Emotional Subjectivity: Enemy or Ally?
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Emotional Subjectivity: Enemy or Ally?
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Toward a Meaningful Life with Simon Jacobson Radio Show Transcript – April 16, 2000
Rabbi Simon Jacobson: Good evening and welcome back to Toward a Meaningful Life with yours truly, Simon Jacobson. It’s always great to see the dynamic of an interactive experience, where you don’t really know in which direction it’s going to head. I often start with a script or with some ideas that I want to share, but then the calls take it to another level entirely. I really want to thank the listeners; it’s just a demonstration of what a collaborative communication can truly be like. If we open up our hearts and speak openly, spiritually, about things that really matter and are meaningful, all kinds of surprises can take place.
So I invite you to call in at 212-244-1050. But, as emcee, I’ll try to define the context of the show and that is, since it’s holiday season, the holiday of freedom, particularly Passover, a season that is celebrated by many people of different backgrounds and different religions, I thought it would be appropriate to take a unique angle on this issue of freedom: what really makes us free and how does one experience freedom?
I first thought of titling the show, “Emotions: Are they our greatest enemy?” It reminds me of someone who recently came to me to consult about certain personal issues and, of course, whenever we’re dealing with a personal issue we get involved in it and it becomes something that we’re invested in. Because we have feelings about it, when we get emotional, our emotions have the ability to entangle us and create subjectivity.
As we were speaking, I was trying to point out to him that there are different ways of looking at this—“this may be your view, there may be another perspective”—and it became very obvious (there are those moments when things become very clear, very crystallized) even to him, and he said, you know, this thing called emotions; I wish we could get rid of them. It would just make life so much simpler, so much clearer.
So emotions, on one hand, are very much a part of our experience (not only a part, but an intrinsic element of human experience). We feel things. We like something, we don’t like it. Love. Pain. We have sensations. If we were just minds, intellects, computers, we wouldn’t be able to experience life.
On the other hand, because of the subjective nature of emotions, they can entrap or blind us. The Bible puts it very clearly. It says that bias, which is shochad in Hebrew, a bribe, blinds the eyes of the wise and distorts the tongue of the tzaddik , the righteous person.
So we know the power that the emotions have, in a moment of obsession where you get totally consumed with something. And I thought it would be appropriate to discuss this at Passover time, because it’s the holiday of freedom and many of you may be at a Passover seder, which is supposed to be a freeing experience.
So I always ask myself the question that I ask people whom I speak to, which is, do you really feel free during the seder or free after the holiday? Do you really feel free of your psychological demons, of scars that you carry? As a matter of fact, someone just told me that she feels more enslaved by Passover than any other holiday. The cleaning that’s done before the holiday; following the letter of the law with such precision can sometimes seem to be an unfreeing type of experience.
So I thought it would be important to address, on a very personal level, what is freedom and how can we really use the holiday as an opportunity to become free.
The angle I’m taking here is that I believe that freedom is very much connected to human experience and to human emotions. The fact that we experience things also means that we become enslaved to them. We become attached to them, for good or for bad, in healthy and unhealthy ways; the biases and denial that it creates.
So the first question that I pose to myself and to the listening audience, and as I like to do is to open this question up to all of your comments as well as to share my thoughts: What kind of role do emotions play in human freedom? How would you define freedom? How do we balance the two? Can we create a situation where we take advantage of the benefits of an emotional experience and at the same time minimize the risks of being blinded to the point of self-destructive behavior or destructive behavior toward others? And ultimately, how does one really learn to become free?
Of course this comes down to the definition of what freedom is. We live in a country today, a democratic country, where freedom is considered to be the epitome and highest objective—the land of the free and the brave—but are we truly free? We live in highly prosperous times, with technology, development. Civilization is getting more cultivated and more evolved and advanced. Are we freer people because of that? Can we say that we’re freer today than we were 100-200 years ago? And how do emotions play into this, psychologically?
Let me give you my definition of freedom, and I invite your rebuttals or opinions on the matter. If you ask most people what the word “free” means, their knee-jerk reaction is, “Freedom? I can do what I like. I can go where I like, I can read what I like, I can meet whom I like. That’s freedom.”
That sound good initially, but if you think about it, that’s really a superficial and meaningless, hollow response because, as you’ll see in a moment, I know people who’ll do anything they feel they like and they’re more enslaved than anyone I’ve ever met.
On the other hand, there are people who can sit in a disciplined way and for 3-4 hours concentrating, meditating, studying, reading, busy at work—seemingly, they are completely controlled by their environment, but it’s their choice, and they are there willingly.
