{"id":11944,"date":"2026-06-07T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-07T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/schlaff.com\/wp\/?p=11944"},"modified":"2026-06-06T18:39:46","modified_gmt":"2026-06-06T22:39:46","slug":"chasing-gemeinschaftsgefuhl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/schlaff.com\/wp\/chasing-gemeinschaftsgefuhl\/","title":{"rendered":"Chasing Gemeinschaftsgef\u00fchl"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Walking around Yale’s Old Campus in the late 1990s, I got an idea stuck in my head that wouldn’t leave for decades. I’m exceptional. Everyone at Yale is exceptional. There’s a line they used to tell us in some form or another, “You can graduate from Yale and become a garbage man, but you’d better be the best garbage man in the world.”1<\/a><\/sup> The assignment was clear. Live up to your potential. Don’t waste it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s not Yale’s fault. This idea had been ground into me since childhood. I grew up in the self-esteem moment of the 1980s, where every kid was told they could grow up to be president. Yale just supercharged it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There’s that feeling of “I am special” that we all have. Alfred Adler, the great twentieth century psychologist, talked about this as inferiority, the universal sense that we are not yet what we could be.2<\/a><\/sup> The danger of inferiority, Adler said, is when we turn it into a pathology, something we think is wrong with us. That’s what was happening to me. I kept chasing this amorphous potential that was always somewhere out ahead of me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The specialness was a real problem for me. For example, I had a real problem with the dishes. For years. Standing at the sink with my hands in soapy water, I would feel something close to physical pain, because every minute scrubbing a pan was a minute I was not using my specialness to the greatest of its potential. Some part of me believed, quite seriously, that I shouldn’t have to do the dishes. I had too much potential. I was so much more special than other people. This wasn’t a good thing. My sense of what was important was clearly out of whack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My kids have a word for the rest of the people in this kind of story: NPC. Non-player character. The bit characters in a video game who say their one line and stand around waiting for the protagonist to walk past. It’s one thing when it’s in a video game. It’s another thing when you take that concept and move it into real life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Adler called the alternative Gemeinschaftsgef\u00fchl<\/em>. There’s not a good English translation for this word. English translators generally render it as community feeling, but Adlerians just leave it there, untranslatable. The concept is something like the felt sense that you belong to the world and the world belongs to you, that other people are real in the same way you are real, that the goodness of a life shows up in how you participate rather than in what you accumulate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s worth knowing some of Adler’s history. He converted to Christianity from Judaism, not because he wanted to, but because Vienna at the time was known as one of the most virulently anti-Semitic cities in Europe. At the same time, the Haskalah movement was giving Jews an intellectual framework for secularism, a way of stepping back from religious observance and traditional Jewish life in order to integrate into broader European society. After converting, Adler kept what he found important in Judaism, the moral architecture of community and obligation, and tried to turn that into something powerful in the secular world. Gemeinschaftsgef\u00fchl<\/em> is a feeling or a concept more than something we can really pin down. No wonder it reads as mystical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here’s what it looks like when someone gets it wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A rabbi in the neighborhood really hates Donald Trump. She can’t resist working it into her sermons, into her remarks on the holidays, into the moments when a congregation gathers and looks up at the bimah hoping to be lifted somewhere. This past Purim, her comments about Trump hit a bit harder than they needed to. People were upset. A group of congregants asked to meet with her, and several of them, including some who had been members their whole lives, told her plainly that this was not okay. Her response was that she hated Trump and that, as the leader of the congregation, she wanted to express her opinions and educate the people in her pews.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She’s right that she’s allowed to have her opinions. She’s a person. But she’s also a rabbi, and a congregation is not the place to bring your individual self and your individual hatred and use the bimah as the amplifier. A congregation is one of the few places left in modern life that exists to do Gemeinschaftsgef\u00fchl<\/em>, to be a community feeling itself into being together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are moments when hatred is warranted. Some things deserve it. But most of the time the better answer is love and understanding. That’s what Adler was pointing at. That’s what community feeling actually means in practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’ve been trying to do something like this at home with my kids, and it’s harder than it sounds. The temptation is to guide them to the person you think they’re supposed to become, to give them the benefit of all of your experience, to help them lead the best possible life for them. We all want what’s best for our kids. Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish wrote a book in the 1980s called How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk<\/em>, and the whole thing, four hundred pages of it, is just one idea. See the kid in front of you as a person who has their own interior life, and respond to that person, not to the parenting outcome you want. It sounds obvious. It is obvious. It is also extremely hard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I support them instead of correcting them, when I see them as people rather than as parenting outcomes, something shifts. They are growing. My job, as far as I can tell now, is closer to what you do with anything that grows. Pay attention to what it needs, get out of its light, help it become resilient enough to make its own choices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is what life is really about. Most of life is the boring, everyday things, and the question is what we do with them. Whether it’s the rabbi at the bimah, or me at the sink with the dishes, or my wife and I at the dinner table with our kids, or the people I work with on a Tuesday morning. The question is how I bring Gemeinschaftsgef\u00fchl<\/em> into every one of those rooms. How I create environments where people get to be people, at home, at work, at shul, wherever I am. How I spread some sense of loving and caring to more people than I did yesterday. The aim is building a better world at home, at work, and even with people I meet in the elevator.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Footnotes<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n

  1. This line sounds very much like it was lifted from Martin Luther King, who said something close to it in a 1967 sermon. Whether Yale knew that or not, I can’t say. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  2. My way into Adler this year was Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga’s two books, The Courage to Be Disliked<\/em> and The Courage to Be Happy<\/em>, which present his ideas as a dialogue between a philosopher and a young man. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li><\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Walking around Yale’s Old Campus in the late 1990s, I got an idea stuck in my head that wouldn’t leave for decades. I’m exceptional. Everyone at Yale is exceptional. There’s a line they used to tell us in some form or another, “You can graduate from Yale and become a garbage man, but you’d better […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"[{\"content\":\"This line sounds very much like it was lifted from Martin Luther King, who said something close to it in a 1967 sermon. Whether Yale knew that or not, I can't say.\",\"id\":\"a434d28a-d9ac-48e4-bf57-df4b022f2298\"},{\"content\":\"My way into Adler this year was Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga's two books, The Courage to Be Disliked<\/em> and The Courage to Be Happy<\/em>, which present his ideas as a dialogue between a philosopher and a young man.\",\"id\":\"ceb16359-6b5f-4bbb-91af-5e4100bac302\"}]","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11944","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-management"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8wCkz-36E","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":10355,"url":"https:\/\/schlaff.com\/wp\/yale-needs-women\/","url_meta":{"origin":11944,"position":0},"title":"Yale Needs Women","author":"Robert Schlaff","date":"November 29, 2024","format":false,"excerpt":"This year, Yale honored Constance L. Royster \u201972, the second Black woman to receive the Yale Medal (as far as I can tell), the university\u2019s highest alumni honor. Ms. Royster was celebrated for her extraordinary contributions to Yale\u2014her dedication, her advocacy, and her unwavering commitment to building a stronger, more\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Books \/ Audiobooks"","block_context":{"text":"Books \/ Audiobooks","link":"https:\/\/schlaff.com\/wp\/category\/books-audiobooks\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/schlaff.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/Women-at-Yale-300-1.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3579,"url":"https:\/\/schlaff.com\/wp\/the-joy-of-the-hunt\/","url_meta":{"origin":11944,"position":1},"title":"The Joy of the Hunt","author":"Robert Schlaff","date":"July 9, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"I have officially become a Grumpy Old Man.((Try to read this piece in Dana Carvey's Grumpy Old Man voice.)) It\u2019s too easy for people to find things online. Back in my day, things were different. People should work hard to discover things. Kids today can just Google things online and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Adventures"","block_context":{"text":"Adventures","link":"https:\/\/schlaff.com\/wp\/category\/adventures\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/schlaff.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/IMG_0799-scaled.jpeg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/schlaff.