Do What You Feel, or Fake It 'Til You Make It? Thoughts on Tisha B’Av

Are our emotions driven by outside stimulus and experiences, or does our internal world change the way we experience the world? Certainly both are true, but Tisha B’Av and my work on healthy arguments have led to some new insights.

As we approach Tisha B'Av, the day commemorating the destruction of the Temple, we are urged to mourn, to feel the pain of the churban (destruction). We read words of mourning, descriptions of the destruction and the pain. We are encouraged to imagine the sadness, and are told of how joy and lightness left the world after the destruction of the Temple. 

But the rabbis knew that words and rituals would not be enough for us to continue to feel the emotional significance of Tisha B’Av.

They realized we needed to do more than imagine what the destruction felt like. We needed to perform it. As with most Jewish traditional rituals, Tisha B’Av is not only about what we do with our thoughts and feelings, it’s what we do with our bodies.

A central ritual for Tisha B’Av consists of sitting on the floor, refraining from wearing leather or freshly-laundered clothing and avoiding hair cuts or shaving. That is, we behave as if we were in mourning. We place our bodies in the clothing and in the shape of sitting shiva. Through wearing mourning clothes and sitting low, our body reconnects with the emotions of personal mourning (the experience that some of us have had sitting shiva for a loved one). In this way Tisha B’Av, a collective memorial of historical pain, is infused with our personal emotion-memories of terrible loss.

It would seem that Jewish tradition appreciates the delicate dance between behavior and being. Jewish tradition has learned how inner thought and imagination can affect our actions, but also how our outward physical performance can affect our inner state. 

“The hearts follow the deeds,” proclaims Sefer HaChinuch. In a surprising assertion the sages suggest that we rarely do good deeds because we have virtuous intentions. Rather, it is in performing the good deed that we develop virtuous intentions. Instead of “doing what you feel,” Sefer HaChinuch seems to suggest there is some value in the school of “fake it till you make it.” 

This approach is very familiar to me, from the world of theater. Theater has always embraced both approaches. Some actors and acting teachers teach that we work “inside-out.” That is, we first work on our character’s emotions, motivations, inner thoughts, and this will in turn inform the persuasiveness of our performance. Inside-out. 

Yet, there is another equally powerful school that advises the opposite: first of all find your character’s body shape, the walk, the facial expression, the makeup and costume, and just present the perfect "shape" of the character. The emotions will naturally arise just from the doing. Outside-in. 

When we began our research on For the Sake of Argument workshops, we were particularly interested in trust. A significant assumption in most bridge-building dialogue work is that one must first build trust before digging in to touchy topics. When embarking on a difficult conversation with someone one deeply disagrees with, most experts recommend starting by asking “getting to know you” questions. The famous Heineken commercial “Worlds Apart” suggested you should first build a bar together before talking things over with a beer. 

This assumption, that I can only talk about deep differences with someone I trust, worried us. Putting it in its coldest, most practical articulation, who has the time? How many bars can you build before you get to the beer?

And then there is the question of motivation. We are given to understand that people are choosing to distance themselves socially from people because they hold different opinions. If I disagree with you I am less likely to want to be your friend. But the “trust-building-first” approach tells us that until I become your friend we cannot address our ideological differences. Catch-22. 

In short, our concern was that if we first need to get to know our ideological opposites before having an ideological conversation with them, the chances are these conversations will very rarely take place at all. 

We wanted to test a different approach. 

What if we worked in the opposite direction? What if our workshops did not begin with getting-to-know-you games? What if there were no ice-breakers? What if we simply established some objectives, some general approaches, and then just jumped straight into the argument? Outside-in?

To our surprise and delight our research is beginning to show that our workshops lead to a significant increase in comfort and “feeling closer” to the other people in the argument, even though the workshop placed no structured focus on getting to know the individuals in the room. 

It would seem that just as trust can allow for healthy arguments, so healthy arguments might lead to trust. 

Before we get carried away with ourselves, I should note that for all the generosity of the Jim Joseph Foundation in funding the research expertly conducted by Rosov Consulting, we’d need a few more millions of dollars to fully substantiate our findings across more people and longer time periods. But this two-way street between emotion and intellect, between gut and brain, fits with assumptions deep in the art of theater, and the world of Jewish ritual and prayer. Perhaps it will work with polarization too.