Some time ago my youngest daughter made a remark that brought happiness to my heart. She was going to be attending a program featuring a lineup of inspirational lectures and she was very much looking forward to attending. But she also wondered aloud whether the experience would be one of moving from one talk to the next with the net result being only an amorphous sense of inspiration lacking something concrete to help effect personal growth.
I was certainly supportive of her going to the program and more broadly I believe the very fact that these events fill the communal calendar reflects wonderfully on the level of moral striving in the Torah world of which I wrote here last week. The first words that come to mind upon contrasting the kinds of evenings and weekends that draw a Torah-observant audience with those on offer in secular society are Baruch hamavdil bein kodesh l’chol.
And yet.
When I wrote last week that there’s an important discussion to be had about “whether we are going about our moral education whether in schools or in programs for adults the right way or are there things we should be doing differently ” this is part of what I had in mind. In my contribution to the latest volume of the journal Dialogue I put the matter this way:
Are such talks truly the most effective way to engender personal growth and spiritual change? Does there not come a point at which a form of “inspiration overload” takes over triggering a spiritual analog to the economist’s law of diminishing returns? We must ask ourselves honestly whether it is perhaps the case that the many talks we’ve attended albeit edifying and enjoyable have not produced all that much in the way of lasting personal change — or perhaps have even inured us to our current spiritual levels.
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