Risks and Rewards in a World of Unknowns

So I want to welcome everyone to our first webinar through Sinai and Synapses, as part of our series “Learning from Scientific Experts for the Yamim Nora’im.” My name is Rabbi Geoff Mitelman, I am the Founding Director of Sinai and Synapses, which bridges the worlds of religion and science, and it’s incubated at Clal, the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership. 

This is the first of a series of webinars for rabbis to gain some scientific knowledge for you to use in your sermons, and your communications, and your questions, and your decisions leading up to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. And I know (I was a pulpit rabbi for seven years) that you all are being forced to do a whole host of unexpected and unprecedented tasks right now, and sometimes people are looking to you for guidance on topics that you are not actually an expert in. So you’re still not going to be an expert in these after these webinars, but hopefully you’ll be able to get a little more grounding for your teaching and your preaching and conversations in the best science we have right now.  So our hope is that we’re going to give you some ways to think about not just the “how” questions, but also the “what” questions, the “how” questions of how are you going to plan to reopen, how are you envisioning the next few months, how are you going to rethink what the High Holy Days are going to look like, along with what you want to share when you deliver your Divrei Torah, or your sermons, and your other messages with your community. That’s also why we’re recording this conversation, and we’re going to have a transcription afterwards so that you can use it to quote in any sermons that you might give or share with others and other lay leaders as well. 

So it’s now today, it’s July 2, 2020, our community is – almost all of our synagogues – have been almost completely closed to in-person gatherings for us for at least over three months, and it looks like it’s going to be that way for a while. And even the in-person meetings that we’re having are having a minimal number of in-person interactions and a maximal amount of precaution – that wonderful phrase that we heard and use, “out of an abundance of caution.” 

And nearly all of us are making this decision due to our value of pikuach nefesh, of saving a life. That’s a phrase that I know all of us have been using and thinking about. But I think even more than that, we’ve been making our decisions based on safek, out of doubt, because our sages realized that even when there is doubt surrounding pikuach nefesh, we should act in a way that probably violates other Halakhic principles in order to save a life. But with COVID-19, we’re living with so much more safek than the rabbis dealt with when they wrote all these responsa. 

Counterintuitively, it’s because we have so much more knowledge than the rabbis had, because we have so many more sources of knowledge, not all of which is accurate – even if it is accurate, it might be conflicting – that we want to obviously create the most meaningful and spiritual and inspiring High Holy Days that we can, while we’re still at the same time trying to figure out who has COVID-19, who can catch it, who can spread it, who’s symptomatic, who’s asymptomatic, who’s presymptomatic, what’s a reasonable risk, what can we do to minimize that risk, what’s the risk we’re willing to take on? It’s not as simple as “saving a single life is saving the entire world.” We are really grappling with some really complicated questions with a lot of different competing sources of information here. 

So you all are grappling and struggling with all these questions of risks, what the risks are right now, what the risks might look like in two months, what your community needs, what your financial situation is going to look like, how your laypeople are acting or not acting. And I think the challenge is that we, as rabbis, can easily see multiple sides of an issue. We really celebrate the “eilu v’eilu,” “these and these are the words of the living God.” And we love the studying, and the back and forth, and the “on the one hand,” and “on the other hand,” and the joke about the two people who say “you’re right” and “you’re right,” “Well, how can they both be right?” “You know what, you’re right!”

We really love that process, but at the end of the day we have to make a ruling, and we have to act on it. We need a p’sak halakhah, we need our decision. When we had our pre-meeting with our speakers here that I’m going to introduce in a few minutes, they said, “You can’t go 80 percent outside.” We need to make a decision, and we need to do it with a whole lot of incomplete or changing information along with competing values and different perspectives – among your own values, and what your president is pushing for, and what your board wants, and what your incredibly diverse community as a whole is looking for. 

So I want to be very clear this afternoon that we’re not going to give you p’sak halahkah. We are not going to tell you what to do, because none of us are epidemiologists. And also none of us are working in your specific community, with your specific constituents and your specific guidelines. Instead, our goal, to learn from these two incredible speakers and presenters, is to help you think about some of the questions you can be asking, and also give some resources to think about and use as jumping off points. So hopefully there are going to be some thoughts and ideas that you can use to talk about these risks versus rewards in a way that’s both a very traditional Rabbinic way of thinking, by holding multiple competing truths and values, along with what you all are doing as a modern rabbi, offering up hope and inspiration and comfort to your community. 

So before I introduce our guest speakers, I need to thank a few of our partners here. First I need to thank our program administrator, Sinai and Synapses program administrator Rachel Pincus, and also our rabbinic publicity partners, Clal and the CCAR and the RA and RRA. I also need to thank the people who have supported financing our program, including some of our donors who I believe are on as well, as well as the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which is the world’s largest scientific organization. They also have the Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion, they have been our programmatic partner for many, many years, and they help ensure that everything that we are doing is grounded in the best, most accurate science that we have. And I also need to thank the John Templeton Foundation, which has been our primary funder for many of our programs about Judaism and science. 

You should also know that through the John Templeton Foundation and our donors, Sinai and Synapses has an open application right now for a grant for your community for $3,600 to do work on Judaism and science, and the deadline for that is July 23, and I’m happy to talk about that as well. 

So in a minute, I’m going to turn it over to our two speakers who are going to present for about 10 to 15 minutes. And you can ask questions throughout the chat. We’re going to ask you to stay muted throughout that conversation. And we’re going to try to respond to as many as we can. But these two speakers, these two presenters, have been incredible science communicators. They have been interviewed and talked about and talked to in a lot of different places; you’ve actually probably read and heard of both of their work here, and I’m really excited to be able to learn from them because they can talk about this question of risks and rewards in a world of unknowns – they can talk about it intelligently and clearly and with deep intellectual humility. And so I am very excited to introduce our two speakers. 

