Between the Haskalah and the Internet

With God's help

And This Is for Yehuda – 5773

In recent years the religious and Torah-oriented world has been wrestling intensely with the issue of the internet. The more conservative part maintains that its harm outweighs its benefit, if it has any at all. The more open part holds that the advantages of the web are significant, and that it is wrong to forbid its use. It seems to me that, at least in the central sectors of modern religious society, this discussion is unnecessary, because we have no real way to avoid exposure to this medium, whether we like it or not. A more important discussion is what we ought to do in the age of the internet. Does this require conceptual changes, or should we make do with various filters, as is customary in our circles?

I should emphasize that I am not speaking here about pornographic sites and other valueless sites common on the web, but about information and arguments that may lead the young person in directions that seem undesirable to us (that is, I am speaking about "after your hearts" ('after your hearts') and not about "after your eyes" ('after your eyes')).

The religious-traditional reflex is that when change opens up new possibilities, we must tighten up and close things down, make a safeguard upon a safeguard, and raise the walls ("When people are gathering in, spread out; and when people are spreading out, gather in" — when others are gathering in, scatter; when others are scattering, gather in). It seems to me that this very reflex led us, during the Haskalah, to enormous damage, because the young Jew was placed at a problematic crossroads, facing the following dilemma: should he be an intelligent heretic (engage in secular learning and open himself to the world, but then be declared a heretic), or a foolish believer (that is, remain a simple righteous person, closed off to the new winds, without the ability to sift good from bad)?

Many young Jews chose the first option, and some chose the second. Thus we received the rotten fruit of that dilemma, which we encounter to this day: the religious grew accustomed to being foolish (to shutting themselves in and sealing themselves off from innovations, even to the point of excommunication, and fighting a lost rearguard battle against them), while the others grew accustomed to going with the spirit of the times and being heretics. Thus our world was divided into conservative pious hardliners and open, sloppy types, at best. Despite the superficiality of this description, which is unavoidable given the brevity of this platform, it seems to me not far from the truth.

Today we stand at a similar crossroads, and apparently are repeating the same mistake: information in every field has become more accessible, and we present the choice as whether to close oneself off and remain a rigid religionist, or to open up and become lax. Here too that crossroads produces either closed religious people, or open people who become secularized, to varying degrees. It seems we still have not found the magic solution that would enable us to create a believer who is also intelligent, that is, a person open to the new winds, who knows how to separate the kernel from the husk, and remains committed to his faith.

It is difficult to criticize the giants of the generations who acted during the Haskalah. And And what are we, that you should complain against them? — who are we to complain against them?! But even so, it seems to me hard to ignore the accumulated experience. Even the Sages allowed themselves to criticize the patriarchs and the biblical figures, because history and a retrospective view of it enabled them to understand things better than those who lived amid the storms and crises of their own period. So it is today as well. Some will feel more comfortable with the somewhat worn metaphor, and in my humble opinion not an entirely accurate one, of a dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant. Therefore I will nevertheless allow myself a small measure of constructive criticism.

Thomas Kuhn, one of the most important philosophers of science in the twentieth century, divides the development of science into two periods: a period of normal science and a period of crisis. When there are data that the standard theory cannot cope with, the paradigm must be replaced. Instead of insisting on continued use of normal science, we should seek a new theory. In parallel, I would like to suggest that a crossroads like the one we went through during the Haskalah, and in which we now find ourselves, is a period of crisis in which we must replace the paradigm. The policy of tightening up and automatically closing things off, that is, the array of safeguards we have grown accustomed to adding and piling up in times of crisis, does not do the job. Something requires change in us, and not only in the environment.

One of the central reasons for these crises and their results is that educators are not equipped with the tools needed to help their students, yet insist on not changing the paradigm. In such situations, the student feels smarter than his educator, because he does not receive adequate answers from him. When history reaches a crossroads of this type, the traditional educator finds himself helpless. The easiest course he can choose is to ban and forbid, and to label everyone who opens himself to the unfamiliar and threatening as a heretic and a transgressor.

