Why it's Hard to be a Better Person

When you think about it, we Jews have wonderful holidays, celebrating goodness, giving thanks to G-d for...everything.  And at this time of year, we Jews are supposed, during our High Holidays,  to do much introspection on our moral selves, our character, and our lives.  We are supposed to make serious efforts to change for the better. 

Well, have we? Have we consciously worked on it? Did you become a better person than you were last year? Have I?

Dennis Prager has a very interesting take on why most of us have trouble doing that.  He has come up with 13 reasons - stumbling blocks, if you will - preventing us from become morally and ethically better human beings.  The one that surprised me was Number One: we don't really want to be good people.  Read the first four reasons below.  Then click on the link, and read the rest.  As someone said in a song (see previous post), it ain't gonna be so easy.

1. Most people don't particularly want to be good.
The biggest obstacle to people becoming better is that you have to really want to be a good person in order to be a better person, and most people would rather be other things. People devote far more effort to being happy (not knowing that goodness leads to increased happiness), successful, smart, attractive and healthy, to cite the most prominent examples.

2. Confusion exists about what goodness is.
Goodness is about character -- integrity, honesty, kindness, generosity, moral courage and the like. More than anything else, it is about how we treat other people.
Not everyone agrees.
For thousands of years, more than a few religious individuals have regarded goodness as being more about sexual behavior and religious piety than about character and the decent treatment of others. And while sexual behavior and religious piety are important, they are not as important as simply acting decently toward other human beings. That is what God wants most (see Micah 6:8, for example) and what we should want most.

At the other end of the spectrum, to modern progressives, goodness is all too often about having the correct political positions, not about character development.
 3. Goodness is not about intentions.
Very few people have bad intentions. Even many people who commit real evil -- such as true-believing Nazis, Communists, and Islamists -- have good intentions. But as an ancient Jewish dictum put it, "It is not the thought that counts but the action." Good intentions alone produce good people about as often as good intentions alone produce good surgeons.

4. We don't learn how to be good.
Even if you want to be a good person, where is the instruction manual? Where are the teachers, the coaches and the schools? People spend years studying how to be good at everything -- from sports to medicine to plumbing -- except how to be good people.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Great Debate: Is it Itsy Bitsy, or Inky Dinky, of Spider Fame?

Image
For the better part of a year, I've had an on-again, off-again debate with my D.H. as to the "correct" adjective in the children's finger-play nursery rhyme, "The Itsy-Bitsy Spider" (now you know which one I favor). My D. H. insists that the correct descriptive is "inky dinky," whereas I demur.  I vaguely recollect from my own childhood, either hearing " itsy-bitsy spider ," or even more familiar to me, the description "eency-weency," referring to said spider's miniscule size, yet plucky persistance, and how he (she?) braved the violent rainstorm which "washed it out" after the arduous climb up the water spout, yet doggedly climbed the spout again, after the sun came out and 'dried up all the rain.' Many, if not most of our American nursery rhymes originated on the other side of the pond, in England, for obvious reasons: the American colonists were British in origin, and brought with them the culture an...
Read more

The End. Is there a Beginning...?

This is my first post back on Tikkun Olam since April 23rd, 2015. It does not feel real. Why is it that we never think we will ever have a JOLT in our lives that will change the entire life course we have been traveling? We continue on, day by day, complacent, even in the face of serious illness--believing that what we are living is the only reality; that it is immutable, that it is PHYSICAL: you can touch it, feel it, and it will continue to be there for you tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow... But it isn't. And it won't.  Because the unthinkable can, and does, happen, in time. To everybody. As it happened to me, almost a year ago, on August 10, 2015, when my DH - Dear Husband, of 46 years, died. I am living in an Alternate Universe. Because the universe in which I was living all my life until now, is gone. I still want to slap myself in the face and wake myself up. It's a dream. A terrible nightmare.  It's a horror movie with a frightening ending, but I will...
Read more

Hijab for Jewish Women?

Image
Someone used this phrase in a comment on a post about the hijab wearing Jewish women in Ramat Bet Shemesh Alef: "modern Hareidi community;" this is an oxymoron. Just for the record, I rarely agree with a Hareidi interpretation of anything. This mode of dress is just a bad interpretation of a good concept ( tzniyut ) taken to extremes. Personally, I cover my hair because I feel it increases my humility by remembering that there is a G-d above me ( not because of the reason of less attraction to men). I chose many years ago to do so; but I have come to believe a woman can be Orthodox without covering her hair all the time; just while in shul, and where it shows respect for the Torah, such as at shiurim, or where it is the preferred mode of dress, such as at yeshiva dinners and the like. But to go to the grocery? Not necessarily . I think the whole message of tzniyut is lost in those hijab cases: where will they go next? Hiding in the home and not going out? Sitting behind a cur...
Read more