How Jews Are So Smart (And How You Can Be Too!)

Wisdom comes from challenging yourself and a dedication to truth.

When I was in the Boy Scouts in my youth, the Jewish troop I was in would attend summer camp in the San Bernardino mountains of California. During the Campwide Games, every year we would excel in one event called the Kim’s Game: each troop would be shown a collection of camping-related items, and would have to rapidly memorize them and then recall and write them down once they had been hidden again, before the clock ran out. For some reason, we were miles ahead of the non-Jewish Scout troops in our ability to memorize things. I attributed this to the rigorous process that many Jewish boys go through while studying for their bar mitzvah—it often involves memorizing the Hebrew pronunciation of an entire Torah portion, about half an hour of public chanting. Memorizing, I concluded, was a skill that could be learned and improved.¹

I didn't know it at the time, but the belief that one’s powers of memory could be developed through practice, rather than being an innate characteristic that is set in stone at birth, is a fundamental teaching of Judaism. And this teaching, and others like it, is a major part of how Jews become so successful.²

These teachings need not be exclusive to Jews. I believe that anyone who takes these teachings to heart, and puts them into practice, can develop greater mental ability. If that sounds interesting, read on.

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You have probably heard of the research of Carol Dweck and her collaborators on “fixed” and “growth” mindsets. To quote the linked article:

There are two theories of intelligence, referred to simply as mindsets, that students can have about their intellectual abilities, although no one has purely one or the other, [Dweck found]. Individuals with more of a fixed mindset believe that their intellectual abilities are simply fixed. They tend to approach learning with the goal of looking smart, and they often shy away from challenges because they believe that having to work hard at something or making mistakes means they don’t have high ability. Those with more of a growth mindset, on the other hand, believe that abilities can be developed—they are more likely to see effort as something that propels learning and to see setbacks as opportunities to build new skills.

Students with growth mindsets tend to outperform students with fixed mindsets, and they feel more in control of their performance and less anxious. More importantly, one’s mindset is domain-specific: I might believe that I can learn to be a better tuba player through hard work, while I could never learn to read upside-down (though in fact, many Yemenite Jews learned to read this way!).

Your mindset can be taught. Mindset is influenced by your culture and intellectual surroundings, as well as your personal experiences.

And American culture, sad to say, often teaches children that their abilities are fixed and cannot change. Students are graded, sorted, rewarded for early success and ridiculed for initial failure. We are told that some people are geniuses and others are not. Some people just think faster than others. We have IQ scores. Excellence is simply out of reach of most kids. You have to be realistic. Not everyone is cut out for success, right?

(In response, the youth oppositional culture denigrates intelligence and learning, claiming that “your brain gets smart but your head gets dumb.”)

Judaism, on the other hand, is adamant that one’s mental powers are not innate or fixed (though some people do begin with powerful minds), but are developed through effort. This goes beyond increasing one’s knowledge or skill; even seemingly inborn capacities such as memory and clarity of thought can be cultivated. You can learn to be smart.

And as a result, Jews strive to get smarter.

(The material to follow is largely adapted from the writings of Rabbi Matityahu Glazerson. It starts from the premise in Jewish mysticism that the Hebrew letters have intrinsic meanings, and that Hebrew words with similar letters have relationships with each other, from which we can gain insight. You needn’t believe that this is literally true for the present purpose; the point is what the Jewish tradition believes about the nature of intelligence, and what it teaches to its members. The concepts here are repeated in many forms throughout the tradition, not only based on their spelling.)

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Memory and Effort

The Hebrew root for remembering, ZaKHaR (זכר), has the same letters as the root for concentration, RaKHaZ (רכז). The Rabbis of the Talmud understand from this that you can better remember things when you concentrate on them intensely. As they say, “The student who reviews his learning 100 times cannot be compared to the student who reviews his learning 101 times.”