The way to deal with this is to change the orientation of the educators. They need to enter this new world together with their students and help them learn and process it in a measured and critical way. I do not mean supplementing education with the intricacies of the internet, but rather broadening it in philosophy, in the various arguments found in fields relevant to faith and tradition, and the like. If the educators of the Haskalah period had entered, with all the intellectual power with which they were blessed — a power familiar to us from their wondrous books of Jewish law and analytical study — together with their students into the thick of the matter, studying science, philosophy, and historical research with them, and helping them advance in an open and critical way, perhaps the results that remain visible to this day would look somewhat different.

The implication for our own time is self-evident. Instead of constantly thinking about how to close and filter, which is close to impossible, and in my view also undesirable, at least on the intellectual plane, we should rather open things up completely. We must leave behind the mentality of closure and wall-building. We must think about how to enter the medium and the new world, with all its branches, together with our students, in order to give them guidance and a healthy critical sense toward what they read. The average internet surfer is not always equipped with the tools needed to evaluate the arguments and information to which he is exposed. An older and better-educated person can help him with that: to show him that not all that glitters — what is attractively and aesthetically written — is gold, that is, true and intellectually honest. A religious outlook that has confidence in itself should not recoil from exposure to information and arguments. At most we will learn a few new things. The alternative is that our young people will surf there without us, and then they may reach hasty and irresponsible conclusions.

From my not especially extensive experience on the web, mainly in the 'Stop Here, Think' forum, I encounter, in all sorts of ways, many dozens of young people who are exposed to different materials and acquire very impressive learning in a range of fields. Some reach extremely high levels in complex areas of knowledge, such as evolution, philosophy, Talmudic and biblical scholarship, archaeology, and more. Of course, they encountered almost none of these things in their schools and yeshivot, and therefore they have no tools to cope with the significance of these matters, and scientific education, as is well known, is no guarantee of a correct philosophical understanding of them. They reach hasty conclusions that simply do not follow from the facts to which they are exposed, some of them from tendentious and biased sites. Needless to say, they receive no adequate response from their educators, who explain to them that all this is useless material and intellectual smoke and mirrors, while recommending proper filtering and pure fear of Heaven, together with fervent and focused prayer. In my experience, that does not really convince them. They understand very well that these are expressions of despair and helplessness. This understanding pushes them all the more forcefully outside, since they come to disdain the tradition in which they were educated, and even those who do not abandon religious life often develop feelings of inferiority toward the intelligent people out there, from the understanding that in their world there are no real answers to what is taking place out there.

Today intellectual discourse takes place primarily on the internet, while the outside world, in all its various shades, brings there its finest intellectual powers, possessed of extraordinary powers of expression and writing; our tradition, by contrast, is represented there by fourth-rate preachers who are met, and justly so, with torrents of ridicule and contempt. The finest intellectual powers of the religious and Torah world are occupied with Torah study in great analytical depth, while ignoring the distress and severe problems their students encounter throughout the virtual world. And if one of them does engage in thought and ideas, he usually sails off into the depths of Greek philosophy — it seems to me that the yeshiva world is almost the only place where people still engage in this 'forbidden' field — through the kindly translations of Saadia Gaon and Maimonides. Scholasticism is alive, well, and kicking, some six hundred years after its death. We are redeeming Aristotle, of blessed memory, whose lips move in the grave day after day. By contrast, Kant, Freud, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Wittgenstein, Russell, Dawkins (to put him in a different category), and many others remain unanswered, and every day they embarrass thousands of young people who are exposed to their thought and arguments with no ability to cope with them.

I must repeat that I do not mean to say that every educator must develop marvelous skill in the mysteries of computers and the internet. Here the limitations of age are almost built in. What I mean is that, precisely in light of the accessibility of information in every field through the web, it is much more important today that the educator know the relevant information and acquire skill in philosophy and in scientific and critical thinking, even if the details are less important. We must now correct the distortion created during the Haskalah, a distortion that is only worsening. Of course, not everyone is supposed to be an expert in every field, but everyone must take part in this general task, and Through me and through you, the One above will be glorified — through you and me the Most High will be praised.

If we are ready to change the educational paradigm we received from our tradition, if we understand that the proper continuation of tradition comes precisely by way of change, if we develop an educational doctrine that opens instead of closes, one that imparts confidence instead of fear and feelings of inferiority, then we have already done half the work. The terrible fear and ignorance that the traditional world projects are among our greatest educational disasters. And the main thing is not to be afraid at all — and the main thing is not to be afraid at all.