Nachshon and Action Bias

Geoffrey Stern: So, welcome to another week of Madlik, Rabbi. You are in Dubai, and I am in Connecticut. How are things going?

Adam Mintz: Things are great here. Everyone who is listening to us from a place where they can get to Dubai for Shabbos is invited to the 1st Shabbos in Dubai since October 7th. It’s really an exciting Shabbos in Dubai. But, you know, the best part of it all is that we get to study together and to do clubhouse, wherever we are around the world, Clubhouse always, always wins. So that’s great. Looking forward to studying together.

GS: So, we didn’t have a chance during the intro to really catch up on where I was and what I’ve done this week, but I did mention in the intro that Nachshon was the poster child of action, of what Heschel characterized as praying with your feet. And, of course, that was a reference to when Heschel walked arm in arm with Martin Luther King across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. And Rabbi, you will not believe this, but I walked over the Edmond Pettis Bridge this week. I was on a UJA/Federation mission from Fairfield, Connecticut, and we traced the steps of the civil rights movement and I literally took a video. I took a video of my feet and I re-lived the – I believe a cynical reporter, maybe from the Jewish Week or another Jewish periodical, came up to Heschel and said, did you have a chance to daven shachras this morning, Rabbi? And he answered famously, I’m praying with my feet. But as I said, that personified the very, I think we would all agree, approach of Judaism that actions count larger than words, than thoughts, than even prayers.

And truly, we’re going to be revisiting Nachshon. I think there’s an episode of Madlik just called Nachshon where we review how many cities and Kibbutzim in Israel are named after Nachshon, how many military campaigns were named after Nachshon. So, if you want, you can Google Madlik and Nachshon, and you’ll be able to see those episodes. But as I said in the intro, we’re going to look at it from a slightly different perspective today. We’re going to look at the other side. I called it the dark side.

You’ll be the judge. But I Googled this, and it turns out there’s something called “action bias”. I kind of understood the concept. I didn’t know it really had a word. And what it means is that in certain situations when people are making a decision, and this is part of decision theory, people have a bias, an inclination to act. They always have a choice, obviously. It’s not only between acting and not acting. It’s about how to act, which direction should we take. But on the basis of it, there is this bias towards action.

And one of the examples that they bring is when you get a penalty kick in a soccer match. Statistically, the best move is to kick the ball directly into the middle of the net. Because the goalie has an action bias. He wants to do something, and he is ultimately going to have to make a decision, which is a 50-50 decision, whether you’re going to go right and whether you’re going to go left. But since you know, because of the action bias, he’s going to do one of them, going down the middle might be the best way to go.

I mean, I think, Rabbi, we find an action bias sometimes in couples who are having difficulty. They might have a child to solve the problem. They think that acting will solve their problems. I know of someone who was in a rut in terms of his business career and decided to go into a new business just for going into the business. He almost regretted it the moment that he signed the contract. These are all examples of how we do have a baked-in bias for action. With Nachshon, we celebrate it, but I think when we look at the sources, we’ll find out maybe not so much.

The Legacy of Nachshon

5:41 GS What’s your opinion, Rabbi?

AM: I mean, it’s such a great topic, you know, and we talk about families and couples and businesses, you know, the way we compensate for our difficulties, we compensate for our vulnerabilities, right? That’s really what we’re talking about here. So great. I’m looking forward. Let’s run with Nachshon. I mean, he clearly has been a hero for the Jewish people for many centuries. But as always, let’s disrupt a little bit.

GS: Great. So, believe it or not, there’s nothing in our parasha that talks about Nachshon. This is all Midrashic, and you have to go to Bamidbar Rabbah when it talks about Nachshon, the son of Aminadab, of the tribe of Judah, and he was the first one to bring the sacrifice when they inaugurated the Mishkan, the tabernacle. And the Midrash asks, why was he called by the name of Nachshon? Because he was the first to plunge into the billow. I guess Nachshol is a billow that you use to put air onto a fire.

