TO ME, THE TRULY IMPORTANT QUESTION IS
THIS: “ARE YOU INTELLECTUALLY CURIOUS?”
There’s a famous expression in the Zohar, or the Book of Illumination, which is the Bible of the Kabbalah: The pinnacle of knowledge is to know that you don’t know. In other words, the more you study a subject, the more you see its vastness. The ignorant man thinks he knows everything, but the scholarly man knows how little he knows.
When Socrates was told that he had been singled out by the oracle at Delphi as the smartest man in the world, he chuckled and said, “If that’s true, it’s because I’m the only man who knows that he doesn’t know.”
As kids grow up, they tend to act as if they know everything: “Yeah, yeah! You don’t have to tell me! I know that already!” They exaggerate facts and invent stories.
Interestingly enough, very young children know that they don’t know (just as they know that living in the present is the right way to live). But as they move toward adulthood, they become self-conscious about their lack of knowledge, and their fear of appearing ignorant often makes them stop asking questions.
To me, this is tragic. A child must never close himself off to advice and guidance. Throughout his life, he will need direction and inspiration. There are plenty of good sources—moral, ethical, religious, spiritual—but nothing can replace a parent.
When one of my children thinks he knows everything about a given topic, I often go out of my way to dig up all sorts of new information, which I then share with him. The object here is not to humiliate the child. On the contrary, I do it for two good reasons: One, to show him that I am interested in his interests. And two, to impress upon him that one never stops learning.
Children do not like to be tested or put on the spot. When a kid comes home with a bad report card, the idea of showing it to his parents is sheer torture. And frankly, I feel for him. I think we put altogether too much stock in academics, and I often wish our schools had a more holistic approach to education. To me, a straight-A student is exactly that: a straight-A student. No more, no less.
I always tell my kids, “I honestly couldn’t care less about your grades. It is absolutely meaningless to me.” And it’s true. I really don’t care.
First of all, if we’re speaking empirically here, many of our most successful entrepreneurs are college dropouts: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Larry Ellison, to name just three. I’m sure there are a great many more dropouts who are wildly unsuccessful, but that’s not my point: My point is simply that there is more to life than grades. Every American knows that Abraham Lincoln never went to school, and that George Washington had very little formal education, but they still did pretty well for themselves—right?
I tell my kids, “For me, grades are nothing but a measure of one thing, and a very narrow measure at that. I don’t measure success by grades, and you shouldn’t either. To me, the more important question is this: Are you intellectually curious? Do you want to know?
“All I want to know is that you want to know,” I tell them. “Intellectual curiosity is the essence of a good life. Intellectual indolence, on the other hand, can be deadly—both figuratively and literally.
“Intellectual curiosity is one of the great blessings. Boredom, on the other hand, is one of the biggest curses. People who aren’t curious, people who don’t hunger for life, are dulled by their lack of interest and lack of appetite. They become diminished and intellectually smaller, almost literally shrinking into themselves. Why would anyone choose that dull path when the world has so much to offer?”
People lose interest in people, too, I tell them, and the results are tragic. Curiosity is the soul of every relationship, I explain. The desire to know is the foundation of every interaction we have in life.
“A woman came to see me a few days ago,” I told them recently. “She said her husband is no longer interested in her. When he comes home, she begins to tell him about her day, and he turns on the TV. When they sit down to dinner, she tries to make pleasant conversation but again he ignores her and turns his attention to the newspaper.
“Do you know what has happened in this marriage? What has happened is that the man is no longer interested in his wife. As far as he’s concerned, there is nothing she can tell him that he hasn’t heard already. He has ceased to be curious about her, and his lack of curiosity and interest is killing the marriage.”
I tell my kids about Robert Nozik, the celebrated Harvard philosopher. He maintained that most wars throughout history were fought largely over boredom. Yes, boredom. It was excess testosterone: men sitting around with nothing to engage their energy or interests. They were bored, so they went out in search of excitement, in search of glory, and ended up slaughtering each other. Life can be boring at times, if you’re not careful, but war is never boring. War breaks up the routine.
We create wars in our own lives, too, and partly for the same reason: to break up the routine, to shake things up. And this happens in many marriages: People create drama to escape monotony. Their lives are so predictable, so routine, that the drama becomes a source of thrills and excitement, and before long they have killed the marriage. On the other hand, if you’re intellectually curious—about life, about people, about each other—this is much less likely to happen.
I say to my kids all the time, “The essence of life is to make ordinary things extraordinary, to make the natural miraculous, and to make the everyday unique.”
