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Facing Facebook

Rosh Hashana 5769 – 2008 by Rabbi Joshua Hoffman

As Jews, we cherish the values that flow from and throughout our tradition. Values like ‘Caring for others before yourself,’ ‘Dignity and respect,’ ‘True friendship,’ and ‘Character counts’ to name a few. But, these days, you won’t find me poring over ancient texts or arguing with rabbis from centuries ago to find them. These days...I find them at a place called Pixar Animation. No, it’s not only because I have young children. Nor is it, as one friend put it, “because I’ve been drinking the Disney Kool-Aid again.” It’s these values and more that are being taught and repeated within the cuddly characters and dazzling feats of creative energy splashed on the screen to attract child and adult alike. 

Nothing speaks more to this message than the recent movie, WALL-E. You can’t help falling in love with the small animated machine, with his high pitched, digitized voice whose bravery, courage, and determination capture both the hearts of the human characters on screen, and the adoring audiences in the theater seats. Human beings have abandoned Earth while robots are programmed to spend 5 years cleaning up all the non-recyclable junk we have created. Meanwhile, the people live aboard a space ship cruising to nowhere, where every need and desire is satisfied with automatic response. What was intended to be a five year project becomes 700 years in cosmic captivity as an ecological holocaust destroys all natural life on Earth preventing their return. There is a shocking disruption to the present situation when a probe called EVE is sent to discover signs of life on Earth and is successful. (The biblical references are there for a reason.) The little soul-filled machine WALL-E risks his life time and again for the tender embrace of his friend, EVE as she follows her directives to help bring humans back to Earth. Along the way, he haphazardly wakes up the human beings on the ship from their over-indulged stupor, only for them to discover meaning in real relationships once again. 

You recognize the film’s creator is holding up a mirror to us when the camera focuses on a large Lido deck with a pool where thousands of people are sitting on floating chaise lounges, talking to each other on the monitors attached in front of them, without a single person experiencing real interaction. Yes, they’re all connected through the computers with every conceivable desire at their fingertips, but no one is actually speaking to another. What’s worse is that the effects of space travel have warped their bodies so much they are too heavy to even move from their chairs! They are captives in a prison of convenience. 

Despite the fantastic adventure the viewers experience on the big screen, one underlying message is clear. Authentic living is not a matter of convenience. Every aspect of life - physical, emotional, and spiritual - requires care, nourishment, and responsibility. For a moment, I’m envious. Millions of people watch these films, and millions have the potential to be transformed. 

The dance between prophecy and fantasy is too close to ignore. How often we speak from this very pulpit of the dangers of a convenient life, one that merely seeks corporeal pleasure, even intellectual comfort, above the conscience? While animators scribble pictures of lovable characters for our enjoyment, Judaism has been teaching the same messages for generations. 

Midrash and movies, Torah and television. Morals jump from the screen, and in the world of Disney, they’re wrapped in cute, cuddly, and schmaltzy animation. In WALL-E’s world (more cultural references for the young at heart...) relationships are essential. They form the core of human experience. It is an echo of the great philosopher, Martin Buber, “All real living is meeting.” The lovable Woody in the movie Toy Story sings “You’ve Got a Friend in Me. "V’ahavta L’Reacha K’mocha - Love another as yourself - the Torah prescribes. 

Here is an important example of the convenient world we’re constructing that also dances between prophecy and fantasy, between convenience and complacency. It’s called Facebook, or My Space, Friendster, or Linked-In. These social networking websites are designed with the tremendous capacity to reach out and maintain regular contact with friends and business associates across space and time. Set up a profile, add a picture, a resume, a favorite band, and you can virtually create a multimedia biography of your life, past and present, for others to share in, comment upon, and enjoy. You can join groups and you can sign petitions for political action, you can send virtual and actual gifts, and you can track the significant and not so significant moments of all your friends. 

