Reddit as a Unique Jewish Resource

 

Dialog has been among Judaism’s most sustainable features.  Our Torah’s greatest heroes ask for advice, whether Avraham delegating the task of finding the ideal wife for his son or Moshe needing a resolution from God himself to assure fairness to the Daughtersof Tzelaphchod.  Our Talmud centers around the giants of our history posing dilemmas or queries to each other. Some as Hillel and Shammai were contemporaries who could present responses to each other.  More often, though, the sages lived centuries and miles apart, yet our Oral Tradition, eventually recorded for posterity, modifies these disparate ideas so that readers for all time will create a mental image of the most learned of men sitting across a table from each other, not only sharing their knowledge and perspective with each other, but with us as we study their legacy.  Sometimes we must study alone, but our most vibrant exchanges occur with a teacher or with a partner.  Minds intersecting, teachers of greater ability creating new peers has been among Judaism’s most enduring gifts to humanity.

Yet, accessibility has always challenged us.  At our Passover Seder we recognize one who does not know how to ask, and take the initiative to teach what we can.  But we also sidestep the reality of many who do know how to ask, ones who could be wise, but lack access to the conversation.  Even in Talmudic times, barriers existed in the form of fees or location or the immediacy of earning a living to support a family.  Later, access became competitive based on merit or wealth, far from universal, much like we have in our secular world where universities can only realistically accept a fraction of applicants.  And even when entry succeeds, we encounter masters who play favorites, nurturing some, excluding others, whether in the form of pay to play, clashing personalities, or yichus that generates entitlement by familiarity.  Jews take pride in literacy being nearly universal in all our scattered communities.  Bringing everyone into the dialog has lagged behind.

Our modern electronic connections, rapidly expanded in part by the urgency of pandemic isolation, has added an important element that our finest academies could not hurdle, one of maximum access, perhaps approaching open access.  Within months of mass closures, our venerable Jewish agencies began creating seminars for anyone with Zoom capability to join in.  Public leaders could be interviewed in real time by experienced questioners, with time left to answer selected inquiries by the international expert.  Where you lived, whether you could purchase an admission ticket or give a substantial donation, or which other affiliations you had no longer mattered.  Even a nobody like me could have his name introduced to the world by the moderator when my own question got selected.  Seminars were also conducted on a less grand scale on endless topics by local or regional experts, yet they remained primarily talking heads, still a long way from our traditional panels or chevruta formats that allow experts to speak to each other over distant locations and separated eras with a bidirectional exchange of minds between those teaching and those being advanced.

Our electronics also created Chat Rooms in real time and social media by minimally restricted posting, encountering disruptors of various types or posts of offensive content that no reputable editor would accept for a print edition.  Indeed, The Forward, America’s flagship newspaper of Jewish content, along with many others, had to discontinue its option of allowing readers to comment on its own articles online for lack of ability to maintain verbal derech eretz worthy of a dignified Jewish exchange. One very promising solution, however, has emerged.

Reddit’s r/Judaism originally came to my awareness by a feature article in The Forward.  https://forward.com/culture/478625/reddit-jewish-judaism-forum-r-judaism/ Once read, I signed up for access, enrolled in two subreddits, r/Judaism cited by The Forward and r/my home state, none others. Reddit assigned me a posting name, a short phrase so random, and used only for Reddit, that my anonymity almost certainly could not be breached.  While the site boasted tens of thousands of subscribers for r/Judaism on the entry display, then and now the postings never seemed overwhelming in volume or the number or subjects introduced for discussion, maybe about twenty in a typical day.

It’s easy to say what the virtual conversations are not, more difficult to delineate what they are.  They are not Talmud shiurim, though there is a daily link to the Daf.  They also are not Jews promoting their agendas, though there are some seeking some empathy or guidance as they lick their wounds, including some inflicted by Jewish sources.  There are really no people engaged in vendettas, whether political, ethnic, or other attempts at retaliation against thems who done me wrong.  Instead, we have mostly inquiry or invitations for conversation, that core element of dialog that our contemporary institutions have struggled to capture.  In some ways Reddit functions as a virtual Multiplex or a professional convention where several presentations appear simultaneously.  But unlike the cinema where a choice must be made on which movie to watch, which mandates which not to watch, the Reddit presentations can be accessed in sequence without disappearing.

What emerges seems to be the spectrum of interests that float around waiting to be displayed to people of similar interests, whether links to articles published in a variety of periodicals, notable art, queries about history, or how fragments of our literature play out in our daily lives.  But I don’t think we need an open forum to satisfy this.  Judaism in all its diversity really has three common end points that Reddit may have captured better than any other.  The compelling posts are more focused on what we have experienced, how we were treated, or uncertainties of upcoming new experiences for the poster that are not new at all to those able to respond.  What did I find bothersome, how can I best cope with what awaits me?