First we’re going to hear from Professor Emily Oster, who is a Professor of Economics at Brown University. She holds a PhD in economics from Harvard. Prior to being at Brown, she was on the faculty at the University of Chicago Booth School. Dr. Oster’s academic work focuses on health, economics and statistical methods. She is interested in understanding why consumers don’t always make rational health choices, which is something that we’re dealing with right now. And aside from her two books aimed at parents entitled Expecting Better and Cribsheet. Most relevant for our work right now, she is the creator and curator of the site COVID Explained, which is made up of a team of researchers and students at Brown, MIT, Harvard, Mass General and elsewhere – we’ll send you the link to that as well. 

And then after she presents we’re going to hear from Professor Stuart Firestein, who is the former chair of the Columbia University Biology Department of Biological Sciences. Dedicated to promoting the accessibility of science to a public audience, Dr. Firestein serves as an adviser to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s program for the public understanding of science. Dr. Firestein’s commitment to engaging the public in science can be seen in his TED Talk entitled “The Pursuit of Ignorance,” which has garnered 2 million views and counting. And he’s written two books on the workings of science for a general audience – Ignorance: How It Drives Science and Failure: Why Science Is So Successful. So I am thrilled to be able to turn it over to Professor Oster to explore some of these questions about risks and rewards, and how we can think about and talk about these kinds of questions. 

Emily Oster: Thank you so much, I’m super excited to be here, and hopefully I can be a little bit helpful on this. So as Geoff said, I am a professor at Brown, I’m an economist, I work a lot on health stuff, and I write on parenting and pregnancy and increasingly, in this period, on COVID. And I am thinking a lot about decision-making and how people can make decisions, how larger groups can make decisions. 

So I thought I would just overview a little bit how I am thinking about decision making, and I know a lot of you had some sort of pretty specific questions, and I think it could be fun, at some point, to sort of talk about some, as you might run them through this kind of framework. 

So I want to talk about how to decide. I think part of what for me has been really challenging about this pandemic is just the incredible uncertainty that has sort of pervaded all of our decisions. So we’re kind of all facing a lot of choices that we don’t expect, and that we didn’t expect to be facing, and not choices that other people have had made before, not situations which other people have experienced before. And so I think for you, I would guess that you, as a rabbi, are facing a bunch of decisions, so things like: “Should we have services? In what way? In what way should people wear masks? Should they wear no masks? Should they sit every other seat? Should we have pods in our services? What would that even mean? Should we limit who can come, should we tell the older people in our congregation that they can’t come?” Of course, those may be the people who would benefit the most from seeing you and hearing what you have to say.

And so I think those are the kind of things that you’re probably thinking through. At the same time, you’re facing people who want answers from you and their families. And these are the kinds of questions that I’m getting all the time, you know, “Should I send my kids to school? Should they see their relatives? Should they see their grandparents? When should they see their grandparents? Should we eat out? Is it okay for us to see our friends? Can we go to services? Can we shop for groceries?” And all of these questions are kind of around, and they’re sort of overwhelming in their frequency and their difficulty. 

And the simple point that I’ve been trying to make in a lot of the writing I’ve been doing is that everyone is facing a different set of these decisions. And even among the people whose question is “Should my kid go to daycare?” or “Should I have services?” the choice, the sort of frame of that decision, is totally different, the circumstance is totally different. So if your congregation is in Houston, you’re facing a very different situation than if your congregation is in Providence – at least this week. Maybe it’ll be different next month. If you are a family and you have an immunocompromised parent at home and your kid is going to go to daycare, that’s a very different situation than if you don’t have that. People face different financial circumstances. Can I afford to stay home with my kids? Do I need to send them to childcare so I can work? There are a lot of things that are layered on top of it. 

So the headline that I keep just telling people and saying over and over again is, “You don’t need an answer, you need a way to decide.” Because giving you an answer, even for your very specific question right in this moment, that’s not going to be the right answer maybe even tomorrow, or next week, or Thursday night, and certainly not in September, when you face those choices around Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. 

So what you need is a way to decide in the moment, when you have to make the decision. And so, I’m going to give you kind of a quick five-step process for how you might start thinking about this in the hopes that maybe it’s a little helpful. So there are five steps, let’s talk about them. The first thing that I’d sort of argue people should do is frame their question. So often people’s questions are too vague. So they say “What should I do?”. “What should I do?” is not a question with a concrete answer. A question with a concrete answer is “Should I hold services on this date or not?” or “Should I hold services with my full congregation or with half my congregation?” or “Should I send my kids to daycare now, or in two months?” 

And the reason it is so useful to frame that question is because then, when you go into thinking about mitigating risk and all these sort of leader steps, then is it A, or is it B? If your question is just “What should I do?” Well, how would I think about the risk of that if I don’t know, whether – if I don’t know what the alternative is, it’s hard for me to think about the question.

So I think often people are kind of not appropriately framing the question, and that makes it hard to answer. Once you have a question, I think the sort of obvious next step is to think about how you can do things as safely as possible. So to take a sort of very specific example, imagine the question is, you know, “Should I open for services or not?” Before you think about how big a risk is that, you want to think about what’s the safest way to do that. “How can I most effectively mitigate risk?” And there, I think, there’s a fair amount of guidance, and as Geoff said, I run a website that has a lot of information about this, the CDC can be pretty good for this, but just sort of thinking about it in your circumstance, is it possible for you to socially distance your congregation? Is it possible for everybody to wear masks? You know, certainly, you should do that if you can. And so there are some sort of simple things there. Can you put hand sanitizer? And what can you do to make this as safe as possible? 