I encountered Facebook for the first time myself last year. I loaded up a picture, filled in the requisite information, and let it go into cyberspace. Little by little someone would ‘friend’ me (the technical term) and before I knew it, I had a lot of friends! Many more than I ever imagined I had! People from high school and college started showing up on my computer screen. Acquaintances were remade and what was once forgotten flooded in through digital bits and bytes. The first time an old high-school friend contacted me I was ecstatic. We spent hours exchanging emails and catching up, sharing pictures of our children and laughing through old memories. 

[Our tradition has blessings even for these moments. The halacha teaches us that if it has been more than thirty days since you have seen a friend, you are to recite the Shehecheyanu prayer. But, if it has been more than a year since you have last seen a friend, you are to recite the prayer “Blessed is He who revives the dead!” There is a heart-warming and inspiring feeling you get when you connect with someone lost through time. You feel a sense of belonging, you taste for a moment that your life had impact on another, even though you did not know it at the time.] 

With such warm feelings to gain, you get hooked into checking the site regularly, not only to see who’s friended you today, but to tend to the housekeeping of your own biographical journal. And like the mythical Sisyphus shoving a stone up the hill, the work is endless and seemingly grows more and more difficult. Like anything, Facebook can consume your time, questioning its genuine convenience. I keep asking myself shouldn’t I be spending this time connecting with my friends in real-time without this website? But the harder question still is whether or not I would even bother to maintain the relationships I do have on Facebook without the technology to help me? 

Questions like these that suggest today we’re only balancing on the precipice of this communication revolution. Just as the printing press and the industrial revolution before, this an historic moment where the access to information is transforming the way we conduct our lives, how we build our relationships, how we construct our society. 

We’ve created tools that capture our interest - but when we use them as toys or distractions - we become beholden to them. We celebrate the triumphs of those who envisioned tools like computer mediated social networking and champion them as emblems of an interpersonal, economic, and even spiritual global interconnectedness. But, we must also awaken to see we have become masters and servants of their convenience. The long waits for the latest Iphone 3G, a computer virus, or the eerie feeling that your call to customer service has been routed to a satellite in the outer limits of space when you hear the voice on the other line saying for the 15th time, “Please stay on the line, your call is important to us!” say it all. 

The problem here is not the way we communicate or the tools we use to communicate that divide us from community experience. There is a more insidious effect. The access to people and information has become so convenient; we no longer see our communal experience as an investment of self. We’ve come to see community as an experience that does not need our presence. For Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of Great Britain and prolific writer, this is the society as a hotel model. We check in, share the space and all the amenities of the facility, and then check out when we’re finished without any accountability except for paying the bill. If we read a weekly email update, if we text message a word of hello to a friend or family member, or if we find another friend through the internet, have we satisfied our need to connect? Or, is this a virtual confirmation that we do not need to be present in order for the world to exist without us? 

And yes, there is a threat here. In the overwhelming and persistent invention and reinvention of new communication technologies, these tools and the values associated with them are completely and totally neglected. We balk at the headline stories, like the one of the mother who destroyed a young girl’s reputation and self-worth through My Space; where the young girl took her life in utter shame and humiliation. Or, we see it in this terrible tragedy with the Metrolink crash, jarring our senses just weeks ago. We see our children, plugged-in, tuned out; hyper-connected, walking down the street ‘talking to each other’ not by the conventional face-to-face approach, but through text messaging and Instant Messaging. I see the crisis when I walk into coffee shops that are filled with laughter and song...sounds now only heard from individuals plugged into their own PDA’s, cell phones, or Ipods. It seems that we are becoming just that....‘I’ Pods. 

Study the trends and look for some light in this looming cloud of social decay. Short of catastrophes of pandemic proportions, we do not easily feel the need to connect, to belong, to affiliate, or to embrace the claim of community in our lives. Despite the knowledge of atrocities occurring around the world at our fingertips, there just isn’t enough impetus to move people unless a tragedy strikes home. 

Will this be our legacy? Without a pending tragedy, will we wander aimlessly for hundreds of years as the planet and its inhabitants slowly atrophy until there is no sign of life to be found? Are we imprisoned, and is it too late? 