Common inquiries come from non-Jews.  People get invited to a synagogue or a shabbat dinner, completely new territory.  Proper attire, proper decorum, gifts, avoiding the innocent faux pas.  Many have no concept that congregations have non-Jewish guests frequently as members invite friends and professional colleagues to share their celebrations.  Many do not realize that our default is one of graciousness and tolerance.  Inquiries from converts or people in the process of converting or even contemplating conversion abound.  Amid their forum, they can expect to encounter people who have already successfully converted and others Jewish by birth who can reassure them that we regard our newcomers as All-In.  The curious include a fair number of Muslims, impeccably polite in their curiosity, seeking to clarify parts of our culture or belief that they had encountered in their own milieu but not in ours.  It is our chance to be the kind of friends that they haven’t made yet, and with rare exceptions those who respond rise to the occasion.

And within our own diversity, we have special challenges.  People often want to become more observant than they currently are, and often in difficult circumstances.  A fellow opened a discussion of trying to remain observant while living in a small American town, perhaps a university center or branch outpost of the corporation that employs him.  Within a few hours, dozens of responses came through from people not only sympathizing with the efforts he needs to gather, but from others similarly isolated geographically juggling parallel scarcities of Jewish living.  Sometimes we need a reminder that while Walmart brought Jews to Bentonville and NASA brought us to Huntsville, some Jews live as the Town Jew.  While many famous people, Soupy Sales and Edna Ferber among them, were raised as the only Jews in town, we think that as something of an historical relic.  As people in that circumstance relate their current reality, we realize that not everyone has a synagogue in proximity.  Moreover, not all Jews live in America or Israel, as we are scripted to believe.  Those in South America and Europe express different challenges to their aspirations as Jews.  And the Americans eagerly help out.

Antisemitism in America has become more overt, well publicized in both Jewish and secular media.  Yet for many of us, that’s where we see it.  Personally, we go to our workplaces each day, corporations or other agencies that take pride in their multiculturalism that make expression of ethnic animosity an enforceable taboo.  Then we shop for our needs at big box places, travel to other metro or resort areas where Jews are one more part of the mix, worship on Shabbos where we greet the guard who wasn’t there five years ago and is there now “just in case.”  Anti-Semitism is conceptually there, but mostly external to our lives and if present at all, a deviance from the accepted communal norm.  Some of the most poignant inquiries come from people living in areas where publicly expressed condescension of Jews, whether slurs, exclusions, taunts, or other unpleasant experiences are still within the limits of acceptance.  School children get mercilessly taunted by other students with school officials not wanting to set limits for fear of backlash from parents, or worse, accepting that community standard as a desirable offshoot of their commitment to their own local religious loyalties or traditions.  These victims do not have recourse, at least not accountability of those with rightful authority.  They either do not know about our Jewish advocates such as ADL or JCRCs, or be too isolated to access them.  Yet the stories that these people convey are also our surrogate stories, and perhaps never accessed by the agencies that can offer the most guidance.

Through these and many other requests for interaction, we passively receive the thoughts, or sometimes apprehensions, of people that rarely intersect with Judaism’s organizational infrastructure. For better or worse, upside and downside, our Jewish world has invested heavily in Leadership Development, assigning the movers and shakers special prominence, allowing choice of proteges for the future, creating programs, some such as Leadership Training Fellowship of my youth petering out, others more successful though presiding over an American attrition within our Jewish institutions slowly disconnecting us over decades.  But the anonymous, unrecognized people turn to Reddit.  Nobody on this electronic forum has power.  Nobody can manipulate either poster or responder.  Nobody has a title that requires submissiveness.  Nobody has to sit in the Eighth Row as Moshe did when metaphorically time-transported to Rabbi Akivah’s virtual class.  And my presence has value to somebody else who knows nothing about me but can still discern the breadth of my experience, familiarity with written sources, history, and organizational resources that they would find useful.  No agendas, no rejections.  Just people who have come to recognize the site’s presenting invitation, always appearing in the first dialog box:  No Such Thing as a Silly Question.  Or as the people who trained me professionally would say, continued when my proficiency enabled me to train the next generation, “the only dumb question is the one you wanted to ask but didn’t.”  And on Reddit, and arguably no place else in vast Jewish universe of ideas, do the inexperienced actually ask with no reason to fear a demeaning response. 

Yasher koach to the creators and to the moderators who understand fully what constitutes Derech Eretz.