Change is Possible

delivered Erev Rosh HaShanah, September 24, 2014

Change is possible.

And yet people insist that change is not possible.

So a question:

Can people really change over the course of a lifetime?

Asked another way, as we mature, do our skills at being in life adapt to what we experience in life?

Think about your lives when you were 20.  Or 30.  Or 40.  Or 50.  Or 60.  Or even 70.  

Are you the same now as you were then?

Do you even recognize yourself from earlier in life?  How about last year?  

Last month?

Last week?

Yesterday?

Truth be told, each day we are alive we are never exactly in the same place whether we are aware of this or not.

This is a moment in our Jewish year when we focus ourselves on change.  

Our liturgy directs our attention to the idea of why and how and what we must do if we want to change.

The ancients who created our liturgies were on to something profound!

They had an insight that people have the capacity to change.  

This is why the process of teshuvah, embedded so prominently in our liturgy is portrayed as a person’s gradual evolution.  

What they lacked was the sociological and psychological research to prove it.  

If they had created a study, one that looked at, say, the generations of our lives, we would then have data points that would confirm their thesis that change is possible.

Today we have that research that bears out the insights and instincts of the liturgists: change is possible over the course of a lifespan.

Known as the Harvard Study of Adult Development, or by its nickname the Harvard Grant Study because its first funding came from W.T. Grant who was interested in finding out people who would make the best managers for his retail empire.  

The study began in 1938 when 268 male Harvard students were chosen to participate in a study that would follow and observe them across the span of their lives.  

As of two years ago, a number of the men were pushing past 90 and are still being observed.

Research from the study is leading to some amazing conclusions that could only be reached after observing these men throughout their lifespans.

Over the course of 90 plus years these men, real human beings, lived and are living in a time and place that like all epochs of time represent profound changes in thinking and attitudes.

Change is possible.

The study’s longtime director Dr. George E. Vaillant wrote a valedictorian book upon his stepping down as the study’s director.  He calls the book  “Triumphs of Experience”  reflecting his own personal growth as he observed the study’s participants over his long tenure as director as he, himself, matured.  

His personal human growth allowed him to recognize many of his earlier insights as inaccurate, and he uses the book to correct them as well as share his newfound understandings.

Dr. Vaillant is proving the point of the Harvard Study of Adult Development in his own analysis of the study:  as people change, as they mature, they can be in the world in a different way, just as he uses newer insights in his work reflecting on the lives of these real people.  

Positive mental health exists and can be understood independent of moral and cultural biases.

In “Triumphs of Experience” he writes: “The very first and most fundamental lesson of the Harvard Study of Adult Development and the one on which all the other lessons depend:  While life continues, so does development.”

How we experience ourselves changes over our lifetimes.  Dr. Vaillant writes that is especially true of what we consider wisdom to be.  

When many of the study’s participants turned 75, they offered definitions of wisdom that are more grounded, more centered, more reflective, and truly reflecting wisdom in its greater meaning.

For instance:

• “Empathy through which one must synthesize both care and justice.”

• “Tolerance and a capacity to appreciate paradox and irony even as one learns to manage uncertainty.”

• “A seamless integration of affect and cognition.”

• “Self-awareness combined with an absence of self-absorption.”

• “The capacity to ‘hear’ what others say.”

In each one of these observations, the men are sharing insights that a person’s perceptions are not black and white, that life has few “absolutes” and that human development comes by being in life as our our coping mechanisms mature.

Change is possible.

Another of the study’s profound insights is that the most important influence by far on a flourishing life is love. “The most important contributor to joy and success in adult life is love .  

Original assumptions about the study participants ability to love were based on childhood relationships.  What the study found was, barring outside destructive forces like alcoholism (the drug abuse of choice), as people traverse life, they can form loving relationships that sustain them.  

Change is possible.

Another outgrowth of the study:  men who are in warm adult relationships with others in their lives, especially their spouses, thrive.  

Even those who had unhappy childhoods or earlier adult relationship disappointments.  Many were able to become happy, functioning individuals as their lives matured.

Or as another study member said, “It’s the old who can teach us that life is worthwhile to its very end.”  

Change is possible.

And what about our Jewish expressions of change’s possibilities?  The study pointed to an important point:  

As we understand the relativities and complexities of life more deeply our immature need to believe becomes a mature capacity to trust, and religious ideology makes room for spiritual empathy.  

Religious ideology makes room for spiritual empathy.

Spiritual empathy means that we need to have self-empathy, to create the room for healthy development over the course of our lives.

That is part of the process of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur that calls so many of you to this place in this moment.

For those of you who enter this synagogue and this time of year with apprehension about the ability to change, know that change is gradual, often indiscernible, and is a process, like teshuvah, that is always happening, oftentimes below the level of conscious awareness.

Know that what many of the participants in the Harvard study said in their early lives fell to the wayside as life’s experiences affected them.

Know that later in life were able to have more fully realized responses to them.

Know that the desire to change is one step in human experience to making change happen.  

Know that the instinct that our liturgists had in speaking of change as possible confirms our modern understandings that human beings are, in fact, able to change.

With this knowledge, know, too, that as you embark on your time here this year that you are changing, just by your very presence in this place.  

Change is possible.

Quotations about Change Being Possible

“In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves.  The process never ends until we die. And, the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.”  Eleanor Roosevelt

“You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.” Heraclitus