Psychology Says This Can't Happen - But It Did

After the lecture, a woman comes to me. I'm a professor of developmental psychology. And according to developmental psychology, it's not really possible that that happened. And if it did, you know, they were just saying words. They don't really know what they're saying because developmentally the children of that age that you're describing, you're saying children of 8 years old like they cannot yet process that kind of abstraction like the omnipresence of God. No, we're entering the child's world and talking to them about things they're already knowledgeable about. They already not only they heard about it, they're not just parenting words. They know what they're saying. I'm going to tell you a story. And in fact, I want to give you fair warning. I think it's going to be a story within a story. But if you bear with me, I think you'll find it edifying. The story is that I was finishing a work translating and giving commentary to Shahuka. Vun is the second volume of Tanya and it's all about the oneness of Hashem. how the the existence of creation poses no secondary it's not a secondary or uh separate existence apart from hashem that uh when we say the ta says there's nothing but hashem that that means not just that hashem is the primary existence but hashem is the only existence okay deep stuff very deep stuff and I was working for kahos doing a translation and commentary. You're going to say, "Well, where is it? Where didn't come out yet?" This story took place. My son was at the Toryim camp in Oracle, Arizona. And so, this story probably took place 12 years ago. This is my son's married now and he has a kid. But [laughter] anyways, I was trying to finish my my translation and commentary on Sharia and it was taking me forever cuz it's deep stuff, you know, oneness of Hashem and all that stuff. Deep deep deep stuff and it was dragging and they were pushing me cuz needed to get published. I mean, [laughter] yeah. Okay. And at any rate, so my son was going to the Arizona camp, the winter camp, and my wife said, "Listen, why don't you take our son with you? I Why don't you go with him and you'll have a writer's retreat? You'll be in the in the desert with nothing else to do and and you'll work and you'll finish the you'll finish the sham translation and commentary." I said, "You know what? Let's go for it." So I I called my shipen who who was uh he was the coordinator of I remember he was the one I remember he was the guy I had to call to get permission and uh he said yeah for sure you we'll put you in a little cabin no one will bother you and you'll just write all day and I remember I brought my little white 12-in MacBook and that's it. I just wrote all day and it was amazing cuz in uh like I think it was 9 days 10 days I I wrote as much it would take me as it would take me 6 months in the normal uh in under normal conditions and I finished now here's the thing when I came to the camp I told him I'm not to be disturbed I have permission to just sit and write I can't like do anything with the campers here I just need to write and I need to think about the oneness of Hashem that's it I'm And they accepted that. Then I I was foolish enough to mention on the second to last day how relieved I was that I finished. And they said, "Oh, you finished, so now you can be disturbed. We can bother you." Oh, no. What do you need? Can you talk to the campers? I said, "I'm not really a kid guy, you know. I'm not really [laughter] not really for for kids." They said, "It's okay. Don't worry. You know, we got some time to fill. You know, whatever you do is not going to be any worse than whatever we were going to do. It's fine." So I said, "Listen, not only am I not a kid guy, my brain right now is totally into like deep deep stuff and oneness of Hashem and I'm I'm I'm not going to have a very easy time speaking on a level that kids will relate to." They said, "It's okay. Just do it." Anyways, I get into the room with these kids. These campers are 8 n 10 11. I think the oldest were 12, but I think the the for sure the youngest were eight. So I get up there and I'm thinking about you know which is the opening of you should know today and place it upon your heart that in the heavens above and in the earth below there is none else that hashem is alim and there is none else a there's nothing but hashem and this is what I'm thinking about there's nothing but hashem and I'm trying to think how do you say that in kid language and I'm think is here is there is truly everywhere up down right left all around here there and everywhere that's where he can be That's how you say that in kid language. So, but it says you should place it upon your heart and you should know which really means you should meditate on it. You should allow it to affect you. So, I get up there and I said to them, if your little sibling, your 5-year-old sibling, cuz these kids, the youngest were eight. So, I said, "If your little sibling, like someone who's even younger than you, like if your 5-year-old sibling would ask you, "Where is Hashem?" What would you say? And they all say the same. They said, "Hashem is everywhere. He's everywhere. Everywhere." Okay. They all shouted out the same answer. I said, "That's great. You're all correct. That's that's the correct answer. Shem is everywhere." So, I say to them, "Now, let me ask you a question. You all know, right? You should know today. You should place it upon your heart, which means to emotionally process it. I said to them, you all know that Hashem is everywhere. That's what you would tell your 5-year-old sibling. But I want to know now another thing. How does it make you feel? They didn't have an answer. I said, "That's fine that you don't have an answer because here's the thing. You don't just automatically have a feeling about a about a thought. You have to think about the thought and then you'll have a feeling about the