Robert Scheinberg: So many of the questions that are found in psychological literature are also questions that Jewish texts address. So much of Jewish texts are about God, of course – but they’re also about us, and they’re about how do we change, how can we forgive? When should we forgive? How can people be happy? How can people solve conflicts?
And so psychological literature addresses many of the same kinds of issues – sometimes coming to similar conclusions, sometimes coming to very different conclusions, and of course, using very, very different methods.
Geoff Mitelman: And there was a lot of research that I was discovering in cognitive science about the role that ritual and action can play in helping us feel more fulfilled, feel more connected, find more joy, make better decisions, be more moral human beings…
Kent Harber: There’s a lot in Judaism which is just exceedingly psychologically smart. One of Judaism’s great innovations is Shabbat. And what it does is that it gives humans a sense of time, and I think it affords the ability to be a self. I think one of the things that excites me about Judaism is that, while it’s very, very conscious of how we are part of a community – very part of how we’re part of a congregation, part of a people – there is [also] the sanctity of being our own person. And I think having the time one day a week gives us that ability – to be, to know, “How do I feel about things? What do I think about things?” It gives us that kind of temporal “room of one’s own,” to be a person. I think Judaism makes being a person a really important element, I think maybe a distinguishing aspect of our faith.
Rachel Safman: I look to the religious text for the message, for the guidance as to where I should be challenging myself or others, and I’m looking to the scientific literature to understand what is the frontier of what’s known about the world in which I live, about the way that I myself am constituted, about the way in which human beings tend to interact with one another and with their world.
Robert Scheinberg: When people have a loss in the family and they are engaged in the traditional Jewish mourning practices, there’s a particular conversational style that is supposed to characterize a Shiva house when people are at home during their time of grieving, which is that the visitors are not supposed to be the ones to steer the conversation, but rather the mourner is the one to steer the conversation.
And an insight that comes from Kent’s research is that when people have experienced a time of trauma, and they receive guidance from other people, or direction from other people…
…it doesn’t necessarily help them as much as when they receive validation from other people or receive support. The Shiva conversational style helps the mourner to chart their own course, which is different from directing them.
Mitchell Berkowitz: There’s some incredible power that’s very stabilizing psychologically, for people to be in their own space, in their own home, and have others come to comfort them. And so there is this staggered approach to “What does it mean, as a person who is suffering a loss, to reemerge into the world in a way that feels safe and that feels supported?”
You know, I don’t sit down with a mourner and explain Shiva to them using the science language. I explain it to them using the Jewish language. But after the experience, they certainly use some of that scientific language to tell me how comforting the experience may have been.
Robert Scheinberg: You know, we could say that religious literature generally is the intuitive way for communities to try to answer these questions that’s different from the systematic way of addressing them that you find in scientific literature, but many of the conclusions look similar, and that bringing them into dialogue – it just seems very, very natural.
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