Hebrew College Psychology Professor Solomon Schimmel

To Speak at Newton Library

By Susie Davidson

Advocate Correspondent

NEWTON - This Monday evening, noted Newton author and Hebrew College psychology professor Solomon Schimmel will appear at the Newton Free Library, as part of their ongoing speaker series coordinated by Programs Director Beth Purcell.

Schimmel will speak on his new book, "Wounds not Healed by Time: The Power of Repentance and Forgiveness", which discusses themes particularly relevant to this time ofyear. A signing will follow the talk, scheduled to begin at 7:30 p.m.

Schimmel, a former Fulbright Senior Research Scholar and Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University, England and current Professor of Jewish Education and Psychology at Hebrew College, previously authored The Seven Deadly Sins: Jewish, Christian and Classical Reflections on Human Psychology (both books are published by Oxford University Press), and numerous articles and book chapters on Jewish thought, psychology of religion, and Jewish education as well. He received a BA from the City College of New York and MA and PhD from Wayne State University, and has been a National Science Foundation Research Fellow at Harvard University and a Visiting Professor and/or Research Fellow at Brandeis University, the University of Texas, Bar-Ilan University and Hebrew University.  

“Wounds Not Healed by Time” examines the obligation of a victim to forgive his offender. It also, however, focuses on the equally critical concepts of repentance and reparation, in order that justice, personal responsibility and accountability are also fulfilled. “Substantial sections of the book,” explained Schimmel, “are devoted to clarifying terms such as revenge, justice, mercy, repentance, remorse, reconciliation. Other sections provide practical guidelines to potentially implement in individual and in group conflicts and strategies of repentance and of forgiveness that can help make our lives and our world more pacific and peaceful, imbued with love rather than hate, reconciliation rather than conflict, and repair rather than guilt and shame.”

Schimmel has had a longstanding interest in the psychology of religion as well as what psychology, especially in emotional contexts, can learn from religious traditions. Apparently, there is always much to learn in these realms.

“In the fifty-six years since the end of World War II,” he stated in the book’s introduction, “there have been numerous instances of fresh crimes against humanity, the World Trade Center bombing being among the most recent, though far from the most destructive of human life. The ‘killing fields’ of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia; the Hutu massacres of the Tutsi in Rwanda; the Serbian ethnic 'cleansing' of the Muslims in the former Yugoslavia and of the Albanians in Kosovo; the unbelievable brutalities of civil wars in Angola, Sierra Leone and many other countries. The same questions of revenge, justice, forgiveness and repentance, and the proper balance between them, arise repeatedly. Humanity's inhumanity makes us ask, ‘from whence does this evil derive and how shall we deal with the evil in others and the evil in ourselves?’.

The emotion of anger, and how to deal with it, was analyzed in his 1997 book, "The Seven Deadly Sins: Jewish, Christian and Classical Reflections on Human Psychology." His research led him to another level, the study of forgiveness, and subsequently to the new release.

"Anger is one of the infamous seven deadly sins,” said Schimmel. “When I was studying and analyzing anger, I noted that few secular psychologists wrote about the role that forgiveness can play in helping us deal with the anger, resentment, and hatred that we often feel towards a person who has hurt us, or who we perceive to have hurt us. Yet forgiveness is an important value in religious traditions and there is much that can be learned from religious teachings about how forgiveness might be helpful in healing wounds that are not healed simply with the passage of time.”

For further information on this free event, please call the Library at 617-796-1360.