Rav Sholom Kamenetsky and Rav Aaron Lopiansky offer insight and advice about technology today

Photos: Meir Haltovsky, Elchanan Kotler

IN today’s murky world of skewed morals and eroded boundaries, so many of us crave the clarity of immovable black-and-white principles. Those principles are all the more essential when it comes to our engagement in the digital sphere. But many frum Jews find they do need to be connected and available on various digital platforms. Black and white is an easier paradigm, but gray is where many of us live. How do we maintain our unbending values amid the gray? How can we understand, define, and set limits in a digital world strewn with risks and pitfalls? And how can we counter the lure of a technological movement that exploits some of humanity’s most basic needs for its own selfish gains?

As tens of thousands of women gear up to attend the massive Nekadesh event revolving around this very issue, Rav Sholom Kamenetsky, rosh yeshivah of the Talmudical Yeshiva of Philadelphia, and Rav Aaron Lopiansky, rosh yeshivah of the Yeshiva of Greater Washington, share their wisdom and guidance

Social media presents a certain attraction, a lure that quickly becomes irresistible. Is this pull to constantly be connected to a large social network a new phenomenon, or is it rooted in a deep, innate human need?

Rav Lopiansky

Humans are social beings; that’s something that’s been part of us since sheishes yimei bereishis. (Adam, of course was created alone, yet, as the pasuk itself says, “lo tov heyos ha’adam l’vado — it was not good for man to be alone.” See also Rambam Hilchos Deios, 6:1). Our desire to interact with society is not merely a reality we must contend with; on the contrary, it is a positive quality, even a vital one. Chazal speak strongly of the importance of not being poresh min hatzibbur. Attaching oneself to a unified social environment is that valuable.

Social media has stepped into what is an essentially positive dynamic and destroyed it. It has created an imagined necessity to constantly be engaged in rapid-fire social interaction with the desperate sense that, unless I am constantly posting, or responding to posts, I cease to exist.

More specifically, three factors contribute to the “unhealthy” nature of social media versus the “healthy” character of natural human socializing.

The first is that “healthy” socializing demands autonomous decision-making. It must be up to you to decide when to socialize, how to socialize, and with whom you socialize. Exposing yourself to a world where that freedom of choice is robbed from you places you well within “unhealthy” territory.

Second, overindulgence in a healthy practice quickly transforms it into an unhealthy one. Eating is a perfect example. You must eat to survive — it’s that vital — but once you reach a certain point, the eating itself can harm you. It’s the same thing here. Social media allows for endless connectivity, well beyond the healthy and vital quantity of a necessary social life.

Third, a core factor in the original idea of social life is the “human” component. It’s the being in the presence of a fellow human that provides the warmth, and the comfort, that is so basic to our nature. Social media doesn’t provide that; what it offers is a synthetic substitute. Operating in a space where the people we feel close with aren’t real people is very unhealthy indeed.

Rav Kamenetsky

The need to communicate is a basic part of human nature, this is certain. But social media has manipulated that need on multiple levels.

There is an incredible Gaon in Mishlei that seeks to understand humanity’s pull toward laitzanus, the mindless pursuit of trivializing and belittling all that is holy — a pursuit that offers no tangible benefit whatsoever. The Gaon explains that whenever someone performs a mitzvah, that very act creates a ruach that thirsts for yet another mitzvah. And the same goes for aveiros. When someone commits an aveirah, a ruach tumah, a spirit of impurity, is created — which in turn craves another aveirah. Laitzanus might not provide any material gain, but once it begins, the thirst for more just grows stronger and stronger and stronger.

What we are seeing with social media — that obsessive need to share, post, comment on posts being shared, and then respond to those comments in return — is very much the words of the Gaon playing themselves out in real time and at an incalculable velocity. This is a partial explanation for the phenomenon of today’s social media-crazed world.

A different issue at hand is the imagined need to constantly showcase. This too taps into a very inherent part of human nature. There’s a fascinating insight said in the name of an early Acharon known as the Mahari Kasuto, quoted in the hakdamah to the second volume of the Ketzos Hachoshen. There, the Mahari Kasuto is quoted as saying that “one can go up to Shamayim and see the greatest treasures in the entire universe, yet he will have no pleasure from that sight unless he can share what he saw with another human being.”

Humans love to share experiences; this is a fact of life. But the need to share step-by-step, live footage of every one of life’s experiences is a distortion of this need that has been exploited by social media.