Teshuva—which is usually translated as repentance but literally means return or turning around—is central to Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement for Jews, which ended at sundown today. This essay is initally about how we turn ourselves around, specifically with how we learn to trust others when we lack some basic trust in the world around us and then it moves on to talk about the connection between trust in others and trust in a process or ideal that we might call God. Much of the beginning of the essay, however, is mostly about my cat Bobcat.
How do we learn to trust?
People who abuse others typically don’t trust others–they expect to be abused themselves and deep down believe that they have to do unto others before others do unto them. Morality and civic virtue are practices that survive only when we live in a community in which people have some basic trust in one another.
So wow do we learn to trust others? Some of us have been lucky in that we’ve not really had to learn to do that. We have had parents or grandparents who made us feel secure, by responding to us consistently and with care, and who thereby created in us a deep seated sense that other people will treat us fairly and with respect. Others of us, however, had very different sorts of parents—parents whose inconsistency and lack of care for us left us deeply insecure, with the sense that the other people are just not to be trusted.
Of course, even those of us who grew up feeling secure have had experiences of various kinds that have left us deeply suspicious in certain situations or with certain kinds of people. Lack of trust, of at least this situational kind, is often useful. We should be suspicious in many circumstances—when, say, we are dealing with a salesman or a banker or a health insurance company.
But lacking trust in some specific circumstances that require us to coordinate our efforts with others, can undermine our prospects of success. And a general lack of trust is deeply damaging. It makes it impossible for us to share enough of ourselves to form either deep relationships with other people and the kinds of practical alliances that are necessary in political and business lives. There is neither love nor coalitions without trust.
So how do we rebuild the capacity to trust when it has been damaged in a particular circumstance or more generally?
Bobcat
I want to start developing an answer to this question by talking about my cat, Bobcat. Bobcat came to live with us—more accurately we tricked him into living with us—14 years ago. He was born on our property in Charlotte, North Carolina to a cat who lived there as well—a fairly nasty cat if I remember correctly who kept her distance from us. We saw them together for a while but pretty soon she departed leaving the cat soon to be known as Bobcat alone.
Bobcat did fairly well fending for himself although a few months after we first saw him he had begun to seem awfully thin. And he was always skittish. Some of this might have had to do with bad parenting, with his mother taking off too soon. It probably also had a lot to do with the dangers of being a suburban cat— the cars that whizzed down our street and the other animals that were a constant threat to him.
My daughter, who was then 2, fell in love with the cat and named him Bobcat for the simple reason that this pretty standard grey tabby had the coloration of a Bobcat. And she begged us to invite him in to join our cat Theo (short for Theory).
So we started feeding Bobcat to get him to come near us. He never actually would come too close. We would put out some food but we would have to go back into the house before he would come and eat it. But he came closer and closer to the house and we finally started feeding him inside our house. And then one day we closed the sliding glass door behind him.
He was a bit frustrated at first and spent 30 minutes or so trying to get out. I felt a little guilty about taking away his freedom. But I also knew that house cats typically live about three times as long as strays. And my guilt was assuaged pretty quickly as Bobcat seemed to settle down and become a bit more relaxed. Indeed, he got out a few days later but hung around the house. And when we invited him back in, he didn’t need to be tricked into staying.
How Bobcat learned to trust
He’s been with us since, only going out once or twice—both times he lead us on a chase around our yard but finally sat down and waited to be picked up and returned home. But while he’s been happy to be with us, for the first seven or eight years he lived with us, he kept his distance, only slowly allowing us to get near him. After three or four years Bobcat allowed my daughter to pet him and then pick him up. A year or so later he let my wife do so. But he kept his distance from me for much longer.
Finally he started to let me touch him, but only when I was lying in bed at night. Then Bobcat would come up to me and sit on my chest and let me pet him. After a week or so, he really got into being petted by me and especially by my rubbing him under the chin. He started to purr heavily when I did that and then, to my initial disgust, he began to drool on me. I didn’t much like the drool but I was happy to have him nearby and let him go on.
From then on, a night time visit from Bobcat has been part of our routine. Indeed, he became insistent about it and would bat my in the face, with his claws semi-out, when the petting did not go on long enough. It has gotten so bad that, despite the recurrent pinched nerve that keeps me sleeping on my back, I sometimes have to turn on my side to let him know that the petting session was over and to get him off me.
That’s where we stayed for a few years. And then, about two years ago, Bobcat began to rub up against me when I was standing up and soon after would let me reach down and pet him. And finally in the last year or so, he has started sitting on my lap when I watch TV and has let me pick him up and nuzzle him.
