Dr. Solomon Schimmel who is a Professor of Jewish Education and Psychology at Hebrew College, Newton, MA has taught many courses on various aspects of Jewish ethics, including Care for the Vulnerable in Jewish Tradition and Thought and is presently completing a manuscript titled In Service to Others: Jewish Values and Concepts.
After many years of studying traditional Jewish ethical and devotional literature (sifrut hamusar), as well as rabbinic texts, Dr. Schimmel decided to pursue a Ph.D in psychology. In the course of his studies he was struck by the many affinities between clinical and counseling psychology and the ethical-spiritual guides to spiritual growth in Jewish as well as Christian and philosophical literature. He was also perturbed that most therapists were not aware of this repository of religious and philosophical wisdom and insight, which is what inspired him to write his first book, The Seven Deadly Sins: Jewish, Christian and Classical Reflections on Human Psychology, and he has continued to be intrigued by psychological and ethical aspects of Judaism in particular and religion in general.
Professor Schimmel is the author of three books, The Tenacity of Unreasonable Beliefs: Fundamentalism and the Fear of Truth; Wounds Not Healed by Time: The Power of Repentance and Forgiveness; and The Seven Deadly Sins: Jewish, Christian and Classical Reflections on Human Psychology, (all published by Oxford University Press), and numerous articles and book chapters on Jewish thought, psychology of religion, and Jewish education. He was a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar and Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University, England in 1998, where he researched the concepts and practices of repentance and forgiveness in the Abrahamic religions, in psychology, and in moral and legal philosophy.
Dr. Schimmel has been a National Science Foundation Research Fellow at Harvard University, and a Visiting Professor at Brandeis, Bar-Ilan, and Hebrew Universities, and most recently, a Visiting Scholar at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan.