The Darndest Things

To the best of my memory, the first book I ever read cover to cover must have been Art Linkletter's Kids Say the Darndest Things.  I was a new reader, probably in second grade exiled to a school annex at the local Firehouse, as my district could not keep up with new construction that suburban migration to my district required.  TVs showed images in Black & White at the time.  Art Linkletter's House Party had considerable popularity.  It ran in the afternoons.  My mother wouldn't miss it.  When I returned home from school it would be airing.  At the end, Art Linkletter added a signature segment.  Each day he would interview children about my age selected from the local schools.  He asked each a question or two, presumably unrehearsed.  And those kids responded in the darndest ways.  He compiled favorite responses to create a short book, which I read in paperback.  YouTube has captured some of those sessions for anyone with cyberspace access who might like a chuckle, long after this classic has faced into the history of American public media.  I've never forgotten those sessions or those kids or that book.

Without knowing it, being much too young, one of our Chabad Rabbis recreated a version of this, which is why I earmark every Simchat Torah evening to attend there in lieu of my own shul which essentially has no children.  Simchat Torah and Purim evenings depend on children for the vitality of the festivities.  In the evenings, we got flags to wave and engage in minor sword fights with the sticks.  For those who returned the next morning, and a many did even when it meant missing school, hijinx continued.  Friends would bring squirt guns.  The Cantor could expect some kids to tie his shoelaces to his tzitzis.  He could be a good sport in different ways, adapting prayer melodies to what the DJ's then played on the Top 40 or the sounds that introduced our favorite TV shows.  Congregations of 70-somethings, mine and too many others across the USA, cannot generate that controlled irreverence which Simchat Torah and Purim require.  We are scripted to decorum.

Chabad seems to attract children who attend on Simchat Torah with their parents or grandparents.  A few Lubavitchers have large families, but most in attendance seem to be Jews attracted to the Chabad environment without adapting its Orthodox observance stringencies.  Each year about thirty pre-Bar Mitzvah children attend.  There seem to be some women nominally in charge of the group, maybe volunteer parents, maybe teachers in their Hebrew school.  They assemble in the sukkah for the last time, that repast between Mincha of Shemini Atzeret and the onset of Simchat Torah.  Some cake, some salads and spreads with crackers but never bread to put them on, liquid refreshments adult and pediatric.  The Rabbi has prepped the children in advance.  They will each be asked, one at a time, as they sit in chairs lining the front of the sanctuary what they will pursue in the New Year to enhance their Jewishness.  

Their two minutes in the spotlight arrives as they parade in with flags, taking their seats in roughly size order.  While adult women and men take seats on different sides of the sanctuary, the physical barrier known as a mechitza is temporarily removed, largely to enable dancing with the Torah Scrolls that will be taken out of the Ark at the front of the sanctuary when the children's interviews conclude.  

Each child has his or her prepared answer.  They will give a coin each day into a tzedakah box.  Some will recite the Modeh Ani prayer on arising or the Shema on going to bed, almost never both.  Some will begin lighting candles every Friday night with their mothers.  Some of the older ones will add the Psalm of the Day.  Other's will begin making Challah at home.

While all seem laudable, all seem to miss some of the essence of what being an optimal Jew entails.  Nobody over several years has ever committed himself to having lunch at school with the classmate who always seems to be alone.  They put coins in the tzedakah container's slot, but never consider where the accumulated money is best donated, let alone why.  Some might be old enough to have cell phones.  Nobody has ever committed to leaving it off from candle lighting Friday evening through Havdalah on Saturday night.  And if anyone ever announced that he would not join his father at the Pornhub screen until after Havdalah, the Rabbi would be able to begin his sequel to Art Linkletter's best seller of the 1950s.

