Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Human Defense Mechanisms: Rain Dances and Faith
We are afraid.
We are afraid of change, and so we are afraid of choices themselves. We are afraid of the dark. We are afraid of what we do not know – which is, once you think about it, quite a lot!
Countless psychological studies have shown that people fear risk much more than they value reward. Wallowing in misery is so much more predictable, safe than taking risks that could lead to wildly different and unpredictable outcomes. This is why engineers manage risk but not reward. Irrational fear explains why a key metric for stocks is their volatility: people fear volatility, even though a volatile stock merely swings around more but often does, on average, produce higher returns.
We even fear success and happiness and good times, instinctively hiding behind superstition (like voiding the evil eye) so as to not appear to be doing well.
So how does mankind deal with this fear? In a lot of ways, most of which defy reason.
Take, for example, the Rain Dance.
It sounds stupid, right? The weather has been dry. You need rain. So you do this big dance to ask some deity in the sky to make it rain. There is lots of preparation and energy expended. You show your commitment by really getting into it. You might sacrifice a goat or even a child. It is a big investment.
What happens?
It rains; of course it does. Because sooner or later, any inhabited place gets some rain. It is churlish to even ask whether the rain dance was the cause: how can you prove that it was not the cause?!
Today, of course, we live in Modern Times. We don’t have rain dances, that is silly stone-age paganism, the quaint practice of ignorant savages. Nor do we make offerings to the Forces of Nature as the Indians did. It is not as if we inconvenience ourselves every day by, say, taking time to sort out our garbage to show our obsequious devotion to some pagan life force deity like The Environment.
Oh, wait.
Lest you think I am just picking on ordinary citizens who worship at the altar of Sustainability, blind and deaf to whether or not rinsing out a tuna fish can will make any actual difference to whether the Rain Gods will strike us all with Climate Change, let me assure you that I am committed to being an Equal Opportunity Critic.
My own co-religionists have their own version of the Rain Dance: I call it Rain Dance Judaism. It comes from the belief that what G-d really wants, more than anything, is blind and unthinking and slavish attention to every possible tittle and jot of every law, custom, and stringency in our entire, millennia-old, databank of laws, customs, and stringencies. And that, if we do it just right, then G-d will, in His way, Make It Rain. If, somehow, we are not blessed in return, then we obviously have failed by error or omission. We must redouble our efforts!
Why? Because we fear the unknown. We fear the realization that G-d is not there to be bribed; that he does not want sacrifices or rain dances or even blessings for His own sake: he wants us to internalize them, to improve and change ourselves and the world around us. He wants us to embrace life and living, complete with all its unknowns and fears, to reject the cocooning belief that if we slavishly go through the motions just so that All Will Be Well.
I don’t have to only pick on Judaism, of course. There is an element of the Rain Dance in most people, found whenever rituals become ends in themselves, instead of means to a higher and holier end.
In the greater culture, I see a wide range of similar Rain Dance defense mechanisms against the unknown, against risks and good times, against being happy. These defense mechanisms are ways to seemingly insulate ourselves from risks, by somehow pre-emptively choosing to limit ourselves and suffer instead of having fear thrust upon us. And we somehow always acquiesce to the madness of these devotees, even – especially – when we are the afflicted.
I think this is a deep, instinctive human instinct in response to uncertainty. I think these fears are at the root of all kinds of good things, like marriage and family and community, and faith.
But the response to uncertainty is also the driving force behind a lot of bad things, too, like political and regional and dress tribalism as well as a range of self-limiting behaviors from crazy diets to faddish alternative medicines to all the aforementioned irrational nature-worshipping paganism that is now almost taken for granted in American society.
Our desire to be insulated from the Unknown throws up all kinds of defense mechanisms. People instinctively reject outsiders in a wide variety of ways, from labeling to openly dehumanizing The Other. Racism and Xenophobia and Anti-Semitism all keep coming back, attracted by enormous forces within the human psyche.
We are seeing it in today’s incredibly polarized political debate, where friends and families have been torn asunder merely because one person supports or rejects Trump and cannot handle anyone who has a different position. That, too, is a defense mechanism born from fear.
People love to revert to instinct. Associating with the herd provides safety. Anyone who disagrees with the herd deserves being righteously trampled by that same herd, protecting its own. Facebook’s witch hunts are reminiscent of villagers with pitchforks, the mindless mob seeking to crush the outsider (there is a reason the Torah tells us so many times to love the stranger).