Once you have thought about what the safest possible way is to do this, you actually do need to think about how big the risk is. So what is the chance, given the overall congregation, and given my congregation, given their demographic risk, given how much disease there is in my area – actually try to evaluate, like, what’s the chance someone will get very sick? And that number is going to be really different if your congregation is a bunch of 25-year-olds than if your congregation is a bunch of 85-year-olds. And it’s going to be really different if the prevalence in your area is 1% or the prevalence in your area is 10%. Those are just numbers, you could sort of say, how large is the risk, what’s the share of people in the area who are infected, what is the risk, fatality risk, the hospitalization risk for my congregation, even if I do things as safely as possible there’s going to be some risk. But there are going to be some benefits too, and I think that this is a piece that we are missing in a lot of these conversations, that there are real benefits to bringing people together, to doing in-person services, or to sending your kids to daycare, or to seeing your grandparents. And you know, I think we really – those are very personal, but they’re something that we really kind of have to think about.

And the final step is, you know, we’re going to weigh the costs and benefits, and decide. And there’s going to be some decision. And it’s not like – to sort of say “decide” there, I think people have been telling me “That’s kind of facile,” and that’s right, it is a little facile to say “Well, you weigh the costs and benefits, you decide, you know, how do I weigh this risk of a seriously ill, or God forbid, a death of a congregant? How do I weigh that against the joy that people will experience from being together? Or how do I weigh this serious disease risk to my parents against the joy from seeing their grandkids?” Unfortunately, that is the choice that you have to make, and so the fact that it is a hard choice – there is no not choosing, there is no choice to not choose, and you’re going to have to make a choice knowing that there is going to be residual uncertainty. 

And then I think the last piece of this is I think it’s important to try to make these choices and then move forward. These particularly go back to the question of like “there’s so much uncertainty.” I think one of the things that means is we’re constantly just revisiting and revisiting and revisiting these choices in our head, but we can’t do that, because we have – there’s another choice coming down the line. I think we really do have to try to have the discipline to make a choice and then move forward. 

And so I think that piece, kind of making a choice and moving forward, that’s a piece of conquering uncertainty. And let me just sort of say two other things and then I’ll stop. So when I think about – I write a lot about parenting, and pregnancy, and people often ask me “What do you think it’s like being a new parent?” Kind of overwhelming, and a lot of people are yelling at you, and you’re stuck in your house. And I think there’s a piece of that that’s kind of like that, right, it has that sort of a little bit of that feel, of like every day there’s a new crazy decision I didn’t think of. The difference is that when you’re a new parent you kind of look out at the world and there’s always people who already did it. And you know, like, “Okay, eventually I’m going to – you know, a lot of people have managed to raise a four-year-old, I’m going to kinda get there.” And here there aren’t a lot of people who have survived through a viral pandemic and come out on the other end. I think that’s what’s particularly hard.

And I think in terms of how to kind of process this, I think the other piece of advice I’ve often been giving people is try not to think too far ahead, that of course you have to do some advance planning, but thinking, you know, what’s Rosh Hashanah going to look like in 2021? Like, don’t spend any time on that. Because there’s no way to predict that right now. You know there are plenty of things to try to figure out in the next six weeks, and you don’t need to be thinking about 18 months out. 

And final thing is I think, you know, we’re all going to have to really accept, and I think this will sort of move a little bit into what Stuart’s going to say, but I think there’s a sense that we should accept a lot of uncertainty here, and unfortunately that’s what we’re going to live with for a little while. And hopefully there’ll be a vaccine and some of this stuff will seem a distant memory, I hope. 

Geoff Mitelman: That’s exactly right, thank you. And it’s really very helpful to be able to recognize that the specific questions that we’re grappling with are going to change. We think about what happened in March versus May versus July and just not being able to know what the future’s going to bring. And so that’s why I’m excited to be able to to turn it over to Stuart, who actually has a really unique take on what uncertainty – and as he celebrates ignorance, not the “I’m not going to listen to experts!” ignorance, but actually a very valuable sense of what it means to not know something. So I’m going to turn it over to Stuart who’s going to present his work.

Stuart Firestein: Thank you Geoff, thank you, it’s a great pleasure to be here with everybody. I’ll just say briefly that I met Geoff – I don’t know, maybe it’s almost 10 years ago when he contacted me, because he read this book that I’ve written called Ignorance, about science, and wanted to use some phrases from it in his Yom Kippur sermon. Which I was quite flattered by, and I have to say, made my mother extremely happy. (laughs) So I have since owed him immensely, and so whenever he calls on me, I respond, because he really did a mitzvah there, I have to say (laughs). I have much less prescriptive sorts of things to say, but I’d like to sort of suggest to you that in science we welcome uncertainty, and that there are great values to it, and that these are things that you might communicate, to your congregations, to other people. And that there is a great deal of optimism to be had in uncertainty. And I know that’s a hard sell at the moment, but I’m going to do my best. 

All right, so this is the beginning of uncertainty, I suppose. This is the haiku from the Japanese poet Basho – very famous. “Too much mist/Can’t see Fuji/Makes it more interesting.” And so sometimes, of course, seeing things too clearly, seeing things too perfectly, relieves us of their interest. There they just are what they are. There’s nothing more to think about them. It’s just sometimes uncertainty, in fact, that increases interest. I’m going to use a quote from a biologist from the early 20th century, J. B. S. Haldane, who was a famous evolutionary biologist who wrote a short essay in 1928. And in that essay, he said an oft-quoted phrase: “Not only is the universe queerer than we imagine, it is queerer than we can imagine.” Although I must say, I’m not sure it’s queerer than that suit he is wearing there, but that’s another story. 

So this phrase is often taken to mean – and I think incorrectly, it’s often taken to mean that we are somehow cognitively limited, that we can’t even begin to imagine how queer, how strange the universe is out there. But I don’t think that’s actually what Haldane meant, because often left off the quote of this is the sentence that preceded it, which is, “I have no doubt that in reality, the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine.” And I think what Haldane was really saying is he welcomes this surprise, that the future will be more surprising than anything I can currently imagine in my current cognitive state, in my current set of knowledge, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be imaginable, or it won’t occur. 

