Science with a Schmear! Join us for breakfast and a Scientists in Synagogues Speaker Series Event:  A talk by Professor Ezra Zuckerman Sivan, Professor in MIT's Sloan School of Management.

Ezra Zuckerman Sivan is a sociologist and Alvin J. Siteman Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at MIT's Sloan School of Management, where he has taught since 2001 and served as deputy dean.

Speaker's topic: “The 7 Day Week: The Surprising Science of this Jewish Gift to the World”.

Ezra will be sharing with us the central ideas from a book he is currently writing on the invention and spread of the 7-day week. 

Contrary to what is commonly assumed, the week is not natural but is an artificial, “man-made” institution. It is also often assumed that the week is essential to the calendars of complex polities and economies, but Ezra will discuss explain why that’s not the case.

All ancient societies had calendars (based on the lunar &/or solar cycles) for dating contracts and public events, and for long-term planning; but through the end of the first millennium BCE, none except Israelite/Judean society had a temporal platform that resembled the seven-day week for scheduling regularly recurring activity.

Still a third assumption is that since the week is just an informal social agreement and it requires no resources or specialized knowhow, it would have been easy to get going. In fact, Ezra will note an array of considerations—beginning with the fact that the week was invented just once—indicate that the week would have been extremely difficult to launch.

And there is one last set of misconceptions, those that concern the biblical presentation of the week. Whereas it is typically assumed that the Torah is a “religious” book that naively views the week as primordial, natural, and universal rather than as a social project that would have been unimaginable and infeasible, Ezra will show us how the Torah is keenly attuned to the true nature of the week and is therefore an invaluable resource for getting to the bottom of the science of a wondrous institution we’ve all taken for granted since childhood.