In the current Harvard Business Review Hal Hershfield a professor of marketing atNew YorkUniversity’s business school discusses several studies showing that people have a third-person perspective on themselves in the distant future. One study for example used functional MRI scans to show that people’s neural patterns differed depending on whether they were describing themselves in the present or ten years in the future.

Yet Professor Hershfield’s brain scans revealed that some subjects did think of their current and future selves as the same person and when asked to choose between a financial investment providing a small short-term gain or a larger long-term profit these people chose the latter. By contrast those who thought of their current and future selves as two different people usually opted for the immediate profit. Hershfield says he “wanted to see if we could change the attitudes of [the latter group]. Could we help people get to know — and show more regard for — their future selves?”

So he and fellow researchers decided to give people vivid images of their older selves to test whether seeing such pictures would change their spending and saving preferences:

We took photos of our subjects and used software to create digital avatars — half of which were aged with jowls bags under the eyes and gray hair…. Afterward we asked them to allocate $1 000 among four options — buying something nice for someone special investing in a retirement fund planning a fun event or putting money into a checking account. Subjects exposed to aged avatars [but only their own not those of others] put nearly twice as much money into the retirement fund as the other people.

Hershfield notes that these results have ramifications for ethical behavior as well. He has tested for example

whether people act more ethically when they feel closer to their future selves. In one study young adults who’d been asked to write a letter to themselves 20 years in the future were less likely to say they’d make an amoral choice — buying a stolen laptop for example — than people who’d been asked to write to themselves in three months’ time. In a second study … we found that 18-to-26-year-olds presented with avatars of their 40-year-old selves were less likely than those who saw current-self avatars to cheat on a test.

But why is that? It’s easy to see why people staring at their wizened image of 30 years hence would be moved to defer the chance for an immediate profit and instead invest for their retirement; they’re looking at that retiree. But why would being visually reminded of their future selves empower them to make more ethical choices?

Perhaps this demonstrates that the impulse to sin is based on being wrapped up in — and unable to see past — this moment. The ruach shtus temporary insanity that Chazal say pervades us as we contemplate sinning whispers — or shouts — I want it now because there is only now! And indeed once the moment passes we often immediately sense the deep regret of one who knows he’s just been had.

But when we focus on a time beyond this very instant we administer to ourselves a sort of psychotropic medication that wrenches us free of “now” and of the yetzer that seeks to ensnare us in it. Even writing a letter to oneself in three months’ time might not mitigate that “now-ness” since we don’t envision ourselves as being any different a quarter-year from now and it’s thus just an extension of this moment.

Another possibility: We often know that something we’re about to do is wrong but cut ourselves slack with self-talk along the lines of “this is who I am now and I can’t help that; I would never want to remain this way and certainly plan to change but I’ve still got plenty of time for that.” But the moment a “portrait of the (con) artist as a middle-aged man” is thrust in one’s face he realizes rather quickly that there’s a lot less time in which to change the way he is than he’s misled himself to believe.

But truth to tell Hershfield’s use of such images is actually a bit late to the game. Chazal (Sotah 36b) teach that as he was poised to sin with Potiphar’s wife Yosef HaTzaddik beheld his father Yaakov’s holy visage through a window which enabled him to withstand that mighty nisayon. I once suggested that perhaps this can be explained in light of the fact that Yosef bore a striking resemblance to his father (Bereishis Rabbah 84:8). Thus for Yosef to see Yaakov Avinu’s face at that critical moment was in essence to see an exact facsimile of the righteous and holy visage he would have at Yaakov’s age — and thus to glimpse his own towering potential of years to come if only he’d stand firm against the temptress. And he did.

None of us merit having a Yaakov Avinu as our first-degree biological father but many of us have parents and grandparents whom we resemble and wish to emulate too. But whether we do or don’t perhaps it wouldn’t hurt if in addition to the pictures of tzaddikim that adorn our homes we kept somewhere a small digitally aged portrait of a potential tzaddik with whom we’re indeed exceptionally familiar as a reminder of what we still wish to achieve and how little time there is to achieve it.

PRAY OR PEACE The Palestinian Authority has come out strongly against Natan Sharansky’s proposal to create a new egalitarian section at the Kosel. Evelyn Gordon writing at Contentions sees this as

a genuine teachable moment in the kind of trade-offs Israelis face every day in dealing with the Palestinians to which liberal American Jews … have lately grown increasingly unsympathetic…. Most [such] Jews have two demands ofIsrael: They want it to recognize the non-Orthodox denominations and they want it to make peace with the Palestinians right now…. So I’d like all these Jews to seriously consider this question: When these two primary demands conflict what do you do — capitulate to the Palestinians in the interests of “peace” and give up on being able to pray at the Wall in your own fashion or insist on your rights at the Wall at the cost of further antagonizing the Palestinians?

Excellent point. But Ms. Gordon missed another dilemma that the Palestinians pose for heterodox Jews: tragically the way early Jewish history is taught in the heterodox seminaries and temples is quite similar to the way Palestinian propaganda presents the subject. To the extent that our claim to the land is based on what G-d promised the Forefathers and the Generation of the Midbar that claim is denied as vehemently inCincinnati’sHebrewUnionCollegeas in Ramallah’sBirZeitUniversity.

But Ms. Gordon’s valid observation aside I almost had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming as I read on that she’d “like every Reform or Conservative congregation in America to discuss … with its membership” whether they favor proceeding with the Sharansky plan since “it’s only fair to get their input before making any decision.”

In contrast to the 80 percent of Orthodox Jews who’ve been toIsrael including 52 percent who’ve gone three times or more barely half of Conservative Jews and a third of Reform ones have been toIsraeleven once. A full quarter of them say they have no interest in ever going; the rest give a variety of reasons for not having gone — and by the way feeling “disenfranchised” by the Orthodox at the Kosel or elsewhere isn’t one of them. And this is before we even discuss who it is that settles there and goes there to study.

So this is where we’ve arrived: An astute and perceptive columnist wishes in the interest of fairness to give a say about the procedures regarding Judaism’s holiest site to a community most of whose members can’t be bothered to pay a weekly visit to their own temples in suburban America let alone the remnant of the one in Jerusalem — even as thousands of Israeli and American religious Jews are restrained by Jewish policemen from praying there something unprecedented in the last 46 years when there hasn’t been a day that the Kosel was bereft of worshippers.

And so as we enter the Three Weeks of mourning over Yerushalayim we must ask ourselves pointedly how such a decree could have come to pass.