Things have not always been this way! Thousands of years of exiles and ghettos, of pogroms and massacres, and we know how to belong, and we ought to know that catastrophe can strike at any moment. There is no such thing as casual community in Judaism. Community is the simple premise that Rabbi Sacks proffers, “It is the home we build together.” It is the solid framework where we join hands and take responsibility. There is no community in convenience and we must not wait for the next catastrophe to awaken our civic and interpersonal responsibility. Will take us 700 years of decay before we truly see the consequences of our neglect? No, we cannot afford a single day to wonder if this will be our fate. 

To forecast when the changes will slow down enough for us to gain a full perspective is foolish. Nor should we avoid those crazy computers either. As in all technology, tools are used to build things, and we can say these tools have one purpose - to build community, to develop genuine friendships. Left unmitigated, left without a context, these tools are just toys, distractions that lead us away from real relationship, real connections. Wielded properly, we stand to witness a generation of community builders who truly know each other and can draw from the individual talents of each other better than any generation before. 

What’s at stake here is nothing less than our core ability to relate to each other, to take responsibility for each other. We will not show our children a virtual model of responsibility, mechanically and digitally constructed. It is in our capacity to live as fully-human beings and to maximize our tremendous potential. Here, the rabbinic wisdom speaks louder than the movie in the theater. Ben Zoma taught:

How many labors did the first human being have to engage in before he obtained bread to eat! He plowed, he sowed, he reaped; he stacked the sheaves, threshed the grain, winnowed the chaff, selected the good ears, ground them, sifted the flour, kneaded the dough and baked. And only then did he eat. Whereas I get up and find all these things before me...

This is simply how we live! Without gratitude, without some active engagement in the process, we’re merely consumers, visitors in the hotel, lives entering and exiting with wonderful memories of golf games and exotic vacations, but nothing more. 

The journalist, George Will made a similar point recently when he refers to Russell Robert’s analogy of the pencil: 
No one can make a pencil....Loggers felled the cedar tress, truckers hauled them, manufacturers built the machines that cut the wood into five-sided portions to hold graphite mined in Sri Lanka, Mexico, China, and Brazil. Miners and smelters produced the aluminum that holds the rubber eraser, produced far away, as were the machines that stamp Ticonderoga in green paint, made somewhere else, on the finished pencil....It is an achievement on the order of a jazz quartet improvising a tune when the band members are in separate cities. 

If the world does not function without all these composite parts, how much more so this community we call our second home. This is the place where our most meaningful experiences are shared and felt, and it does not happen with one rabbi, one administrator, one volunteer. 

Again, Rabbi Sacks teaches, “Society is the home we build together.” What does Valley Beth Shalom need to be built better? Are we prepared to harness these tools and help our children - help ourselves - navigate through the maelstrom of cultural transformation? Our own Rabbi Schulweis taught us over thirty years ago, synagogue life must include the dedicated and sustained commitment to building havurot - small groups of friendship circles, to share life and to grow as families together. Over the years these havurot have had the greatest impact on sustaining this community and in cultivating its leadership. But, these groups have also suffered the fate of so many other communal affiliations in our time. When we assume that a havurah will be made for us, that with one signature on the credit card slip, we have paid for our communal affiliation, havurah fails. When we relegate our responsibility to some else, we check out of the hotel, and check out of the Jewish community at the same time. Rabbi Feinstein has shared this vision with us. We are not a people of consumption, we are a people of covenant. Nothing less than a re-commitment to havurot, to authentic belonging, is necessary today. And so I propose we focus our efforts in three areas: 

1. We must choose our community/ies. There are so many places and so many people with whom to connect. A congregation of this size understands this. There are so many of us here who feel utterly overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of choice. More often than not, that opportunity is supplanted by indecision. While moving in and out of different social groups does afford us emotional protection, it also leaves us bereft of real connection. As soon as one group becomes too demanding it is easy to walk away and find another group. But with no investment, you get no return. Choose a place to belong. Let it be the Wednesday night lecture series, or a Live a Jewish Life group. Learn Mussar with me or Torah with one of our new rabbis. Let it be a meditation minyan, or a commitment to 3 days a week at the daily minyan. Let it be a day of stuffing envelopes, or a visit to a fellow member who is sick or grieving. 

