My Father is in Women’s Underwear

I am in England right now on tour with my book, The Shabbat Effect. By the time you read this, I will have finished a series of talks in London before I move on to Leeds and then Oxford and on to the continent.

Going back to Oxford will bring back many memories because I did my post-graduate training at that university. I’ll be giving a talk at Rhodes House, which is the headquarters of the Rhodes scholarship, which is what took me to Oxford in the first place.

That talk is titled “Character in an Age of Performance: Lessons from the Jewish Tradition of Mussar”

I will be addressing young people – possibly future leaders – and I want to impress on them that, despite the apparent success in public life of people who seem to have few or no scruples, there are good reasons that they should make matters of character a high priority in their life-choices and behaviour.

A story from my own experience supports that idea.

In 2016, I was invited to attend conference sponsored by the Templeton Foundation and held at “The Institute for the Study of Human Flourishing” at the University of Oklahoma. The topic of that entire conference was “humility” and the book that was published that collected the presentations is titled with that one simple word: “Humility.”

It was a very interesting conference, and I have lots of stories, but the one thing I want to point out to the young students at Oxford is that among the dozens of presenters at the conference, I was the only one who came from a religious tradition. All the others were psychologists, philosophers and people from schools of business.

It was surprising to me, as it may be to you, to find out that business schools are increasingly taking an interest in humility in particular, and character in general. That turns out to be an unexpected point of overlap between business studies and Mussar.

But it should not come as a surprise that business schools are looking at the impact of ego on leadership, organizational behaviour, management ethics and executive development. They are recognizing that the humble leader – someone who is able to listen and take suggestions, who values the contributions of others, who does not seek personal aggrandizement and is open to learning – is more likely to bring an enterprise to success than the stereotypical macho leader who leads by fiat and projects ambition, authority,competitiveness, and strength.

None of that was surprising to me, coming as I do with knowledge that the Torah proclaims Moses to be the most humble person on the face of the earth. Humble, yes, and also an unparalleled leader. We have long known that the two are far from incompatible, despite what we see on the daily news.

That’s a story about humility that I hope will strike a chord with the students. Another I will tell is about my own personal experience that taught me the importance of being true to yourself.

I got to Oxford because I was selected as a Rhodes Scholar. And though anyone who has seen me recently will be hard pressed to believe it, at one time I had shoulder length hair. I had gone to a quite repressive high school, and so for the 3+ years between entering university and the scholarship interview, I did not cut my hair.

My long hair created a dilemma for me. I knew that I would be interviewed for the scholarship by a panel of illustrious, establishment types: the chairman of the selection committee was George Gale, then Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Ontario and sitting beside him were six luminaries from business, law and academia.

Knowing that these 7 men would be judging me and determining my fate, I had to decide whether or not to cut my hair. Would making my appearance more conventional improve my chances of getting selected, or should I not pander to conventions and just come as I was, let the chips fall where they may?

In the end, I decided not to cut my hair but not because of any high-minded principle. I actually had decided that I had very little chance of winning the scholarship. Neither of my parents went beyond high school and in the year that I was applying for the scholarship, my father was working as a traveling salesman representing manufacturers from other cities in our home territory of Toronto. At that time, his primary client was a manufacturer of women’s under-garments and the joke in our family was that if anyone asked, what does your father do for a living, the answer was “Oh, he’s in women’s underwear.”

And I thought to myself that they didn’t give Rhodes Scholarships to men whose fathers were in women’s underwear, and so there was likely nothing to gain from cutting my hair. And, on the other hand, there was a lot to lose. If I cut my hair but did not get the scholarship, then every day I’d be looking in the mirror and the image looking back would shout out both my failure and the futile compromise that cutting my hair represented.

So I did not cut my hair and I got the scholarship.

I can’t claim that I had been high minded and made my decision based on principle. I was motivated by not wanting to be reminded on a daily basis that I had reached for a brass ring and missed. Nevertheless, this episode taught me a lesson that informed my life and that I want to convey to the students I’ll be addressing.

Be yourself. It’s such a cliché, but that does not mean it is not true. As one of my primary teachers had posted on her filing cabinet: “Be yourself. Everyone else is taken.”

When we present ourselves as someone other than who we are, we create a division between the truth of our inner life and the pretense of our outward behaviour. That flies in the face of an injunction taught in the Talmud (Yoma 72b) that says, “One’s inside should be like one’s outside” (tocho ki baro):

Rava said: “Any Torah scholar whose inside is not like his outside is not to be considered a Torah scholar.” Abaye said, and some say it was Rabba bar Ulla: “He is called loathsome.”

I hope that these and some other stories will support my contention that integrity of character remains crucial despite the fact that we live in an age when performance – by political leaders, celebrities, social media influencers, public intellectuals and even some business and religious leaders – is in the ascendant. Those prominent people are concerned not with being who they are, but with how they appear to others. They are actors in an economy of attention.

How different is the motivation to monetize eyeballs (i.e., making money by attracting attention) from the message we get in scripture that what matters is living a life of integrity, referred to as shem tov, a “good name”:

Proverbs 22:1: “A good name is more desirable than great riches.”

Ecclesiastes 7:1: “A good name is better than fine oil.”

But the most powerful statement appears in Pirkei Avot (4:13):

Rabbi Shimon says: “There are three crowns: the crown of Torah, the crown of priesthood, and the crown of kingship. But the crown of a good name rises above them all.”

What do you think? Is there any possibility of influencing young people to turn away from the performing influencers and their materialistic goals, and to turn instead toward their own souls and the pursuit of integrity?