Judaism has its identifiable trappings.  Observances of all types. Who has the most stringent standards for Kosher, Shabbos, Study?  Mezuzot on all doors.  Coins in the tzedakah box.  Who puts on their tefillin every day and wears tzitzis under their shirt?  Just what the kids pledged themselves to do.  But it's not only kids.  Reddit as its r/Judaism has many participants, primarily young adults of secular Jewish background, who seek to strengthen their Jewish identities.  They pose to the more experienced Jews how they should go about it.  What books might they read, what videos would enhance their quest, maybe pledging to read the weekly Torah portion in translation each week as primary text.  Should they buy tefillin, or maybe put a mezuzah on all the doors of their apartments. Those elements particular to Jews.  What too often bypasses them may be the realization that many people across the globe do things that are honorable but no longer uniquely Jewish because we have succeeded in bringing to the world standards of conduct, days of respite to our calendars, advocacy for ourselves and for others who we can help move forward.  Those are missing from the r/Judaism requests, as they were from the kids as they announced to their adult audience what they might like to pursue.

When I respond to the r/Judaism seekers, I will recommend written resources for their learning, while discouraging primary Bible readings.  From our earliest reading years, we learn from the wisdom of those who have gone before us.  We read physics texts, not the lab notebooks or research papers of the people who wrote those texts.  The seekers need to read commentary of people before them who have proficiency to share.  The primary Bible sources are not ignored but put in context.  That is Chochma, or Wisdom, one of Judaism's pillars.  We have Tzedek or Righteousness expressed in many ways.  As Kindness.  As Generosity.  As Respect for boundaries of our traditions, whether in our diets or our calendars.  So turn off the cell phones, designate an empty jar to put spare coins into so they can be donated periodically, don't demean people, be a friend when friends are scarce.  Not overtly ritual but Jewish.  The Chabad kids sort of have Kehillah or Community, the r/Judaism seekers understand they need to be part of one.  But methinks they are too quick to gravitate to a synagogue.  Jewish gatherings are sometimes social, sometimes for advocacy, sometimes for communal learning.  The r/Judaism adults have much too restricted a view, the Chabad kids have exposures directed by parents.  Chochma, Tzedek, and Kehilah have a common destination.  We recognize the intersection of these as Kedusha or Sanctity.  Making Kiddush on Friday night contributes to sanctity, but Holiness is never stand-alone.  It is mindset, communal, behavioral, sometimes avoidance of immediate druthers.  The kids at the Rabbi's House Party interview may get there.  So might the Reddit explorers.  But they will have to think about what to strive to become Jewishly in a more expansive way than I heard at Erev Simchat Torah or read on the Reddit app.

Notifications

My typical morning, excluding shabbos, begins with a screen once the preliminaries of dental care, newspaper retrieval, and a k-cup brew have been completed.  Restrict Social Media appears on my Daily Task List essentially automatically.  And I really do limit my access, though from time to time I will concentrate on either FB or r/Judaism as a personal focus.  But once coffee has been placed within reach of my laptop in My Space, I seek my notifications.  There are five:  emails, FB, Reddit, Twitter now Rated X, and my stats on Medium Daily Digest.  There's a habit to this, though an ambivalent one.  As Loneliness becomes rampant, with our devices as prime villains, there is a certain irony to the first connection to other people each morning should come from how people responded to us on our screens. Designers of these platforms, including psychology majors, have as their business models the attention time to their offerings preferentially to competitors' options.  And they helped create Loneliness so they know which crumbs to toss to offer a very transient reprieve.

All five forums for me are a little different.  Email is by far the most important, though very few messages come from people I know or from organizations I asked to contact me.  Still, there is frequently something from my wife or financial advisor that needs action.  Some of the passive notifications I solicited indirectly, whether notifications from the synagogue, receipts for payments that I made electronically, subscriptions of various types.  And then there are the unwelcome, transferred to spam, deleted without opening, unsubscribed after opening, or more often than not, just not opened.  And on occasion I will also find a notification that somebody else on another forum responded to a comment I had made on that other platform.

