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.
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