From Learned Helplessness to Spiritual Resistance, and From Imutz HaLev to Ometz Lev

Many of you heard Rabbi Jonah’s story on Rosh Hashanah about the chassidic rabbi – Rebbe Menachem Mendel of Vitebsk – whose students thought that things felt so perfect inside their room that perhaps the moshiach had come and the world had entered a messianic age. The rebbe got up and walked to the window to look out and see, and then came back to the table to confirm that sadly no, the moshiach had not arrived. It still stinks out there. 

Ten days later, I don’t have to peek out the window to tell you that it still stinks out there. I’m thinking, right now, about what’s happened in our country this year, in recent months and weeks and even days. ICE agents with face masks and no name badges are picking people up off streets in arrests that feel more like kidnappings. Political violence and gun violence on the rise - we’ve seen shootings of Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman and right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, the seder night attack on Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro; the shooting at the Capitol Jewish Museum and just this week a fire and shooting combo at a Mormon church in Michigan. Legislators are being threatened. Trans folks and especially trans kids are also being targeted and scapegoated, each and every day, with access to gender-affirming medical care challenged or removed. Reproductive rights have been rolled back in many states. And don’t get me started about the lies: that taking Tylenol during pregnancy causes autism, that #47 has ended seven wars, that Portland is aflame with protest. This week we saw a meeting of generals, where military aggression is being promoted and the presence of anyone other than white men is being undermined and challenged at the newly named “Department of War.” We’re witnessing the defunding of science and institutions of higher learning, and much of that is being uncomfortably pinned on Jews. Comedians are losing their jobs and restrictions on free press are growing. These are just some of the big flashy stories. And to be honest, it’s hard to know how much these stories are the actual story, and how much they are all distracting smokescreens so that maybe we the people won’t notice all of the money changing hands, and the billionaires who are benefitting while seeds of division are sown for the rest of society to fight over the scraps. The rise of autocratic rule, dictatorship, and fascism is terrifying. 

I am speaking about this on High Holidays, because this is the backdrop we’re all operating in this year and I think it’s important to name it. This is not normal, and it is not aligned with our Judaism. Our job on Yom Kippur is to think about what kinds of human beings we want to be this year, but we can’t consider this in a vacuum, or when everything is perfect, because we live in the real world, and all around us, that real world is a mess.

I can tell you – from the conversations I’ve had with so many of you over the past year, and the past eight months especially – that one place where this community is pretty like-minded is in bristling at the cruelty, the hatred, and the corruption we are witnessing in real time. While some in our community inspire me by their ability to regularly roll up their sleeves, I also know that many of you – like me – are experiencing overwhelm, at least some of the time. When we don’t know what we can possibly do to be helpful, when the world around us feels so out of control, it is human tendency to feel paralyzed, to shut down, to start to tune it all out, to grow discouraged and decide that perhaps our actions don’t even matter at all. 

In the 1960s, scientists first discovered and studied the psychological concept that is today known as “learned helplessness.” They conducted experiments on animals (experiments, I should say, that would never be allowed today because of their cruelty to the research subjects). American psychologist Martin Seligman did his experiments on dogs, who were exposed to unpleasant electric shocks at random intervals. Some of the dogs could stop the shocks by pushing a lever, and they soon learned to do so, but others experienced the shocks at random and had no way to stop them, no matter what they tried. After many attempts, the animals who couldn’t control the shocks stopped trying altogether and simply endured the torture. In part two of the experiment, sometime later, all of the dogs were moved to a new situation where the solution was pretty simple. They were placed in a two-part cage where the dog could escape an electric shock by simply jumping over a low barrier to the other side. The animals that had had the ability to use the lever previously learned quickly to move from one side of the cage to the other to avoid the shocks. But the animals for whom nothing had worked before seemed to have learned that nothing they did could possibly matter, and they gave up even when a way out was right in front of them – literally, they lay down passively and whined or whimpered. This is what psychologists came to term “learned helplessness”: that repeated experiences of being unable to change a bad situation can lead to a deep sense of passivity that carries over into new situations.