thought. I said for instance I'll give you an example. These are all this is this is the camp. So these a lot of these kids are from like far-flung communities, remote communities. They don't have kosher food where they are um or you know they bring kosher food in from elsewhere but you know that's in the deep freezer in the basement at home. They don't go out to restaurants. So I I wanted to make a relatable story for I said, "Imagine you're in Crown Heights and you're going to go out to a restaurant, right?" Cuz that's like a big deal for a lot of these kids, like going out to a restaurant. So I said, "Imagine you're in Crown Heights and you're going going out to a restaurant and you have to pick Milk or or Fleek." So the Milk is pizza, the Fleix is uh schwarma, and uh you know, the family has to pick is it going to be pizza or schwarma? Pizza or Schwarma. and your teenage sister is taking the, you know, she's taking the votes and she's going around and everybody gets one vote. Um, pizza ashawarma, pizza, pizza. And they come to you and you say, "Hold on a second. I I I have to think. Give me a minute. I have to think." Why do you have to think? What What do you mean? You don't know what pizza is. You don't know what schwarma is. You've had them so many times. What do you What are you thinking about? But you do need to think. You know why? Cuz you know what they are, but you're not feeling anything about them right now. But what do you do? You take a minute and you think about pizza. You take a minute, you think about shuarma. And after you think about it, you don't just know what it is because you've known what it is all along. You've known about it for years. But by thinking about it, after that minute of thinking, you turn to your sister and you say, "I feel like pizza now. It feels like something." So to move from just knowing something to actually having a feeling for it, you have to think. So I said to them, same thing here. You know the answer. If your little 5-year-old sibling says, "Where is Hashem?" You know the answer. You've known the answer for a long time. And the answer is everywhere. But when I ask you, "How does it make you feel?" You don't know the answer yet. You know why? Cuz you don't have an answer yet. Cuz you haven't thought about it. But that's fine. Let's think about it now. I said, "Let's take a minute and let's think about Hashem being everywhere." I didn't tell them how to think about it. I just told them, "Think about it." Because I I didn't want it to be my thoughts. I wanted it to be their thoughts. So I said, "Just think about Hashem being everywhere." So, and I said, "I'm going to take a minute." And I and I put on a timer and we we were silent for a minute. And to their credit, they they really did it. Okay. So, at the end of the minute, I uh I say, "Okay, let's hear how it made you feel." So, I call on I just called on one kid randomly, but he happened to have been sitting in the front row on the like far right side on my right. I said, "How did that make you feel?" He said, "Safe." I said, "Wow, that's really cool. Who else?" Now, I just wanted to call on maybe like two or three kids just to get examples. But what happened is the kid right next to him was the next kid to raise his hand. So, I said, "How'd it make you feel?" He said, "Calm." I said, "Wow, that's beautiful. Calm." And what happened is the kids thought they were all supposed to go one at a time in order the entire room which was not what I had in mind in a room full of like 80 kids or however many kids it was and it took a long time for everyone to answer [snorts] but the results were actually beautiful. Each kid answered and uh so one kid the first kid said, the second kid said calm. Um the third kid said um I I I felt uh peaceful like different beautiful answers really. It was really really beautiful. And uh anyways, that's the story that happened at the young Schloam Winter Camp in Oracle, Arizona. Um and and I and I told that story at a lecture and I'm not going to say exactly where the lecture was, but it was sometime later, you know, maybe a few years later. And I told that story and I told that story as an example of the power of meditation. I said look if these kids can do it we adults can do it. And look what they did. I told them to think about Hashem is everywhere for a minute. And after a minute they had these beautiful answers of of of an emotional outcome that they experienced just by thinking about this idea. So what happened is after the lecture lecture was actually on a college campus. I'm not going to say where but it doesn't matter. After the lecture, a woman comes to me and she says, "I was not going to interrupt you during your lecture, but I am a professor of developmental psychology." And according to developmental psychology, it's not really possible that that happened. And if it did, you know, they were just saying words. They don't really know what they're saying because developmentally the children of that age that you're describing, you're saying children of 8 years old like they cannot yet process that kind of abstraction like the omnipresence of God. Now, it happened to have been that where I was speaking, the schlak who brought me out, his kid actually happened to have been there and he was walking by and I stopped the little kid and I said, "Could you come here for a second?" I said, "How old are you?" And he said, "He was eight." It was perfect. And I said, "Where is Hashem?" And he said, "Everywhere." And and I said, "Okay, thank you." And the kid walked off. I said, "Look, he he said it, too. I mean, you see it for yourself." She says, "Doesn't know what he's saying. He's just repeating words that he was told to say. He doesn't know what he's saying. Okay. I wasn't going to debate. I frankly I didn't even know what to answer. Um, but I thought about it afterwards. I was like, I know that these kids know what they're saying. Like, I