For me, intellectual curiosity is the essence of a good life, and the essence of good relationships. When you’re curious about life, hungry to know more, you will never be challenged by the great bane of existence—boredom. And when you’re curious about another person, you will always remain fully engaged with that person. You’ll want to know what they’ve been doing all day, what they’re thinking, and what they want to do that weekend. That person will never bore you.
Without intellectual curiosity, we are lost.
I said this wasn’t a prescriptive book, and it isn’t, but we can’t very well live without rules. One of the rules in our home is that there’s no watching TV during the week. On Saturday, after sundown, when the Sabbath ends, the family sometimes gets together and watches a video or DVD. I let the kids choose, within reason, but I try to discourage them from watching action movies and science fiction or fantasy. The reason for this is simple: Life itself is interesting. I don’t want them to lose their appreciation for everyday magic. I think the most intelligent films are the ones that are about normal life. If I have to choose between Terms of Endearment and Star Wars, there’s no contest. I can connect with, and respond to, the former because it’s about real people, real life, and real situations.
Kids today have lost the capacity to be intrigued by life, in part because they are overstimulated by the make-believe, and their parents seem to be losing it, too. If a kid has an eighty-year-old grandmother, a woman who has lived a full, rich, sometimes tragic life, why isn’t he sufficiently interested in listening to her stories? It is a symbol of the magnitude of our failure as parents that the average kid is infinitely more interested in playing with his Xbox than in learning what his grandparents did during the Second World War.
There is a very famous verse in the book of Deuteronomy, which I often discuss with my kids. Moses is speaking to the Jewish people on the last day of his life, lecturing them, getting ready to relinquish his leadership and pass the torch to Joshua. “When I die,” he says, as interpreted by the Talmud, “there will be times when God’s law, the Torah, will feel empty to you; you will feel that it is boring, not stimulating. Whenever you feel that way, you must remember that the emptiness comes not from the Torah, not from God’s law, but from you. The barrenness comes from inside you. You are the ones who are empty. It’s all interesting. You are the ones who just don’t see it.”
The message is simple: Life depends on intellectual curiosity. I talk to my kids about this tirelessly. “I have only one major thing going for me,” I tell them. “If someone were to say to me, ‘Shmuley, what’s your greatest virtue?’ I would say, ‘Intellectual curiosity.’ That’s what has sustained me. People fascinate me. Why people do things fascinates me. History fascinates me. God fascinates me. America fascinates me. Judaism fascinates me. The Christian faith fascinates me. The Islamic faith fascinates me.”
At our home, on most evenings at the dinner table I do pop quizzes and my children have grown to love it, becoming trivia buffs in the process. History, geography, politics—maybe something I read in the paper that morning. And I make it fun because it’s my job to awaken their interest. These nonstop quizzes, which continue on hikes or on long drives, have led to an interesting result: My kids may not have the highest grades in their class, but they are universally acknowledged to have the largest amount of information. And this is a direct result of having internalized the desire to know.
If one night at dinner I see they’re not in the mood for a quiz, I’ll bring something else to the table, something I can share with the entire family. It could be a forthcoming segment from my television show that I hope will spark debate: “What is motivating this husband to be so cruel to his wife?” “Why does this eighteen-year-old girl never speak to her mother about her boyfriend?” “Why is this boy so sullen?”
But you don’t need your own television show to stimulate your children. Life itself is exciting. A businessman might come home and tell his kids about a real-estate deal that went sour. He can describe the principal players, and he can describe the terms of the deal, and he can tell them where it fell apart. He makes a simple business transaction come alive for them, awakening their curiosity. The ordinary becomes extraordinary. These are the people involved in the deal. This is how it fell apart. What do you think happened? What was the straw that broke the camel’s back?
A mother can talk about a friend with whom she had a falling out. She can take the kids back to the day she first met this friend, to the reasons they became friends, and, finally, she can describe the events that caused the friendship to crumble. That, to me, is better than any episode on television, and much more exciting: after all, one of the principal players is in the room!
Nowadays, it seems as if families have stopped talking to each other, and when they do talk, the conversations usually remain on the surface of life. But if you foster an appetite for depth early in a child’s life, it will have a tremendous effect on his future. Your son will look for a deeper kind of woman. Your daughter will find a man with the types of subtle qualities that often go unappreciated. (Nice guys do get overlooked from time to time!) A child who has the ability to look deeper, who is attuned to the world around him, has a far greater chance of becoming a success than a child with an indolent mind.
