By Rabbi Patrick Beaulier
Carl Jung said that whatever your highest virtue is, that is functionally who God is for you. Believing in God is not like believing that 1+1=2. It’s about deciding what means the most to you, and behaving in accordance with that value. When we pray, sing, learn and grow through this High Holidays, we’re really just leaning into that which brings meaning to our life.
God is your sense of meaning in life.
Researchers who study our sense of meaning in life have broken it into three elements:
Coherence (which is the feeling that life has some kind of order or sense to it)
Purpose (having and working toward goals that are important to you)
Mattering (the sense that one’s life has value and makes a difference, otherwise called impact)
University of Sussex social psychologist Vlad Costin argues the last of those factor, mattering, that sense of having an impact on the world, may be the most crucial. In three experiments, Dr. Costin found that a person’s sense that their life has value, for any reason, predicted whether they beleive that life as a whole has value.
So we start with our own sense of meaning,
and we extrapolate it out to everyone else
and the world around us.
Or to put it another way -
we start with the God of our understanding,
and grow that sense of God
into all parts of the universe.
An important part of understanding and living our values is, of all things, routines.
Some research found that a preference for routines was correlated with a greater sense of meaning.
Quick pause - it’s interesting that we have routines in religion: prayers at particular times, Shabbat, holidays, etc. Could be that Judaism evolved a system of meaning-making that…well…just works!
In the research, students who were tracked for a week reported somewhat greater meaning, on average, when engaging in everyday acts such as studying or commuting—perhaps because routines build a coherent sense of self. Study co-author and Rutgers University psychologist Samantha Heintzelman observes:
“Moments that make sense and feel right can make life meaningful, too.”
In Judaism we have a term for this: keva. It means (basically) the order of a prayer service. We can’t have our prayer service by starting with Kaddish because that’s the end. And we can’t end our service with Barchu, because that’s a beginning.
That sense of the routine,
the structure,
the order,
actually does a lot to bring us into a greater sense of keva’s dance partner, kavanah, intention. It’s polar opposite that often sounds more fun than order.
A quick pause: if all of this is overwhelmingly complicated to you, and you just want a basic intro to Judaism without all the psychology, pop culture and commentary, consider First Steps.
And if you LOVE this stuff and want to live this out, consider our self-guided (and not too expensive) B’nai Mitzvah program where you get access to ALL our courses for one price.
Most of us in the progressive Jewish world are kavanah-oriented: just feel it, just go with it, unstructured, ecstatic, free-flow. That it’s the spirit of the law, not the law itself. But psychologists are snapping us back to reality: there is something very beautiful and life affirming through the rituals, traditions, routines and processes of daily life if done a certain way, the same way, consistently.
They say this with raising children: sure, it’s fun to give a kid ice cream for dessert and to stay up late on a Monday night. But we know that children thrive in structure, consistency, the knowledge that the world is a safe and loving place where yes, the trash needs to be taken out, the dog walked, and bed time unchanging. Those people who grow up in those homes (again, loving versions of those homes), grow up to be incredible people — many of whom are in fact, free spirited.
So, you’re asking - if God is my sense of meaning in life, and I live out routines that draw me closer to that sense of meaning, then what does it mean to sin again’t your own, highest value?
In the context of Jung's statement that the highest value equates to one's understanding of God, sin can be seen as acts or behaviors that go against one's highest values or moral compass.
These actions can create inner conflict,
disharmony,
and a sense of separation from the Divine
or one's own inner truth.
The opposite of sin is that which disorders and disconnects us, even if we’re able to rationalize it.
So my request is that you post below: what are those “sins” that you feel disorders and disconnects you? POST BELOW ⬇️