Next most important, though probably expendable, is Facebook.  It has taken an ugly transformation in the fourteen years since I subscribed.  FB's initial attraction was to reconnect with old friends and relatives.  Being some forty years past HS graduation, there was a not entirely healthy curiosity about where the decades had taken the people I once interacted with daily in the classroom, school bus, or gym class.  Most volunteered what they were up to.  I became closer to some that first year on FB than I was in HS, even got to see a few.  After establishing about a hundred FB style quasi-Friends, the number of contacts atrophied one or two at a time.  The nominal connections are still there if I ask for my Friends List, but the number of people who post in a way that reaches my daily passive screen has dwindled to just a few.  It has been replaced by algorithms, computer matches which my own keyboard use helps generate, or a perhaps degenerate, which then post things people want to sell me, donations I might like to consider for either causes or candidates, or updates on my preferred teams.  The real people no longer offer short posts about their lives or what they do, other than photos of destinations they are visiting as they visit them.  Still, every morning I can count on an icon that appears designed after the Liberty Bell with a red number next to it.  Open the bell, and I will get a summary of who liked something I had posted or commented upon. In a world of mostly Zero Responses, these are rarely zero.  And the Likes or related emotions nearly all originate with somebody I know personally.  Moreover, somebody on occasion exchanges an idea.

My Reddit feed differs a bit.  Anonymity is built into the platform and it is moderated for propriety, usually successfully.  Like FB, it has a Liberty Bell with a number attached to it.  However, it is a more multifunctional bell than FB's.  It does not ding for each like, but instead milestones of likes:  5, 10. 25. 50. That's as high as I've gotten, though I'm confident others have gone viral with the bell reflecting that.  It notifies me in duplicate when anyone has verbally responded to a comment that I have made.  One number appears next to the bell with a link to take me to the faux conversation, another notification is directed to my email Inbox.  And then there are unsolicited rings of the bell, comments that their algorithm personalizes to me, thinking I might want to read them, though I am not a participant in that Subreddit.  The bell gives me two options, other than going to that conversation.  I can delete the comment, my most typical response.  Or I can ask for no more notifications from that entire Subreddit, which I also do less frequently.  And while my preferred destination is r/Judaism, when I log on I get a Home feed with a lot of other topics other than my personal subscriptions.  Depending on interest, I will respond to some, an invitation to more notifications from that group, even though I am not enrolled in it.

While I do not know anyone on Reddit by platform design, I am quite helpful to a lot of other posters seeking knowledge and experience.  People come testing the waters of Judaism.  They are attending synagogue for the first time, maybe have let their connection to Judaism become dormant and would like to revive it.  We have guests from the Christian and Islamic world who wish to pose a polite question.  Being helpful to somebody else is one of the best defenses to established Loneliness, something Reddit enables far more than any other forum to which I subscribe.  And in some ways the comments, which are not length restricted, can be developed into forms of conversation.

The most problematic forum is Twitter, that public cesspool of ideas which unfortunately also had people of real public influence present in some way.  There are not many ways to give feedback to a journalist, elected official, top executive, or major scholar.  All generate hundreds of responses.  I know almost nobody personally, though many by reputation and by their public presence.  Likes are few, maybe one every few days, and rarely from the person of public prominence.  What I find, though, is that somebody of obscurity will read my comment and opt to follow me further.  These people, when their profiles are accessed, will typically be following 4000 people but have under 100 who follow them.  By contrast, I follow 37 and have 34 who have chosen to follow me. I cannot think of a more overt identification of Loneliness than seeking anyone who comes along randomly while attractiven nobody else in return.  I almost never initiate a political post, mostly share something I've written on my feed.  I've also deleted many a public figure, including some who have the most to say.  The reason, they post something every ten minutes through their waking hours.  And it arrives in my feed as clutter, since they say pretty much the same predictable things for every one of those q ten minute posts.  As a result, my time of that forum is severely rationed.  My most common Follow is The Atlantic, to which I have a subscription, and most common comment is a response to an article I have read there.  Responses in return have been minimal.  