And indeed, since 1928, I have to say we’ve imagined some pretty queer things. Quantum particles, nano-entities, dark matter, DNA and RNA (which were discovered after 1928), nuclear energy, epigenetics, microbiomes, Viagra – I don’t know who saw that coming – and of course, an Internet. I mean remarkably, an Internet. So in 1928, it wasn’t that people thought any of these things were either likely or unlikely, they hadn’t even thought of them. They hadn’t even imagined that they were possible. Connecting two computers together would be – there weren’t really computers – but even until 25 years ago, now 50 years ago, I guess, the idea of connecting two computers together would have seemed as strange as connecting two refrigerators together. And yet now it seems so common to us.

And so it’s this notion that the universe is full of surprises, and we should welcome these surprises. To use a quote from Shakespeare, well known: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in [your or our] philosophy,” depending on which version of Shakespeare you pick up. And then one of my favorites is from Douglas Adams and his “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” which some of you will know,  the second of the trilogy of four books was actually called The Restaurant At the End of the Universe. And in it he states – Douglas Adams, who died at the unfortunate age of 49, totally unexpectedly, of an aneurysm, just popped off. That was it. So you know, the unexpected happens. And he says that there is a theory which states that “If anyone ever discovers what exactly what the universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable than what we currently have.” 

There’s a corollary to this, because there’s another theory which states that this has indeed already happened. And of course, we expect it may yet happen again. 

I’d like to introduce a term that I think would be very valuable to us now, it’s a term that I didn’t coin, but was coined by the dreamy-eyed poet here John Keats, in a letter to his brother in 1817 called “negative capability.” It may sound a little oxymoronic, but I think it’s a very valuable trait to practice, to learn. And Keats defined negative capability as “that is, when a man [a person] that is, capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” That is, this idea of being patient with uncertainty, patient with mystery, and patient with doubt, he thought that this was a critical frame of mind to develop, because he considered it the ideal creative state for the literary mind. I would say it’s the ideal creative state for the scientific mind as well, and indeed, maybe the ideal creative state for anyone’s mind – this notion of “The world does have uncertainties, the world is full of mysteries, the world is full of doubts, and we should learn to manage that, we should learn to immerse ourselves in those and enjoy them, because this is where creativity comes from.”

And so this tells us that the unknown is an interesting place, but of course, even greater than the unknown, there is the much feared unknown unknown, if you will. That is, what we don’t even know we don’t even know. And many of you in the audience today will remember that this phrase was made famous most recently by Donald H. Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense who was responsible for the ill-begotten military adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. And in a testimony to a Senate hearing about why it went so badly, he said, “Well, there were some things we didn’t know, of course, and that was a problem, but the real problem was there were all these unknown unknowns, the things we didn’t even know we didn’t know.” 

Now, he is somewhat roundly criticized and ridiculed for this statement, but it’s actually of course quite clever. And I’m happy to say he’s not the first person to have said it, it had been around for awhile. But the earliest remarks that I can find is certainly those that would be of interest to us today, were from another D.H., not D.H. Rumsfeld, but D.H. Lawrence, the poet, in a long narrative poem called “New Heaven And Earth,” written in 1917, which is essentially about the transition from this earthly plane to whatever awaits us in the next plane, post-this-earthly-plane. And he talks about this as  “the great unknown.” And near the end of this lengthy poem is this stanza that  reads “Now here was I, new-awakened,” – of course, at this moment of transition – “New-awakened with my hands stretching out and touching the unknown, the real unknown, the unknown unknown.”  

And I think it’s just both a spiritual idea and a useful idea in our lives today, because we are confronted with the unknown unknown. And this virus that we’re all dealing with now, of course, it’s not just the unknowns about it, it’s not just the uncertainties, but it’s the things we don’t even know we don’t even know about it, and continue to find out each day and change our uncertainty in unpredictable ways.  

So we not only have uncertainty, we have unpredictable uncertainty. Could you ask for anything worse? Well, I would say yes. You could ask for certainty, which in some ways would be worse. I would say certainty can be a problem, and that there is a value in uncertainty, and we should begin looking for it now. Of course, there are many areas in our lives where we already value uncertainty. So in games of chance, in sporting matches, we don’t want to know the score beforehand or how things will turn out. Even in terms of our own mortality, I don’t think many of us would really like to know the exact time and place and date of our death. So we have these things called a “spoiler alert,” in which we purposely hide the outcome if it’s known, so as not to ruin the fun, if you will. 

Now, but of course, these are somewhat different than scientific uncertainty, even though we enjoy them and there’s some similarities. But there is a fundamental difference, because these uncertainties all do finally resolve to some known state. I mean, the hand is shown, the bet is either won or lost, the game comes up with a final score, and like it or not, the exact time and date of your death will appear on a certificate somewhere, and probably in a book in the synagogue as well. So these things will all come to a conclusion.

This is sort of not true in science, where I think there is a kind of a grander uncertainty where there may be in fact no alternate solution, no lasting resolution or guaranteed complete answer, no – (in a somewhat loaded phrase, especially with this crowd) – no final solution, which we all know is a rather fraught term, and one that we would not really like to entertain. 

There’s a famous phrase which says “The opposite of a fact is a falsehood, but the opposite of a profound truth is often another profound truth.” This almost rabbinical-sounding statement, which echoes a little bit of what Geoff said at the beginning, was actually uttered by Niels Bohr, the famous quantum physicist, as the only way he could understand and describe the universe. And so this notion of keeping two profound truths in our mind at one time, even though they may conflict, is one of the great intellectual challenges we face, but we can do it.

