Over years of writing about Jewish life I’ve become quite familiar with how the media covers religion generally and the Orthodox Jewish community in particular. I do after all write a column for Mishpacha that’s focused in part on discerning the “text messages” to be found “between the lines of today’s media and commentary.”

But if these years of observing the general and secular Jewish media in action have been the equivalent of my coursework toward an advanced degree in media studies my recent stint as media spokesman for the Citi Field asifah could easily double as my graduate thesis. With just weeks until the event and no formal public relations apparatus in place I felt compelled to volunteer to do whatever I could to ensure that the media would not present a distorted picture of the asifah’s purposes and what would actually take place there. Here then are some class notes from my experiences.

Lesson One: Taking the Media Seriously But Not Too Seriously

There’s a subtle balance to be struck in interacting with the media. On the one hand however dubious one may be about the objectivity of a reporter or news organization it’s important to project a confidence in and make an appeal to the journalistic standards they themselves profess to uphold. Case in point: In a letter-to-the-editor of the New York Times seeking to correct an egregious falsehood in its coverage of the asifah (on which more later) I concluded with the line: “The Times can and must do better.” Do I really believe that paper with its long-standing anti-Orthodox bent is prepared to “do better” by our community? Not necessarily but that’s the tack one must take. 

On the other hand it can be helpful to subtly convey one’s awareness that the Fourth Estate is not held in particularly high public regard and for good reason. In my first several interviews I actually began the conversation by asking my interviewer half-kiddingly but good-naturedly “So … are we going to give this story a positive spin a negative spin or are we going to aim for that mythical journalistic objectivity?”

The knowing laugh at the other end of the phone line told me that they had gotten my point that they knew that I knew what this was all about and wasn’t going to let them off easy so to speak. In general I’ve found that one can be quite direct in calling out a reporter’s potential bias and insisting on a fair shake so long as it’s accompanied by a dollop of good humor.

Lesson Two: The Devious and the Clueless or Why the Media Gets It So Wrong So Often

Journalists’ failures to accurately report religion-related stories are not always the product of conscious bias against people of faith. It’s often a mix of more benign factors that makes truly accurate and thoughtful media pieces on religion so rare: reporters’ simple ignorance and inability to think beyond their narrow secular mindset; the lazy resort to trite preconceived templates or “narratives” that are conveniently imposed upon complex people and events in keeping with the generally superficial nature of so much of journalism; the allure of the exotic and the controversial to grab readers’ attention and sell papers; and of course the pressure of the deadline and the unforgiving news cycle that requires sacrificing truth and nuance at the altar of timeliness.

One writer who ultimately wrote a very balanced piece on this topic began by asking something about the “gathering of ultra-Orthodox Jews railing against the Internet.” I responded with tongue firmly in cheek that having been on-site on May 20 I could attest to having seen numerous iron railings — why I’d been leaning against a very rigid cold one throughout much of the program — but couldn’t recall spotting any human railings that day. Point taken.

Lesson Three: Building Rhetorical Bridges To Those Beyond Our World

Beyond the effort to ensure accuracy and objectivity I also saw my role as a priceless opportunity to convey what the asifah was really about and at the same time portray the Orthodox community in a highly positive light by stressing certain commonalities that would resonate with people in the broader society. There are two approaches to explaining the concerns underlying the asifah: One is to focus exclusively on the harms technology causes to our parochial Orthodox community and our standards of sanctity and purity. Those are deeply justified concerns but also entirely foreign to contemporary society.

Indeed the very name of the asifah’s sponsoring group Ichud HaKehillos LeTohar HaMachane presents when translated as “Coalition of Communities for the Purity of the Camp ” a public relations challenge. When New York Times reporter Sharon Otterman of whom I was quite wary — only a week prior she’d cowritten two front-page articles on the subject of abuse in New York’s Orthodox community — asked me to translate the Ichud’s name for her I did so adding: “I did that for you because it was a fair request and in fact the name is not merely innocuous but in my value system highly laudatory. But I’m sure you realize how foreign — and that’s being generous — the phrase ‘Purity of the Camp’ will sound to your readers. I’m sure you’re sensitive to the challenge of trying to convey one culture’s values in the idiom of a very different culture.” She ultimately did include the Ichud’s name in translation but she also wrote a very fact-based and fair-minded story. Perhaps our mildly contentious conversation in which I raised my concerns bluntly but with humor and reason and not a trace of ill will helped that happen.

There is a second approach to explaining the concerns of the asifah. It’s the one I took in keeping with a discussion I had with the Mashgiach shlita just before beginning my duties. In my conversations with the media I emphasized that the technological onslaught on so many aspects of our lives “is in truth a global crisis. If New York Times’ executive editor Bill Keller a card-carrying secular liberal with whom I can hardly imagine agreeing on any moral issue can write worriedly that technology ‘may be eroding characteristics that are essentially human: our ability to reflect our pursuit of meaning genuine empathy a sense of community ’ that means this is a unfolding human catastrophe.” This was not “spin ” but rather cross-cultural translation; what I told the media about why we were holding the asifah was entirely accurate even if it didn’t sound very much like what one heard in the speeches that evening.

We were largely successful b’ezras Hashem in getting the media to report on this intersection of concern between our community and the broader society on the challenges technology poses to so many basic aspects of our humanity — deep wholesome relationships; our sense of privacy and empathy; our ability to contemplate study and educate; the dignity of women; freedom from addiction to immorality gambling and technology itself.

Lesson Four: You Can Get the Media To Report A Lot of Things But Not Everything

Importantly Ms. Otterman’s article for the Times also included this quote from my interview: “These are the same concerns that people across society — in academia in psychology parents spouses — have about the Internet. But here is a community that is actually standing up and coming together and putting our money where our mouth is to express a unified communal resolve to address the issues.” I echoed this theme of the Jewish community serving as a model for society in my conversation with the Wall Street Journal observing that this is “the role that the Jewish People have tried to fill from time immemorial … serving as a beacon to the world and as a force for a transformation for the good in society.”

