Beyond Pros and Cons: When To Trust Your Gut |
As someone who suffers from a healthy dose of indecisiveness, I’m always interested in wisdom on making better decisions.
One of my favorite books on the topic is Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Gladwell popularized the idea of “thin-slicing”: the human ability to gauge what is truly important from a very narrow slice of experience. Sometimes, he argues, spontaneous decisions are as good as, and even better than, decisions made after long, careful analysis. We possess what he calls an “adaptive unconscious,” an internal mechanism that constantly absorbs information, reads situations, and helps us react before our conscious minds can explain why.
Gladwell is basically telling us to trust our gut.
But what is the Jewish perspective? When we face life’s most important decisions — whom to marry, which profession to pursue, where to live – should we decide instinctively, or should we carefully weigh every factor?
This week’s parsha, Parshat Chukat, provides deep insight into this question. The Torah commands us to observe chukim — mitzvot whose reasons are beyond human comprehension. A chok calls us to act from a place deeper than logic. Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik asked a powerful question about the Jewish people’s response to God’s offering of the Torah at Sinai: Why did we say Na’aseh v’nishmah — “We will do and we will listen” — before knowing exactly what we were accepting?
The Talmud (Shabbat 88a) teaches that when the Jewish people placed “we will do” before “we will listen,” a heavenly voice declared: “Who revealed to My children this secret used by the ministering angels?”
But why were our ancestors praised for this response? Shouldn’t we be expected to use our minds? Maimonides teaches that man’s uniqueness, being created in the Divine image, lies in our capacity for intellect and wisdom. If so, why........