When I talk to my children about the characters I meet as I go about my day, or about the people who appear on my television show, my goal is to get them interested. I want them to become students of human nature. What motivates people? What drives their actions? What destroys their lives and leads them to make the wrong decisions?
I don’t believe in sheltering my kids, and I’m not sure I could shelter them even if I wanted to. They hear about marital breakups, they’re familiar with tragedy, and they know that the world has been polluted by hatred and war. Instead of denying reality, I try to give them the tools to handle, and hopefully, change it. Kids are genuinely curious, and it is part of your job as a parent to foster that curiosity, and to make them even more curious.
“Why are there evil people in the world, Daddy?”
You could sidestep this question; it’s a tough one. “Well, there just are, son. But you don’t have to worry about it—you live in New Jersey. Now finish your vegetables.” But why not capitalize on your child’s interest and use to the opportunity to broaden his mind?
“Well, baby girl, there was a very famous German philosopher named Georg Hegel, and he often talked about something he described as the thymotic urge. That sounds complicated, but it’s not. Hegel believed that the greatest human desire was to be recognized, that we all want to be respected by our peers—that we hunger to have our accomplishments and our uniqueness appreciated by equals.
“Hegel pointed out that animals will risk their lives for food, but humans will risk their lives for recognition. We see this in professional athletes, many of whom gladly endanger life and limb for fame and fortune. And we see it in titans of business, who can be relentless in their pursuit of wealth and fame: Look at me! Notice me! Then there are people who want recognition so badly that they seek it out at any cost. A murderer often hungers to get caught because if no one knows what he did he will remain unrecognized.”
“Don’t you want recognition?”
“As a matter of fact, I do. As much as the next man. Maybe more so. Your father has his own insecurities, and he often looks to outsiders for approval. To be completely honest, I have sought recognition my whole life. I’ve wanted people to know me and to appreciate my unique gifts, and I’ve wanted to inspire them. But I also want to be recognized for being authentic, for trying to inspire goodness in others, and that is more important to me than my desire for recognition. I am genuinely driven to do good because I believe in doing good, in doing right—even when no one is looking, and maybe especially when no one is looking.”
Of course, I don’t always succeed. One of the things I have struggled with my whole life is my fear of failure and mediocrity. And it still colors much of what I do. But I don’t believe in hiding my shortcomings from my children. I believe that part of the reason they respect me is that they can see me struggling to become a better man, a better husband, and a better father.
I tell my kids, “I have taken thousands of hours from my time with you to write books, produce shows, deliver lectures, and meet with influential people. Part of this is because it’s how I make my living, but part of it is my continuing thirst for recognition, albeit for good things. I still want to be special, but I want to be special to you kids most of all. And that’s why I will keep working on myself to always make sure that you guys come first in my life, because you are absolutely first in my heart.”
Certainly, we all want to distinguish ourselves, even if it’s only to compensate for our insecurities. But we need to distinguish ourselves as parents first. If you focus exclusively on your professional life, you might be a hero at the office, but you’ll be a zero at home. That eight-year-old you’re neglecting today could very well demand a great deal of attention from you in his teens (probably the wrong kind of attention!). And think about it: Have you really been a success in life if the people who mean the most to you think the least of you?
Parents often come to me and say, “You make it sound so easy, but I’m not a rabbi or a talk-show host or a philosopher. I don’t know how to talk to my kids! I don’t know how to get them excited about learning!”
“Everything is learning,” I tell them. “On the way to the grocery store today, you heard an interesting debate on the radio. While you were in the grocery store, a belligerent man got into an argument with a meek woman at the express check-out lane because she had more than twelve items. And on your way home, you saw a dog-catcher chasing a homeless dog down the street. There are stories behind all of these stories. Who was that belligerent man? What kind of person would embarrass a stranger in a grocery store? And who was he really angry at? It couldn’t have been that meek woman.
“And what about the dog-catcher? What a strange way to make a living, chasing animals, day in, day out. And how does he feel about animals? Does he like them? Does he treat them well? Does he have pets of his own? And why do people have pets, anyway? Is it because we’re lonely? And what about all those people who seem closer to their pets than to people?”
Everything that happens in your life provides an opportunity for conversation with your children. You just have to train your self to see it. It is all interesting. It is up to you to make it so. You can do it with an extra twenty minutes at the dinner table. And here’s the thing: It doesn’t have to be preachy. If one of my kids does something wrong, I might take him behind closed doors and give him a good talking to, but more often than not I use everyday occurrences to start conversations with him. Something memorable or inspiring happens in the course of the day, and it becomes fodder for communication. It’s about reacting to life, and it’s about showing our kids that—if one looks—opportunities for reflection and inspiration are everywhere. The trick is not to let these moments pass us by.