Finally, I self-publish fifteen or so articles each year on Medium, which comes across as a daily digest.  While a freeloader, I have a handful of people who subscribe to my feed, and a small handful of people who read what I have written, or at least open the article.  While never a lot, there is always a measure of gratification to contributing to somebody else's mind.  I do not know these people and get close to zero comments in return.  But it takes only moments each morning to check.

So knowing how I relate, or really how my mind relates to people known and unknown, has an allure that seems difficult to set aside, though I do set it aside for Shabbos every Saturday.  I'm part of cyberspace.  The magnates who control cyberspace want me as part of it, which is more than I can say for people I know in person or through organizations who have done their best to exclude me.  It does not take a lot to feel included.  Mostly a bell shape on a screen with a single digit in red next to it.

Controlling Social Media Time

Social Media needs some personal restraint.  For a lot of people it has become destructive, a time sink that bypasses more substantive achievements that people could have, myself among them.  Yet its popularity, even when toxic or because of that toxic element, continues.  It is alluring.  Nobody really needs Adderall or Ritalin to pay attention, as attention is not needed.  A Tweet requires conservation of words, which means you can read a lot of them in a short time.  And as we keep our device and tablet screens in our visual focus, these programs assure us that there are other people on the other side.  We used to have other people at the Mall, and probably still do at the workplace.  The stadium may have tens of thousands of people, but they are not interactive with us.  The electronics match us to people who respond in an era when, even in the workplace, the cubicles and factory floors keep responses intermittent at best.

I am not on all platforms.  I never signed up for TikTok, which at least one state tried to ban.  A site restricted to physicians called Sermo wore out its welcome.  I don't miss it.  The WhatsApp app has been downloaded to my smartphone.  I never open it.

So my daily cyberspace surf sessions really begin with four, all with their own overlaps and their own uniqueness:

1. Email
2. Facebook
3. Reddit
4. Twitter, now rated X

Each morning I go to all four, though not in the same sequence.  Any notifications from each, from the most trivial Like to the usual email updates of places where my subscription is intentional.  No message?  Move on.  More typically, I just admire myself momentarily for having posted something yesterday that caused a reaction in somebody else.

Then I move to my daily blog to begin composing the next entry. And my daily five crosswords come next.

But the discipline to do things that advance me yield to things that get my brain to release endorphins and enkephalins.  So at the very least succumb to the social media in a defensible way.  

Email enables me to conduct my personal business.  Its delete trash can makes it easy to clear.  By now I can recognize phishing and move it to spam.  That winnows the messages to notices of articles related to my professional activity, a writing group I subscribe to and periodically post what I have written, notices from reputable publications where I am also a subscriber or participant.  Requests to do a Torah reading arrive that way, along with notices of my synagogue's activities.  Clutter easily managed.  And there are times when I need to send somebody else a message.  Virtually no politically generated thought takes place in this forum.  