This year, given everything that’s happening out there, I believe we are all at risk of succumbing to learned helplessness. With constant exposure to news and social media, with rampant cruelty and hatred on the rise, with attempts to shut down dissent, we are confronted daily with images of crises, injustice and suffering that we often cannot influence. This stream can create the same sense as it did for the dogs that were exposed to electric shocks in Seligman’s lab: that nothing we do matters, which reinforces the sense of disempowerment. And, it’s even worse that to some extent, this is a political strategy – it’s called “flooding the zone,” and it involves overwhelming the media and the public with a rapid, massive barrage of information, controversy and actions. The deliberate deluge is a form of propaganda intended to make it difficult for the public to focus on any single issue or critically analyze events. In other words, to the extent that we’re feeling overwhelm, fatigue, and paralysis, this is because it’s part of somebody’s plan. 

Recently, I read an article by an Israeli doctoral student in cognitive neuroscience named Iddo Gefen. He explains this concept of learned helplessness but then writes (in a very High Holiday connected message): “But even though our brains are wired to fall into feelings of helplessness, they are also wired with the ability to change. This means that even in moments when everything feels out of our control, there are things we can do to push back against that feeling.”

Gefen cites a 2023 study titled “From Helplessness to Controllability: Toward a Neuroscience of Resilience.” It explores how the brain can be trained to resist this state of learned helplessness, and offers practical insights. “...The key to protecting ourselves from learned helplessness is not simply avoiding situations where we lack control, but actively building experiences of control. Even very small steps matter. Choosing a concrete and achievable goal, doing something that has a visible effect, or helping someone close to us can all reactivate these brain circuits. Such actions may not change the world, but they slowly remind the brain that what we do can make a difference.” The way out of helplessness and paralysis is doing.

I want to argue tonight that our Jewish tradition actually beat the psychological researchers to the punch here. Long before 2023 when this particular contemporary study about the neuroscience of resilience was published, and even before the 1960s and Seligman’s naming of learned helplessness, our liturgy encoded into it precisely the kind of building blocks we need to rewire our brains when they are under stress and to build resilience that protects us against the pull of helplessness. Yom Kippur gives us the space and the tools to do the spiritual work to combat the learned helplessness and sense of overwhelm that are so easy to feel in this moment.

In our service tonight, we have completed the Kol Nidre prayer and the Maariv prayers around Shema and the Amidah. As we continue, we will move into the Selichot set - the prayers that are specific to Yom Kippur and which we will repeat multiple times over the coming 24 hours. 

At the heart of these Selichot prayers lie two confessionals. The first, vidui, is a short alphabetic acrostic, listing out actions that we have taken that are examples of sins, or missing the mark – that don’t represent our best behavior. The second list, Al Chet, is a longer alphabetical acrostic, listing what we’re atoning for. Let’s turn to that one - please join me on page 450.

My central argument here is that our observance of Yom Kippur itself can be an antidote to learned helplessness, and that this is helpful Torah for this particular moment. If you’ve ever done any meditation, typically there’s a “return to the breath” that brings you back to center when the mind wanders. Yom Kippur does something parallel, only it returns us to our own bodies and to our own small sphere of control on an annual basis. In doing so, it helps us fight against feelings of powerlessness and overwhelm, and promises us that we do have the power to effect change, first and foremost within ourselves and in our own realms of control.

Skimming through pages 450-453 together, what I want to show you is this: Al Chet is filled with descriptions connecting to body parts! We see that with imutz ha-lev (the sin of hardening the heart), vitui s’fatayim (the idleness of the lips), dibur peh (the speech of the mouth), harhur ha-lev (the scheming of the heart), vidui peh (the confessions of the mouth - aka hypocrisy), chozek yad (the outstretched hand - good when God does it, but an abuse of power when we humans try it), tum’at sefatayim (impure speech), tifshut peh (foolishness of the mouth), lashon ha-ra (evil tongue), netiyat garon (translated haughtiness, but literally the extending or stretching out of the throat), siach siftoteinu (idle conversation of our lips), shikur ayin (translated here glancing lustfully, or literally the lies of the eye), einayim ramot (haughty eyes, or eyes elevated), azut metzach (translated insolence, but literally the strengthened forehead), tzarut ayin (translated pettiness, but more literally the narrowness of the eye), kalut rosh (it says levity, but means lightness of the head), kashiyut oref (stubbornness, or literally stiffness of the neck), ritzat raglayim l’hara (the running of the legs to do evil), t’sumet yad (by being meddlesome, or more literally, the placement of the hand), timhon leivav (confusion of the heart). That was fully 20 examples, and that’s before going to the figurative ones that refer to the human body as a whole… together, my point is that there are a large number of embodied actions (they almost make up the majority of this list). 

