Ten years into the Internet age, its impact on Jewish outreach and education has been profound, and the Internet has made the Jewish world smaller. But the things that matter most in Jewish life–synagogues, families, communities of real people touching each other’s lives in a physical way, not just through ephemeral tracings on a video screen–have not changed.
“For all the talk about its impact, the Internet hasn’t changed basic Jewish institutions,” said Rabbi Don Weber, spiritual leader of Temple Rodeph Torah of Western Monmouth, NJ. Rabbi Weber served on the Central Conference of American Rabbis’ (CCAR) Committee on Computers and the Rabbinate. “Jews still need to be together in real ways. The day we have a cyber minyan is the day I bail out.”
The Internet has allowed rabbis in tiny communities to get together via e-mail for the kind of support and collegiality that big-city rabbis take for granted, he said. Countless synagogues, including his own, have used e-mail and the World Wide Web to revolutionize communications with members.
Thanks to the Internet, the printed synagogue bulletin is heading quickly
toward buggy-whip status.
But Rabbi Weber said the idea of the Internet as the basis of a whole new kind of Jewish community is hype, not reality. Despite the endless proliferation of Jewish Web sites, many aiming loftily for a kind of community feeling, the real core of Jewish life remains unchanged. And that includes all of the community’s divisions.
Daniel Faigin is a model of the modern Jewish cyber-activist. For years, he has served as organizer, umpire and sometimes bouncer of one of the top Jewish discussion forums on Usenet, soc.culture.jewish.moderated. His Mail-Liberal Judaism mailing list–an Internet discussion forum that uses the medium of e-mail–is a model of civility and stimulating discussion. But he admits that while the Internet revolution has made it far easier for Jews around the world to talk to each other, too often what they say has not kept pace.
“It’s brought about increased communication, and it has made it possible for
different communities to talk to each other,” he said. “But it hasn’t improved communications. We communicate more, but we are still fighting the same battles. We have all the same kinds of interdenominational warfare.”
In fact, much of the interaction that takes place on the Internet is the electronic equivalent of shouting; the disconnected character of Internet interaction makes it easier than ever to talk without listening.
Jewish education on the Web is burgeoning, but it has never moved beyond its status as a second-best option or a supplement–fine for those far from the nearest synagogue, or Jews with only tentative ties to Judaism, but incapable of duplicating the learning that can take place at the local yeshiva or Reform Sunday school or Reconstructionist chavurah.
“It’s a gateway into Jewish life,” said Rabbi Yaakov Menken, director of Torah.Org, one of the first and biggest attempts to provide in-depth Jewish learning through the Internet. “But it’s not a substitute. When people see it that way, it’s dangerous.”
For Jews who live in places with real Jewish institutions, the Internet can serve as a new route to full participation, he said. For those far from the nearest synagogue or yeshiva, it offers the potential for a kind of connection, although Rabbi Menken is careful to avoid the word “community.”
Communities, he said, will always require a physical, not just a virtual, connection.
Rabbi Menken’s Torah.Org illustrates the Internet’s potential as a gateway.
The group provides dozens of correspondence courses on Jewish subjects via e-mail. Currently there are more than 40,000 subscribers in 100 countries.
For Jews in Brooklyn or Los Angeles, Torah.Org merely duplicates a small part of what any local yeshiva has to offer, and it lacks something even the smallest shul has: vital real-world interaction between teacher and student and between classmates. It’s hard to scowl, or smile approval, through a modem connection.
Still, for many thousands of subscribers in smaller communities–or those totally cut off from other Jews–it provides something they simply could not get before: a taste of Jewish education, a limited degree of interaction with other Jews.
Ultimately, Rabbi Menken said, subscribers in far-flung places will have to plug into “real” Jewish institutions to experience Jewish community life.
But there is one area in which the Internet has been genuinely transformative: it has added a new dimension entirely to the idea of Klal Yisrael. And while computer networking does not provide a panacea for assimilation and apathy, it does provide a powerful new tool for those who seek to counter those destructive trends.
Today, Jews scattered across the wreckage of the former Soviet Union, Chabad
emissaries in Africa and the Far East, Israelis living in precarious West Bank settlements, and Jews in remote corners of the United States, all have something they’ve never had before: immediate, easy connections to other Jews.
And yeshiva students in Jerusalem and Brooklyn now have a way to connect with Jews outside their own insular communities. The outreach-minded Lubavitchers were among the first Jews to exploit the globe-shrinking potential of the Internet. The late Lubavitcher Rebbe taught “that no Jew should ever be lost to the Jewish people, no Jew must ever be lonely,” said
Zalman Shmotkin, head of the Lubavitch News Service and one of the leaders of the Chabad Internet outreach.
“Thanks to the Internet,” he said, “we are witnessing the amazing phenomena
of Jews living in the very farthest reaches of exile who no longer feel quite as estranged and lonely as they did just a few short years ago.”
“Instead they feel that they have a global support system, learning tools, even the infrastructure to obtain religious items that were completely inaccessible to them.”
Internet learning is important; so is the ability of a Jew in a rural outpost to buy a religious text or a kippah by visiting a Jewish Web site.
Infinitely more important is what these things do to revitalize the notion of a genuinely worldwide community, and to provide new ways for diverse individuals to connect to it.
On the Internet, Jews around the world can find their own mode of connection in an environment of endless choices. They can connect through Torah and Talmud study, through mystical explorations, through the teachings of the Rebbe or the learning materials provided by the Union of American Hebrew Congregations; they can connect through Holocaust studies, or debates about Israel, or politics or Jewish jokes. There are connections for those seeking a Reform refuge from Orthodoxy, and those journeying in the opposite direction.
That revolution in connectivity comes at a pivotal moment in Jewish history,
said Rabbi Irving Greenberg, president of the Jewish Life Network. The unprecedented freedom of Jews today poses enormous challenges to a community whose bonds–forged in the European ghetto, in the intensely Jewish neighborhoods of New York and Chicago and other cities–are under unprecedented strain, he said.
“The sense of community, of being one people, is significantly upgraded by
the enhanced ability to communicate globally,” he said. “The Internet opens the door to the shrinking of the exile in a good sense.”
“The Internet can help the Jewish world cope with transitions that were in
process long before the Internet was created,” Rabbi Greenberg said. “It’s the challenge of freedom; the Internet helps us meet it though unprecedented modes of communication.”
It remains to be seen whether Jewish institutions will find ways to exploit that potential in ways that unite the Jewish community, instead of reinforcing old divisions. It’s not yet clear whether the Jewish Internet pioneers will focus as much attention on the quality of communication as its quantity. But if they do, the Internet “can revolutionize Jewish life,”
Rabbi Greenberg said. “And we have no other choice.”
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