It’s a pump. Into the billow of the sea. Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai explained, the Holy One, blessed be He, said to Moses, he who sanctified my name by the sea shall be the first to present his offering, and that was Nachshon. And so not only was Nachshon celebrated for that, he was from the tribe of Judah, he was a merit to the famous tribe of Judah, And, you know, the famous Midrashic embellishment of this was, of course, that Moses was praying. God said to Moses, why are you praying? This is a time to act.

And Nachshon of all of the tribes jumped into the water, got into the water up until his eyeballs, and only then did the Red Sea split. So that is the standard benchmark of Nachshon. But what is fascinating, and I quote in the source sheet from an article by a gentleman named Leonard Grunstein, and it’s called, Why Did Nachshon and the Other Nessim Join the Korach Rebellion? Well, he’s got a leading title already, and in the lengthy quote that I give of his article, because it’s full of references to rabbinic classical and later medieval rabbinic commentaries, the argument is made, and it’s based, I believe, Rabbi, on the fact that in later lists of the Nesi’im, maybe Nachshon all of a sudden disappears and Caleb takes his place.

AM That’s right.

GS: The rabbis are trying to explain a textual situation where Nachshon is the Nasi and all of a sudden, he’s not. So, what happened to him? So according to this lengthy article, Nachshon was in fact involved possibly in the Korach rebellion. He may have been involved with the sin of the spies for that doomed generation. In Kivro Ta’iva, the graves of desire, the sin of the complainers, he may have been a part of that. And if you look through some of the commentaries, they try to flush out what about Nachshon made it so that, on the one hand, he was the guy at the splitting of the Red Sea, the Sea of Reeds, and on the other hand, maybe in everyday life or in the later narrative, he wasn’t so much the guy.

So there’s a Tosefot, Rabbi Joseph Ben Isaac, who talks about why wasn’t Nachshon picked to take care of the Israelites when Moshe was up at Sinai? Why wasn’t he picked, instead Aaron was picked, to kind of modulate and redirect and re-channel the angst of the Jewish people? And this commentary says that he felt that Nachshon would not have voluntarily stepped down when Moses returned. So clearly, in this reading, Nachshon is considered to have a little bit of an ego. He had this born sense of leadership, but maybe a little bit too much of it.

The Chizkuni, another medieval commentary, commenting on the fact that unlike the other Nasi’im, the other princes, Nachshon is not referred to a prince posits that if Nachshon had been both called Nasi and received the prestigious honor of being first, he would have lorded it over the other tribal leaders. So clearly, for whatever reason, Rabbi, the classical and medieval rabbis are reading into Nachshon kind of the flip side of his leadership skills and character.

What do you read into this?

AM: Yeah, I mean, well, you’re 100% right, but I think the question is, why is that? Why don’t they just take him for what he is? It’s interesting that they kind of look for a deficiency.

11:35 GS: You think they were threatened by Nachson? Because clearly in the classical story it’s kind of a zero-sum game. Either you’re a Nachshon or you’re a praying Moses, you know? But with Moses, there seems to be the nuance that Moses maybe wasn’t theguy for that moment, but he was the guy for going forward. I don’t know, but there’s something that made the rabbinical commentaries temper this idealization.

AM: To me, that’s the interesting question. Why did they temper it?

GS: Of the interesting commentaries in this article, he talks about this concept that we find in Kiddushin 39b, which is this idea of being somchin al ha’nes, relying on miracles. And in a sense, when Nachshon went into the sea, he was waiting for God to save him, so to speak. He was waiting for the special effects department to come up with a solution. And that goes against another tenet, which is not to rely on miracles. I found an interesting commentary, contrasts Nachshon to Miriam, and in his reading, as we read our parasha today, we read that Miriam brought with her timbals and with dances.