Facebook lives off its more glorious past.  Like many of my era, HS Class of '69, the lure of reconnecting with old chums, most in limbo for forty years, had endless merit.  We learned of each other's careers, families, geography, personal and political views, in a short summary, where their adult lives took them.  My HS had its bullies, but not a lot, and learning how to cope with them made most of us antifragile, fully capable of swimming through our personal circumstances.  While everyone on our contact list was designated Friend, we found gradients of friends to be the reality.  As we learn about people of our past nearing the completion of their careers, grandparents or at least empty nesters, the people we connected to as electronic friends were often very divergent from the people we had hung out with, shared classroom space with, or went to USY with as teens.  Was never close to the Cheerleader types then or now.  Found myself attracted to people whose posts and reactions displayed kindness.  Unfortunately, Facebook became Meta, algorithms ruled, and advertising made stockholders rich.  Those several dozen sources of electronic banter and sharing parts of our current lives dwindled to about fifteen, all admirable people if not the fifteen that I would have selected to continue from my original list of a hundred or so if free of algorithms.  But with those fifteen, we still share interests.  I like seeing places that they visit as they visit them.  Parents have died during that interval, with abundant messages of condolence.  Birthday greetings are conveyed by thoughtful reminders.  In order to get to the people, I have to endure a feed of twenty commercial, political, ideological, and otherwise disruptive messages.  And I have acquired my own Likes.  Pictures of cats, whether cute kitty or awesome tiger, can get a Like.  And I have my teams.  The algorithms figured out which ones they are.  So FB needs the time on it rationed, the responses mostly limited to messages to people I know personally who have made their own contribution, and maybe a swipe at a coach of one of my teams when they falter.  And as unsolicited faux news appears, I am generous with its remove procedure.  They ask you why.  "I find it offensive" needs to be added to the options.

Reddit enables me to think.  I subscribe to r/Judaism and r/Jewish cooking.  Unsubscribed to r/my  home state due to some unwelcome responses to one of my rare posts.  And usually I allow my initial screen to just be HOME with whatever the company thinks I should see.  There are thousands of subjects.  Everyone is anonymous with an avatar.  It also seems to be moderated, as trolls and overt nastiness is rare.  For r/Judaism I am a serious contributor.  People present dilemmas from anti-Semitic experiences to how to engage more to other queries more suitable to Dear Therapist.  My range of knowledge, my experience with synagogues and organizations, and my advanced age that has lived through how the Judaism of today got that way is helpful to scores of other people, Jewish and not.  Since my satisfaction as a contributor does not depend on keeping score with Likes, I can be at that site a very long time.  While often rewarding, I could and should be doing other things instead.

And finally, Twitter, that cesspool of toxic applications of the English language.  Its only redeeming feature is that people of major accomplishment, whether celebrities, elected officials, thinkers of the upper tier, have all established their base there.  While they travel in spheres other than mine, I am not likely to meet any of them.  But they let me into their electronic space where I can have my say if I keep to the rationed number of characters.  And it has helped my expressions.  When I exceed my allotment, I have to edit the response to make it more compact.  An unexpected benefit. People have been harmed by engaging too seriously, but if I really want is not friendship but access to ideas from people of public presence, that will suffice.  Harm to me is unlikely.

Sites I either neglect or reject are much larger that the four in which I engage. In another century, our endogenous CNS pleasure chemicals came from opium dens where people escaped from anything else they could be doing instead.  We have that now, more with X than with any of the others.  Except it is not really the escape from engagement but its illusion.  I keep a daily task list, created each evening, reviewed each morning, referenced periodically through the day until I compose a new one the next evening.  Engagement with old friends is on the list, FB being the best way to do that.  Many of these tasks, the writing and learning in particular, are also best done on screens, though my mind acting solo with what is presented or with what I create.  Engagement is better done selectively, even if helpful to others, as my contributions to r/Judaism often are.  Put your own mask on first.  Advance my own brain, environment, face to face encounters first.  And some rationed time for 

1. Email
2. Facebook
3. Reddit
4. Twitter, now rated X

Returning to Twitter

Twitter, now formally X but for most of its history probably Rated X as toxic, has settled into its new management. Yet with a war in progress, probably a just war to send the modern Amalakites who exploit whatever weaknesses they can identify without regard to consequences, I find myself lured back to commentary.  The service thrives in large part because of the vile nature of the people who display where mental reasoning bottoms out without an editor denying them their functioning SUBMIT icon.

But I have my ideas, too.  And I have the same SUBMIT icon as anyone else.  Needless to say, even as social media goes, my life hardly focuses on X as my forum.  I much prefer the more dignified Reddit where I know nobody, but also cannot tell who is either a public figure or personally accomplished.  Even FB puts me into connection with people that I know.  None are the best without conviction, none are the worst overcome by Yeats' passionate intensity.  I know them personally.  On X, I know many virtually, as they are often public figures with high profile positions, though none personally.  Some really are Yeats' the worst, but a few are also his best.   By now, a successful product of Smart America, I can tell which.