What do we do on a day where we want to atone, we want a fresh beginning, and yet we find that so many things in the world around us are beyond our control? The liturgy focuses us squarely on our own bodies – as though to say that if we can’t change the whole world, at least we can change ourselves. This is a lot of human body talk for a day when we make a big deal about ignoring the physical body and its needs – refraining from eating and drinking, from physical comfort or adornment. If this is helpful to you, one way you can think of Yom Kippur is about doing a reboot – a system reset – on the self. We shut down the emphasis on our physical bodies, and instead engage the spiritual dimension.

You heard that list of 20+ items. If I had to generalize, I would say that many of them – the physical body actions and gestures that are categorized as sins, actions for which we human beings need to atone, the things we want to do a lot less of – are about physical strength, lengthening and hardening. Try doing these actions, physically, and you’ll see what I mean: N’tiyat garon - the extending of the throat. Chozek yad - the strong arm. Azut metzach - the tough forehead. Einayim ramot - lifted up eyes. Kashiyut oref - the hard nape of the neck (tense those muscles!).

I leave all of this for you to consider and play with in your minds as you like throughout the day, but I want to take rabbi prerogative now and focus our attention for a moment on a single transition that I think could be read as THE KEY to Yom Kippur. It also happens to be a brilliant pun and word play.

Returning to near the beginning of our Al Chet list, I want to direct your attention to the phrase “v’al chet shechatanu l’fanecha b’imutz halev” (it’s the second line of the prayer). “For the sin we have committed before you through the hardening of the heart.”

Imutz ha-Lev means the strengthening or hardening of the heart – like a calcification. We should be familiar with the concept – although the vocabulary is a little different – from the story of Exodus, when our ancestors were getting ready to leave Egypt and God hardened the heart of Pharaoh (there it’s vayechazek or vayikabed lev paroh). This kind of hardening of the heart implies callousness, an inability to feel empathy, remaining hardened in the face of the suffering of others. In systems of power, like in ones that we can see on display so clearly right now, a hardened heart is mistakenly viewed as a sign of strength, but our Jewish tradition is very clear that this is a big no-no. When, in this year, immigrants were rounded up by ICE and deported to prison in El Salvador to cheers and laughter of some, that was imutz halev. Ditto when the Navy carried out an airstrike on a Venezuelan boat in the southern Caribbean last month, killing 11 people on board. It’s relatively easy to say that those who are carrying out these acts and those who are cheering them on are guilty of imutz halev - that’s easy to condemn. But actually, our tradition also says that we – and here I include myself and probably most of us in this room – may also be guilty of imutz halev for hardening our hearts too much to meaningfully counter them. If we are too beaten down by the system already to feel empathy, to be moved to act by the plight of others (and, again, this is part of the machinery that has been very precisely designed to beat us down and overwhelm us) then we too are guilty of imutz halev, of hardening our hearts.

Returning to neuropsychology and to Iddo Gefen for a moment, first, as I already shared, he says that the key to combatting learned helplessness is not simply avoiding situations where we lack control, but actively building experiences of control. He says: “It turns out that the brain reacts very differently when we have even a small sense of influence over what happens. For example, volunteering with elderly people or adopting a rescued animal are small actions that remind us that what we do can make the world a little better. Experiences of control act like a “vaccine” for the brain. When a person faces a situation where their actions make a difference, circuits in the medial prefrontal cortex become engaged. This part of the brain, which is involved in planning and self‑regulation, quiets the stress signals coming from deeper regions… and over time these circuits become stronger.”