Progress, I think, we have to understand, lies in uncertainty. An overdedication to immutable fact is finally an impediment to progress. Certainty, curiously, breeds pessimism, and uncertainty often can bring optimism. It’s recently been shown in some psychological studies that one of the symptoms of depression, unexpectedly, is certainty. Now, you might think that’s weird and counterintuitive, because uncertainty seems to create anxiety and difficulties and so forth, psychological difficulties. But it turns out that depressed people suffer from an overly-developed sense, if you will, of certainty, “Things will be the way they will, there is nothing to do about it, it’s what it is.” And so this loss of a sense of agency actually breeds pessimism. And certainty breeds a loss of a sense of agency, whereas uncertainty is open possibilities. 

So the question is not so much how we become certain, but how we get on successfully while accepting uncertainty. And I think Emily had some very prescriptive ways of doing that that are very valuable, and which science uses too. George Boxer, the famous engineer, once said “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” And so that’s what we do. And in science, I think this is a key idea. In science, revision is a victory, and I believe that this should not be limited to science. We have to understand that in life in general, revision is a victory. We don’t have things that are immutable and true for all time, because things change. The more we know, the more we have questions. 

I’ll end with this story, an almost Talmudic story – I think of the optimism of the condemned man. It’s the story of the condemned prisoner who, rather than beg for mercy, asks for a year’s reprieve by promising to teach the king’s horse to talk within a year. And he’s granted that. But that night a fellow prisoner asks him what possessed him to make such a crazy bargain. Well, the answer is, “Well look, a lot can happen in a year. The horse might die, the king might die, I might die! Who knows – the horse might learn to talk!”

So the condemned man, I would say, is an optimist, because he knows that he cannot predict the things that might work out in the future, the opportunities, the solutions that may arise, are simply not available to his current cognitive position, his current level of knowledge. His optimism actually arises out of insufficient knowledge, out of uncertainty and ignorance. The prisoner is optimistic because he decides to remain open to the possibilities of the future, possibilities that he like, J. B. S. Haldane, who I began with, cannot imagine, but can yet come true. And so this prisoner is optimistic. This is the optimism, I would say, of uncertainty. I’ll end here on this obligatory New Yorker cartoon, which says that we, you know, we find truth in many places, and we should get as close as we can to it, but we don’t have to have the ultimate truth to feel that we’ve been successful. 

 I’ll end there, and I hope to hear a lot of questions from people about this. Let me stop sharing my screen. Thank you. 

Geoff Mitelman: Thank you, Stuart. It was interesting, and by the way, I want to open this up to people, you can type questions in the chat as we’re talking here, because there’s a lot to unpack. 

And what’s striking me, and I’m assuming that for most of us who are on the call who are rabbis, who are maybe starting to think about the High Holy Days but not quite yet, I’ve always been struck by the phrase that is said both on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, which is a prayer called Unetaneh Tokef. And it says, you know, “On Rosh Hashanah it is written, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed, who shall be born, who shall die, who by fire, who by water, who by plague, who by pestilence…” there’s a whole list of different pieces, and then at the end it says: “Prayer, repentance and charity cancel judgment’s severe decree.”

And it’s an uncomfortable reading, but something I think people are really going to be thinking about this year. What was sort of preordained, what was not preordained? What are the different things of – the decision in March that actually had an impact in May? What were the decisions we’re making where we don’t know, was this the right decision, was this a good decision? And what happens if you did a good process and [get] a bad result? And so how do we work with that, how we think about that, from both a more practical perspective and I think a more philosophical perspective, how do we recognize that there are so many things that are outside of our control? And we can try to make the best decision that we can and it still blows up in our face? 

Stuart Firestein: Emily, do you want to respond to that? 

Emily Oster: I don’t know, I think that’s hard. Stuart, do you want to respond?

Stuart Firestein: Well, I’ll just say that this goes on regularly in the laboratory, I have to tell you – that the best experiments you can think of often don’t work. I mean, failure is what happens most of the time, but that’s where we learn the most from. So when I say “The unknown unknown is the deepest kind of ignorance there is,” one question is “How do you get to the unknown unknown? How do you access what you don’t know you don’t know?” And the way you access that, I think, is by failing. And so when we fail, we learn that we didn’t know something. We thought we knew something, we did an experiment – this is a scientific perspective, but it’s true in many areas of life – we didn’t know something, we did an experiment to find it out, and the experiment fails in some curious way. And so now what we know as well – there was something we didn’t know we didn’t know. And we have to go back and rethink this experiment. We have tapped into yet a deeper kind of ignorance, a deeper kind of uncertainty, but it’s where the newest and latest discovery will come from. This is certainly true of this virus. We know a lot about viruses, but there’s a great deal about this virus it turns out we don’t know. And there’s probably still much more about it that we don’t even know we don’t know. 

 We should recognize from the long view, I think, that plagues are nothing new. Certainly throughout Jewish history, there have been plenty of plagues, I mean, both biblical plagues and, you know, the plagues of the ghetto and all the rest of that, all the rest of that history. And we’ve survived them all. The universities are in a panic these days because of the pandemic and what will happen, will there ever be universities, will they ever come out of it? But I like to remind people that universities in the West are at least over 1000 years old, and they’ve been through multiple plagues and pandemics, most of them much worse than this one in fact, and we still have universities. I think the difficulty in this one, and as Emily pointed out, the uncertainty surrounding it, is actually the result of how much more we know. The reason we’re so uncertain about this is we have so many better questions to ask about it. We used to be – “Well, people died, let’s burn their bodies, let’s get rid of the bodies quickly, let’s – who knows what, let’s say incantations and hope for the best.” So we don’t do that now, but we don’t actually know what the answers entirely are either. We do our best, we get as close to the truth as we can. 

Emily Oster: Yeah, I mean I think that resonates. I think the other thing is that because our technologies are better now, and our understanding is better, there’s more of a promise of an end, right. I think there was a, you know, if you’re sitting through the Black Plague, the end was just like, eventually it was just going to end, and there was no understanding of how you could make that happen more quickly. I think part of what has happened here is, you know, we had the “Okay, there’s going be a vaccine,” and so that opens up the possibility of “Let’s wait until there’s a vaccine.” Of course, we have to recognize there are periods of uncertainty even around that kind of ending. 

I think there’s a question in the chat that closely relates to Geoff’s question, which is sort of how do you kind of revisit, how do you think about revisiting decisions, and like whether the decision you made was wrong?

And so I think there is a space for revisiting decisions, and maybe that’s like, the sixth step, is sort of like –  if there will be a moment at which you may need to change your mind, or decide that what you were going to do what was wrong, or what you did was not right, and you want to do it differently the next time. So you know, I think that there is a point after the decision is realized when you want to reflect back on like, you know, “We opened this week, was that the right thing to do? We had services this week, like, let me think about, you know, should we do it next week – did we learn something from this week that would change our mind?”

But I often emphasize that piece about that sort of “change our mind thing” – you can make the wrong choice ex ante, I think that’s a particularly important piece of it. So you know, you may open your congregations for the High Holy Days, it may be the right choice, and it may well be the case that someone in your congregation becomes infected with COVID-19. No matter how careful you are, that may happen – it may happen at the congregation, it may happen somewhere else. And I think one of the things that has gone on is as we have reopened a bit, whenever we see a case, then there is this sort of moment of like, “Oh my God, I didn’t know that, maybe I did this wrong.” And I think it’s important to sort of step back and say okay, you should have anticipated that that would happen to some extent. Maybe it is more than you anticipated, but we have to recognize, unfortunately, we’re in the middle of a viral pandemic, and some people are going to get sick. And the question is, you know, did you actually make the wrong choice from an ex ante standpoint, as opposed to just “I wish the outcome had been realized differently”? That there were a range of outcomes, I wish we’d gotten a better outcome. But actually with the right choice, as opposed to saying, “Well actually, we made the wrong choice, we should have done this differently.” So I think when revisiting that kind of piece, I would have that in mind: is it the wrong choice ex ante, is it the wrong choice ex post facto? 

Stuart Firestein: Related to that, the first female world champion poker player, Annie Duke, whose books I recommend you if you don’t know them, lectures on this regularly. And she’s often said, you know, “80/20 – when the risks are 80/20 and you do the math, and it’s an 80/20 positive risk, the trouble is, 20 percent happens.” You know, 20 percent of the time – 20 percent happens. And as she said, “I have lost a lot of money on 80/20 hands in poker, but I still bet them heavily, because 80/20 is a good bet. And so you can’t go back and say, “Well, 80/20, that was a bad bet because I lost it this time,’” because 20 percent of the time you will lose it. And there’s, you know – one has to live with that to some extent, and one has to be careful about revising everything you did just because you lost one hand in an 80/20 bet.

Geoff Mitelman: There were a couple of questions that came up and I want to try to join together. One is that, “We as rabbis often love to talk about the aggadah and the philosophy and the thinking-through and sort of playing things out, and yet these are decisions that we’re going to have to make relatively soon with some very concrete impacts and some concrete decisions, because the holidays are coming – whether we want them to come or not, they are coming, and they’re going to have to be rethought. Can you give an example of what might be a way that you would think through a process where there is a little bit of uncertainty here?” I know Emily, you actually wrote a piece, I think this morning, about opening schools, and how did you walk that back through, and what happens if we’ve gotta revise? 

Emily Oster: I mean I’m happy to talk about that, but I also – I was looking at Natasha’s question here, which is about a concrete congregation. Is there something maybe even better that I could talk through for a little bit? Do you want to give me one of these concrete questions? I know I saw a few of them. Or Natasha, should we unmute Natasha and see, Natasha, do you have a specific question that might be useful to talk through?

Natasha Hirschhorn: I would be delighted, thank you so much, I really appreciate that. Yes, so okay, so what we’re struggling with is we’ve done a survey with our community, not as a sole determining factor, but to see where people are, if they would even show up to in-person services should we make them available. There is some significant number of people who are interested. We have a large sanctuary, six stories high, 1,300 seats, no air conditioning, only open windows and fans-type of ventilation, and we also considered, possibly, outdoor services, which have their own set of worries about security, whatever – but let’s talk about just the COVID question right now, to narrow it down. We also know that a significant part of our services are bound and grounded in activities are high risk, like singing. Singers are known super-spreaders. So I am the leader of the singing, and there are congregants who would want to sing. How do we weigh, you know, the sort of aesthetics of the service – that, is you know, very decentralized people in masks, each in their own corner,  discouraged from singing, versus, you know, the Halachic value and the religious value of being together, and safety of everybody involved, including the leaders. And you know what I mean, there’s so many considerations. Like how would we think this through, that we want to protect our people, we want to give them a meaningful religious experience – how would you go about thinking through that?

Emily Oster: Okay, I think that’s a very good frame. So what I would say is, I think that this is a good example of where it is difficult to – where it is important to frame the question. And so you sort of outlined, like, there’s 50 different things that we can do. The first thing I would say is “What are the two main things?” Is it like – “One option is outdoor services with singing, one option is indoor services with no singing?” What are the kind of range – it could be more than two, maybe there’s four different options, but very concrete. What are the four different things you are considering doing? And then I think that in those frames, how can you mitigate risk, how much risk can you mitigate?

