Daf Yomi, Rabbi Simcha Feuerman, Torah and Psychology, Marriage Counseling, Psychotherapy
Our Gemara on Amud Beis describes who was responsible to fund the Cohen Godol’s daily Mincha offering, on the day he died if he did not get a chance to bring it. There were various stages in history where the rabbis required the heirs to pay or it was paid from Temple funds.
We will focus on one stage:
“Initially, they acted in accordance with that which is prescribed by Torah law, and if a High Priest died and a new High Priest had not yet been appointed in his stead, his griddle-cake meal offering would be sacrificed from public funds. Once they saw that the funds in the chamber of the Temple treasury were being depleted, the Sages instituted an ordinance that the payment for the offering should be collected from the previous High Priest’s heirs.”
Why were the funds being depleted so severely? Rashi and Tosafos add historical backdrop. This came about in the era of the second Temple, where the high priests did not merit their position and used bribes and political favors to “buy the vote”. The Yom Kippur service involved entering the Holy of Holies several times, and if the High Priest was not of sufficient piety, he would not survive the year. Rashi, quoting Yoma 9a, says that the Second Temple era went through more than 300 high priests in a 402 year period!
I can understand the first few high priests could rationalize an argument along the lines of, “Perhaps I’m not the most righteous, and true there is somebody more deserving for this position, who I managed to shoehorn myself into. But I’m not such a bad guy. I could also pray on behalf of my people.” However, with a new Cohen Gadol dying every year, as much as the status was so desirable, was it worth risking his life? How can we account for this extreme denial?
First we can consider the difference between something that is intellectually believed but not emotionally imminent. Consider the person who had a major heart attack and his cardiologist told him he needs to lose 100 pounds and stop eating certain foods. If he could, at one moment in a single decision, push a giant red button where he could “opt in” or “opt out” of certain unhealthful foods, he would certainly do it. (Like Adam on his first day of the Garden of Eden, who had one simple mitzvah - pass or fail.) However, in order to keep that awareness of that sense of imminent danger, day after day week after week, is difficult. The visceral existential fear will soften, the desire will at least be the same or increase, and he will somehow rationalize. This is not some theoretical point, rather this is actual human nature and happens every day. How many people are eating or smoking themselves to death, absolutely know that’s true, and if they had the red button scenario would make the right choice, yet day-to-day they do not. Many die slowly or quickly because of this.
Another aspect of contributes to this process, is what’s known as the Dunning Krieger effect, discovered by researchers David Dunning and Justin Kruger (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1999, Vol. 77, No. 6, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments”).
Dunning and Kruger discovered an interesting and persistent form of cognitive bias: people who were unskilled in a particular area tended to grossly overestimate their ability, while inversely, people who were competent in a particular area tended to underestimate their ability. These findings resonate with the adage, “The more you learn, the more you realize that you do not know.” In a series of experiments, Dunning and Kruger had people evaluate their skills in a particular area, such as logic, humor, and grammar. In each of these separate experiments, people in the 16 to 25% percentile of competence evaluated themselves as being closer to the 60-65% percentile, in other words, above average. Ironically, the top 25% tended to think their skills were in the 70-75% percentile, although their performances were actually in the 87th percentile.
How do we account for this? Dunning and Kruger attribute it to a meta-cognitive deficit. In plain English, it means that the same lack of intelligence and skill which caused their poor performance also accounts for their inability to perceive that their performance was poor. Imagine a person enjoying singing completely out of tune, but not knowing it’s out of tune and not being bothered by it, because they don’t have the ability to recognize whether they are in tune or not. The same can be said for hard skills like mathematics and even softer skills like piety and humility. How would you know if you’re hurting somebody’s feelings if you have insufficient empathy?
Where this cognitive bias becomes dangerous in professions or situations where a high degree of skill is required, and/or the consequences for lack of skill are great. For example, you would not want your surgeon to be overconfident in his abilities, although, ironically, a certain degree of overconfidence and cockiness might be necessary to have the steel resolve to perform surgery. Similarly, our High Priest who attends “daf yomi” and daily minyan might think he’s not different than one of the sages on the Sanhedrin. He knows a little lomdus and could say over a nice mussar vort. Why can’t he be good enough to pray and repent so as to merit entry into the Holy of Holies?
The lesson for us is that while we should be optimistic about our spiritual and intellectual abilities and take leaps of faith, we must also be realistic about our blind spots, particularly when it comes to recognizing deficiencies and our ability to assess them. And we certainly should not try to ascend the ladder of religious leadership without taking the long, meaningful road of humility, study and character development.
(*Later researchers have critiqued Dunning and Kruger’s attribution and have come up with other interesting explanations for the effect. Some argue it is simply a matter of statistics, particularly the concept of regression toward the mean. If we look at self-assessment scores in the entire population, and the average score is a certain number, the lowest performers, whose scores are lower, will by definition estimate a higher score, as they apply the average ability to their own self-assessment. In other words, those with lower competence will tend to overestimate their abilities because they fail to accurately assess themselves within the larger statistical average.
Others argue that the bias arises from a lack of incentive to be accurate. People may be incentivized to overestimate their abilities in certain situations. For example, when applying for a job, if a person is humble and talks about their weaknesses, it could hurt their chances, whereas overestimating their abilities might increase their chances. However, this can backfire if the person is exposed as incompetent. The irony is that some irrational behaviors persist because, in certain ways, they confer short-term benefits, and sometimes even long-term ones.)
Translations Courtesy of Sefaria, except when, sometimes, I disagree with the translation
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Rabbi Simcha Feuerman, Rabbi Simcha Feuerman, LCSW-R, LMFT, DHL is a psychotherapist who works with high conflict couples and families. He can be reached via email at simchafeuerman@gmail.com