For us younger families, I hate to say it, but thank God for children’s birthday parties! Yes, they’re incredibly indulgent, but without them I personally would have no social engagement with my peers. For us, I challenge us to make time to learn Torah together, literally the text, and literally more of our beautiful and deeply relevant traditions. Participate in an Our Jewish Home program, or a Family Shabbat Service. 

In all of these suggestions, if you spend even three months in some dedicated group, you will already feel the draw and response of your presence. 

2. Speak to young adults today and they will tell you the perils of digital social networking. Unlike an actual community, virtual communities are more exclusive, more invective, and more time consuming. Besides the sheer time investment, in a virtual community you choose with whom you interact, who are your friends, and even more perilous, who’s character and reputation you can bully, ostracize, and eviscerate with the single click of the “SEND” button. This cannot be our children’s model, and this community will be the only place our children will know an alternative to find the courage and support to act better than that. The statistics show that a majority of young adults use this technology, and they’re savvy. It begins by making internet, cell phone, and Ipod use a regular topic of conversation at home. It’s not about parental controls, it’s about providing a context for all this information. 

Our children must be taught and given the reinforcement for building healthy, nurturing, and lasting friendships - friendships that are not kept on artificial life support, but friends who, in the words of Santayana, “...are that part of the human race with which one can be human.” Or, it is to achieve, in the words of one Jewish author:

Friendship [as] a heart-flooding feeling that can happen to any two people who are caught up in the act of being themselves together, and who like what they see. The feeling is deeper than companionship; one can hire a companion. It is more than affection; affection can be as false as a stage kiss. It is never one-sided. It elevates biology into full humanity. (Lettie Cottin Pogrebin, author and activist 1987)

The connections start now. 

3. Let’s use Facebook, (There is already a VBS group) the internet and any tool this generation creates to help us connect to each other. Anything that brings community together is a sacred tool. But, if we merely allow ourselves to be subjected to the careless distraction of maintaining who is our friend or not, if we only allow our virtual identity to be an empty shell of our casual likes and desires, and an empty forum for our opinions on whatever fancies us in the moment, the tool will become the instrument of destruction. Let us beat our modern day swords of critique and narrow-mindedness into plowshares of encouragement and inspiration - as a means to an end, and not the end in themselves. 

We can use these tools to invite people to Shabbat meals, to come listen to outstanding lectures and learn in classes of Torah. If building better communication tools is what we are devoting our time and energy to, then we have a sacred task of employing each and every tool to build our community stronger and more connected. Building havurot, building dynamic learning institutions, building places of worship that transform us and move us to act in the world. Organizing social, political, and environmental justice groups from this community to reach farther into the world, to touch more wounded souls, to inspire our children to model our triumphs and not scorn our complacency. 

It was eight years ago that Robert Putnam’s seminal study on American social life concluded with challenges and visions for the future. It is a future that is currently our present. He writes:

Spur a new, pluralistic, socially responsible ‘great awakening’ so that by 2010, Americans will be more deeply engaged than we are today in one or another spiritual community of meaning, while at the same time becoming more tolerant of the faiths and practices of other Americans. (p.409)

‘Spiritual communities of meaning - tolerant of other faiths.’ I cannot think of a better description for Valley Beth Shalom. To accomplish this takes nothing less than the absolute dedication of our clergy, educators, leadership, staff, parents, and grandparents to genuinely practice living in a community of meaning. This is accomplished with nothing less than a community centered on Torah. We are a people who study our tradition, not to get lost in the folds of history, but to reach higher and farther in our present. 

This year, this holiday season, may we all aspire to see the world through WALL-E’s eyes - May we too have the courage, the audacity, and the wisdom to build a new and renewed spiritual home with our friends and family, here at VBS. May these friendships old and new be a source of blessing and a spark of God’s Presence among us. 

Shanah Tovah.


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Thu, March 28 2024 18 Adar II 5784