Rashi in Exodus 15.20 says the righteous women in that generation were confident that God would perform miracles for them and they accordingly had brought timbals with them from Egypt. So, this article by Joshua Rabin says the difference between Miriam and Nachshon was Miriam did not precipitate the miracle, she did not go ahead and have this self-confidence to force the miracle, but she was prepared for the miracle. And he actually uses “action bias” in his article to contrast Miriam to Nachshon.

I thought that was kind of interesting.

AM: That’s really, really good. I mean, yeah, okay, that’s great. You learn something new every year. That’s why we review the Parsha every single year.

GS: Well, and people look at things so differently, so now we’re getting different graduations. But getting back to the rabbinic commentaries, one of the traits that Moses had was he was the most humble person, and one of the commentaries touches upon a piece of Talmud that we discussed probably around Tisha B’Av time, where if you recall, there was this banquet that Kamsa was not invited to, and they went and they prepared a sacrifice with a blemish in order to put the rabbis into a pickle.

And one of the rabbis decided that the thing to do was not to do anything. That was the easy solution. And Rabbi Yochanan says, the excessive humility of Rabbi Zecharyah ben Avkolas destroyed our temple, burnt our sanctuary, and exiled us from our land. So, truly, in this case, the interpretation of humility might be humility in action, lack of this kind of ego and pride that Nachshon seemed to have implied. So we really do get flushing out the two characters in this story, and maybe that’s why the rabbis wanted to definitely show some of the negative things about Nachshon, is that it was in comparison to the humility, the humility, and I would say economy of action of a Moses.

16:26 AM Yeah, that’s interesting about economy of action. Moshe does what he’s supposed to do. He doesn’t do more than what he’s supposed to do. I guess part of it, going back to the first question, why do they focus on Nachshon? Maybe part of it is the question of why didn’t Moshe jump into the sea? I mean, isn’t Moshe our hero? Shouldn’t he be the one who jumped into the sea? But maybe the answer is that jumping into the sea, maybe that’s not all positive. That would be interesting, isn’t it?

Action Bias vs. Status Quo Bias

I think it is. I think the lesson here, and we can talk about, we can pretend that we’re looking at the dark side of what is called “action bias” as opposed to another term, which is “status quo bias”, and that exists as well, and I think most of us would say that we’re more appreciative, we recognize more, we’re more sensitive to act. Status quo bias is when you’re on a committee and there are those who don’t want to make any changes. They just want to stay with the status quo. I think the Haredi community could be accused.

AM: Of Status Quo Bias…

GS: Of status quo bias. But there are halachic terms that either whether they initially meant this or they were taken to mean this going forward that I think we should sprinkle into the conversation. And that is the word Shev v’Al’taseh.. there are Commandments; mitzvot that require you to come to get up, “asseh”, and to do.. like putting on Tephilin, making a blessing, and there are commandments, that are commandments that are shev v’al’taseh, sit on your hands and don’t do it. Don’t do idol worship.

And the rabbis do have discussions about which is better. One of the sources talks about if you do a commandment of lo ‘ta’aseh, it’s as considered as if you do a mitzvah. It’s considered as if you do a positive commandment which implicates an action, but sometimes inaction has built and baked into it an action, which I think is kind of a fascinating concept. The bottom line is in modern-day Hebrew, Sheva v’al Taseh is a term that people understand for not doing something, and I think that is kind of fascinating as well.

19:15 AM Yeah, that is fascinating. Now, Sheva v’al ta’aseh, you know, sometimes not doing is considered to be preferable. For instance, if Rosh Hashanah falls on Shabbat, so we don’t blow the shofar because we’re afraid that maybe you’ll carry the shofar to shul. And the Talmud, when it tries to explain why that is that we don’t blow the shofar when Rosh Hashanah falls on Shabbat, it says that it’s better to be inactive. If we were active, if we blew the shofar, we’d be potentially violating Shabbat.

So therefore, it’s better to be inactive. So it’s an interesting kind of tug-of-war there about whether inactivity is something to be praised or something that’s problematic.

