3 Cognitive Science Books That Have Influenced My Judaism

By Rabbi Geoffrey Mitelman

Why is it often so hard to do the right thing? Why doesn’t everyone share our same beliefs? And why is it so hard to be happy?

These are questions that are integral to the field of cognitive science—the study of how and why we think, feel and act the way we do. But what’s interesting is that so many of these questions have links to Jewish thought and practice.

As someone whose shelves are overflowing with books about cognitive science, and who often integrates these findings with Jewish teachings, I want to share three books that teach Jewish ideas.

The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone—Especially Ourselves by Dan Ariely

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Sinai and Synapses is an organization whose mission is to offer people a worldview that is both scientifically grounded and spiritually uplifting. It aims to provide tools and language for learning and living to the millions of people who see science as their ally as they pursue personal growth and the repair of our world.

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Why Can Judaism Embrace Science So Easily?

Rabbi Geoffrey A. Mitelman

I recently had a conversation with a neuroscientist, who also happened to be a self-described atheist. He knew I was a rabbi and so in the middle of the conversation, he very tentatively asked me. “So…do you believe in evolution?” I think what he was really asking was, “Can you be a religious person who believes in science?” And my answer to that question is, “Of course.”

While some people think of science and religion as being inherently in conflict, I think it’s because they tend to define “religion” as “blind acceptance and complete certainty about silly, superstitious fantasies.” Quite honestly, if that’s what religion really was, I wouldn’t be religious!

In fact, it’s not “religion” in general, but that particular definition of religion that is so often in conflict with science. Instead, my experience with Judaism has been that it embraces science quite easily. So why is that?

While there may be many reasons, there are three in particular that I have found to be especially significant:

1. The Bible is almost never read simply literally

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Why Time Isn’t Money

We often tend to use the same language for time as we use for money. We “spend” it. We “save” it. We “buy” it. We use those same words because both time and money are very precious resources to us.

But while money is always money (the same 20 dollars can used to buy food, movies, or in my case, a new book), time is a little more nuanced.

In fact, the Greeks had two different words for time: chronos and kairos. Chronos was the quantitative sense of time. It could be measured and dissected, and most importantly, was undifferentiated.

Kairos, in contrast, was the qualitative sense of time. It was psychological, how we felt time, and it reminded us that not every moment was exactly the same — some moments were more powerful, more important and more holy than others.

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Can Slacktivism Lead To Activism?

(This post is part of the Sinai and Synapses Discussion Forum, a collection of perspectives on specific topics. It is part of our Fall 2014 series, “Are We Using Technology, or is Technology Using Us?“)

This past summer, everyone from Bill Gates to George W. Bush to Jennifer Aniston to your old college roommate to your boss’s daughter filmed themselves dumping a bucket of icewater on their heads. It was all but impossible to miss “The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge,” and by all accounts, it was a massive success. It raised both awareness and financial support for the disease, with literally millions of people sharing their videos, and raising money that ended up in the eight-figure range.

But it also received a fair share of criticism. Many people believed that the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge – like “Bring Back Our Girls” from May or “Kony 2012” video two years ago – was a form of “slacktivism.” People could click “Like” or share a video, and feel good about “doing something to help the world,” but in reality, they would not be making that much of an impact.

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A Moral Life? Or a Meaningful Life?

(This post is part of the Sinai and Synapses Discussion Forum, a collection of perspectives on specific topics. It is part of our Winter 2015 series, “Why Do Good People Do Bad Things?“)

Recently, David Brooks wrote an article in the New York Times entitled “The Problem of Meaning.” In our society today, and especially in more liberal religious circles, “meaning” has become a high value. We want our prayer services to be “meaningful,” we want our social justice activities to be “meaningful,” we want our study to be “meaningful.”

But, as Brooks notes, meaning can potentially be very self-centered. It is often less about making our world better and more about making ourselves feel better. As he says,

If we look at the people in history who achieved great things — like Nelson Mandela or Albert Schweitzer or Abraham Lincoln — it wasn’t because they wanted to bathe luxuriously in their own sense of meaningfulness. They had objective and eternally true standards of justice and injustice. They were indignant when those eternal standards were violated. They subscribed to moral systems — whether secular or religious — that recommended specific ways of being, and had specific structures of what is right and wrong, and had specific disciplines about how you might get better over time.

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Science, Religion and the Moral Arc – An Interview with Michael Shermer

(This post is part of the Sinai and Synapses Discussion Forum — a collection of perspectives on specific topics. It is part of our Winter 2015 series, “Why Do People Do Bad (and Good) Things?“)

Is the world becoming more just?

Michael Shermer thinks so. Shermer is the editor of Skeptic magazine, and has long been a strong advocate for science and rational thinking, since they are the best ways we have for understanding the way the world works.

Yet he has come to believe that not only is science our best source of truth for the natural world, it is also the best source of our morality, as well. In his new book The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity to Truth, Justice, and Freedom, he makes a strong and compelling case that scientific thinking has helped individuals and society become more free, more prosperous, and more compassionate.

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Why Judaism Needs Velcro

Why do we remember all the details of every urban legend we hear, but can’t remember the last PowerPoint presentation we saw?

That’s the question that brothers Chip and Dan Heath tackle in their outstanding book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Die and Others Thrive. The book answers the questions “What causes us to remember some things and not others? What makes something ‘stick’?”

Surprisingly (or perhaps not so surprisingly), for an idea to stick, the how matters a lot more than the what. After all, how many amazing stories have you shared on Facebook, only to realize later that they were hoaxes? Or, on the flip side, how many terrific educational ideas have you heard at conferences, only to have forgotten them even before you implemented them?

In other words, just because is an idea is good, it doesn’t mean that we will remember it. As we all know, bad ideas can be just as “sticky” as good ones, and far too many good ideas have been lost because they weren’t presented well.

So for those of us who care about Judaism and the Jewish future, then, we can’t just focus on the next big idea, or create more content, or believe that “if we build it, they will come.” Instead, if we want Judaism to “stick” for our students, we need to be intentional about how we do it.

And what we need is Velcro.

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