It took 14 years, but Bobcat has gradually learned to trust my family and me. He is still a little skittish with strangers but even with them has become friendlier. He doesn’t immediately run and hide when someone new enters the house.
Cats are not quite people, too
Is that how it is with human beings? If we don’t trust others, can we only develop trust through a long period of what looks like experiential retraining or behavioral therapy? Do we have to be gradually exposed to circumstances in which we trust others a little more at a time without getting hurt in order to build a deep sense of basic trust? Does the process always have to be so slow?
My answer is no and yes and no. No because we actually have another way in which to change our selves than the long experiential route. Yes because that other path doesn’t always work if it is not supplemented by a process of training. And no again because under the right circumstances, when we are graced by love, we can short circuit the training process and radically change ourselves.
Let me explain.
How language makes a difference
Because we are beings with a language that gives us the capacity to talk and generalize about our experiences, we can change how we think, and to some extent, how we act far more quickly than animals without this kind of language.
I’m not going to fully defend claim that we are the only creatures on Earth that have a language with this capacity. It is, I know, a claim that is both controversial and hard to explain. What convinced me was an argument that goes back to Hegel and that I read in updated form in a wonderful short book by Jonathan Bennett called Rationality. The argument is that thought has to be embodied in some medium of one kind or another and that abstract and general thought requires a medium with the capacity to register general and abstract ideas
There is no little or no question that animals think and have beliefs and desires. The thoughts of Bobcat—that his food is in a bowl in the kitchen or that he is about to get fed—are not hard to discern because they are embodied in a physical medium, that is in his brain and body. Bobcat’s actions, like mine and yours, exemplify his thoughts, desires and beliefs. Thought is, most of the time, not something hidden at all but something we display in action. When Bobcat wants to be fed he rubs us against us in a certain way and place. When he wants to play with a cat toy he is perfectly capable of remembering where he left its.
What Bennett showed me is that Bobcat can’t do something important that you and I can do, have general and abstract thoughts, or thoughts about the past, that are separate from his thoughts about the present. That’s not to say that Bobcat doesn’t have general ideas. He is, after all, scared of certain general phenomena, like people or loud noises. He runs from certain general kinds of phenomena and not others so he clearly is capable of general thoughts of some kind. He also has thoughts about the past, about, for example, where he left one of his cat toys. But he acts on these general ideas and ideas about the past only when they influence his present actions. He can’t do what you and I do. He can’t think or write in general terms about what scares him or what he has done in the past. He can’t contemplate and cogitate the way we do.
The reason he can’t do these things is because Bobcat has no medium for this kind of thought. There is no action he can take that just expresses a general belief or a belief about the past without also expressing a belief about the present. We can, of course, engage in such actions because we have a language with the grammatical capacity to register ideas that are abstract, general, or about the past. Our thoughts about the past and our general ideas are embodied in our language which, when we first learn it, and most of the time after, is embodied in sound or marks on a paper or arrangments of electrons. Without a language with a structure that enable them, these thought would be impossible.
But how do I know that Bobcat doesn’t have language that allows him think in this way to himself or that his meows don’t have this structure? It’s fairly evident that cat’s don’t make the variety of sounds that could have this structure. It’s less obviously evident, but far more important, for us to recognize that the general and abstract thoughts and thoughts about the past embodied in language gives us the capacity for so many kinds of action that don’t seem to be engaged in by cats. These include theorizing and joking; leaving memorials and making long term plans and most importantly for my present purposes, changing our selves in ways that are not open to cats.
How language enables us to change ourselves
Sometimes we become different people as Bobcat became a different cat, through a long period of gradual adjustment.
And sometimes, we just change ourselves, almost overnight. We stop smoking or drinking cold turkey. We decide one day that we are going to get married or divorced. We take up an instrument or a new sport. We resolve not to be so difficult with people or to show gratitude for what we get more often. We decide to be more trusting with a particular person or in general.
The change may happen overnight but what usually precedes it is a great deal of thought. For we can reflect on our lives, think about what has happened to us in the past and what we want to have happen in the future, and reach some general conclusions about what we have to do to get what we really desire. This is, most often, hard and difficult thought not least because most of us only do it when we are suffering, when things have gone badly and we are trying to right ourselves. Wittgenstein once said,
I know that it’s difficult to think well about ‘certainty,’ ‘probability,’ ‘perception,’ etc. But it is, if possible, still more difficult to think, or try to think, really honestly about your life and other people’s lives. And the trouble is that thinking about these things is not thrilling but often downright nasty. And when it’s nasty then it’s most important.
