From the Rabbi's Study
Torah, Technology and Me — and You
June 2002

It finally happened. Not that I'm particularly current or adept with fancy digital technology. Palm Pilots intimidate me - I just throw my Rolodex into my briefcase. Why some attached files download and others don't mystify me, but that's okay. I just tell folks they can fax things to me and I'll receive them on my handy, first-generation, curly-roll-of-paper fax machine via my non-dedicated line.

But something new did have me staring in astonishment. A colleague pulled out what looked like a Palm Pilot-type apparatus, pulled off what looked like the case, and unfolded it into…. a keyboard. The Palm part clipped on to the keyboard, recording and saving the minutes and notes from the meeting. Occasionally he tapped on the screen with a stylus that was also tucked into the little package.

It brings to mind an ad campaign I've seen around town for a local synagogue. It has me puzzled. The image is of a computer and the text reads something like: "Torah. The original technology." I'm certain that I am not remembering the text entirely accurately - and I truly mean no disrespect to the host shul, or even the creators of the ad - but my attempts to discern the intended message leave me stumped.

Are we supposed to nod in agreement with the notion that the Torah got it all down way back then and anything we could come up with today - even computer-based technologies - could not surpass it? Or are we being primed to enter the world of Torah through the enhanced access that I.T. can provide? Perhaps we are being invited to accept that the students of this era, who can study Torah while also learning a new, broader range of subjects and skills, are the true inheritors of our evolving civilization. Or, going down another road entirely, that it is foolishness, even heresy, to consider that there are any other paths to Torah than the simple, low-tech scrolls we venerate in our synagogue arks.

Hey, the original was really low tech, according to the story: a pair of stone tablets, etched with, with…. well, um, gee. The divine, etching finger of, of, er, the heavenly Stonecutter?

Now I'm in trouble. I seem to have led us back to a technological moment far more fantastical than the fold-up pocket computer. Could I possibly be comparing the mysterious workings of computers, digital technology and the Internet with the mysterious workings of creation, redemption and especially, revelation?

Maybe that's where the ad wants us to go. To connect the mysteries in our daily lives, and the changes that progress and modernity have wrought, with the deeper mysteries of our beginning, our sustained identity as a people and the simple yet dazzlingly multi-dimensional "technology" that holds it all together, Torah.

We just celebrated, in May, the third of the year's three festivals. Other than the commemorations linked with Tisha B'Av, in July, our year impels us forward from Shavuot, and its month of Sivan, through Tammuz and Av to Elul, the month of preparing for the days of Awe.

Rabbi Zalman Shachter-Shalomi described a paradigm-shifting experience of celebrating Shavuot at Sinai in the mid-‘80s with a mixed multitude of Buddhists, Muslims, Sufis, shamans, Christians and Jews. He said, reflecting on passing through an oasis towards the sand after they had left behind the urban chaos of Cairo: "Against the fragility of our modern technology, the forty years in the desert began to make a different sense."

Shachter-Shalomi concluded his reflection as follows: "Mordecai Kaplan envisioned the reconstitution of the Jewish People…. It is so clear to me that we cannot lean only on old theophanies [divine revelations], which were good for the times they were given. We need to renew the old in the light of the radically different."

Torah's "technology" need not be irrelevant or overwhelming. It may leave us awed. It can have us stumped. But may we never overlook the richness it offers to connect our selves, our families, our communities and the global village in a great nexus of connection, and may that connection serve, in its infinite variables, letaken olam bemalkhut shadday, as the Aleynu prayer says, to repair the world through the all-embracing divinity.

Engage in Torah. Wrestle with it. No special equipment is required; just a mind and heart open to the challenge.