There are all kinds of herds: they may have different beliefs, but the ways in which they defend themselves are invariably the same. Blacks or whites or Muslims may defend their own. But so do atheists, who reject faith out of hand, blind to their own irrational faith in Reason. The color of the spots may be different, but the instinctive and reflexive defense mechanisms against outsiders and their ideas are no different.
Religious people have their own defense mechanisms: we use faith not merely as a spur to personal growth, but we also use it as a defense against the things they cannot explain. In this form of pushing away our fears, everything that is not explainable becomes rolled into the “We Are Not Meant to Know” category, practiced by the devout. And that, too, is a way to find solace in the face of uncertainty.
It sounds very nice and pious: “God has a plan.” But if we don’t know what that plan is, then why does invoking the mantra somehow serve as an excuse for inaction? After all, who is to say that we are not meant to be actors or counteractors in that very same plan?! And yet, “God has a plan” invariably is like waiting for Superman or the Messiah to come in and save the day, while we applaud from the bleachers instead of taking the field.
“We cannot know” is itself a form of a Rain Dance: we express our devotion and faith (but no actual useful action), and leave the rest up to external forces. We have done our part by expressing our faith – our faith not truly rooted in G-d’s omniscience, but instead a deep and unshakeable faith in our surety that we are ignorant and helpless. In other words, this mantra is a drug that inspires nothing more than passivity.
A key challenge in building relationships with other people or with our Creator is that we have to step outside our comfort zone, we have to be willing to endure the fear of the unknown, accept that while we may not know the outcome, we are not free to simply stand aside and wait for someone else to do something. In other words, caring about other people requires us to accept risk. We must rise above our insulated thinking and actions, just as we must be willing to fight the instinctive tribalism in our hearts that tells us to reject other people because they are different than we are.
But it is more than this: deciding that We Cannot Know is actually an excuse to stop thinking. When we hide behind blind faith and belief in The Divine Plan, then we use it as an excuse to not think about the hard questions, the challenging and frightening questions that open doors into the dark.
If We Cannot Know, then there is no point in asking the question, and all potential answers are never more than empty speculation. Such thinking leads to theological sloth and then slumber.
I am not opposed to ritual – not at all. I follow the commandments, and I try to be a strictly observant Jew. But I do it knowing that the purpose of the Laws of the Torah and Moses are really to provide the STRUCTURE that allows us to grow. To the extent that the routine and ritual and structure helps us grow, then we are freed up to do beautiful and creative things. But when those rituals become their own purpose, then we have entered Rain Dance territory.
Praying in the morning kicks off my day, and everything works better with the rituals that I engage in throughout my working and Sabbath days. The ongoing rituals frame and allow for freedom and creativity everywhere else. BUT when those commandments become an obsession in themselves, then they can go too far, and suck out our lives rather than nurturing them.
So we can believe that G-d Has a Plan. And that belief is not necessarily bad in itself, as long as it does not become an excuse for becoming a spectator instead of G-d’s own agent in this world. As an agent, I can consider myself part of G-d’s plan. But as a spectator, I have made myself irrelevant and useless to our creator.
The Torah describes early mankind as being either evil or merely directionless. The world was not improving. And while there were occasionally righteous people, they had a very limited impact on the world around them.
Maybe G-d gave us the Torah after He realized that we do not function without the skeleton of commandments, within which we can be productive and creative. So that would mean that early man, lacking those rituals and structures, were aimless and wasted – which is exactly what the Flood Generation was, as well as Avraham’s contemporaries.
This may be why G-d went through the trouble of giving us the Torah, of giving us commandments. We need ritual, we need those structures that allow us to learn how to deal with the fear of the unknown. We need commandments that remind us of the importance of loving each other and seeking a relationship with G-d – and the rituals that help keep us on track, with our eyes on the ball.
There can be no argument with the historical accomplishment of the Torah: it is the single most foundational text for all of Western Civilization. But I do not think its work is done even these thousands of years later, because we keep instinctively seeking to avoid fear and uncertainty and risk, seeking refuge in rain dance ritual observance or groupthink that shields us from engaging emotionally and spiritually and intellectually.
Published in General
Hear hear!
The Talmud has a rain maker, too.
Being foundational, as you say, the Torah contains every imaginable longing of the heart and every invention of the mind. The difference between Talmud (oral Torah) personalities and those that followed them is a matter of character refinement and closeness to G-d. Choni, the Talmud’s rain maker, had a direct, active, and verifiable heavenly connection.