know that they do. [laughter] They're not just parenting words. They know what they're saying. But I had to think about it. So, I'll tell you the answer that I came up with on my own. And it took me, you know, I thought about it for a few days and uh I came to the conclusion that, you know, maybe it's true. Generally speaking, developmentally, children don't know how to think about things like the omnipresence of God at that young age. And I mean for full disclosure, not that I ever actually studied Pia in its primary texts, but you know I grew up in a home where my father alum was a psychologist and my my mother Tanga Yordin is a speech pathologist and an educator. So I was expos I I knew the name Pia and I knew what developmental psychology was just overhearing it in you know a dinner table conversation. So I knew that there's such a concept of there are different ages at which different skills come in like just cognitively there's a maturity and I mean we have this ino that that's why we say that a person is not culpable morally culpable until they're intellectually mature enough. Exodus calls it godless that until a girl is 12 or a boy is 13 they're simply not intellectually mature enough to be held morally accountable and that's why bar and basitzvah are the ages that they're at. So there is such a concept. All right. So I'm thinking to myself, well maybe Pia, he was when he came up with his benchmarks, he was studying just regular kids. He wasn't studying kids who are told from from the time they're in their crib. But if you talk to a child about these ideas, then they can grasp it at an earlier age than typical. And that was the answer that I came up with and I liked my answer. [sighs] But then I mean it's not and it's not a bad answer. It's not a bad answer. But then I realized that there's a much better answer. And I realized that when I was studying this uh the REB uh tinid um when the Reb talks about being able to explain Israel to children and actually being able to explain to them the same basic concepts that we explain to adults but just explaining it to a child on the child's level. And I want to bring us back to to the text. And I'm going to unpack this slowly, but it's just a few words, but I'm going to repeat the words that I that I repeated earlier. I'm going to repeat them now a third time. As we said, you could explain this concept to a child according to the child's level of understanding and in the child's language because he already sees heavens and the earth and the four directions on his level of understanding. ing. Why does the deba say he already sees it? This is so powerful. If you if you just stop and absorb this, [sighs] I can grant the premise of the professor of developmental psychology that a little child isn't capable of abstract reasoning and wouldn't be capable of explaining a hashem. That's fine. But that's not what the Reb is talking about here. Actually, the Reba makes it very clear. We're not saying that a child can relate abstractly toem and the meaning of but to the contrary that is saying the child can relate to it experientially. Meaning to say, we're not trying to take the child into some other realm and explain to them things that they've never seen or heard or or experienced on their own. No, we're entering the child's world and talking to them about things they're already knowledgeable about. They already not only they heard about it, they they see it for themselves. And this is what the Reb is saying. The child sees Shmayits. Now, what does that mean? He sees well how much can he really understand? I mean how much do you really understand? How much do I understand? That's why the says according to the child's level of understanding. But the point is the child has a lived experience. The child sees that there's heavens and earth. He sees whatever that means to the child. Whatever that means to him or her. The point is that the child has a lived experience of there's stuff all around me. There's a world around me. And all we're doing is explaining to the child, yeah, you see this reality that you're already knowledgeable of and you're already experiencing and it's already something you relate to. Yeah. That's where Hashem is. So, we're not explaining to the child Hashem as an abstract concept. To the contrary, we're speaking to the child in the context of the child's lived experienced of the child's lived experience and relating that to what it means to think of Hashem. They're not thinking of some concept of Hashem that comes from some other experience that they've never had. They're relating to Hashem based on the experience that they are having right now. That's what it means. That whatever it is that you're living, wherever it is that you whatever, however you define reality, even if you don't have words for it. See, that's the thing. The child doesn't have to have words to explain it. They just know that they've seen it. Whatever that means to them. And now they relate to Hashem in those terms. That's what it means to explain Israel to a child. Mean it means that a child has a life and a child is a conscious being who has some experience, some subjective experience of what that life is. And now when we speak to a child about Hashem, we're not asking a ch a child to to to give us a theological description of Hashem. To the contrary, we're we're we're teaching the child to have a personal experience of Hashem that Hashem where is Hashem in this reality, whatever it is that you're experiencing. And that is something I believe that even Pia would agree a child is capable of doing. So that's that's what I would have answered except I didn't realize I didn't have that insight until many years later [snorts] till fairly recently. [sighs] So in very simple terms what is when you talk to a child and you let them know that everything they're experiencing, everything that they're aware of, Hashem is there. Hashem is in there.