And yet, even when it’s nasty, all of us do it because we have to. (If you are lucky and have a reflective bent, it becomes easier over time and almost second nature and then possibly a danger in itself, something I’ve discussed elsewhere.)
What this kind of reflection can enable us to do to is to reach a decision to change our lives. Coming to that decision may be hard but once we reach it, we can just make a, possibly, radical change in direction and set off in a new way. We can make a decision to do something different, including to trust another person or become a more trusting person in general.
And that’s what Bobcat or any other non-human animal can’t do because they don’t have the linguistic capacity for the general and abstract thought, for the reflection, that leads to a decision to changes our life. Bobcat sits around a lot looking like he is contemplating the world. But he never was able to conclude, for the first ten years he lived with us, that he could trust us and my benefit by doing so.
(Of course, Bobcat also doesn’t sit around now thinking about all the love he lost by keeping away from his. But that’s another story.)
The limits on reflection
Sometimes we do make a decision to change our life and it doesn’t take. For we are bifurcated beings. We have the language based capacity to think about our lives and resolve to change them. But we also have ingrained habitual patterns of action that are the product of long experience of the kind that made Bobcat initially an untrusting and then ultimately a more trusting cat.
Those habitual patterns of action are not always easy to overcome especially when they satisfy some of our basic human wants or wants that we have acquired.
This is easiest to see with regard to an acquired want like an addiction to nicotine or alcohol. We decide to kick cigarettes or alcohol but, if we are addicted, we find that at certain times and places, when we usually smoke or drink, we get a temptation, an uneasiness, that is only relieved by drinking or smoking and thus is hard to resist.
And more or less the same thing happens when our patterns of action are tied to emotional reactions that are the product of deep seated human drives.
A lack of trust in others is, after all, a survival strategy. It is a way of protecting ourselves—sometimes physically or more often emotionally. We all crave a sense that life is secure and will go well for us. When our trust has been abused by those close to us, we become anxious and distressed when we become too close or too dependent on others in general or, in all those circumstances in which we have been badly disappointed or hurt. And so to avoid being hurt again, and to find as much of a sense of security and hope as we can, we limit those involvements and try to keep our distance from others. When we have been deeply hurt, the anxiety created by being close to another person can become so overwhelming that we flee from them.
It is, of course, almost impossible to go through life without others. So those of us who get anxious when we get too close to other people also try—sometimes desperately and sometimes out of fear, sometimes in half hearted ways and sometimes more directly—to find people we can trust. But the desperation itself can lead to bad judgment about others or expectations of others so high as to be unattainable. Or it can lead us to take a leap and put our faith in someone to the extent that we lose ourselves in them, with the inevitable result of being disappointed or hurt by the relationship. And that can reinforce our underlying sense of distrust.
Even when one thinks hard about these patterns of behavior it is still enormously difficult to overcome them. And the more ingrained they are in us, and the more anxiety they create, the harder it is to even think about them.
Language and training
But that doesn’t mean it is impossible. Either by ourselves, or with the help of others, we can combine the two human ways of changing ourselves. We can use the insights that reflection makes available to us humans to set in motion the kind of longer term change we share with cats. We can understand our broken patterns of behavior and change them more gradually, putting ourselves in situations that make it easier to change those patterns while minimizing our stress and anxiety in doing so.
So, for example, knowing how difficult it is for us to trust others—and how much our relationships to others are shaped or distorted by the anxiety created by our problems with trust—we might take small steps to let very carefully selected people into our lives. We might limit our relationships for some time, and then test our friends and potential lovers slowly and carefully both to make sure they are trustworthy and we are capable of dealing with the anxiety that affects us as we get closer to them. We might also avoid those kinds of circumstances where trust become particularly difficult for us. So, for example, if trust is particularly hard for us in work relationships we might avoid that kind of work for a time and try to first establish stronger friendships outside of work. Or vice versa.
Changing our selves is never easy, especially when that change requires us to confront deep rooted problems and emotional reactions. But we human beings, unlike our animal friends, are not limited by the circumstances we find ourselves in. Bobcat was lucky that we took him in, that we were patient with him, that we were tender and loving, that we liked to rub him under the chin as much as he liked to be rubbed there. All of us need good luck, too. But we, far more than Bobcat, can also understand the circumstances that we need to overcome our problems with trust, and try to create them for ourselves.
Grace, love, and language
Even then, change isn’t always possible for us without some additional help, without the kind of grace that comes from love.
