There is a famous psychological phenomenon known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect. The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence overestimate their abilities. For example, students who get D’s and F’s on their exams tend to think they scored much higher. Elderly people who can no longer drive very well often think they are still excellent behind the wheel. In a study on emotional intelligence, participants were asked to rate their own emotional intelligence, meaning, how well they understood themselves and others. Those who scored the lowest rated themselves the highest. I find this to be an incredibly scary thought; we are often blind to our own deficiencies, and we foolishly walk around overestimating our abilities.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is quite well-known; I’d venture to say that most of you are familiar with it. But there is another component to the Dunning-Kruger Effect that is not as famous. And that is the inverse. Those with high levels of competency often underestimate their abilities. The students who got an A often assume they got less. The excellent driver thinks she is not so great at driving. And those with high emotional intelligence do not realize how emotionally intelligent they really are.
There is a parallel phenomenon in the spiritual world. It doesn’t have a name and because I wrote this when I was quite exhausted, we are going to call it the Spiritual Dunning-Kruger Effect. I know, very creative. The Spiritual Dunning-Kruger Effect represents the fact that we often overestimate in the material realm and underestimate in the spiritual. Take the Jewish People traveling in the desert as an example. They are a group of slaves who were beaten daily and fed a measly diet, if they were fed at all. Two days into their exodus from slavery, they all of a sudden felt that they need meat. A heavenly bread falling from the sky was not enough for them; they “could only survive” if they had a good juicy steak, something they presumably did not experience in Egypt. And yet, when it came to spirituality, when G-d started speaking to them on Har Sinai, they begged Him to stop. Despite being the descendants of Avraham, Yitzchak, and Yaakov, despite having a piece of G-d, i.e., a soul, within them, they claimed to not be holy enough to hear G-d’s voice; “it’s too much for us.” They overestimated their physical needs and underestimated their spiritual abilities.
And as bizarre as this seems, hos different are they than all of us who want nicer vacations, bigger homes, better food, and even the best secular education. But when it comes to our spiritual needs, we are content with a whole lot less. “I’m not that spiritual.” We overestimate our physical needs and abilities and underestimate in the spiritual realm.
Truth be told, es chato’ai ani mazkir hayom, I want to publicly acknowledge a failing of my own. I, Yisrael Motzen, underestimated your spiritual aptitude. I did.
In mid-September, I gave a speech on Rosh Hashana (not that one…). I spoke about Rabbi Akiva and the importance of learning Torah. And I thought I was being so bold by asking of you all to learn for a maximum of 13 minutes a day. The topic I was asking you to learn was an easy one, the weekly parsha. And here we are, just a few months later, and about 140 people in our shul have been studying a page of Talmud a day, a difficult 35–55-minute daily endeavor.
There have been hiccups, challenging hiccups, and now is not the time and place to get into all that. But the bottom line is I was wrong. I sold you short. I too suffered from a form of the Spiritual Dunning-Kruger Effect. (I know, I know, we need a better name.)
All the research on the Dunning-Kruger Effect points to one effective way of overcoming these biases, and that is feedback; having someone else tell you who you really are, how your actions are seen by others. So allow me to right my wrong and give some feedback this morning on what I am seeing:
What I am seeing in this room and in our Ner Tamid community is nothing short of a spiritual revolution.
I am sure many of you are thinking, “Eh, this is nothing. We just did it for the money.” Maybe you think you did, but I don’t believe you. I do not believe that you spent all that time just for the money. I just don’t.
I sent out a poll this past week on the Daf Yomi chat with some questions about people’s past learning experiences, and over 2/3 of respondents stated that prior to this Daf Yomi initiative they were not learning daily, with 33% of respondents saying they almost never learned Torah. One of the questions that was asked on the poll was, what did you cut out from your day to make time for the Daf? And most respondents wrote, ‘leisure time.’ Many of us realized that we do not need as much unwinding as we previously assumed. I could get by with less TV, less scrolling, less listening to music. In short, a good percentage of our community just made a significant 90+ day change to our daily habits.
On Rosh Hashana, I mentioned the dirty little secret, which is not much of a secret, the sad reality that for some reason, in Modern Orthodox circles, the centrality of Torah learning and the level of Torah learning is not as strong as it is in other Orthodox circles. There’s no reason a school cannot have exceptionally high standards of secular education and exceptionally high standards of Jewish education, but for some reason, parents are often left choosing between them. These past three months have given me hope that maybe we can change that. And that’s because when I go to the youth lounge every Shabbos to teach the daf to a group of teenagers on a Saturday morning and they are engaged, and they ask me deep questions, and they are thirsty for more Torah, I have hope. This is nothing short of a spiritual revolution.
When I see people who never opened a Jewish book in their life walking around with a gemara, when people tell me that their whole household is walking around listening to the Daf Yomi podcast, when I come to shul meetings and the topic of conversation is yesterday’s daf, when our shul has what I believe to be the highest concentration of women doing the daf in North America, when I wake up in the morning and open my phone and see tens of people who started their day with some Torah learning, this is nothing short of a spiritual revolution.
That’s my feedback. I underestimated you, I underestimated myself. I underestimated our community. We are capable of so much more.
And so now the question is, what’s next? Do we just collect our $1000 and catch up on all the episodes of Suits that we missed? That’s what the Jewish People did in the desert; they received the Torah and 40 days later they were dancing around a calf. They didn’t get it. They didn’t realize how far they came, how much they grew. They didn’t believe in their spiritual aptitude. But we can.
And so I’d like to share with you all a menu of different daily learning programs. Whether you participated in the Daf Yomi project or not, you can still join this revolution. There is truly something for everyone, whether it’s Daf Yomi, Amud Yomi – a class I hope to start here where we will learn half a daf daily, Nach Yomi, or Mishna Yomi. And we’re going to keep that chat – that whatsapp chat that I initially thought was sooo annoying where everyone typed in that they learned that day. It’s a chat I’ve grown to love and be inspired by. It reminds me throughout the day what we are doing here.
One more thing – if you recall, when I came back from Israel, I shared with you a story about a woman we met outside the destroyed police station of Sederot. This young woman’s husband was a police officer who was killed by terrorists on October 7th. Our learning of the Daf was done in memory of her husband. In less than four weeks from now we will be celebrating our conclusion of Bava Kama, and this woman, Hodaya Harush, and her three adorable little children, will be joining us for a weekend.
When I met this woman, she was a police officer. However, her husband, Eliyahu, had always told her you are capable of so much more, you would make an excellent police investigator. After shloshim, she decided, this widow with three orphaned children under 8, to go further, to grow in her career, to be able to do more for the Jewish People, to be a greater merit to her deceased husband, and she enrolled in a program to become a police investigator.
You’ll meet her soon, and you will see how she is brimming with faith; not only faith in G-d, but a healthy faith in herself, in what she can accomplish. Rav Tzadok HaKohein writes that inasmuch as we are commanded in this week’s parsha to believe in G-d, we are also commanded to believe in ourselves; to stop selling ourselves short.
I look forward to being able to share with Hodaya not only what we already accomplished in her husband’s memory, but what we will continue to accomplish. I look forward to continuing together in this spiritual revolution. Because each one of us is capable of so much more.