The Disappearance of Big Ideas

August 30, 2011

Neal Gabler bemoans in the following New York Times article the demise of the “big idea.” He is on to something, but occasionally shows his own biases. Some relevant quotes:

If our ideas seem smaller nowadays, it’s not because we are dumber than our forebears but because we just don’t care as much about ideas as they did. In effect, we are living in an increasingly post-idea world — a world in which big, thought-provoking ideas that can’t instantly be monetized are of so little intrinsic value that fewer people are generating them and fewer outlets are disseminating them, the Internet notwithstanding. Bold ideas are almost passé. Read the rest of this entry »

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Posted by Arie Folger

Biblical Advice for the Internet Age iii

July 27, 2011

This is the third of four instalments on internet privacy and Biblical values. Last week we discussed how peoples’ professional and even social life suffers from the excess information we put on line, which does not remain private, and suggested some practical measures, inspired by Micah’s prophecy, that would spare people much anguish. Not everybody, however, can simply fix his or her on line profile and re-engineer his or her online identity to be more wholesome, more chaste. Some people suffer their identity irrevocably, as we will see.

Some people land in difficulty because poor taste and poor mores; others because of poor judgement. Some people exhibit smaller or greater moral-ethical failings, and commit crimes, for which they subsequently get arrested. Others get arrested by association, because of the poor, apparently criminal company they keep, but are ultimately freed of all charges, or are arrested through no fault of their own whatsoever – mistakes happen. Courts eventually sort out who is or isn’t guilty, but the court of public opinion doesn’t necessarily keep up with all the updates. Read the rest of this entry »

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Posted by Arie Folger

Can the Minority Save the Majority?

July 27, 2011

Our Western society is, in some ways, better than those that preceded it. There is more and more widespread tolerance and equal justice than perhaps throughout all of history. In other ways, however, our society represents a regression from a more moral, more pious past (although, in truth, in many segments of the world’s population, in many societies, that piety and morality was often just a veneer, covering up tremendous lust and violence). As religious people, we hope that we can combine the progress of today with the qualities of yesterday, but in our secular age, modest, moral, pious people are in the minority. Jews are particularly a small minority, and have always been one, outside of Israel.

Is there a rational hope to impact, influence and elevate society all around us? Can Orthodox Jews hope to impact and elevate all Jews? Can moral and pious people everywhere in the West rationally hope to impact and elevate all of Western society, to help society slowly veer away from hedonism and irreverence, to a golden fusion of freedom and piety, to a society where responsible freedom and responsible piety rule?

According to a recently published article, which agrees with an old biblical teaching, I’d say the response is a resounding yes. Read the rest of this entry »

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Posted by Arie Folger

Speaking To Your Kids About Personal Safety

July 25, 2011

We are all devastated by the horrible murder of Leiby Kletzky. Slowly but surely, the suspicion is growing that Leiby knew his attacker. Indeed, most children who are abused or abducted suffer at the hand of people they knew, not complete strangers. Abusers may come from the circle of family and friends, or they may be strangers who have slowly groomed the kids, and even their families, to trust them.

Hence, to protect our children, it is not enough to teach them not to talk to strangers, tough that remains important, as ever. It is instead important to empower our children to seek protection even from people who may be close to them, and it is the parents’ responsibility to empower their kids, by talking to them about these matters.

However, parents who try to raise their kids in a wholesome, innocent environment stand before a dilemma, as they try to warn their kids without prematurely explaining the nature of sexuality and sexual abuse to them. In the following 30 minute video, the noted educater, R’ Yakov Horowitz shows how to go about developing this aspect of the parent-child relationship and how to protect both the integrity of the child’s body and soul. [Hat tip CF]
Read the rest of this entry »

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Chance Favors the Concentration of Wealth, Study Shows – What’s Torah’s Alternative?

July 24, 2011

Just saw this: Chance favors the concentration of wealth, study shows [PhysOrg]. Quite interesting and convincing, that save for corrective government action, over time, chance favors few people becoming mega rich while others become poor.

Contrast that with the biblical idea of Sabbatical and Jubilee years. In the beginning, land is distributed evenly. Then, every seven years, everyone effectively goes bankrupt (overdue loans are forgiven), and every fifty years, all agricultural land reverts to its original estate. That way, expertise, human capital can allow for accumulating wealth (no, you won’t lose your accumulated expertise on the Sabbatical year), so people can still get rich, work pays, but a limit is put on the systemic bias that may otherwise develop in favor of large, super wealthy landowners.

How could such a system be implemented in our financial (rather than agrarian) economies?

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Biblical Advice for the Internet Age ii

July 21, 2011

In last week’s post, I described how Internet 2.0 – technologies undergirding Facebook, Youtube, ubiquitous personalized search, etc. – has steadily eroded privacy and turned our lives increasingly into that akin to aquarium fishes: every bit of information is quickly becoming public, the homes we live in are almost becoming glass houses. On the one hand, this increased transparency is a democratic dream come true. Many wrongdoers have been exposed because of the electronic trail they left behind. Technology has even empowered ordinary citizens, who can now pick up the electronic trail of their elected leaders’ wrongdoing.