A similar relationship exists between the root words for “thirst” (צמא), “effort” (אמצ), and “finding” (מצא). If you thirst for knowledge and make the effort, the tradition teaches, you will find it. Indeed, the Rabbis say in the Talmud, “If a person tells you, ‘I made an effort, but did not find [wisdom],’ don’t believe him. ‘I did not make an effort, but I found,’ don’t believe him. ‘I made an effort, and I found,’ believe him!”

Especially in the Orthodox world, Jewish children are taught the story of Rabbi Akiva, who was an illiterate shepherd for the first 40 years of his life, yet became the greatest sage of his generation and an accomplished mystic. For him, the turning point was when he chanced upon a stone that appeared to have a hole drilled through it:

Once [Akiva] passed by a well and noticed a carved stone. He asked who carved this stone, and they told him that it was the water that constantly dripped on it. From this, he said that if “soft” water was able to carve a hole in the hard rock, surely the words of Torah that are hard as iron could carve [i.e. penetrate] his heart of flesh.

The lesson is that persistence in study pays off, even (especially!) when it seems difficult.

Wisdom and Asking Questions

The Hebrew letters of the word for wisdom, HoKhMa (חכמה), can be rearranged to read כח מה, “the power of ‘What?’” In the simplest sense, this tells us that wisdom is gained by always asking questions, never being satisfied with what you think you already know, being willing to challenge yourself and what you believe is true. Again and again, the tradition tells us that there is no finish line in study—the further you go, the more questions present themselves to you, and your struggle to answer those questions teaches you even more.

On a deeper level, כח מה indicates that wisdom is acquired through humility. During Korah’s rebellion (Numbers 16), Moses and Aaron say to the rebels, “And as for us, what are we?” (ונחנו מה). This adds more detail to our previous point: the willingness to challenge yourself and continue asking questions is impossible to sustain if you are arrogant. Wisdom and humility go hand in hand.

Ask yourself: is it better to be right? Or to feel like you are right, even when you are actually wrong?

The way to actually be right more often is to keep open the possibility that you are wrong, so that you can be receptive to the truth and correct your beliefs once you discover an error.

Meditate upon this truth.

Intelligence and Truth

We also learn from contrasts between words. The letters of the word for “intellect,” SeKheL (שכל), are similar to those of “foolishness,” KeSeL (כסל)—but rearranged. ש and ס are pronounced the same, but ש in some contexts represents truth, while ס in such contexts represents the power of the forces of impurity. In Jewish thought, “foolishness” is not the same as “stupidity”; the fool can be intelligent and well-studied, but his intelligence is disordered because he does not put the truth first. If you tolerate falsehood in your own thinking, your intellect will be perverted, and you ultimately become a fool. (Certain highly educated contemporary thinkers come to mind.) However, the tradition teaches that you can repair the damage to your mind by rededicating yourself to the truth and to righteous behavior.

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Jews are taught to study hard, always ask questions, cultivate humility, and cherish the truth.³ None of these things are exclusive to Jews. Anyone can learn these habits, and the effects on your mind of doing so are profound.

There is much more to learn, as always. But these principles will get you started.

1. Broad American culture, by contrast, looks down on memorization these days. It is viewed as unimaginative, sterile, "drill and kill." Many curricula discourage teachers from requiring memorization, believing that memorization drills lead students to hate learning. Instead, students are expected to soak up the material by osmosis.

This attitude never made sense to me. If you haven't memorized your times tables, how can you be expected to gain fluency in math? If you haven't memorized the spelling of large numbers of words, how can you be expected to read unfamiliar text? Once you memorize something, you stop having to struggle over it—and you can use your mastery of that material as the basis for more complex learning.

2. To be sure, Jewish achievements are influenced by many factors: the positive effect of having educated parents, historical forces that rewarded education, pressure by parents in some segments of Jewish society for their children to go into high-status professions, and so on. (I was tempted to subtitle this post The Quest for Clickbait 2: Electric Boogaloo, and maybe I should have!)

But focusing on such structural aspects is not helpful to a person who wants to get smarter. You can’t change who your parents are or how they raised you. But you can change what you believe about your own mind, and how to improve it.

3. Not all Jews actually do these things, alas, and some with a taste for falsehood end up causing much harm.