And trust me, I know what it’s like—I have eight kids, thank God. Most families tend to rush through dinner, especially the kids. They can’t wait to get back to their computers and cell phones and iPods. But they’ll stick around if the conversation is interesting. And the biggest determinant is you. If you see yourself and your life as a crashing bore, your kids will see the same thing. But if you see your life as an endless succession of miraculous and fascinating events, your kids will be transformed by it.
It’s not limited to the dinner table, either. I may not know much about opera or ballet, but I love to read, and I think reading is a critical component of an inspired life, so once or twice a month I take all the kids to the local bookstore. I try to direct them to the types of books I like—historical biographies, for example—but if they prefer Harry Potter I’m not going to complain. I will try and steer them toward books that are inspired by real people and events, but as long as they’re reading I’m a happy man.
Of course, if I see an opportunity to get them to read something I really want them to read, I try to take it. Last year, for example, I took the family to visit Graceland, and I picked up a wonderful book about Elvis, Last Train to Memphis. It had all the elements of a Greek tragedy, and I found it so gripping that I found myself reading passages aloud to the family. The kids ended up arguing about who had dibs on the book when I was done, and eventually three of them read it. It taught them an incredible lesson: Success can be just as corrosive as failure.
In the days ahead, our dinner table discussions became very lively.
“Elvis had tremendous success, but it still wasn’t enough,” I observed at one point. “I find that fascinating because to me that is one of life’s great mysteries: When is enough enough? Why are we insatiable? Are we ever truly satisfied?”
When you can discuss these types of things with your children, you are doing your job as a parent. You’re discussing humanity, discussing human strengths and weakness, interpreting motivation—and it’s all interesting. Such conversations make the world come alive for a child, and they awaken his intellectual curiosity—and that’s the objective.
My kids had been to Graceland, so the subject resonated for them. If I had told them to read an academic book about the fall of the Roman Empire and have a report on my desk by Sunday night, I don’t think I would have seen much enthusiasm. But by seeking out a subject that engaged their interest, I had them hooked.
And there is no shortage of material. The world is interesting. I often turn to the newspaper for inspiration. As the host of a talk-show, I live and die by current events, so I start my day by reading two newspapers, clipping articles, then calling my producer to figure out which ones we’re going to concentrate on that day. When I get home in the evening, and the family is gathered around the dinner table, I will often mention one or two of these stories, hoping to engage the kids. In seeking out their opinions, I am not only trying to stimulate their developing intellects, but I’m letting them know that I’m interested in what they have to say.
I do the same thing when we go on vacation. Last summer, we piled into the family RV and spent six weeks on the road. We went to the Little Rock Central High School, and my children learned how the forcible desegregation of that school in 1957 impacted the entire country. I took them to see the Lorraine Motel, in Memphis, where Martin Luther King was shot in April 1968. Standing together at the site, we read the hauntingly appropriate Biblical words, originally written of Joseph, on the marble slab erected there in Martin Luther King’s memory: “And they said to each other, Behold, the dreamer cometh. Come let us slay him…and we shall see what will become of his dreams.”
We went to the Mississippi coast to visit Beauvoir, the home of Jefferson Davis, the only president of the Confederacy, and we talked about the turbulent times that shaped this country in one of its darkest hours. We even went to New Orleans, just months before Hurricane Katrina devastated the city, and visited the Chalmette Battlefield, where Andrew Jackson crushed the British in January of 1815.
Do my kids always find all of this as fascinating as I do? Definitely not. But my efforts have turned them into intellectually curious kids. When Time and Newsweek arrive at the house, for example, they scramble to read them first. That pleases me greatly, especially since my son, Mendy, at age twelve, is often more familiar with current events than I am. In a day and age when most kids can’t get excited about anything beyond the hot new video game, or what everyone is doing on Saturday night, my children are intrigued by, and have an appetite for, the world around them.
A parent’s job is to expand a child’s horizons. Hanging out in front of the TV or playing video games with them is better than nothing, but it’s hardly a philosophy of parenting. Our job is to inspire our kids to maximize their fullest potential. To dig deeper. If your son is interested in baseball, talk to him about the recent steroid scandal. (“Why would a man risk all by taking steroids? What price are we prepared to pay for success? What constitutes a true hero?”) I do my humble best to make them look deeper, to peer under the hood, as it were.
