Religion/psych snippet

[403]

I think I've finally put my finger on what bothers me about the "do what's personally meaningful" approach of Reform Judaism. In my experience, that's not how the relationship between personalized, intrinsically motivating meaningfulness and action works. From what I've observed in myself, meaning grows around actions if given sufficient time and mental space, regardless of the initial reason* for taking them.

So, they seem to have it backwards.


* Except for "someone made me do it" type reasons. Pretty much kills any chance of growing positive meaning around the activity.

Comments

[siliconshaman]

Odd that. I find that repetition of action gradually wears away meaning.

Perhaps if one were to graph meaning over time you could arrive at an optimum number of times one does something for it have maximum meaningfulness?

Of course, one would have to factor in the level of "I have to do this" feeling, as an offset bias.

[403]

Interesting...

For a secular example, when my family visits the university, we've developed a tradition of going out to eat. It's become meaningful to me because it's one of the few circumstances where I and > 1 relatives can be in the same place for an hour or more without it devolving into bickering. If we did so too frequently, the luster probably would wear off, but once or twice a month seems to be about right.

[liv]

You're not wrong that this can be a flaw with Reform's individualist approach. I think part of it is that it's reaction to a feeling that Orthodox Judaism constitutes a huge great heap of "someone made me do it". And actually if you observe Reform Jews, you see that it's not a matter of everybody doing exactly what they feel like, there are such things as community norms even if they're not stated as explicitly as in other denominations.

It's very possible indeed to say, what I find personally meaningful is to commit myself to doing repeated ritual actions every single day, even at times when I really don't feel like it. So you don't get a lot of people who say, oh, I'll keep kosher today cos I feel like it, but the next day they have a craving for bacon for breakfast so they don't keep kosher any more! It's more like, people make a personal decision that they are going to keep kosher (to whatever level) as a long-term thing, and then put up with missing out on what they want to or find convenient to eat on a day to day basis.

[403]

I can see how that would work, yeah. My contact is mostly with the university community, which is in a constant state of flux thanks to people entering and leaving each semester. So community norms never have a chance to settle in, and it generally is a bunch of people following the customs of wherever they happened to grow up.

My own position is currently a vaguely-defined middle ground. I don't have the "someone made me do it" baggage on this topic, so I'm just gardening meaning. (And, of course, I have no intention of telling people what they "should" be doing. That would be counterproductive.)