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/IMG_0799-scaled.jpeg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/schlaff.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/IMG_0799-scaled.jpeg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/schlaff.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/IMG_0799-scaled.jpeg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/schlaff.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/IMG_0799-scaled.jpeg?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/schlaff.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/IMG_0799-scaled.jpeg?resize=1400%2C800&ssl=1 4x"},"classes":[]},{"id":1348,"url":"https:\/\/schlaff.com\/wp\/in-praise-of-humility-the-forgotten-story-of-edward-s-harkness\/","url_meta":{"origin":11944,"position":2},"title":"In Praise of Humility — The Forgotten Story of Edward S. Harkness","author":"Robert Schlaff","date":"October 12, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"The Residential Colleges were created 85 years ago. Though they have the names of many famous Yalies, the donor of these colleges is nowhere to be seen. Why? What is a Yalie? When I think of the archetypical Yalie, I think of two things. First, a Yalie is someone who\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Life Lessons"","block_context":{"text":"Life Lessons","link":"https:\/\/schlaff.com\/wp\/category\/life-management\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9335,"url":"https:\/\/schlaff.com\/wp\/yale-architecture-disney-collegiate\/","url_meta":{"origin":11944,"position":3},"title":"Yale Architecture: Disney Collegiate?","author":"Robert Schlaff","date":"June 19, 2024","format":false,"excerpt":"When I visit Yale, I\u2019m immediately inspired by the architecture. As an undergraduate, I couldn't believe that this was my home. The intricate details of the Gothic and Georgian buildings, with their soaring arches and ornate facades, made me feel like I was traveling through history. Walking through the courtyards\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Design"","block_context":{"text":"Design","link":"https:\/\/schlaff.com\/wp\/category\/design\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/schlaff.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/Larger-Pic-2-1.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/schlaff.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/Larger-Pic-2-1.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/schlaff.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/Larger-Pic-2-1.png?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/schlaff.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/Larger-Pic-2-1.png?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/schlaff.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/Larger-Pic-2-1.png?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/schlaff.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/Larger-Pic-2-1.png?resize=1400%2C800&ssl=1 4x"},"classes":[]},{"id":537,"url":"https:\/\/schlaff.com\/wp\/free-speech-a-view-from-yale\/","url_meta":{"origin":11944,"position":4},"title":"Free Speech — A View From Yale (From 2017)","author":"Robert Schlaff","date":"November 15, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"This a post I wrote in 2017. I figured I'd publish it now given the unrest on campus. In the last few years, there's been an increasingly polarizing discussion around freedom of speech and values in the US -- especially on college campuses. It reminded me that in contrast to\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Life Lessons"","block_context":{"text":"Life Lessons","link":"https:\/\/schlaff.com\/wp\/category\/life-management\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11368,"url":"https:\/\/schlaff.com\/wp\/what-i-wish-i-learned-in-college\/","url_meta":{"origin":11944,"position":5},"title":"What I Wish I Learned in College","author":"Robert Schlaff","date":"August 24, 2025","format":false,"excerpt":"Colleges teach you how to think. What they should teach is how to live a life that matters. On the train up to Yale for an event, I told my friend Cherie, \"Whenever I go back, I get this feeling of anxiety. It's not about other people judging me\u2014it's about\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Life Lessons"","block_context":{"text":"Life Lessons","link":"https:\/\/schlaff.com\/wp\/category\/life-management\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/schlaff.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11944","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/schlaff.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/schlaff.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schlaff.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schlaff.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11944"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/schlaff.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11944\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11945,"href":"https:\/\/schlaff.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11944\/revisions\/11945"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/schlaff.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schlaff.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schlaff.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}