The Role of Episodic Memory in the Three Weeks and Tishah b'Av

The Torah content for these two weeks has been sponsored by Judah and Naomi Dardik in loving memory of Rabbi Moskowitz zt''l, who taught his students to pursue truth by asking questions, who modeled love of Torah and learning, and who exemplified living a life of the mind.

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Artwork: Memory Leak, by Karl Kopinski

The Role of Episodic Memory in the Three Weeks and Tishah b'Av

Although this is technically 1-page long, I reference a bunch of other articles I’ve written. Ordinarily I wouldn’t rely on the reader’s familiarity with my previous content, nor would I expect them to read it. However, the goal of this article is to capture where my mind is at going into the Three Weeks. Since I find myself picking up where I left off, I have no choice but to reference these past ideas.

We have commenced the three weeks of mourning during which we reflect on the national flaws that led to the destruction of the two Temples and our present exile. Last summer I wrote a 1-page article about how the Three Weeks, the Nine Days, and Tishah b’Av are designed to induce “metaphysical trauma” on a national level. I wrote another 1-page article about how such trauma is necessary for national teshuvah. I wrote a third 1-page article explaining how the Tishah b’Av liturgy is designed to facilitate this type of teshuvah-from-trauma. I concluded by stressing the importance of allowing ourselves to really feel the unpleasant emotions awakened by our reading of Eichah and the kinnos in order to tap into the trauma which will “awaken our hearts and open the paths of teshuvah” (Rambam, Laws of Fasts 5:1).

This year I believe I have found a new way to induce the aforementioned trauma. This past week I wrote an overview of EFT (Episodic Future Thinking) and a follow-up article on how this technique can be integrated with halacha. Towards the end of Chapter 2 of Imaginable (pp.37-38), McGonigal introduces the following thought-experiment:

I want you to try one more time travel experiment with me. Imagination works both ways in time. So let’s take a ten-year trip in the opposite direction … I want you to picture in your mind’s eye a day more or less ten years ago today. Where would you have been on a typical day? What would you have been doing? Can you picture what you might have been wearing? Who were you with? What were you excited about ten years ago? What were you worried about? What life goal were you working toward, or what life problem were you trying to solve?

It might not be easy to recall all these details at first. Keep working at it. Like episodic future thinking, episodic memory also requires you to stretch your imagination – if only because you’re retrieving memories and reactivating thought patterns you haven’t used in a while … At the Institute for the Future, we call this technique “looking back to look forward.” It’s another excellent strategy for unsticking your mind. As the historian and activist Rebecca Solnit has written, “When you don’t know how much things have changed, you don’t see that they are changing or that they can change.”

As is true of all McGonigal’s exercises, the goal here is not to achieve factual accuracy, but to “learn to control your imagination” (p.33). By practicing episodic memory with your actual past, using your imagination to recall those lived experiences in rich detail, you will become proficient in simulating future experiences with a higher degree of realism.

Halacha obligates us to practice episodic memory on at least one occasion: Pesach night. “In each and every generation a person is obligated to see themselves as though they, themselves, left Egypt” (Hagadah). As a source for this injunction, Rambam (Laws of Chametz and Matzah 7:6) cites: “you shall remember that you were a slave” (Devarim 5:14). In other words, we are commanded to remember events that didn’t actually happen to us as if we lived through them. The intellectual objectives of the Pesach seder cannot be achieved without this use of the imagination.

Likewise, the vividly horrific descriptions of the tragic events depicted in Eichah and the kinnos are also designed to facilitate episodic memory – provided we are willing to take that extra step. For instance, instead of merely reading Kinnah #17 and reacting to the depiction of Jewish women being forced to cannibalize their own children, we should use our imagination to simulate what it might be like for us to live through a time of such starvation and desperation that we are forced to engage in the unthinkable. Will this exercise be traumatic? Yes. And that is precisely the point.