Obviously we are coming from different faith traditions but I see the rain dance as an example not of abandoning control but rather trying to attempt to control something that cannot be controlled. I think it is important to distinguish between three kinds of interacting with the divine. There’s what you described as proper observance to the Torah, where we obey out of love and devotion and we do not expect reward beyond the stronger relationship we have with the divine. There’s the Pagan model, wherein we offer sacrifices and petitions and we have expectation of receiving the other end of the bargain. And then there is the Witchcraft model, wherein we attempt to control the divine. It is worth noting that pagans, such as the Romans, were strongly opposed to Witchcraft, because they believed that the Witchcraft model was fundamentally incompatible with a pagan model of sacrifice and expected but not contractually obligated reward.
You see it at work with prosperity gospel. IWe, you might have been describing that in your words on following the law.
Indeed!
Here’s a Southern Baptist who doesn’t believe he’s ever once heard that phrase used in that way.
The Torah, in Genesis 12, shows us the pattern for how to use that phrase (which is how Christians, in my experience, actually do use it): G-d has a plan, and therefore Avraham acts.
Thanks, iWe, for another great post. This Baptist always gains fresh insight into his own faith from your writing.
Yehoshua, you see a rain dancer differently than I do. It is not a positive label; it is one that connotes (I think) a kind of voodoo Judaism. A rain dance Jew becomes so obsessed with the ritual that he or she forgets that it is meant to be a conduit to G-d. The ritual observance becomes most important, not doing things to serve others; it helps us connect to G-d, but it is the connection itself not so much the ritual. In fact G-d tells us that ritual (sacrifice, for example) is a means to an end, not the end itself. I’m not sure how you are using the phrase “rainmaker.”
Choni was not a professional rain maker. He knew that the land and the people needed rain, so he demanded it of G-d, “like a child nags his father.” And, “because I am like a member of Your household,” Choni reminded G-d, his demand was granted.
From a Christian perspective, the rain dance Jew is rebuked.
And certainly in any religion, anything can be made an “idol,” which is what a rain dance Jew does–substitutes devotion to G-d with devotion to the ritual itself.
Yes!
The thing is, we all put idols in place of God all the time, usually starting with ourselves.
Please read the following accounts of those whose brought rain. They were highly sensitive, honor shunning individuals who only wanted to bring prosperity to their fellows but not at the expense of violating their own code of proper and modest conduct.
Yehoshua, I believe that in this post, @iwe is using the phrase “rain dance” as a metaphor. It’s meant to symbolize those things that still exist in Judaism, for example, that are superstitions. In the case of rituals, please re-read my comment. There are those who believe that it matters to G-d just how precisely a ritual is performed (to the nth degree). Perhaps that is your belief.
Is it superstitious to believe that by putting boxes on your arm and head each morning you connect with G-d? If so, I plead guilty.
Now you’re putting words in my mouth. It isn’t just the action that matters; it is the intention behind it, and whether you are obsessed with doing it precisely right, rather than honoring and embracing its real intention. If I throw salt over my shoulder, I don’t think that will protect me from the evil eye.
This is very much akin to prayer in Orthodox Christianity too – those of great but humble faith are heard.
But if throwing salt was one of the 613 mitzvot (divine commandments), I would throw salt, too, just as putting boxes on my arm and head is also one of those mitzvot. However, protection from the evil eye — although it was at one time a strongly held notion and certain customs (which are as powerful as other traditional practices in some cases) were associated with it — is more of an excuse these days for hanging hamsas as household ornaments or for wearing them as jewelry.
I was struck by the similarity of Lutheran and Orthodox views on fasting as compared to a more contractual model. We don’t fast to win favor or shave time off of purgatory, but rather to deepen our faith and relationship with the divine.
This reminds me of a sermon I heard years ago. The rabbi giving the sermon pointed out that the true purpose of prayer (and ritual) was to connect with G-d. We may think we are praying to G-d to have a need met, but in reality G-d GAVE us the needs so we would pray (and thus connect to Him).
The evil eye stuff is popular in some corners of Christian Orthodoxy too, but it’s something the priests are often fighting against given its origins in pagan cultures.
Never been a fan of rain dancing to encourage the Big Guy to do what I want. More a fan of the sun dance, in which the dancers’ skin is pierced by barbs not unlike fishhooks, which are tethered to a tree or pole. The sun dancer’s mission is to pull free of the barbs, rending his own flesh, with his eyes to the sky and his mind on the Great Spirit.
Way I see it, it’s saying “Hey, G-d, I don’t know what you’ve got coming, and I don’t think I can influence you. I just want you to know I’ll be ready.”