I have taken a break from my postings as of late to gather perspective. The Good Decision as a project needs to better communicate something that is critical to the times we are in. Thus far, while the focus has sharpened, this projects efforts are falling short in terms meeting today’s needs. The Four Pauses will remain the four pauses. The science that led to their design and sequence is not going to change much. However, you will see a new urgent emphasis on discernment as the central discipline and skill set driving The Good Decision and related conversations. This emphasis will be in response to the issues arising around artificial intelligence and the near certainty that critical decisions will be made more independently of actual human consideration. The AI machine is here to change our lives and the change is inevitable. How we relate to that change is the challenge of this age. 

We humans have the capacity create from a posture of discernment. Discernment is a positioning of the assets of mind, body and spirit. The AI machines, impressive as they are, can only replicate and reorganize what already is. While this reconfiguring of facts can sometimes result in impressive unique expressions, uniqueness is not creativity. Human good or as in The Good Decision or “the sense of good” is personal creative project that only you as an individual in a human context can develop and express. The Good Decision wants support our full capacity to create goodness out of the complete range of the human experience. Intelligence is but a single dimension of the necessary gifts we have in the ‘ground of our being’. Exploring the creative act of goodness is where this project is heading. 

Meanwhile here is a person who I think speaks to you from the ground up and may slide into your discernment capacity as well as decision process a new sliver of good. 

Rabbi David Wolpe

Quoted From the New York Times 7/2/2023

“After 26 years in the rabbinate, as I approach retirement, I have come to several realizations. All of us are wounded and broken in one way or another; those who do not recognize it in themselves or in others are more likely to cause damage than those who realize and try to rise through the brokenness.

This is what binds together a faith community. No religious tradition, certainly not my own, looks at an individual and says: “There. You are perfect.” It is humility and sadness and striving that raises us, doing good that proves the tractability of the world and its openness to improvement, and faith that allows us to continue through the shared valleys.”

Rabbi Wolpe is the Max Webb emeritus rabbi of Sinai Temple and will be a visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity School in the fall.