So I would define freedom, and of course the antithesis being the opposite of freedom, slavery, as the following: that when you do something, you do it by no imposition from outside. No one imposes upon you to do something. It’s a true free expression from within, which basically means, if a five-year-old child is allowed to do anything he or she desires, like cross the street, that’s not freedom. Because in their ignorance, they may choose something that’s completely not healthy or self-actualizing. They need to be disciplined; they need to be instructed, educated.
True freedom is learning how to access your own inner self. How to be able to make a choice that is not affected by, or imposed upon by society, educators, community, peer pressure. A choice that’s truly yours and yours alone.
That is how I would define freedom. So when you look at it that way, can we really achieve freedom in a world like ours? Remember, we do live in a very great media age, where we’re exposed and inundated by media all the time—images, identity, labeling, and all the branding that they try to impose upon us. So how does one really find and discover him or herself?
Remember, this touches very much on the element of emotions, because when someone comes to you, or there’s peer pressure (people dress a certain way, you want to feel accepted), that’s an emotional reaction to becoming part of a group, which clearly biases you from being able to stand up and take a position.
It’s sad to say, but when you look at statistics, what people will do when there’s a group pressure, a mass mentality, it’s quite frightening.
So freedom means discovering who you are, which immediately implies that freedom requires some type of education, knowledge. Knowledge makes us free; knowledge is power, because it gives you options.
The first thing that any Fascist government does when it establishes power and control, is to control minds. They cannot give people the ability to have a free-flow of information because information allows people options; they see there are other ways, alternatives, and alternatives creates open ideas in their mind, which is a threat to a Fascist totalitarian regime.
On the other hand, in a country that we consider to be free, as Thomas Jefferson once said, “If you had to choose between a free press and a free government, you would choose a free press,” because without a free press, free expression, there’s no free government, there’s no accountability.
So freedom is very much connected to what you know, the perspectives that you have. It reminds me of one of my favorite stories from the city of Chelm (I’ve recently been telling you some Chelm stories). If you listen to the show weekly, you’ll soon be Chelm experts. So Chelm stories have these unique insights into the human psyche. They’re somewhat outrageous, even farcical, but they have quite interesting insights into human psychology.
Chelm was a small town in Poland that they say was inhabited by very wise people, but the neighbors were resentful so they created this whole folklore and parables of the foolish people of Chelm.
So you hear a lot of stupid jokes about the people from Chelm. In one, there was a farmer in Chelm who had a small farm, but this farm was special to the farmer because it was his baby. He inherited from his parents and grandparents, and he catered to it, cared for it, knew every grain of soil on the property.
One day he gets a letter from his cousin from a big-town farm in let’s say Texas who’s coming to visit. He’s very proud that his cousin is coming to visit him, and the day his cousin comes, he shows him around, showing him every part of the farm. They finally sit down to dinner and the small-town, Chelm farmer says to this big-town cousin: “So what do you think of my farm?”
The big-town farmer thinks to himself, “What should I say?” So he says, “Well, it’s nice and cute, but it’s so tiny.”
The Chelm farmer is taken aback, insulted, and asks, “How big is your farm back in Texas that you call this small?”
Now the Texan farmer is looking for some point of reference and he tells him, “Well, it takes me all day to travel with my tractor from one end of the farm to the other.”
So the Chelm farmer, with deep empathy and compassion, says to his cousin, “Ah, cousin, I once had a tractor like that too.”
So if you ask this question to yourself—we’ll do an on-air survey—check this box: are you close-minded (narrow-minded) or open-minded? Are you subjective or objective?
I don’t know if there’s a person out there who would check off: I’m close-minded, narrow-minded, and subjective—the reason being that part of being subjective is that it makes you think you’re objective. That’s what subjectivity means; it doesn’t let you see clearly.
So this Chelm farmer was also objective. He wasn’t malicious. He just never could envision a farm larger than his own. When he heard that it took an entire day to travel from one end to the other, he thought to himself, it must be the vehicle. He remembers that he once had a jalopy like that too, once upon a time, that took him all day to crank up to go from one corner to the next.
So that was his subjectivity. He couldn’t even see a broader horizon. This is an example of subjectivity that is not malicious; however, it’s clearly subjective and limited based on our perspective.
So we are as objective as our perspectives allow us. And that’s where freedom comes into play. That’s why any true free state, free government, has to provide equal opportunity in education, situations where people can access the knowledge necessary to be able to see broader horizons, or else they end up with a perspective that this farm is the only farm in town. And we all have our little farms.
This, I believe, is what the true celebration of freedom is about. How do we get beyond that perspective? How can we see broader horizons? How do we get out of the tentacles, the trap of our own emotional view on things? Because interestingly, of all traps, of all enemies—peer pressure, social pressure, parents, community, media, even real criminals and enemies outside of us—nothing cannot compare to your own enemy within, the enemy of subjectivity.