The conversations that stimulate your children will stay with them. When I talked to my children about steroids, they referred back to our conversation about the thymotic urge. “People need to be noticed! They’ll do anything to get noticed! And when you can hit the ball out of the park like that, you’ll get noticed.”
“But when is it enough?” I ask my kids, “Do you know what the greatest destroyer of mankind is? It’s his insatiability. Nothing is ever enough. You’re not pretty enough. You’re not making enough money. Your house is too small. Your neighbor has a faster Porsche. Why is it never enough?” In this manner, we take a simple conversation about baseball and transform it in to a great deal more.
A few nights later, we were back on the subject of man’s insatiability, and I found myself again talking to my children about Adam and Eve: “As I interpret it, they are adults who are really children, so they’re perfect, and their perfection lies in the perfect synthesis of their adult and childlike virtues. As adults, they are responsible and intelligent and developed, but they’ve lost none of their childhood innocence. So they run around naked and unashamed and content. And that’s the reason they’re in Paradise—because they are content. Contentment is a pretty good definition of Paradise, don’t you think? If we read a story to your little brother, that’s enough. If we play with him, that’s enough. That’s because he hasn’t yet been bitten by the serpent, which is what ruined Paradise for Adam and Eve. And what is the serpent? The classical, Jewish interpretation is that the serpent is a metaphor for insatiability. The snake slithers along the ground eating dust, which is plentiful but never satisfying, and so the serpent remains hungry always. Now he spreads his insatiability by biting Eve and putting that same poison into her, and she in turn passes it on to Adam. They become cold, just as a person who is bitten by a real snake becomes cold when the poison begins to take effect. And the coldness robs them of their passion. Nothing excites them anymore. Not even each other. Not the bounty that surrounds them. Only the forbidden fruit captures their interest, and so they become fixated on what they can’t have. And that is how it begins. Adam and Eve become adults who are consumed by a deprivation mentality. This is what drives them out of the Garden. They will never be satisfied. Paradise is lost to them.
“And that is the lesson here: Learn to be satisfied.”
I have many shortcomings as a parent, but one of my strengths is that I holistically pursue the intellectual development of my children, and one of the ways I do this is by including them in absolutely everything and anything I find interesting. And it goes well beyond books and the newspaper stories. Embrace knowledge and you embrace life.
Oh, I know: Parents today complain that their kids don’t want to talk to them, but who’s running the show? There are two approaches to parenting. The short, long way would be: “What did you do at school today?” And the answer will be: “Nothing. It was just a regular day.” The long, short way would be to do your homework as a parent and bring something of interest to the table. “I was driving home today and I heard a story about the Flying Wallendas, one of the most famous high-wire acts of all time. Did you know that they always worked without a safety net?”
“Wow! Were any of them ever hurt?”
“Hurt?! Are you kidding? Several of them were killed.”
“No!”
“I wonder why they risked their lives for their art? Who would do a thing like that? What kind of risks do we take in our daily lives? When is a risk worth taking, and when is it not worth taking, and how do we know the difference?”
The most important weekly tradition in our orthodox Jewish household—and a great opportunity for family conversation—is the Shabbat dinner, which is celebrated every Friday night. It is observed just before sundown, and it begins a day of rest, or of “ceasing” from work. We always have many guests, and in most households I notice that kids run away from the table, because they don’t enjoy adult company and conversation, and aren’t expected to enjoy it. But my kids don’t do that. They seldom ask to leave the table because adult subjects are not foreign to them, and because human beings interest them. “Every person has a story, and every story is interesting,” I always tell them. “Life is fascinating. If you listen intently, everyone has something to say, and you can learn from everyone you meet.”
When you no longer find other people interesting, your life becomes diminished, and you are touched by less. If you let this happen to your children, they will begin to live their lives vicariously, through the fantasy mediums of movies, television, and video games, and they will lose their connection to other people.
“Only connect,” the British writer E.M. Forster wrote in Howard’s End.
Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon.
Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted,
And human love will be seen at its height.
Live in fragments no longer.
Only connect…
But maybe we should disconnect—from our computers, from our cell phones, from our iPods, from our plasma televisions and our BlackBerrys and our Palm Pilots—so that we can reconnect with humanity.
I am suddenly reminded of something Karl Wallenda once said of his life as a trapeze artist: “Being on the wire is living. Everything else is waiting.” Well, that’s a bit cynical for me. I’d like to think that living is being on the wire. If you’re interested in the world around you, there is no waiting.