We’ve been away from our campus on Ellis Street for so long (this is the 25th Shabbat in a row since COVID19 moved us into our homes), it’s easy to overlook things that happened last March. One likely overlooked March 2020 headline headline announced a breakthrough in artificial intelligence. AI researchers in China and the United States finally bested real people on the benchmark used to measure sentence comprehension and sentence-pairing.
Seeing that headline triggered a vivid memory of my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Gray, presenting our class with a very modern, machine looking box. As she set the big box on the table in front of her desk, she lifted the lid to reveal a set of illustrated story cards side by side with a range of color-coded question cards. It was called the SRA Reading Laboratory. Mrs. Gray said we’d be using it to deepen our 9-year old reading comprehension skills. I bet a lot of you used that or later versions of the SRA reading boxes.
I loved that SRA box. I could move at my own pace. I was competing just with myself. It was very growth-mindset oriented.
But -- and I share this part of the story because it is the season of reflecting on and assessing our past mistakes as we prepare for the new Jewish year that starts in three weeks -- I messed up. My 9-year old self began getting focused on moving through the box in order to look smart to Mrs. Gray and my classmates. Seeming smart on the outside became more important to me than being understanding what I was reading.
I was so fixated on the wrong goal, that for a few days I cheated a bit by looking ahead at the answer key whenever I pulled new stories out of the box. I used those purloined answers to accelerate through the SRA color levels. My rapid pace caught Mrs. Gray’s attention. She was suspicious and asked me about it. I flatly denied cheating. She called my parents to alert them. I held fast to my denials of cheating.
Getting caught was scary. I felt ashamed and embarrassed. Still, I stuck to my denial. While getting caught was enough of a wake-up call to keep me from doing it again, it wasn’t enough to convince the 9-year old me to tell the truth.
It took my parents patience and persistence to convince me to do that! i’ll tell you how they did it after sharing a bit about this week’s torah portion, Ki Teitzei. It is a torah portion rich in mitzvot (divine exhortations) more than 10% of all mitzvot in Torah come from this week’s portion. Nearly all of them this week guide how people can build, sustain, and elevate our relationships with others.
Three verses, in particular, connect to how my parents handled my cheating.
24:16 - Don’t punish a parent on account of their child’s behavior and don’t punish a child on account of their parent’s behavior. In other words, each of us has to take individual responsibility for our own actions.
24:19 - Leave the forgotten gleanings of your harvest to feed those who are vulnerable. In other words, we need to master our own appetites toward cultivating generosity for others.
24:22 - Remember that you (through your ancestors) were slaves in Egypt. In other words, we need to enact empathy for and be aware of the needs of others because we know what it means to be “othered.”
These three mitzvot describe the ways my parents patiently -- very patiently -- got me to admit my cheating. By doing that they transformed my scary experience into a growing one.
First, they didn’t overly identify with my behavior on the one hand nor judge me for it on the other. That restraint created the space I needed for taking responsibility on my own.
Second, they showed generosity in love and patience instead of using confrontation or ultimatums. This encouraged me to take authentic responsibility rather than pretend to it.
Third, they enacted empathy by telling me stories of their own 9-year old mistakes. This inspired me to learn from my mistakes rather than be paralyzed by them.
I am grateful still to my parents for how they handled it more than 50 years ago. I share them with you today as a way of promising how we at jchs will help students when they stumble or trip over themselves (as my 9-year old self did). The adults working at JCSH be show patience and try to show the strength and wisdom needed to refrain from judging or blaming, rather they will encourage students to take responsibility for their own conduct.
We will cultivate generosity in time and conversation so student self-reflection and truth-telling can be authentic rather than forced or fake. We will enact empathy by sharing stories of our own mistakes (like the one I’ve just shared) when we were younger, so that students know making mistakes is not terminal, telling the truth about them is how we learn and grow.
Back to that AI headline . . . while researchers are developing artificial intelligence comparable in some realms to human intelligence, human relationships cannot artificially be built, sustained, or elevated. That’s because there is no such thing as artificial responsibility, artificial generosity, or artificial empathy. Machines cannot produce those. Only people being thir authentic, imperfect, selves can do that. May the new school year and the new Jewish year create lots of opportunities for all of us to learn and grow in those ways.
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