GS: You know, I love that you bring that example and that you add to the discussion this concept of which one is better. You don’t have rabbis saying kum asei odif, that getting up and doing something is better, because that is the default. The default is we all believe that praying with your feet, that jumping into the Red Sea, is obviously the best way to go. We all have that action bias, but those that argue Shev v’al’tasa odif, they have to kind of crawl their way up. They have to say, now hold on for a second.

There are instances where not doing anything is the preferable way, to the degree that it’s considered a mitzvah in one telling, or as you say, that it is odif, it’s even better. And I think that is exactly a little bit of what we are exploring today, which is those who go against the grain, or who are a little bit more nuanced and subtle, and celebrate the action of inaction. I think Club Med used to say, “you can exercise the right not to exercise”. So I looked at some other instances going forward where maybe we are seeing a situation where this concept of, you’ve just got to do something, is not necessarily the right way to go.

Exploring the Nuances of Action and Inaction

21:52 GS: And the first one is clearly Aaron’s sons, Nadav and Avihu, who bring this strange fire, and everybody is jumping over themselves to know why they were sacrificed themselves, why they were burned to a crisp. And I think clearly in this instance too, whether you call it innovation or whether you call it doing something when nothing is necessary to be done can be extremely problematic. The other example is in Numbers 13.2, when it talks about sending out the miraglim, the spies, to spy out the land.

It seems to be a command, send agents to scout the land of Canaan. But in Deuteronomy, in the retelling of the story, We have then, all of you came to me, says Moses, and said, let us send agents. So, there is this conflict between whether this was something that was done at God’s command, at Moses’ command, or it was something, an unnecessary action that got the Jewish people, the Israelites, into trouble. And here too, the commentaries such as the Ramban wax poetic about saying that part of the sin, and of course this is the ultimate sin, because this caused the whole generation to die in the wilderness, was first and foremost a situation that didn’t have to be, an action that didn’t have to be initiated.

I think from this perspective, these two examples of Nadav and Aviv and of sending out the spies take on a new commentary, a new complexion.

23:52 AM Yeah, they definitely do. I mean, isn’t that so interesting? I mean, you know, Nachshon seems to be associated both with the greatest victories in the desert, as well as the biggest sins in the desert. Isn’t that fascinating? I mean, he’s the one who jumps into the sea, and he’s the one who’s involved in Korah, and he’s the one who’s involved in the golden calf. It just seems to be that they, and I guess maybe this is something, you know, this is, this is kind of the way you started, that leadership has within it certain complexities and you find yourself in leadership roles in good things and in leadership roles in bad things as well.

GS: Yeah, and I think what we have to conclude at the end of the day from this discussion is that it’s nuanced, and the rabbis went out of their way to say and to argue that there were no easy answers. And they used this sense of kum v’aseh and sheva v’al’taseh, doing something positive, and sometimes just sitting and not doing anything, as a way to really not come down on one side or the other, but to explore the different possibilities, because at the end of the day, we call it “decision theory”, but exercising one’s free will is not something that is easy, and if it was, it wouldn’t be such a challenge.

I mean, I’m just looking through the sources, this concept that I mentioned before of lo samchinen anisa, not relying on a miracle, what they talk about that in the sense of putting oneself into a situation that is dangerous, and therefore needing God to salvage one from the situation. It’s almost like forcing God’s hand, and if you look back at the story of Nachshon plunging into the Red Sea, in a sense he was forcing God’s hand. It worked out in his case, God came through. But it doesn’t always work out that way because we don’t have that power.

You know, this idea of a yoshev v’lo avar avera notnin lo schar ke’ose mitzvah (יָשַׁב וְלֹא עָבַר עֲבֵירָה – נוֹתְנִים לוֹ שָׂכָר כְּעוֹשֶׂה מִצְוָה) , that someone who sits and does not do something bad, we give them the schar, the reward, as if they did the mitzvah, a positive commandment. And I think that’s a way of kind of characterizing inaction. In a very positive way. And I think that is fascinating. You know what it made me think about as well? It made me think about the Mussar movement, and in particular, one book, which is called Chovot HaLevavot, the requirements, The mitzvot of your heart” (by Bahya ben Joseph ibn Pakuda).

