David Wolpe: belief

Transcript context

…I’ve thought about social media quite a bit and written on them, and I have two questions relating social media to Judaism. If you think about the tradition of the Torah, the Torah is so much itself commentary on the Torah. And there’s Mishnah and Talmud. Everything’s commentary upon commentary upon commentary. But there’s something about social media that seems to act to strip away context, and people who write for mainstream media will tell you this: “Well, I wrote an article that ended up on Facebook in a very different setting than how I intended it to be read.” And you can say all you want — all the hyperlinks are there, but people don’t click through. What do you think is the intellectual future of a belief system based on commentary on commentary on commentary, now injected into a world with this technology that so strips away context and just gives you some bald statement of something? I think that Judaism has the same problem that any thick civilization has in a world in which, as you say, context is stripped away. And not only is context stripped away, but attention to any one thing is scanter and less than it used to be. So, for example, a lot of Jewish commentary is based on your recognizing the reference that I make. Who recognizes references anymore? Because people don’t spend years studying books. The optimistic take on that is that the availability with ease of the vast libraries of Jewish learning at your fingertips will create a more conversant community. And in some ways I think that has happened. The negative is that Jewish culture will get thinner and thinner, and Judaism, as you said, depends on a very deep and thick culture. If I look at the history of the arts in other areas, I see a tendency for centralization of the past. So I think today, actually, many more people read Shakespeare than they did 30 years ago. But older plays and fiction are in general less read. More people read Jane Austen, but the second-tier authors from that time are less read. Maybe from the 1960s it will be the Beatles, but the Byrds will fall away. Whatever. Do you see that happening with Jewish philosophy and with the Hebrew Bible? There’s a centralization of what people know and a falling away of what superficially appears to be less important.…

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