“Culture eats strategy for breakfast”:[i] That’s a management truism, that drums home how hard it is to change organizational (and even family) cultures. Yet the weight of inherited culture is frequently overlooked by analyses that posit, instead, a rational-choice theory of the world, as if people necessarily choose what is in their rational self-interest. They don’t. Especially in moments of stress or challenge, we tend to retreat into the way our various cultures (family? feligion? nation?) have conditioned us. Cultures have their go-to thing-to-do, their favored way of seeing the world and acting within it. When different cultures collide, self-interest may evaporate altogether. Culture can even eat self-interest for breakfast.
Not everyone who belongs to a culture is equally enmeshed in it. New generations regularly question their parents’ priorities, for example. Moreover, culture is the product of many forces: religion, ethnicity, gender, class, and so on. An 8th-generation Methodist postal-worker in Muncie Illinois and a Holocaust-rooted Hasidic Torah student in Monsey NY are both Americans, but not in the same way. A Sefardi who fled Syria in 1948 and an Ashkenazi who left Vienna just ten years earlier are both Jewish and Israeli, but differently.
Nonetheless, making allowance for differences in degree, it is useful to consider the “go-to” cultural proclivities of different populations.
Farea al-Muslimi, a Yemen expert at the London-based research group Chatham House, for example, says: “The Houthis have one solution for every problem in the world, which is go to war. The Saudis solve every problem by trying to shower it with money, and the Houthis by shooting at it.”[ii] This is probably an off-the-cuff overgeneralization. But still, there is probably something to it. Cultures specialize in what they have plenty of: Saudis have money; Houthis have guns. And not just the Houthis. TV images abound of Hamas too, and even the PLO in Arafat’s day, where crowds of men attend demonstrations, rallies, and funerals, brandishing machine guns and shooting them in the air.
It may seem irrational to plunge your population into war. But some cultures value war as the go-to thing to do: Medieval chivalry for instance. Forget the romance of shining knights saving fair damsels in distress; medieval knighthood was a code of violence: tournaments where champions killed one another; and war itself – an entire Hundred Years War (1337-1452), even.[iii] More recently, consider modern Germany: The Prussian glorification of war under Bismarck until 1890; then World War I; and even in defeat, huge sectors of the population could not wait to engage yet again in a world war under Hitler.[iv]
What, I wonder, is the Jewish go-to fallback? What, historically, and even now, do Jews throw at problems? Even though Jews are traditionally philanthropic, and despite some very wealthy Jews giving large contributions to everything from hospitals to political candidates – and contrary to antisemitic stereotypes — the answer is not money. For most of Jewish history, most Jews did not have money. It was certainly not guns either! The go-to response of Jewish culture was “learning.” Jews had books. Jews threw learning at everything.
Traditionally, that was rabbinic texts, the Talmudic and lessons from the weekly Torah portion. Synagogues had tables with Talmud folios spread open upon them, at the back of the sanctuary.
Modern Jews who lacked traditional talmudic competence replaced it with secular learning. Still today, Jews go to university, and even graduate schools, in record numbers. Our faith in all sorts of things (prayer? God?) may be lacking but we have rock-solid faith in learning. Not for nothing, did the early pioneers in Israel create a Hebrew University already in 1925.
Sociologist Max Weber gave us the concept of “ideal type,” an idealized portrait of what people in different cultures strive to become. Jews strive to be scholars.
And not just ivory tower scholars, but scholars of matters that have practical consequences. Lo hamidrash ha’ikar ela hama’aseh, goes the Talmudic dictum. “Study is not the main thing; the actions that flows from it are.” No wonder Jews have done well in modern times. Science and modernity venerate learning and its application to human life.
I am no expert in other religions, but I sometimes suspect that the go-to solution of classical Christian culture has been prayer. Churches still assess their strength by counting attendees at worship. Jews don’t. Christian colleagues have frequently told me that they pray over life’s dilemmas – a strategy that would never occur to a Jew. For centuries, the Christian ideal type was a monk, who divided the day into eight prayer times. Jews, traditionally, have three, but two of them (afternoon and evening) are combined for convenience; and it is not unusual for traditional Jews to hurry through the Shabbat morning service at breakneck speed but spend an hour discussing the Torah portion within it.
It is not that Jews don’t pray; we do. Brilliantly composed poetry enriches the basic core of Jewish prayer books; And Ashkenazi worship, especially, produced a magnificent cantorial tradition. But Jews specialize in Torah study.
One of the benefits of multicultural democracies is the opportunity is cross-cultural fertilization. I am a Jew, for whom learning is central. But from my Christian friends, I have come to see the benefit of prayer. I have also learned to pay more attention to theology; spirituality; and what goes into aesthetically pleasing, and spiritually moving, worship. But I have also taught Talmud to those friends, and sometimes surprised them in ordinary conversations by the way I question everything. I know too that even Jews must sometimes go to war.
I eventually became a liturgist, an expert at prayer; but as much as I “do” it (and I do), I mostly “study” it, so as to make the practice of it (worship) more meaningful. Like my ancestors through the centuries, I am mostly a “learner.” Color me Jewish.
[i] Attributed frequently, but mistakenly, to Peter Drucker. Its actual source is debated.
[ii] Vivian Nereim and Shuaib Almosawa, “How the Houthis Cornered Saudi Arabia Into a New Conflict,” NY Times, July 28, 2026.
[iii] Cf. Richard W. Kaeuper, Medieval Chivalry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); idem, Holy Warriors: The Religious Ideology of Chivalry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); David Green, The Hundred Years War: A People’s History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014).
[iv] See Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (New York: Penguin Books, 2005)
Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, Ph.D. 