The final chapter of Eichah begins with a plea: “Remember, Hashem, what happened to us; look and see our disgrace” (Eichah 5:1). We know that Hashem sees everything and never forgets anything. Thus, when we beseech Him to remember and see, He expects us to do the same. And unless we do so on a visceral level, then we will not be moved to national teshuvah.

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If you've gained from what you've learned here, please consider contributing to my Patreon at www.patreon.com/rabbischneeweiss. Alternatively, if you would like to make a direct contribution to the "Rabbi Schneeweiss Torah Content Fund," my Venmo is @Matt-Schneeweiss, and my Zelle and PayPal are mattschneeweiss at gmail.com. Even a small contribution goes a long way to covering the costs of my podcasts, and will provide me with the financial freedom to produce even more Torah content for you.

If you would like to sponsor a day's or a week's worth of content, or if you are interested in enlisting my services as a teacher or tutor, you can reach me at rabbischneeweiss at gmail.com. Thank you to my listeners for listening, thank you to my readers for reading, and thank you to my supporters for supporting my efforts to make Torah ideas available and accessible to everyone.

Be sure to check out my YouTube channel and my podcasts: "The Mishlei Podcast", "The Stoic Jew" Podcast, "Rambam Bekius" Podcast, "Machshavah Lab" Podcast, "The Tefilah Podcast"  Email me if you'd like to be added to my WhatsApp group where I share all of my content and public shiur info. 

Judaism and the Benefits of EFT (Episodic Future Thinking)

The Torah content for these two weeks has been sponsored by Judah and Naomi Dardik in loving memory of Rabbi Moskowitz zt''l, who taught his students to pursue truth by asking questions, who modeled love of Torah and learning, and who exemplified living a life of the mind.

Click here for a printer-friendly version of this article, and click here for an audio version.

Artwork: Witness the Future, by Anato Finnstark

Judaism and the Benefits of EFT (Episodic Future Thinking)

Note: This is a sequel to yesterday’s introductory article on EFT. If you haven’t read that, then this will be difficult to follow.

Soon after I began reading McGonigal’s book, I realized that as an Orthodox Jew, I pass by countless opportunities to engage in EFT as part of my day-to-day halachic observance. Every time I daven, I express my yearning for a future in which our nation has returned to Israel, the judges have been restored, our enemies have been destroyed, Jerusalem rebuilt, the Davidic monarchy reestablished, the shechinah returned to the Mikdash, and the world filled with peace. Every time I say mussaf, I ask Hashem to bring back our korbanos. So many of the pesukim I recite on a regular basis are about the Messianic era, the climax of world history. Shabbos, Pesach, Sukkos, Tishah b’Av, Purim, and Chanukah all have future-looking themes. Judaism certainly focuses on the past, but it is a remarkably future-oriented religion.

If you noticed, I said that “I pass by countless opportunities to engage in EFT as part of my day-to-day halachic observance.” I haven’t truly seized these opportunities by imagining these future scenarios in vivid detail, as EFT requires. I haven’t taken the time to really apply my full imagination to these phenomena, asking specific questions such as: Where exactly am I in this future? Who else is here? What is around me? What is true in this version of reality that isn’t true today? What do I really want in this future moment? How will I get it? How do I feel, now that I’m here?

What would happen if I did these things? Not only would the future become more real to me, but it would trigger a shift in my entire perspective which would lead to other psychological and intellectual perfections. McGonigal explains:

When you take a mental time trip ten years into the future, your brain starts to think with a different point of view. This isn’t a metaphor – it’s a literal fact. Scientists describe this as switching your imagination from first-person to third-person perspective … When you’re thinking in first person, you’re totally immersed in your own thoughts and feelings. When you’re thinking in third person, you escape your own ego and get a more objective and expansive experience.