But is there also an “on the other hand,” a dark underbelly to this great feast of transparency? Read the rest of this entry »

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Posted by Arie Folger

The Ecologically Correct Funeral

July 18, 2011

Westerners are increasingly becoming aware of how ecologically wasteful – and toxic – the standard funeral is. Embalming, hardwood coffins, varnishes to prevent coffins from disintegrating in the ground, steel and concrete liners and large grave monuments all dump large amounts of resources into the ground – and they are costly, too. Even cremation is ecologically wasteful. As the video below argues, increasingly, Westerners are waking up to that fact and are choosing simpler burials.

In the process, they are (mostly unwittingly) adopting long standing Jewish funerary practices. Simple caskets and simple shrouds, no embalming, no open casket and no cremation are the hallmarks of traditional Jewish funerals. Read the rest of this entry »

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The Goodly Tents of Jacob

July 14, 2011

While the gentile prophet Bil’ám (Balaam) is, on the balance, condemned by Jewish tradition, he enjoys the rare distinction that some of his words were incorporated in the Jewish prayerbook. Just about every prayerbook includes somewhere in the beginning of the book a paragraph beginning with Bil’ám‘s words: מַה־טֹּבוּ אֹהָלֶיךָ יַעֲקֹב מִשְׁכְּנֹתֶיךָ יִשְׂרָאֵֽל – How goodly are your tents, O Jacob, and your tabernacles, O Israel!

Once, in a discussion about the layout of siddurim, I remarked that that paragraph does not really belong in the body of the siddur – or, more precisely, in the morning prayers section – and that it would be far better to print it, for example, on the inside of the front cover. My reasoning was that the custom of reciting this verse relates particularly to the synagogues, symbolized by the tents and tabernacles of Bil’ám‘s verse. Indeed, R’ Ovadya Sforno comments on that verse:

מה טובו אהליך יעקב. בתי מדרשות… משכנותיך. בתי כנסיות ומקדשי אל המיוחדים לשכן שמו שם ולקבל תפלת המתפללים.

 How goodly are your tents, O Jacob – [those are the] study halls … Your tabernacles – [these are the] synagogues and other sanctuaries of G”d, dedicated to the presence of His Name and for the [heavenly] reception of the the worshipers’ prayers.

This was not met with anything near consensus, but as the image below, taken from an old Rödelheim festival prayerbook, argues, the phrase may have little to do with the morning prayer service and everything to do with visiting a synagogue. Read the rest of this entry »

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Biblical Advice for the Internet Age

July 12, 2011

[Note: I am back. After a three month hiatus, during which travel and other obligations made it rather hard to post, I am back, and have prepared a number of interesting posts for the upcoming weeks. Thanks for hanging in and being so patient!]

In the twenty odd years since its inception, the World Wide Web has proven to be a most revolutionary innovation, enabling human cooperation on a previously unimaginable scale. At the fulcrum of this massive cooperation machine, we find the ever more ubiquitous social networks and other socially enabled sites, which enable us to exchange information and connect to each other in an unprecedented manner.

We maintain contact with friends and family, reconnect to ever more long lost classmates and colleagues, discover previously unknown relatives, and even expand our professional networks, seek jobs and recruit clients with ease, whereas as recently as fifteen years ago, we still needed to rely mainly on printed phone books and classified ads.

And yet, a malaise is setting in. Repeated stories of job applications denied after HR managers uncovered compromising personal pages, as well as repeated privacy breaches potentially exposing users to identity theft is making users more wary. Read the rest of this entry »

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Meditating on the Tragedy in Japan

April 11, 2011

It’s been a month since tragedy hit Japan and over 25’000 men, women and children died, many of them swept away by the terrible waves of the tsunami. 150’000 are still homeless, living in temporary shelters. Many more are probably living with friends and relatives, so that the actual number of homeless may be much higher.

While we cannot possibly make sense of out such a human tragedy, it does (or should!) evoke in us a feeling of human brotherhood, shared suffering, a tremendous sadness that so many of G”d’s creatures, each endowed — as all humans are — with a spark of G”d-likeness, were so tragically lost (cf. the aggadeta in Megilla 10b, where G”d rebukes he angels at the Splitting of the Sea of Reeds, where the Egyptian army perished, saying “My creatures are drowning in the sea …”). It also evokes in us our very own human frailty. In the words of the author of the High Holiday liturgical poem Untane Toqef, man bears resemblance to:

… the broken shard, like dry grass, a wilted bloom, a passing shadow, a disappearing cloud, the blowing wind, the whirling dust, the fleeting dream.

And despite our frailty, we, humans, are called upon to better the world, and Israel has a particular responsibility to lead by example and construct a just, loving and spiritual society.

When faced with massive but distant tragedies such as these, one must of course ask what it is one wants to achieve.

What such a situation calls for, is, first and foremost, an emotional study of those who were facing their deaths, and of those who, while they survived, saw their homes and often their friends and relatives, too, swept away under the terrible waves. Beyond that, the sought after texts should give strength to those who survived but became bereft and destitute, and should allow those far away to explore the religious questions and needs of the survivors.

So what texts may be fitting meditations on those themes of human frailty? Which texts may give us strength in the face of the fear of death? I want to suggest the following psalms. Read the rest of this entry »

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