Sukkot is a time when we emphasize our sacred tradition of hospitality. Hachnasat Orchim has become a major building block of our culture.
In a brilliant new book, Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind (Norton, 2012), Mark Pagel demonstrates that it has been the development of human culture that has enabled humanity to overcome the "limitations" of our genetics and thrive through obstacles and environmental constraints that have hindered all other species. He writes:
Humans had acquired the ability to learn from others, and to copy, imitate and improve upon their actions. This meant that elements of culture themselves - ideas, languages, beliefs, songs, art, technologies - could act like genes, capable of being transmitted to others and reproduced. But unlike genes, these elements of culture could jump directly from one mind to another, shortcutting the normal genetic routes of transmission. And so our cultures came to define a second great system of inheritance, able to transmit knowledge down the generations.
I think the author is giving a reasoned, scientific representation of what Judaism has called the shalshelet shel kabbalah - the "chain of tradition." How wonderful as we consider the power of tradition - its rituals, symbols, metaphors and meaning - during these festival days. Like all forms of sacred heritage, Pagel argues that "culture" itself is one of the gifts we've received, or developed, as human beings unique among the animals:
Our possession of culture is responsible for our art, music, and religion, our unmatched acts of charity, empathy, and cooperation, our sense of justice, fairness, altruism, and even self-sacrifice;
And he continues with the important and necessary caveat reminder
but also for our undeniable self-interest, our tendency to favor people from our own ethnic or racial groups, wariness of strangers, xenophobia, and predilections to war...it is why we, and probably we alone, have consciousness, and yet why our conscious mind is often divided between reason and passion...
Considering these fascinating insights on the human condition brings greater sweetness to these days...
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