(She goes on to support this assertion from the scientific literature, which I can’t summarize in a 1-page article; let me know if you’d like the citations.) Afterwards, she enumerates some of the benefits of this shift in perspective:

a major benefit of switching from first person to third person is that it’s a huge empathy booster. In scientific language, we “reduce our egocentric biases” and become “less ego-identified” – which means we get out of our own heads and can start to see things the way someone else might. We’re better able to consider that others might have different wants, needs, values, or ideas than we do. We also become more open-minded – and this is particularly important when it comes to thinking about how the future might be different, or how we ourselves might change. Studies show that when we zoom out in time and perspective, we become much more likely to take in new information that runs counter to our existing beliefs. This is a kind of mental superpower.

I can’t help but wonder whether Jews tap into these benefits on a minimal level simply by thinking about the future so often, even if we don’t practice EFT. Thinking about the ingathering of exiles three times a day must, on some level, chip away at the feeling of permanence we have about our current home. Yearning for the judges to “remove sorrow and sighing” must, on some level, give us hope that our emotional turmoil is not everlasting, and that there is hope for a cure. Verbalizing our conviction in a future of peace with our neighbors must, on some level, rewire our minds and emotions to believe in peace as a real possibility; this, in turn, will make us more likely to do something about peace in our lifetimes.

It seems to me that it would be a worthwhile investment of time and energy to practice EFT on the future scenarios we talk about in davening, whether through journaling, simulations (like this cool video of a modernized Chamber of Hewn Stones in the Third Mikdash), reading fiction, writing fiction, fleshing out these scenarios when we encounter them in our learning and teaching, or even by taking a few moments just to visualize what we’re saying when we daven.

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If you've gained from what you've learned here, please consider contributing to my Patreon at www.patreon.com/rabbischneeweiss. Alternatively, if you would like to make a direct contribution to the "Rabbi Schneeweiss Torah Content Fund," my Venmo is @Matt-Schneeweiss, and my Zelle and PayPal are mattschneeweiss at gmail.com. Even a small contribution goes a long way to covering the costs of my podcasts, and will provide me with the financial freedom to produce even more Torah content for you.

If you would like to sponsor a day's or a week's worth of content, or if you are interested in enlisting my services as a teacher or tutor, you can reach me at rabbischneeweiss at gmail.com. Thank you to my listeners for listening, thank you to my readers for reading, and thank you to my supporters for supporting my efforts to make Torah ideas available and accessible to everyone.

Be sure to check out my YouTube channel and my podcasts: "The Mishlei Podcast", "The Stoic Jew" Podcast, "Rambam Bekius" Podcast, "Machshavah Lab" Podcast, "The Tefilah Podcast"  Email me if you'd like to be added to my WhatsApp group where I share all of my content and public shiur info. 

EFT (Episodic Future Thinking) Training: A Summer 2022 Experiment

The Torah content for these two weeks has been sponsored by Judah and Naomi Dardik in loving memory of Rabbi Moskowitz zt''l, who taught his students to pursue truth by asking questions, who modeled love of Torah and learning, and who exemplified living a life of the mind.

Click here for a printer-friendly version of this article, and click here for an audio version.

Artwork: Future Sight, by Dan Scott

EFT (Episodic Future Thinking) Training: A Summer 2022 Experiment

My learning, my teaching, and my life (yes, I realize I just listed three synonyms) are shaped by the books I’m reading. Sometimes I can tell from the outset that a particular book will have a huge impact on my thinking. One of those books is Jane McGonigal’s Imaginable: How to see the future coming and feel ready for anything – even things that seem impossible today, published in 2022. I’m only halfway through, but I figured I should plan ahead by writing this prefatory article now.

McGonigal has the unique distinction of being both a future-forecaster and game designer. Her specialty is creating simulations that help people imagine the biggest global challenges we might face in the future. In 2008 she led a six-week future-forecasting simulation called Superstruct in which 10,000 people worldwide simulated living through five different threats, including a global respiratory pandemic that originated in China. The simulation was based entirely on the imagination of the participants: “we simply asked people to predict how they would feel and what they would do in their own lives during this kind of rapidly spreading outbreak.” Despite the fact that the simulation was entirely imagination-based, it yielded shockingly accurate predictions about the details of pandemic life during Covid-19.

