Recently in Jewish Issues Category

It has been heartwarming to read the warm responses to Rabbi Waxman's post asking Beliefnet to reconsider its decision to cancel Virtual Talmud. Virtual Talmud offered an alternative model for internet communications: civil discourse pursued in postings over a time frame of days (rather than moments) predicated upon the belief in the value of and respect for alternative viewpoints.

We hope we have showed through our debates that Jewish tradition offers a rich resource that can help us find answers to all of today's questions: from finding contemporary meaning in ancient Jewish rituals, to making sense of the political and cultural issues leading the headlines, to exploring our personal roles in repairing the world.

Well, loyal readers, all good things must come to an end and we’ve been informed that this particular experiment in blogging as a forum for creating wide-ranging discussion on topics of interest to contemporary Jews has run its course. Maybe it’s that blogging doesn’t lend itself so well to the longer and more thoughtful reflections we tried to put out, or that multi-person blogs do better when they involve ruthless smackdowns rather than nuanced responses. Whatever the case, I’ve certainly enjoyed the opportunity to enter into discussion with such thoughtful colleagues and, especially, to read your responses-–both those that were positive and those that were, perhaps, less so.

What I saw is that there is great interest in the topics we discussed, in using our Jewish lenses to look at contemporary life and issues to engage core questions of values and meaning. I saw passionate responses from readers that suggest, as is the case with me, that these questions aren’t merely of academic or intellectual interest but are issues that really matter, and the way we in which discuss them matters as well.

There are few times in this blog’s history when I have felt that Rabbi Grossman was one hundred percent correct in her criticisms of my ideas. However, a few weeks ago she called me out for citing a few crack websites on Barak Obama’s advisors. She was right. I never should have cited those websites--they were wrong and I apologize to my readers for my misstep.

As I intimated in my first post the notion that Obama is somehow bad for the Jews is absurd based on what we know and what we have seen. All we as a community should be focused on is what the person has said and what he has done. While I am still unsure about a few issues and disagree with him on a few others, the more the campaign continues, the more I like what I hear and see from Obama. Many have already praised his talk on race as being indicative of the type of nuanced and complex yet straight and simple kind of thinking that this country needs, I would like add just a few points that have not been addressed.

It has been said that if you say something often enough and emphatically enough, more and more people will believe it. Something that at first may seem obviously ridiculous with repetition becomes accepted fact. That is why Holocaust deniers are placing their works in college libraries so that future students will come to question the historical fact of the Holocaust. That is also why purveyors of hate are having a field day with an Internet that provides unlimited and immediate access to spread all different forms of hate, particularly anti-Semitism.

Though cloaked in modern technology, the problem of spreading lies about one group of people to stimulate hatred and violence against them is probably as old as human kind. It is a crucial element in the Book of Esther we will read next Thursday night on Purim. The story recounts how the evil vizier Haman sought to destroy all the Jews in the Persian Empire because he was insulted that the Jew Mordecai would not bow down to him. The Jews are saved when King Ahashverus’ queen, Esther, who had hidden her identity as a Jew and Mordecai’s relative, reveals she is Jewish and begs the king to save her life and the lives of her people.

It is a truism that the power of the Internet is to allow for the proliferation and dissemination of information without passing through central sources (newspapers, radio, TV) that would screen or block them. The advantages are obvious: repressive governments can be pressured by bloggers, writers and artists who are given a forum for bringing their work directly to viewers, and so forth. The danger, of course, of not having barriers to putting out information is that a lot of junk gets out there that a responsible central source (an editor, a journalist) might filter out or at least provide some perspective on. (“All the news that’s fit to print” is still an operative category: I may want untrammeled access to information, but I also want discerning people who are held to high standards of integrity to offer their honest opinions on which information is worth paying attention to).