To be completely frank, I think singing, having people singing, even people sitting in every other seat, we know that singing is kind of like being in a bar, and this is a high-risk activity even with masks on. Just, for whatever reason, this seems to be a source of some super-spreading – outdoor can be safer than indoor. But I think in some sense that the first thing that you need to do is actually think about what are the four concrete things you’re doing. And then are you – when you sort of get down to this point of benefits, like – singing in a bar is the worst. When you get down to this point of benefits, you know, think about, given what you feel you need to do to mitigate the risks, how large are the benefits? So is there actually a strong benefit to your congregation in being together in a socially distanced outdoor way where nobody can sing? Is that – maybe that does have a benefit? Or maybe you’re going to say, you know, “Well, in fact, what we’d have to do then, we would rather be online.” 

So I don’t know how helpful that is, but I think that in some sense, when hearing you talk, the first thing I think is that we’ve got to narrow the sort of set of things, or the first step would be narrow the set of possibilities, that you’re thinking about.

Geoff Mitelman: And you bring up an interesting question, there was a point that somebody brought up, Stuart, in your response to how Annie Duke talks about that you’ve still got to risk the money and you know, if you lose, you still may lose. I think one of the challenges for a lot of our congregants is that we want to have a large number of people have the most meaningful spiritual experience possible during the High Holy Days, however that’s going to look like, and that’s the wonderful reward. But I think that we, as rabbis, who so deeply value human life, you know, what would happen if one or two of our congregants died because we wanted to have singing? And you can’t always necessarily know what’s the direct link in this kind of way. And so how do we deal with this level of uncertainty, of also not knowing what led to this result, right? Like this is – you know, we’re trying to figure it out. And obviously, if we’re saying we want to mitigate the risk, we don’t want to lose anyone, we don’t want any of our congregation to die because of this, I think that’s an incredibly noble goal. And I also think that we know that people die, and there are other people’s decisions, you know, it’s not just our decisions. It’s “What are they doing with other communities in different places, in different schools?” And there’s so many different confounding factors. In many ways, how can we sort of emotionally accept this?

Stuart Firestein: I don’t want to sound glib about this, but what I would say, at least at this moment, several – well, no, a couple of months at least before the High Holy Days – might be an opportunity to say: Well, you know, there’s more uncertainty around this pandemic or this plague than there ever has been in Jewish history because science has created all this uncertainty. Fortunately, by accumulating all this knowledge, it’s offered us bigger questions and more difficult questions. But why not take advantage of that time to say well, what’s the essence of the spirituality that we want? I mean, how do we combine this? Are there ways in which the service can be just as spiritual in silence? Can you hear the singing just as loud if it’s absent? I mean, you know, there’s always that issue of “the whole makes the thing more apparent” more clear. So I don’t know, but it seems to me that you’re far enough in advance not to have to make immediate decisions about inside and outside, singing or no singing, but look at lots of different possibilities, no? I mean, when do you really need to make a decision about whether this will be inside or outside?

Geoff Mitelman: I think for a lot of people, they’re making that decision now, because there’s a lot of logistics that happen, I think. It’s almost like trying to open school, you know, and trying to be able to do that if there’s staff – and there’s also trying to also communicate. I think it’s hard. And that’s the challenge – there needs to be a lot of lead-up time, and yet things may change radically. We may have to change on a dime with some of this information. 

Stuart Firestein: Well, the situation that we have now requires, I think, solutions that are not so apparent or not so obvious, perhaps, but that require a kind of alternative sort of thinking sometimes. That there may have to be other ways, and one does these other ways – and they may not succeed, those other ways. I would rather see them not succeed by being a little less spiritually satisfying than not succeed by having people die, in my personal opinion. Well, if this year Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur were a little less spiritually satisfying, then we would know that these are the really critical things that make them spiritually satisfying, and we’ll put them back in next year for sure. That would be a better loss in my opinion – in my humble personal opinion – than having people die. So I would err on the side of that. 

Geoff Mitelman: And you know, Emily, in your piece again this morning, and we’ll send some of this information out over the next couple of days, but one of the things you talked about in terms of school – you’ve got to start by making a commitment, and being able to say “This is what we’re going to do,” because if you say, “Well, maybe we can do this or maybe we can do that,” it’s very easy to opt out. And in many ways Judaism, by restricting things, actually opens up more opportunities. To be able to say “We’re not doing this, we are not going to use electricity on Shabbat,” or “We are not going to go to work on this particular day,” that actually opens up – saying “no” to this allows “yes” for lots of other things. And so I’d love for you to actually talk a little bit about that.

Emily Oster: Yeah, so I was writing this morning about schools. And kind of the logistics of opening schools, obviously, is like really big. And the first point to make there is just that if we’re going to make that happen, we have to say that we are going to make it happen. Like you have to announce that you’re going to do it, because if you say “We’re thinking about it,” you will not do it, because it is too hard. And I think announcing some decision, then, really restricts the set of things. And so then you can say “We’re going to open schools,” and then you can start talking about “Well okay, how are we going to do the surveillance, and how are we going to do distancing, and how are we going to do masks, and who’s going to wear masks,” and the other millions of sort of individual decisions. And you won’t get to those decisions if you haven’t decided to do them. So I think in this context, the same kind of thing – some of you may be thinking about this in the context of schools that you are running, but I think the other thing is here, you know, if you say “Okay, we’re going to have some kind of in-person services, we are committing to doing that,” then you can start thinking about what are the steps that you need to make that date. Or you can say, “We’re not going to do that, we’re going to have some kind of online services.” And then you can think about “How can we make that experience as spiritually fulfilling as possible in the constraints of ‘it’s going to be online’?” And so I think that sort of – whatever that choice is, I know I say “don’t think too far ahead,” but this is probably not too far ahead, given how many decisions that are going to need to be made before September. And I think that first sort of pulling the trigger on a first decision is then the key to unlocking, sort of, being able to do the logistics.