And like my FB personal friends, I have some conviction short of passionate intensity.  But I still have an intellect with sensibility.  My own perspectives may only generate a handful of reads and an occasional response, but it is a forum where I have at least enough conviction and intensity to report what I think to the few viewers that come by.  And with the world fraying around us as Yeats' worst spread their passionate intensity, I need to take ownership of my mind and my SUBMIT icon.

No Messages

FOMO.  My interactive electronics, other than telephone with my kids, shut down for shabbos each week.  From candle lighting Friday until the specified conclusion of shabbos on my congregation's weekly newsletter the internet gets placed someplace else, with rare exceptions like needing Waze to get where I need to go.  Festivals extend that.  These last two days.  When they begin on Wednesday night, or on rare occasions Saturday night, that extends to a three day internet free hiatus.  But mostly two days.  They can cluster a bit, like they do each fall for Rosh Hashanah, Sukkot, and Simchat Torah, plus the Shabbatot between them most years.  FOMO more at the beginning of this season.

I find myself in the middle.  Sukkot with its two days off ended, extended about an extra hour as I was having dinner with friends in a sukkah when the Festival time concluded.  I had left my cell phone in the car's cell phone holder, covered with a baseball cap to deter thievery.  When I returned to my car, Festival fully concluded, I just drove home.  No FOMO at all.

Into the house, supine posture on the living room couch, then see what I missed for two days.  Not exactly Nada, but nothing of any importance that would cause me any hesitation about setting the phone aside again next weekend.  All emails but one, some three dozen of them, from commercial or subscription sources, those automated messages that just go out from places that think I might want new tires or have an article that I have to read, or a FB friend had posted a message of some type not really directed at me personally.  Only one real notification, a message from an old friend wishing me a great Sukkot.  The FB notification bell read 14.  Majority were Likes of something I had posted about the Sukkot festival or something else.  Reminder that a Hagar the Horrible strip was open for view would never get opened, nor will a couple of real FB friends making one more post to share guidance from somebody else who shares their political hashkafa, which never gets opened lest I offer a false impression that I buy into something like that.  The text icon had only one message, that I am due to schedule platelet donation, which I already knew. My initiative to block unsolicited political messages over the past month seemed pretty successful.  Reddit r/Judaism, no messages.  They were all off for Sukkot too.  And Twitter, now appropriately Rated X as a public blight, had no responses to any of the few things I had posted.

So, it appears that much of cyberspace is very expendable.  We've probably known that for about a hundred years, ever since a personal telephone in the home became an American population norm.  When it rings we answer it.  Mostly still do.  For a long time, we wondered who might have called while we were away, mostly rationalizing those missed chances to chat with the largely correct assumption that people who really needed to reach us will call back.  Then we got answering machines and caller ID, so the compulsion to answer every ring before it stopped ringing became much less, though for many of my era never fully disappeared.  And in business and medical care, we accumulated secretaries, answering services, and beepers so there would never be FOMO in that setting.

While postal mail is never urgent, many of us are scripted to look out the door for the mail carrier.  Birthday or holiday cards could be open on arrival or deferred.  Letters, bills, bank statements all had their envelopes opened. Same with IRS refunds, and for those of us applying to schools that year, their correspondence was eagerly awaited each day. Solicitations for money, maybe not.  The nature of postal mail has shifted.  There are no letters, maybe a few greeting cards, no postcards of friends on vacation, bills on autopay and therefore either not notified by mail or already paid before the notices arrives.  Instead, we have a few periodicals, some by paid subscription, some a benefit from organizations where we hold membership, many unsolicited.  But mostly the daily mail is from somebody who desires a portion of our accumulated treasure, sometimes for a worthy cause, sometimes to enrich themselves.

