Some weeks ago I quoted a winner of a line from a New York Times op-ed by Sherry Turkle the MIT professor who is one of today’s most thoughtful observers of the techno-era: “Technology doesn’t just do things for us. It does things to us changing not just what we do but who we are.”
But there was much more of value in that essay which focused on the phenomenon of the “selfie.” That’s the term — chosen by Oxford Dictionaries as its 2013 word of the year — for a self-portrait photo taken by camera phone or handheld digital camera and then circulated via social networking channels.
Turkle writes:
A selfie… interrupts experience to mark the moment. In this it shares something with all the other ways we break up our day when we text during class in meetings at the theater at dinners with friends… at funerals… at church and synagogue services….
The selfie makes us accustomed to putting ourselves and those around us “on pause” in order to document our lives. It is an extension of how we have learned to put our conversations “on pause” when we send or receive a text an image an email a call.
The case she makes for the loss in simple human terms is compelling. But for us Jews there is I believe an additional dimension. It is one thing for someone to interrupt his mundane everyday experiences for a moment of fleeting self-indulgence.
But it’s something entirely different and the loss is incalculably greater when the activity we’re interrupting is one that partakes of eternity and the activity that we’re interrupting for — such as snapping a self-portrait — is even at this very moment the very definition of nothingness.
I recall reading Rabbi Akiva Tatz’ Anatomy of a Search and being struck by the following passage in his account of the spiritual odyssey of a South African baalas teshuvah named Eve:
After becoming used to yeshivah chassunas Eve would stand with a sense of tragedy at a non-religious wedding…. They come together with no concept of the deeper levels involved in what they are doing… aware of nothing more than the here-and-now surrounded by equally uninformed family and guests at this greatest moment of their lives; and undreamed of and untapped all that kedushah is flying past them.
I can’t help but think of those lines when I see someone copiously documenting a chuppah or a bris milah with cell phone or video camera. I’m a parent and grandparent and I understand the sentimentality that underlies the desire to have a record of a special moment. I get it. And perhaps sometimes the pictures are for example for Bubby who’s in a nursing home and can only shep nachas from afar.
And yet there’s something about the need to capture every last nuance of the goings-on (likely to be watched once and hardly ever again) even as “all that kedushah is flying past them ” that seems reminiscent of trading the eternity of a birthright for a pottage of lentils. At moments like these I’d like to say “Just take one shot and then use these precious moments this unusual eis ratzon to daven for everything that really matters.” And should one ask: Cannot the same be said of those who stand about and converse throughout such occasions every bit as oblivious to the momentousness of the moment as is the picture-taker? The answer is that it can indeed be said.
Rav Eliyahu Gutmacher talmid of Rav Akiva Eiger and one of the 19th century’s poskei hador writes in his commentary to Shabbos 130b that the cries of a baby following his bris rise Heavenward without impediment and that pouring out one’s heart over one’s troubles at that moment enables those prayers to rise on the coattails of the child’s wails something he calls a “wondrous piece of advice.” But we can only do so if we’re at all conscious of the deeper dimensions of the moment.
In his letters the Chazon Ish ztz”l writes regarding Chazal’s teaching (Berachos 63b) that divrei Torah will endure only for one who puts himself to death over them:
The death described here is the turn from the surface of life to the depths of life the inner core of life. The more one breaks his character traits the more he increases life because breaking such traits is the slaying of the superficial life….
Life is deep and Torah is infinitely deep and to live fully Jewishly means to live deeply to understand the opportunities that exalted moments — every moment really — present to us and not to trade them away for something as inconsequential as a snapshot.
Professor Turkle continues:
When you get accustomed to a life of stops and starts you get less accustomed to reflecting on where you are and what you are thinking.
We don’t experience interruptions as disruptions anymore. But they make it hard to settle into serious conversations with ourselves and with other people because emotionally we keep ourselves available to be taken away from everything.
These days when people are alone or feel a moment of boredom they tend to reach for a device…. [A]t a stop sign at the checkout line at a supermarket and yes at a memorial service reaching for a device becomes so natural that we start to forget that there is a reason a good reason to sit still with our thoughts: It does honor to what we are thinking about. It does honor to ourselves. 
Turkle is writing here in line with her opening insight that technology “does things to us changing… who we are.” She’s perceptively focusing in on subtle changes that we too in the recesses of our consciousness know we’ve undergone and she’s bringing them to the fore for us to confront.
How ironic it is that this era’s byword is “connectivity ” when as she describes everywhere we turn technology is disrupting our ability to connect with others with our life experiences with our very selves.
She concludes:
It is not too late to reclaim our composure. I see the most hope in young people who have grown up with this technology and begin to see its cost…. A 14-year-old girl tells me how she gets her device-smitten father to engage with her during dinner: “Dad stop Googling. I don’t care about the right answer. I want to talk to you.” A 14-year-old boy reflects: “Don’t people know that sometimes you can just look out the window of a car and see the world go by and it is wonderful? You can think. People don’t know that.”
The selfie like all technology causes us to reflect on our human values. This is a good thing because it challenges us to figure out what they really are.
All of this focus on “human values ” on “reflecting on where you are and what you are thinking ” and on “serious conversations with ourselves ” ought to resonate most strongly with us of all peoples. But because the threat to human values of which she speaks is in fact so universal in nature were we to put on the countercultural gear bequeathed us by our forefather Avraham and go out to do battle with the technological goliath even if only incrementally we’d be doing what we’re meant to do: leading the world by example toward a more spiritual understanding of life and ultimately toward Hashem Himself. —