The Jewish and Christian notion of grace is that of a free gift from God, something that we don’t really deserve, that makes it possible for us to becoming the kind of people who are justified or right with God. Grace, in other words, is what makes it possible for us to change our lives.
About fifteen years ago I was talking with student at UNC Charlotte about rational proofs of the existence of God. He readily agreed with me that most of them are failures and that faith needs some grounds in reason. And he said that his faith was based on seeing the work of God’s grace in life, that is, in seeing people dramatically change their lives for the better for no apparent reason. Of course he recognized that there were naturalistic ways to understand such change. But, he said, somewhat plausibly to me, that he had seen people with drinking problems so severe that they had failed every program no matter whether it had six, nine, or twelve steps. “Something,” he said, “enabled these people to get their lives together. And God’s grace seems as plausible an explanation as any other.”
How does God’s grace work? Sometimes it is imagined as a supernatural power that directly reaches into our soul and re-orders it. But it is much more plausibly portrayed as working through love. And the kind of love that makes it possible for us to change is that which provides support for our ideals and ourselves. It is the power in the universe that aids those of us who try to make ourselves and the world around us a little bit better. It is the sense that our lives are not only worth saving but that we can draw on the moral force of the universe to save ourselves and others.
I don’t always know where to find God’s love in the world. But when I do find it, it is always through gratitude for all that is good in the world—trees, rivers, mountain ranges; the people who have loved me and my daughter—and always at those times for the capacity to experience all that is good in the world, that is, for life and, also, for language.
In moments good, and also bad, I’m grateful for being the kind of beings who can experience good and bad, gratitude and grace. I’m grateful, as Heidegger put it, for being the kind of being who can question his being. I’m grateful for the language that gives me a sense of self from which I can experience all that is good in the world; for the language that enables me to articulate the beauty I see in the world; for the language by which I can formulate the ideals that give meaning and purpose to my life; and for the language through which I create with others the relationships, both personal and communal, that bring me sustenance, pleasure, and some hope that we can attain our ideals.
This focus on language may seem idiosyncratic. But it is, in fact, deeply rooted in Jewish and Christian tradition. In Genesis, God creates the world by speaking. And the notion that God creates us in his image is usually understood to mean that we share with God the capacity to reason and use language. The same theme is found, in powerful form in John 1, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” “Word” here is a translation of the Greek word ‘logos,” which since the Greeks understood that language, reasons, and thought were all intricated with one another, can mean all of those things.
This focus on language in the Bible as the path by which we encounter God’s presence in our lives points to what I can’t help regard as the fundamental miracle—we are here and have been blessed by this incredible capacity to take in the whole world, to see it as God does, and to wonder about our place in.
So even when I despair at the misery and injustice in the world, I find God’s love for us in our capacity to experience good and bad, to formulate our ideals, and to come together to attain them. That love, that profound sense that God or the universe is not indifferent to us; that there is some support in the nature of things for our ideals, and that there will be help for us if we try to become better people or make the world a better place is, when we can find it, enormously empowering. It gives us the strength to look at our lives closely and recognize how far we fall short from who we want to be. It gives us the confidence that we can, despite setbacks, change who we are. And it gives us the motivation to take the first step so that we can be worthy of that love and all it promises.
A Sleight of Hand?
I began by focusing on how we restore our trust in the world, moved to a more general discussion of how we change ourselves, and have wound up here, talking about how trust in what we might sensibly call God helps gives us the power to change ourselves and restore our trust in the world around us.
And I’m profoundly aware that I’ve perhaps only solved the problem with which I began through some sleight of hand. If the initial problem is how we can restore our sense of trust in the world, then to find a solution in a belief in God’s love, or in a moral order and the communal effort to realize it, might seem to be assuming the problem away.
We have come to see just how importance a sense of trust in the world around us is. For trust in God’s love and grace seems to be the ultimate power we use to change ourselves. But the problem is, if you don’t have some fundamental trust in the world around us, how can you trust in God’s love and grace or the communal effort to realize that love in the world?
Let me try to answer that very difficult question in two opposite ways.
Coming to ourselves by seeing ourselves from the outside
Sometimes things that can’t be seen if we look at our own lives through our own eyes, we can see when we take a broader view. Our language enables us to take the broadest possible, God’s-eye view. And from that point of view we can see what is often so difficult to see that when we are caught up in our day to day lives, that there is a way of life that makes sense for creatures like us—a way of life in which we work, as individuals, and as members of collectivities, to attain the moral ideals that have been formulated in so many different ways by all human religions and moral codes.
