In the bookshops in the part of London where I live, there used to be a substantial section of works about religion. Nowadays these sections have shrunk, downsized in some cases to non-existence. In their place have come books on self-help. There is something deep about this, but also something quite perplexing.

It is clear that the secular societies of the West have found a new god. It is not any of the many gods of ancient times. It isn’t the one God of monotheism. It is not even any of the three substitutes for religion dreamed up in the nineteenth century: nationalism, racism, and Marxism. The god of our time is the self.

In 2017 I read about a new medical condition, called “selfitis.”¹ (London), December 15, 2017. The term was coined as a joke in 2014 to describe people who feel compelled to keep taking selfies and posting them on social media. Three years later, researchers in Nottingham and India had produced evidence that the condition actually exists. Typical “selfitis” sufferers, they say, are “attention seekers, often lacking in self-confidence,” and hoping to “boost their social standing.”

footnotes: ¹ The Telegraph

The self now rules in one domain after another. Politics is about individual rights; above all, the right to choose. Morality is about doing whatever you want so long as you don’t harm others. People once turned to religious leaders in their quest for the good, the holy, and the transcendent. Now, often, they pay coaches to help them reach their life goals, preferences, and the holy grail of self-esteem.

Instead of turning to faith in something beyond ourselves, millennials turn to books, mentors, or gurus who teach us how to help ourselves. The new religion tells us we can achieve anything we want if we know “the secret.” We can awaken the giant within, win friends and influence people, think and grow rich, feel the fear and do it anyway, and discover the life-changing magic of tidying up. We can learn to “love yourself like your life depends on it.”² (CreateSpace, 2012).

footnotes: ² From the title of the book by Kamal Ravikant, Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It

In one way, there’s nothing wrong or strange about this. These works are the twentieth- and twenty-first-century equivalents of what used to be called “wisdom literature” – common sense guides to life by those with insight and experience. In fact, the most recent trend in self-help books is to turn back to wisdom writers from ancient Greece and Rome, in particular Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, the sages of Stoicism. What people tend to forget, though, is that Stoicism appeared as a philosophy in Greece and Rome when those two great civilisations had passed their prime. People had lost faith in the old gods and not yet found new ones. Stoicism is a superb recipe for finding calm when the world is falling apart. It is, though, supremely self-centred.³, August 25, 2017.

footnotes: ³ See Thomas Joiner, “Mindfulness would be good for you. If it weren’t so selfish,” Washington Post

That is the problem. The trouble with self-help is that the things that really change your life almost always come from the outside. The Talmud tells a story about R. Yoḥanan, who had great powers of healing. Visiting people who were sick, he would cure them by the touch of his hand. One day, he himself became ill, and R. Ḥanina came and cured him. The Talmud asks the obvious question: Why did R. Yoḥanan not cure himself? It answers: “A prisoner cannot release himself from prison.”⁴

footnotes: ⁴ Berakhot 5b.

That is what is missing from the new religion of the self. Oddly enough in an age that venerates Darwin, it ignores the most salient truth of Darwinism, that what makes humans different is that we are supremely social animals. Aristotle knew this. So did Maimonides. The Torah says so loudly and clearly at the very beginning of the human story: “It is not good for man to be alone” (Gen. 2:18). Happiness, meaning, fulfilment, blessing, the gifts of a life well lived, are not – at least for most people – to be found in the self, but beyond the self, in relationships, families, and communities.

That is why the first thing Moses did after his long stay up the mountain, winning forgiveness for the people after the sin of the Golden Calf, was vayak’hel: to turn them back into a community.

He did so, as our parasha elaborates, in two ways. One was to begin the work of constructing the Mishkan, the Sanctuary. The best way of creating community is to get a group of people to build something together. If you have ever been engaged with others in bringing to fruition an innovative project, you will know the exhilaration that comes from bonding with a team while working together. That is what the Israelites experienced while they were making the Sanctuary. It is the one extended episode in the Torah’s account of the wilderness years in which there were no complaints or rebellions.

The other way – stated in our parasha ahead of the Sanctuary-building – was Shabbat. Shabbat is the antidote to “selfitis.” It’s the day in which we lay aside our private projects of working, earning, spending, and striving, and simply celebrate together the things that are not about “Me” but about “Us”: family, community, congregation, praying together, learning together, eating together, and singing together.

Judaism is a supremely social faith, built around the concept of vayak’hel, the act of gathering together as a community. Our holiest prayers cannot be said without a community. On the High Holy Days we confess publicly, together, not “my sins” but “ours.” We pray for the sick, and comfort mourners, by grouping them with “the others” who are similarly afflicted. Maimonides writes about one who “separates himself from the community”:

Even though he commits no transgression, he remains separated from the congregation of Israel, does not observe the commandments together with them, does not include himself in their troubles, nor afflict himself on their fast-days, but follows his own path as if he were one of the nations and not [a member of the Jewish people]. He has no share in the World to Come.⁵, Hilkhot Teshuva 3:11.

footnotes: ⁵ Mishneh Torah

To be a Jew, in other words, is not just a matter of believing or behaving, but also of belonging. Martin Buber wrote a famous book about spirituality called I and Thou. It had a huge impact on Christian theologians, much less so on Jewish ones. The reason is self-evident. Judaism is less about I-and-thou than about we-and-thou.

It is constructed in the first-person plural of togetherness. We know perfectly well that we are imperfect; that we all lack something. Even Moses needed an Aaron and Miriam. That is why davar shebikedusha, a holy act or prayer, requires a community,⁶ because what we lack individually, we hope to achieve collectively. All-of-us is greater than any-of-us.

footnotes: ⁶ Berakhot 21a.

That is something we are in grave danger of forgetting, especially with the spread of smartphones and social media. The evidence is rapidly accumulating that virtual relationships are not the same as face-to-face ones and that social media-generated crowds are quite different from communities. As Susan Pinker writes in The Village Effect, “Digital networks and screen media have the power to make the world seem much smaller. But when it comes to certain life-changing transformations, they’re no match for face-to-face.”⁷ (London: Atlantic Books, 2015), 8. As she and others have documented,⁸ (Portland: Broadway Books, 2014); John Cacioppo and William Patrick, Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection (New York: Norton, 2009). being part of a community is good for health, happiness, and the successful negotiation of life’s challenges.

footnotes: ⁷ Susan Pinker, The Village Effect: Why Face-to-Face Contact Matters ⁸ See also Matthew Lieberman, Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect

This is why self-help has its limits. A prisoner cannot release himself from prison. The self cannot cure its own sicknesses. We need the presence of others to heal, to grow, to help us through the hard times, and to remind us of our responsibilities when times are hard for others. Hence the life-changing idea: Happiness lies beyond the self, in the strength of our relationships, our connections to community, and in what we give to and are given by others.

האושר טמון מעבר לעצמי — בחוזק מערכות היחסים שלנו, בהתחברותנו לקהילה, ובמה שאנו נותנים לאחרים ואחרים נותנים לנו.

Life-Changing Idea 22 Happiness lies beyond the self, in the strength of our relationships, our connections to community, and in what we give to and are given by others.