Second, although he doesn’t use this language, he also talks about the importance of acting with kavana, with intention. In his words: “Habits can be useful, but when we are under stress, relying only on automatic responses tends to reinforce passivity. In contrast, pausing to think, analyzing a situation, trying a new strategy, and noticing the link between actions and outcomes strengthens the brain’s resilience. For example, instead of automatically walking past someone who looks lost or is struggling with heavy bags, you choose to stop for a moment, offer directions or lend a hand. This small choice turns an automatic habit into a conscious action and reminds you of your ability to choose and to make a difference. Turning habits into conscious, deliberate actions also engages brain areas involved in planning and self‑control, and over time this practice helps build resilience against the pull of helplessness.”

Back to the liturgy now, we have explored the concept of imutz halev, the problematic hardening of the heart that makes us callous towards others. This is precisely what our rabbis don’t want us to do and to be (and it may be precisely the sin that the prophet Jonah is guilty of, but that’s a conversation for tomorrow).

Instead of imutz halev, the hardening of the heart, our Jewish tradition points us towards a positive kind of strengthening of the heart, and Yom Kippur gives us a chance to get there, and to set ourselves a different heart intention. With the same trilateral root of alef-mem-tzadee, we get the phrase “Chazak ve’ematz” – “be strong and take courage” that Moses said to Joshua three times in this past Shabbat’s Torah portion, Parashat Vayeilech. The concept of “Ometz lev” – literally meaning “strong of heart” – means something akin to courage, and it’s a core soul trait in Mussar. Ometz lev is the quality that Moses’ mother Yocheved and the midwives Shifra and Puah all possess when they decide to go against Pharaoh’s decree and not kill baby boys born to the Israelites – it’s civil disobedience for the good. Ometz lev is the courage that Esther and Mordecai possess when they stand up in defense of their people. In the animated BimBam “Shaboom” videos created by my brilliant friend Sarah Lefton, Ometz Lev is translated “hero’s heart” and I like that translation even better. On Yom Kippur, we remind ourselves that we cannot fall into the trap of imutz halev – hardened hearts – and instead need to strive towards cultivating Ometz Lev – hero’s hearts. This is what we’re asking on these High Holidays when we pray “Hayom T’amtzeinu”: “On this day, give us strength and courage, give us hero’s hearts.

So as we move through the next 24 hours together, one central image that I hope you’ll reflect on is that we’re moving away from that physical strength that looks like hardening – that looks like military might and machismo, callousness and indifference to the suffering of others. We are actively rejecting the kind of hardening of the heart that would allow us to tolerate this cruelty, and instead, moving towards an emotional strength that is supple and flexible: the strength of bravery, courage, sensitivity, and empathy, and spiritual resistance.

It’s easy to feel that these small actions are not enough, that they are far from changing the world. But, in fact, small actions, starting from the self, can make a huge difference. On Yom Kippur, we remind ourselves that we have the ability to change ourselves, to strengthen ourselves in the ways that we need to be strengthened. And if those actions that grow out of our self work aren’t just decent ones, but very precisely, are the ones that transform imutz halev into ometz lev – that help us move from a hardened heart to a hero’s heart – we have great power indeed. If we can do this as a community and in community, we can begin to transform our society. We know from history that this moment will not last forever. There will be a backswing; there will come again a time where it feels like our society is again getting better and not worse. And Yom Kippur promises us that even if we can’t control everything about what’s happening, we do have the power to hasten that time, starting from our own bodies, our own selves, and our own heart intentions.

And so, as we embark on these Selichot prayers for the first of many times this Yom Kippur, I invite you to use this day to reflect on what is in your sphere of influence, to visualize softening your heart from callousness and then strengthening it again towards empathy, bravery, courage, resolve, and a hero’s heart. On this Yom Kippur, as we look out the window, we know that it is really bad out there. But our tradition reminds us that we cannot despair, lie down and whimper. We have agency, which begins from each of our own spheres of influence, from our own actions, from our own bodies, from what is in our own hearts. This year, let’s really do the work of trying to prevent our hearts from hardening and atrophying, and instead engage our hearts bravely and courageously in acts of spiritual resistance. With intention, with resolve, and in community, we have the power to change ourselves and slowly, collectively, eventually, together we will also change our society for the better.

Gmar chatima tova - and may we all be sealed for a good year - a year of courage and empathy.

Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum

Yom Kippur 5786 - Oct. 1, 2025