And so even when we despair about our lives, our limitations and our weaknesses, our inability to trust those around us and to form the relationships that give us support and our lives meaning, that fundamental truth—that there is a pattern of life that make sense for human beings—and our miraculous capacity to grasp it, is there for us to see. That’s why people who are troubled pick up books on religion and philosophy. They are looking for some general approach to life, some sense of the meaning and purpose of life that they can bring into their own lives. And to find and attend to some view of how life makes sense can create a sense of awe, that can inspire us, and that can move us to deal with all those difficulties we face in our lives. That is certainly true for those whose religion is not just based in reason but also in revelation, and who can draw upon a literal belief in the stories, traditions, teachings, and rituals of one of the great religions. But it is also true for those of us who have doubts about the literal truth of revealed religion and but who still can find in the religous texts and practices a key that unlocks for us what I have called a pattern of life that makes sense to human beings and makes sense of our lives.
Different religions and moral traditions describe that pattern of life, that notion of good or ideal life, differently. But they all share some basic notion–that life is meant to be lived in commitment to refining our ideals in theory and realizing them in practice; that there is great joy to be found in life, not just or primarily in those things–food and sex, music, art, and nature–that are immediately pleasurable but even more so in the work we do and in the deeply committed relationships we form; and that justice is an essential element of the communal life that makes individual as well as communal pleasure possible; and that we must learn to trust others and do so wisely if we are ever to move closer to our ideals.
Even when we can’t find grounds for trust in our own experience, we have the capacity to transcend that experience and find it in the broader perspective that almost every religious and moral tradition of humanity encourages us to pursue. We can discover why we must trust others and begin to take steps to make it possible for us o do so. That, to me, is the essence of God’s love and grace.
Love, Actually
And if we can take that broader view, and be moved by God’s grace, then we can also open ourselves up to another kind of grace that comes from a more personal love.
The care and commitment of a friend or lover gives us the kind of support that, for many of us, makes God’s love real and effective in our lives. A friend or lover, especially one who sees something in us that we don’t necessarily see in ourselves or who helps us accept something in us we have always doubted, can inspire us to live up to the ideals we share—and also make us regret how far we fall from them, perhaps in our dealings with that person but not only there. A friend or lover who tells us that we can attain the change we seek in ourselves can give us the confidence to move forward.
Of course if you have trust issues, it is may be harder to trust in a friend or lover than it is to trust in God. And it may be just as hard to find a good friend and lover as it is to find the love of God in our lives.
But those two kinds of love are mutually reinforcing. The God’s eye perspective can give us the insight and inspiration we need to open ourselves to the love of another person. And, when we do, we find that flesh and blood friends and lovers bring us things that God cannot, if only in that they make the vastness of God’s love personal in our lives. Our friends and lovers can also talk back to us when we talk to them and give us the particular advice we need about how to deal with our difficulties. They can show us in concrete action that they love us and that they know us with kind of the knowledge of a person that comes only through love. And they can hug, kiss, stroke, and, if necessary, rub us under our chins to demonstrate their love.
After all, we are¸ as I said, all, bifurcated beings. And while I generally don’t like to rely on outworn and highly questionable distinctions, this is one time in which I’m willing to say we are sensual as well as rational creatures. (But let’s please understand sensual and rational as points on a contiuum not opposite qualities.) One danger of being a bifurcated being is that language can become detached from and contradict action. Indeed it is the distance between language and action, between what people say to us and what they do, that undermines our trust in the world to begin with.
So to find someone in our lives whose physical presence and touch is a true expression of love can, more than most anything else, help us gain the trust in the larger world we so badly need.
Conclusion
Freud pointed out in Civilization and It’s Discontents, that human beings have found a number of paths to salvation. I’ve tried to make that point in a more abstract way in this essay. Because we are humans with a rational language, a logos, we can be saved at time by reflection and decision. Because logos is not all there is to us, reflection and decision often has to be supplemented by an effort to train ourselves in more or less the way we train animals. Because love, more than anything else, motivates, activates and moves us, it is the grace of love that saves us when all else fails. And because love can come from both God and other people, we can find that moving from one to another and back again gives us the power to trust others and change ourselves.
Acknowledgments: I been thinking about these issues for years. However, I began this essay about a week ago when, thinking about a friend, the overall structure of the essay just popped into my head. It got a lot better as a result of Yom Kippur services last night, so thank you Rabbis Yael and Linda for the inspirational few hours. And the ideas in it it are shaped by the people whose love has helped me navigate my own life, friends from so long ago I’m not comfortable naming them here. Thanks to you all.