And in his introduction, I didn’t have a chance to put it into the source sheet, but he waxes profoundly about all of the scholarship, all of the time and effort that we Jews put into mitzvot, which means doing things, doing commandments, fulfilling, it means practice, it means observance, is wonderful, but not if it comes at the expense of doing the hard work about one’s inner life, which he calls chovot halavavot. And I think that, too, is a wonderful context and contrast to put between those Nachschon types, the actors, and those who possibly reflect more and think more and don’t necessarily have that knee-jerk reaction to think that action is always the answer.

28:06 AM Yeah, I think, I mean, that’s really a very important point. And I think it’s a point that we, you know, we often overlook because we’re made to think that leadership is all about action. And I think what this, what you’re teaching today is, I mean, in the Chavot HaLevavot really, you know, that going forward is the fact that we need to be humble enough to recognize that action isn’t always the best solution.

GS Sometimes it can eclipse. An inner life and it should never come at that expense. So I think, you know, so many of our recent podcasts, we’ve tried to tie it into the current situation and you know, when you’re attacked, there is clearly a response that is needed, and the kinds of discussions that we’ve been having go into it in terms of, well, how do we respond, and maybe the enemy is expecting us to respond in a different way and is acting in a manner to trigger that response, and we have no answers.

We have no answers now that we’re in Gaza. When is the appropriate time to get out of Gaza? But I do think it’s a fascinating discussion, especially in the shadow of Nachshon, which is so famous and would seem to lead so much in saying that the response to anything has to be a powerful reaction. But the way I want to end is, as you know, Rabbi, I’m a big fan of Daniel Gordis, and one of the amazing things he does in his podcast (Israel From the Inside) is he brings videos and other media that are in the Israeli press that we might not get in our press here.

And he shared a video of a soldier who is talking about the conversations that he has with his band of fighters every time there’s a question of who goes first, who gets out of the tank first, who goes and attacks the enemy (who goes back into Khan Yunis in Gaza). And I think nothing could ring truer to Nachshon than to listen to the way he speaks, but I want you to focus on the latter part of his speech, because he’s talking to a reporter, maybe he’s talking to a blogger, or someone who is an influencer, and he talks about the power of inaction and reflection, possibly, before you make your next tweet, before you make your next Instagram image.

And I think it so balances this balance between the correct action, the needed action, and reflective thought, and sometimes not doing something, that I wanted to end with that. So, before I play it, Rabbi, Shabbat Shalom in Dubai. Okay, and for you, Madlik listeners, please listen to this wonderful soldier who describes what it’s like to go into battle with other equally committed soldiers. And here we go.

“There was a stage where they were debating about who would go in.

And suddenly an argument started within the unit between me and some of the other soldiers, each one of us explaining why he should be the one to go in. And suddenly my friend says to me, what are you talking about? You don’t need to go in.

You were already in. And I say to him, no way, brother. I was already inside. I got practice. I’m already scuffed up.

He says to me, no way. You have four children. And I say to him, no way. You have two children. You have a home to build. Everyone insists on getting more. I’m telling you, it’s like when you cross the border fence. A different atmosphere begins. If it were possible to take the whole nation of Israel to Khan Yunis, just so they could experience the atmosphere that is there. I’m telling you, no one would dare speak words of divisiveness. No one would dare to start returning to the discourse of that time (of the demonstrations regarding Judicial Reform etc).

We must not go back to that time. I’m telling you, it makes me weak. We are talking a few hours before I return to Khan Yunis. It weakens me. You came to write something? Stop for a second. For them. They are now ready to sacrifice their lives for another post of yours. Make this post one of unity and connection. For them.”

Shabbat Shalom