The last time I wrote about technology in this space one of my children seeing what was on tap for that week’s column got a quizzical look: “Again?” Since there may be readers who have the same reaction when intermittently I turn my attention to technological threats to us as Jews and as human beings an explanation is in order.

Were the dangers of today’s technology static manageable and merely external sounding the alarm about them every once in a long while would suffice. But that’s not the reality. The advent of television for example introduced a new danger to the Jewish home but its nature hasn’t changed much over the decades.

But the challenges posed by today’s technological advances are something else entirely. They are dynamic and constantly changing as technology becomes ever more ubiquitous and portable. Today’s advances pole-vault as it were over the defenses we hastily erected in response to yesterday’s digital innovations.

Many of these technologies have also become seemingly indispensable to functioning as citizens of contemporary society in conducting business and other aspects of daily living. I write “seemingly indispensable” because I don’t believe we will ever reach a point at which it becomes truly impossible to live without a full embrace of spiritually and morally inimical technology. That’s because as Chazal teach ein HaKadosh Baruch Hu ba b’trunya im briyosav — Hashem doesn’t challenge us with tests we can’t possibly pass.

Thus when we tell ourselves this or that technology is impossible to do without and we’ve got to make peace with it what we really mean is that living without it would require more sacrifice of comfort and convenience than we’re prepared to endure. As for those situations in which for example one needs to file an application and the sole option is to do so online we need to clear our heads make a cost-benefit analysis of what’s at stake and adopt the motto of A Yid gibzach an eitzah — a Jew finds a way.

And to understand just what that means in practice perhaps one ought to take in hand a book describing what it meant to be a Shabbos- kashrus- and taharas hamishpachah-observant Jew living under Stalin’s rule. Granted not many survived the pressure with their Judaism in tact but those who did can teach us a few things about “finding a way.”

But even without going to that extreme even earlier spiritual threats in our modern society such as that of television weren’t nearly as pernicious in their effects as those of today’s technology which inflicts lasting harm by encroaching upon and tampering with essential aspects of our personalities our minds and our souls. MIT professor Sherry Turkle a leading writer in this area just authored a New York Times op-ed in which she put it so well: “Technology doesn’t just do things for us. It does things to us changing not just what we do but who we are.”

Technology wears us down eating away at important parts of ourselves our sensitivity to others’ feelings and to their privacy and to the priceless moment-by-moment opportunities of life. Since the losses are subtle and incremental we fail to take note of them and sometimes dismiss them as inconsequential.

But they’re not at all. They’re cumulative and ultimately transformative and we have no one but ourselves to blame. We have become our own enslavers and no external taskmaster can possibly accomplish what willing self subjugation can.

And so I continue to write every now and then to delineate and dissect various aspects of an ever-changing multi-pronged threat the likes of which I don’t believe human society has faced before. The tech companies aren’t about to give up their new product rollouts society as a whole will continue to become ever more self addicted and communal bans don’t work so all that remains is the power of moral suasion.

OPPRESSED AND UNDERPAID 

A recent article in the Forward reports on a study of the compensation earned by heads of major Jewish non-profit organizations. It lists both the most overpaid and underpaid chief executives at these groups and appearing among the latter is a name familiar to our readers: Agudath Israel of America’s Rabbi Chaim Dovid Zwiebel.
“The rewards of trying to use one’s talents and energies to serve the Jewish community” he told the newspaper “extend far beyond monetary compensation.” And to its credit the newspaper’s editorial on the study highlighted Rabbi Zwiebel’s statement noting that “it’s rare to hear that sort of humility” in the ranks of Jewish organizational leadership.
During the several years I had the privilege and joy to work under Rabbi Zwiebel the line repeated in the office in Rabbi Moshe Sherer’s name was that Agudath Israel imitates the Divine in regard to employee compensation: Just as in Bircas Hamazon we ask that HaRachaman Hu yefarneseinu b’chavod so too does Agudah’s benefits package consist more of communal honor than of salary.
In the Agudah head’s case the honor he receives for his superlative klal work is generously supplemented by another source of honor. Chazal teach after all that the true mechubad is one who is mechabeid es habriyos the person who truly honors others. And by that standard Reb Chaim Dovid possesses honor by the boatload.
The aforementioned Forward study also highlights another glaring discrepancy:
The … fourth annual survey of Jewish not-for-profit organizations shows little change in communal leadership or compensation or in the gender gap that has women still lagging far behind the national trends in salary and representation in the upper echelons of Jewish communal power. The number of women in leadership roles grew slightly and the gender gap in pay narrowed since last year by four cents….
Studies by other Jewish organizations mirror the Forward’s findings. A study of rabbinic compensation by gender released in June … found that women rabbis consistently earn less than their male counterparts as much as 77 cents to the dollar.
So for four years now the Forward has been watching as women’s compensation and opportunities for leadership roles have continued to be vastly out of whack with those of men and nothing changes. Check that: The situation from last year to this one improved by four cents. Yet all the newspaper can muster in response is a helpless-sounding editorial statement that
in the end all the Forward can do is continue the painstaking work of presenting this information as accurately as possible…. It will be up to board members donors citizens and other community leaders to insist that the best practices of some Jewish not-for-profits are extended to all.
The same strange complacency infects the heterodox movements which as I wrote in a column earlier this year have known and done nothing about the misogyny in their ranks for about a quarter-century.
But what makes this lethargy of the non-Orthodox media and movements all the stranger is that when it comes to freeing the ostensibly oppressed women of Orthodoxy the timidity disappears and they are suddenly flush with energy bursting with brazenness. They send reporters onto the Boro Park-Williamsburg bus to disturb male and female passengers who want nothing other than to be left alone to sit separately as they wish.
They monthly send and lionize dozens of agitators to disrupt the prayers of thousands of fellow Jews at the Kosel all for the purpose as WOW leaders Susan Aranoff and Anat Hoffman have acknowledged of “shocking Orthodox women … and changing their worldview.” And almost every week their publications feature tales many of the fairy variety of Orthodox discrimination against women; yet reports like this one of institutionalized discrimination against women by the non-Orthodox appear once a year and then nothing.
It’s bad enough that they act toward Orthodox women like those Boy Scouts who had such a hard time performing the good deed of helping an elderly lady across the street — because it turns out she didn’t want to go.… But in the process they’ve also left at curbside all the underpaid underemployed ladies of their own world who’d be more than grateful for help in crossing to the other side.