particular and Jews in general have fought back against terror by preserving the normalcy of day-to-day existence.
On the one hand, we have relentlessly lobbied against genuine hypocrisy throughout the international community. We have repeated historical truths — ad nauseum — to the morally blind and ethically deaf, like French Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron and Irish President Michael Higgins. We have fought with facts and logic against willfully ignorant activists like Greta Thunberg. We have articulated the evil of moral equivalence with the self-deceived, like the farcically named International Court of Justice. We have gathered to recite Psalms, to comfort our mourners, to show solidarity with the hostages so horrifically mistreated and shamefully ill-served.
But on the other hand, we have kept to our work and continued our schooling. We have married off our children and welcomed the next generation amidst tears of joy and peals of laughter. We have observed our festivals and clung to the light of hope that dispels the darkness of futility.
As our soldiers continue to fight on the battlefield against the agents of terrorism, the rest of us fight against terror itself by carrying on with our lives through the supreme discipline of compartmentalization, as if evil holds no sway.
It's not hypocrisy. It's the ultimate cry for sanity in a world gone mad.
Previously:
• Checking More Boxes Is Not the Solution
• Why Sometimes NOT Seeing Is MORE Believing
• A Healthy Diet for the Brain Promotes Ethical Clarity for the Mind
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Rabbi Yonason Goldson graduated from the University of California at Davis with a degree in English, which he put to good use by setting off hitchhiking cross-country and backpacking across Europe. He eventually arrived in Israel where he connected with his Jewish roots and spent the next nine years studying Torah, completing his rabbinic training as part of Ohr Somayach's first ordination program. After teaching yeshiva high school for 23 years in Budapest, Hungary, Atlanta, Georgia, and St. Louis, Missouri, Rabbi Goldson established himself as a professional speaker and advisor, working with business leaders to create a company culture built on ethics and trust. He has published seven books and given two TEDx Talks, is an award-winning host of two podcasts, and writes a weekly column for Fast Company Magazine. He also serves as scholar-in-residence for congregations around the country.