Geoff Mitelman: Yeah, because it’s often easier to be able to talk through the process. But it’s scary, right? It’s a scary thing to be able to say, “Here’s what we’re doing and here’s why.” But I also think being able to – probably a level of transparency also, and being able to say “Here’s what the decision that we made, and here’s the thought process that went into it, and who was also part of that conversation,” I think that’s also got to be a key piece of this also. that what I’m hearing from a lot of rabbis is  “Wait a second, I’m not an expert in these kinds of things, and I’m being tasked to make these decisions, and I don’t know what the right decision is, so who are the other people to be able to talk to and to be able to say? Who are the people who are expert in the kinds of decisions that we need to be thinking about?”

And there’s another question here there’s also a role that politics and personality play into this also, because it’s not just COVID-19 and the epidemiology, but it’s also how do you get people to behave in a reasonable kind of way.

Emily Oster: Yeah, I know. I mean, I think there’s a personality component, which you probably is something that  – individuals are going to make different choices about about their attitude toward risk, and I think that’s okay, and in some sense we have to acknowledge that people have different risk tolerances – even putting aside the fact that they have different actual circumstances and actual sort of risks – some people are more afraid of this than others, I think we need to be respectful about those different preferences. 

I think the politics piece is much more complicated – it’s going to be complicated to reopen your congregation and then have people fighting over whether they should wear a mask. You know, it’s going to be much easier to open – like everyone where I live is very comfortable with masks, for whatever reason, Rhode Island has done a very good job with masks, and I’m sure when the synagogue down the street reopens, it will be fine, and everyone will wear masks – you know, we don’t have to fine everybody to wear a mask, that’s not going to be true for all of you. And I think that that’s a hard piece, you do not want to have your services open with people sort of at fisticuffs over mask wearing. And I think that, you know, sadly is the word I would use for that as well. I mean in part, this is just like – this is where we find ourselves, I’m not sure why. 

Geoff Mitelman: And Stuart, can you talk a little bit, because you talk really beautifully about ignorance, and the difference between the ignorance of “I don’t know and I want to find out,” versus “I’m not listening to the experts,” or “I saw this on a YouTube clip and I will trust what Jenny McCarthy has to say about this” or the meme that I got shared. How do we talk about the different levels of ignorance and how we respond to those kinds of different questions?

Stuart Firestein: Yes, well I think that’s one of the great misunderstandings in the public arena with science today, of course. I mean, there’s scientific ignorance, which I think is the ignorance of expertise, of somebody who knows what is known, but also knows what questions arise from what we know. I mean, that’s always the nature of science, the best – I think there’s actually a nice piece of poetry by e.e. cummings, who says it’s “Always the most beautiful answer that asks the best question.” So that’s what we always hope for in science, as an answer, not that provides the final answer, because we don’t necessarily think there is one, but provides yet a new set of questions and more questions, but better questions, more sophisticated questions. That of course is different than just a simple ignoring facts, or ignoring data, or pretending that something is different than it is, or ignoring facts. I don’t think it’s anything wrong with facts. I like facts, I just don’t think science is only about accumulating facts. That’s one piece of it, but it’s what you do with those facts, is how to use those facts to ask new questions. And I guess, you know, to some extent that takes a certain kind of intellectual courage to be willing to understand that just getting the facts is only going to lead you to more questions. And that’s good, that’s what you want. And as Emily said, the important thing is to come up with the right question, as it were, to formulate a question well. One of the things I fear we never – I don’t want to get too far off in a tangent here, but one of things that we don’t do well in education is teach people to formulate questions. We teach them to learn answers, but we never teach them how to properly formulate a really good question. Which is not easy to do, as it turns out. And so to me, that’s the fundamental difference. And we misunderstand science when a scientist stands up and says “Well that’s an issue that we just don’t really know at the moment, it could be this, it could be that.” Harry Truman was famous one time for saying that he would want somebody to get them a “one-handed scientist,” because he was tired of having scientists come up to him and say “Well, it’s this, this and that, but on the other hand it could be this, this and that.” So he said “Please, find me a one-handed scientist.”

Geoff Mitelman: I heard it was a one-handed economist. I don’t know if that’s –

Stuart Firestein: Oh, it could be that too, who knows.

Emily Oster: You never know.

Geoff Mitelman: Well, that leads nicely to sort of the conclusion, because I want to let you all know that we’re going to have another webinar in about two weeks called “When Facts Lead to Uncomfortable Truths and What We Can Do About It,” with Professors Brian Nosek and Cailin O’Connor. Brian founded Project Implicit –  if you may know about the Implicit Bias Test, he talks a lot about what that actually does and what the limitations are. And Cailin wrote a book called “The Misinformation Age.” And you know, as we’re thinking about questions of the biases that we face in the unconscious and the political and the personal, and the spread of fake news and also the fight for racial justice, and trying to engage with people of different political persuasions, and build on this conversation today. I’ll send you a link for that, that’s going to be on July 15. 

But I really want to thank our two presenters here, Emily and Stuart, Professor Oster and Professor Firestein, for such a thought-provoking conversation to open more questions than it answered them, but hopefully a framework to be able to think about some of these kinds of questions, and hopefully, if it’s okay – I think both of you are actually, people can find your email address online, but we can include that there for follow up questions if that’s okay. And we’ll include some links there. 

We’re also going to send out a post program survey in a couple minutes, that’s going to take you three minutes to be able to do that. But I also want to just give you a reminder that Sinai and Synapses does have an open grant opportunity for your community to explore Judaism in science to get $3,600 to be able to explore questions of Judaism and science, feel free to reach out to us, you can reply to that email, I will send you a link for the webinar in about two weeks. And thank you Emily, thank you Stuart, and thank you to all of you who are doing incredible work trying to dream up the High Holy days and trying to be able to make the best decisions that we can when there are things that we just don’t know. And we’re going to do the best we can. And thank you both for inspiration and some very practical questions to think about this.

Emily Oster: Thank you so much for doing this. All the best.

Geoff Mitelman: Thank you.