And now we have things beyond our telephone calls that really are interactive.  Personally I don't care who or if anyone responds to my FB posts.  At one time when most of my Class of '69 enrolled, who is doing what today had more urgency than it does now.  Birthdays and anniversaries come while I am away on shabbos.  At one time a belated greeting went out, or if I remember I could be the first to convey my best wishes.  Now I'm just not part of FB that day.  Somewhere between sign-up and a fair number of years ago, notes from my friends mostly petered out in favor of pitches for things for me to buy or to believe in.  Those things don't seriously compete with shabbos or yontif when I am electronically away.  And the posts really haven't generated faux conversations for a considerable time

Some users of Twitter and Reddit try to handle their posts as dialog.  I don't.  I write what I want, let the readers do with it what they want.  No reason to respond to most whether shabbos or not.  

Some use their text messages as a conversation.  Good way to collide with something while driving.  And even if not driving, it's never as good as a telephone call for personal interaction with exchange of ideas.

So for two days periodically and one day every week, I have cyberspace rest.  No FOMO, as I am really not part of this global conversation in real time.  But in exchange, I get fifteen minutes of real interaction, those few minutes selecting who I want to talk to at kiddush or who might want to talk to me while we nosh on a mini black & white cookie and some babka.  Those only happen when the cell phones have been set aside.

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.

 

r/Judaism

Forget how I got introduced to Reddit.  It must have been through another article about how Jews collected to a designated topic published in The Forward or JTA.  I signed on and have been a regular contributor.  I don't know if there are trolls.  There don't seem to be, though I rarely read any of the comments that other responders make to the original post.  They gave me a handle, which I use.  And by now I have established a pattern of what I will and will not address.  A lot of posts come with a link to some other article, usually a reputable one from a respected source, though I scroll past these.  I want to read what the posters present, not what somebody else created that they want to convey.

Most of the participants are far younger than me.  They have themes that young people solicit advice to address.  Many are exploring Judaism for the first time, either as potential converts, people raised in secular homes, or people invited to a synagogue for the first time.  Others want background information, looking for basic sources for new entrants or those rediscovering to get their bearings.  Young guys know the internet sites.  I know the classic books.

There's some culture to exchange, notes on cuisine.  There's also some pilpul which I usually scroll past.  Unfortunately, internet anti-Semitism impacts most of them a lot more than it does me as a late life rather successful Jew with far less future uncertainty than most of them anticipate.

Most of all, it gives me a chance to be helpful to somebody I don't know in an electronic environment that appears considerably more respectful than most.

Avoiding Distractions

 One day, perhaps today, will be the day to set aside those screen distractions:  FB and Reddit primarily, where I am a contributor when I type, transiently engaged when I read, but when done have not produced anything important beyond a connection to an old friend from HS that was already there.  Email skirts that middle ground, containing significant communications amid the clutter.  But my Daily Task List will have a lot more completions and my Semi-Annual initiatives a lot better progress if I were more selective about what appears on my screen and how my typing skills respond.

Part of the Conversation

After some consideration, I paid the $50 subscription to join the Bari Weiss virtual community.  I also jointed two segments of Reddit.

Social media has become something of a wasteland, perhaps the toxic dump of cyberspace.  Conversations abound, trolls lurk,  You don't get to choose who else shares that forum, but that was also true in college where I had no control over who the Admissions Office would place in the classrooms with me.  Unlike Twitter, though, it wasn't anybody and everybody.  And the rules of idea exchange were better defined.

Reddit and Weiss at least define the conversation by subject.  Weiss charges a fee and targets her kind of people, which is about as close to my kind of people as I have come across on the internet.  Reddit seems to have mostly sincere people thus far, at least in the two subject areas that I have selected.

I'll see how it goes, but thus far, nothing particularly offensive.