Two Operating Systems, One Day of Truth: Yom Kippur as an Override Manual

Humans come with “survival firmware” (short-horizon, self-protective heuristics) and uniquely powerful “override hardware” (reflection, language, norms, law) that lets us edit those heuristics when they start harming survival and flourishing.

Free will isn’t a magic switch; it’s a capacity to reprogram defaults—alone and together. Yom Kippur spotlights this truth annually: we confess (vidui), resolve (teshuvah), and… often repeat the same patterns next year. The problem isn’t that Yom Kippur “fails.” It’s that we misdiagnose what must change and at what level—habits, environments, and institutions—not just our intentions.

Evolution equipped us with a fast layer—call it OS-S (Survival)—that prioritizes now: defend status, avoid pain, conserve effort, follow the herd. It’s adaptive in emergencies and short feedback loops. But modern life magnifies side-effects: our words travel instantly; our purchases affect distant ecosystems; our anger scales via networks. What protected us in the small now harms us in the large later.

On Yom Kippur we accurately name many OS-S........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)