Friday night, April 8, 2011
Congregation Bnai Brith, Santa Barbara CA
In the past two weeks, I have entered the strange new world of Facebook. I actually set up my account over a year ago, but for the entire first year I used it only to follow the activities of my two college-age children, and to re-connect with long-lost friends from elementary school. About two or three weeks ago, I decided to start using it to communicate with members of our CBB community. I have been sending and receiving friend requests, and have built up a list of about four hundred Facebook friends. If I have not “friended” you yet, it is simply because I have not found you….yet. Please go ahead and send me a request.
From what I can tell, 400 is nowhere near the one or two thousand that our college students have each accumulated….but more than most people my age. Let me tell you what I have found.
It has been like stepping into a huge noisy, chaotic party. Suddenly I am privy to hundreds of snatches of conversation, ranging from the serious to the trivial, a universe of conversations that I could never have imagined. Hundreds and hundreds of photos. Recipes. Links to websites and youtube videos. Political commentaries. Inside jokes. Much of it I don’t even understand ….especially the cryptic coded messages between our teenagers. Much of it I would be happy not to be reading! But for the first time I understand the phrase “virtual community.” Everyone there is physically distant from each other, each person typing away at their own computer keyboard; but there is at all times a constant buzz of communication and interaction flowing among our members. Our community members, and especially our young people, are buzzing to each other. And I am glad to be part of that buzz and flow.
All of this has happened so quickly that it is still too soon to understand what these changes mean for us. Just a couple of months ago, we saw long-standing, powerful dictatorships in Egypt and Tunisia collapse in a matter of days, brought down by uprisings orchestrated on Facebook. In the aftermath of those revolutions, it is no longer possible to regard Facebook as trivial. The social network has emerged as a powerful force in our world. That is a fact. But we do not know: Will it be a blessing or a curse?
I raised the question last night at dinner and was met immediately with a barrage of emotional reactions: “I hate it.” “The people who use it are just bored.” “What do I care if you happen to be going to the shopping mall?!!” And perhaps the most serious charge: when people are so busy connecting virtually to all their Facebook friends, they are distracted and disconnected from the flesh and blood human beings sitting right next to them. One day last week in Washington DC with the Confirmation Class, I was trying to get on line with my IPad, and happened to be sitting next to Rabbi Solomon and a few of the other staff people. I complained that I was unable to get a wireless connection in that room. To which they replied “Oh no, so you will have to actually talk to us???” In that moment, I felt like the teenager whose parents have to take away his or her cellphone at the dinner table so that he will not be busy texting to his friends during what is supposed to be a family dinner. Virtual community can be at the expense of real, physical community. In fact, there may well be some people right here tonight who are texting their friends or family across town, or across the country, right now!! It would not be the first time.
Virtual community explodes the boundaries of time and space….lifting us out of our particular time and place, into a heavenly cloud of virtual selves. In that cloud, we can all be connected to each other, whenever we want. With Skype, Marian and I can see and speak, face to face, with Marian’s mother in Cumbria, England and with our kids Rachel back in Philadelphia and Ari in Bangkok, Thailand! With Facebook, I have renewed friendships with old buddies I have not spoken to in forty years. Quite literally, the old limits of time and space are exploding.
But what about the wonderful teaching of that wise old hippy guru Ram Dass, whose Jewish mother called him Richie Alpert, and who taught a previous generation of young people the simple wisdom: “Be Here Now”? Be Here Now taught our entire generation…even those who did not read the book, about the profound importance of being present. Of being mindful. Of not being distracted. Be Here Now reminded us to pay attention to the world around us, and to the person in front of us. Facebook, and Twitter, and the internet, and youtube and Google are about being everywhere except here, now.
Our sages, of blessed memory, lived 2,000 years ago and could not have imagined the internet in their wildest dreams. But listen to what they said: “Rabbi Hiyya bar Ammi said in the name of Ulla, “since the day on which the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, the Holy One Blessed be He has nothing in His world except the six feet of the halakha.” I know, this needs some explanation.
They were sages, they needed to sound a little mysterious. So what did they mean by “the Holy One Blessed be He has nothing in His world except the six feet of the halakha.”? First of all, halakha is Jewish law. It comes from the word lalechet… “to walk” and so it literally means “walking the walk.” Living by the commandments, the commandments that Hannah takes upon herself this weekend. The six feet of the halakha are an invisible cube that surrounds each of us. What we Californians call our “personal space.” It is called the six feet of the halakha because all of our actions,-- what we eat, what we say, how we conduct business, how we treat the poor, the elderly, our neighbor--all of our choices, all of our actions take place within these six feet by six feet by six feet. It is a tiny little kingdom…. the here and now….but this is where we human beings have free will, and make all of our real life decisions. “Since the day when the Temple was destroyed,…which is the old rabbis’ way of saying “in this imperfect world”…. God, the Holy One has nothing in this world except that little kingdom of the here and now.”
The here and now is the kingdom of halakha…of Jewish law. But there is another side to Judaism. The dimension of imagination. Of stories. What our sages called aggadah…from the same root as the word haggadah. In the realm of aggadah, we Jews have been experts, for many centuries, in exploding the boundaries of time and space. We step into this room on Friday night and begin to sing and suddenly we are back on a mountainside in Tsfat in the 16thcentury. We light the Shabbat candles and close our eyes, and we are suddenly in Judy Meisel’s shetl in Lithuania, or in Spain in the 13th century. And with a little bit of imagination we say to each other “didn’t I meet you at Mount Sinai?” And in the most crucial moment of the Passover seder, we recite the ancient words b’chol dor vador, in each and every generation, a person is required to see him or herself as though he or she personally went out from Egypt. In our Passover seder, we create together a virtual reality.
We Jews have been time and space travelers…..never content to stay put in the here and now, always seeking to transcend our particular time and place. I think this is the impulse that draws us to the internet. We want to connect, infinitely….to be with our friends wherever they are, at any time. To be able to exchange greetings, or a picture, or a video with human beings across the globe…whom we may have never met, but who are seeking to reach out to us. This impulse to break the bonds of time and space is both deeply human, and deeply Jewish.
In the end, though, our Torah makes it clear that there must be a moral reason and an ethical purpose behind our time and space traveling….whether in our storytelling rituals or in our Facebooking. “Provide for the poor and the stranger,” says the Torah, “for you know the heart of the stranger.” Remember: You were a slave in the land of Egypt. Use your imagination. You were there…that is how you know the heart of the stranger.” Our time and space travel expand our empathy and compassion for the person standing right in front of us. They may look frightening, or strange. Dirty. Broken-hearted. But we have been there, and with a bit of memory and imagination, we know what they feel. In the six feet of the here and now…..this is where God lives. Here and now, in the last analysis, is the only place that matters.
Shabbat Shalom.