At the Malava Malka on Saturday night, my parents told me that Charlie talked about neuroplasticity in Jewish teens. He was talking about the concept of נעשה ונשמע, that we must first do something and then figure out why we do.
The repetition of performing mitzvot and embodying a good Jew will create neuroplasiticity in our brains. For example, we are taught from childhood that on Shabbat evening we light candles to welcome the Shabbat queen. From doing this for years and years, you finally create a new neural pathway that helps us understand why we do it. First we must do the action many times that it becomes natural, and then we start learning about why we do what we do, we listen.
The concept of Neuroplasticity is that new neural pathways are always forming in our brains because of actions that we do over and over again. Until those neural pathways are formed in our brains, we are reminded week after week by some outside stimulus to light the Shabbat candles, but once that pathway is formed, it is an automatic function. Once those pathways are formed we can take a step back from the physical world and focus on the spiritual world and listen and learn to why we light Shabbat candles to bring in Shabbat.
WOW! thanks for sharing that. I never thought about that before. I would think that if you have a reason to do something you are more likely to continue to do it. What is the benefit of doing it before you know the reason because then your mindlessly doing something that has no meaning to you. I guess the question is. Will doing something for no reason eventually bring us to the understanding of why we are doing it?
ReplyDeleteVery interesting!
ReplyDeleteI guess I never really thought about it like that. Even when learning Neuroplasticity. I thought of it more as reorganizing after damage than building based on experience.
Hudis -- in response to your question, I don't think that doing something for no reason will eventually bring us to understanding why we're doing it. But I think if we do something over and over again, we build new neural pathways from experience, and then once we establish those pathways we can go to a deeper level of understanding why we are doing what we're doing.
This is super interesting. Now that I think about it, it truly makes a lot of sense! Some things become so automatic and so second nature that we don't spend time thinking about actually performing the action. I guess that allows more room for thinking about the spiritual connection and why we do what we do. I'll definitely think about this next time I light Shabbat candles!
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