McGonigal advocates a specific use of the imagination called episodic future thinking, or EFT. Here’s her description:

[Episodic future thinking is] the mental ability to transport yourself forward in time and pre-experience a future event. EFT is often described as a kind of “mental time travel” because your brain is working to help you see and feel the future as clearly and vividly as if you were already there. But EFT isn’t just thinking about the future; it’s simulating the future in your mind. It’s the difference between knowing that it’s probably going to rain tomorrow – a kind of “fact” or abstract thought about the future” – and vividly imagining yourself in the rain, trying to pre-feel the rain on your skin, and using everything you know about what tomorrow might be like to make the scenario more detailed and realistic. EFT might entail picturing where exactly you’ll be when it starts to rain, what you might be wearing, who might be with you, whether you’re likely to be annoyed by the rain or delighted by it, whether you’ll rush to get somewhere dry or stroll leisurely through it, and so on.

Her book is an eminently practical one, the full benefits of which can only be unlocked by readers who practice EFT on a regular basis. I’ve read enough to be sold on the power of EFT, and I’ve committed to practicing it every day for the next month. The main utility I hope to derive from my EFT practice can be summed up in Chazal’s definition of a chacham (wise person) as: “eizehu chacham? ha’roeh es ha’nolad” – “Who is wise? One who can see what the future will yield.” My rebbi, Rabbi Moskowitz zt”l, would note that Chazal didn’t say “one who knows the future” but rather “one who sees the future.” Chochmah (wisdom) is when the future is as real to the mind and the emotions as if it were perceived by the senses. How can we make our knowledge of the future real to our minds? By utilizing our imagination. In the introduction to his commentary on Mishlei, Saadia Gaon explains that this is the crux of Shlomo ha’Melech’s method:

Furthermore, sensory knowledge is easier and more real to the [minds of the] masses than intellectual knowledge since the sensory faculties exist in them from birth. Therefore, it is necessary to craft mashalim (examples and metaphors) for [the masses] in order to equate the dictates of the intellect with the dictates of the senses ... For this reason, when the intellect sees something detrimental or hears about something harmful and reveals it to the emotions and sees that they don’t trust it or accept it, [the intellect] should speak with them in a manner that they will understand.

This is why EFT needs to be vivid and detailed. The emotions don’t grasp abstractions and will not be moved by them. It’s not enough to tell the emotions that “the lazy man’s estate will deteriorate.” Instead, you need to say: 

“I passed by the field of a lazy man, the vineyard of a man who lacks understanding, and behold! it was all grown over with thistles, its face was covered with nettles, and the stone wall was broken down. And I beheld, and I applied my mind and took discipline: a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to recline, and your poverty will come like a traveler, and your lacking like an armed man” (Mishlei 24:31-34). 

The more details you imagine, the more your emotions will be impacted.

This article was just an intro. I hope to expand upon other benefits of EFT over the next few weeks. That is, in the future.

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If you've gained from what you've learned here, please consider contributing to my Patreon at www.patreon.com/rabbischneeweiss. Alternatively, if you would like to make a direct contribution to the "Rabbi Schneeweiss Torah Content Fund," my Venmo is @Matt-Schneeweiss, and my Zelle and PayPal are mattschneeweiss at gmail.com. Even a small contribution goes a long way to covering the costs of my podcasts, and will provide me with the financial freedom to produce even more Torah content for you.

If you would like to sponsor a day's or a week's worth of content, or if you are interested in enlisting my services as a teacher or tutor, you can reach me at rabbischneeweiss at gmail.com. Thank you to my listeners for listening, thank you to my readers for reading, and thank you to my supporters for supporting my efforts to make Torah ideas available and accessible to everyone.

Be sure to check out my YouTube channel and my podcasts: "The Mishlei Podcast", "The Stoic Jew" Podcast, "Rambam Bekius" Podcast, "Machshavah Lab" Podcast, "The Tefilah Podcast"  Email me if you'd like to be added to my WhatsApp group where I share all of my content and public shiur info.