Still no one in the media seemed prepared to publish the rhetorical questions I posed over and over again: “If society has come to recognize Internet immorality as a sustained assault on human dignity and an unconscionable debasement of women why haven’t 42000 feminists or an equal number of secular humanists yet packed Citi Field to declare ‘Enough!’? Why will half a million people pack Central Park’s Great Lawn for an ephemeral rock concert but not for a serious conversation about where civil society is headed in the Internet Age?”

I suppose there’s just so far the media is willing to go in allowing hopelessly outdated Orthodox Jews in funny hats to speak the truths that reveal the superficiality and aimlessness of secular society. Then again maybe the word “ephemeral” scared them off.…

Lesson Five: You Really Never Know Who Might Be Listening …

Over the last month of pre- and post- asifah interviews I pointed to the concrete steps that a broad spectrum of people far beyond the Orthodox community have been taking to counter technology’s onslaught. There are those adopting what they call an “Internet Sabbath” swearing off all connectivity from Thursday evening through Monday morning; there are “black hole” resorts that charge exorbitant rates just for the “privilege” of not having online access in one’s room; and of course a plethora of filtering and monitoring systems that Orthodox Jews had no hand in developing.

There’s even I told a gaggle of reporters on the plaza outside Citi Field shortly before “game time” a fellow named Paul Miller who although a senior editor at a Manhattan-based technology publication announced recently that he was entirely disconnecting from the Internet for an entire year. From that remove he hopes to make the sort of cost-benefit analysis of the Internet’s impact on his life that I suggested the asifah was intended to inspire. And just then in a surreal moment captured for posterity on video I heard a voice to my right say “Paul Miller’s right here ” and to my utter disbelief out of the crowd stepped the aforementioned Mr. Miller microphone in hand. He and I chatted for about 15 minutes with cameras rolling about our shared interest in the effects of technology in dismantling piece by precious piece important aspects of our humanity.

Miller whose publication actually bought him a ticket for the asifah later wrote a long mostly positive piece about his foray into a world that couldn’t have been more foreign to him. An excerpt: “I wandered the stadium and took in the sights trying to comprehend what I was doing and where I was…. Filling the stands of a major market sports team were 40 000-something men in black suits wearing black hats quietly attentive (or texting respectfully) to ancient wisdom about their modern lives. The brightly lit field in the center of them all was entirely empty because a spectacle was unnecessary.”

Lesson Six: Gender on the Brain

From my very first interview and on I was asked about the absence of women at the event. After noting that many thousands of women would be viewing live feeds at various locations closer to their homes I explained that their no-attendance was due to the logistical difficulties of ensuring religiously desirable gender separation and that according to organizers some of the chassidic rabbis involved had actually advocated for women to attend until apprised of the pragmatic challenges involved.

One reporter insisted on referring to the “ban” on women’s participation. “You know” I told her “I’d really like to do a story in your paper’s newsroom this evening.” “You’re welcome to visit the newsroom” she replied. No I clarified I wanted to file a story for publication which she of course said was simply not possible. “Do you mean to say I’m banned from participating in your newsroom?!” came my incredulous rejoinder. Although the two contexts aren’t identical I explained that my point was that it wasn’t fair to employ with no elaboration an obviously freighted word like “ban” that favors one side in the complex gender issue that divides two radically disparate worldviews.

I found it instructive to contrast the asifah’s men-only attendance with another fervently Orthodox communal event of double the size set to take place in August — the Siyum HaShas — that will have as in the past a large female presence. I cited this fact as evidence that it was rather benign factors like stadium size and the reality of a small team of volunteers tasked with producing an event of great magnitude with very little lead time and not some nefarious anti-women design that were at play. Most stories on the  asifah noted the absence of women but not one cited the compelling evidence of the Siyum HaShas.

On other occasions I simply noted that beyond our community a lot of people are “hung up” on gender issues fixated on evidence of bias everywhere they look and they really ought to chill a bit; we Orthodox are quite comfortable thank you with seeing men and women as united in a common purpose of serving G-d and fellow man which manifests in somewhat separate roles for each gender. And no those quotes didn’t make it in either.

It took a writer for the Catholic intellectual journal First Things — Catholics are after all the other minority group in American life one can still publicly malign without fear of consequence — to identify the accusations of misogyny for what they were: “Predictable reactions from those made anxious by such a striking visual expression of the size and vitality of a faith community often ignored by the commentariat.”

In other words “we” spook “them” — with our numbers our unity of purpose our uncommon willingness to gather for serious introspection and yes our readiness to take direction from sages filled with life wisdom.

Lesson Seven: Don’t Let Falsehood Stand

Although I regard the offensive simplistic term “ultra-Orthodox” as a breach of journalistic ethics almost without parallel in today’s media this wasn’t the time to wage war on it and I let its ubiquitous use pass without comment.

But when the media prints or speaks outright untruths those can’t be permitted to pass unchallenged. The Forward article prior to the asifah spoke in its headline and opening paragraph of the event being advertised on Facebook and Twitter. That an event of this magnitude purposely did not even have a website went unremarked; the Facebook reference was a simple falsehood; and buried further on in the article was the fact that a Twitter account had been dropped early on at rabbinical insistence. Challenged on all this the reporter saw fit only to remove the Facebook mention.

Much more disturbingly the New York Times’ post-asifah  story stated that the Ichud is “linked to a software company that sells Internet filtering software to Orthodox Jews.” I immediately wrote to the reporter to demand a retraction of this categorically false statement and a few days later the paper indeed published a correction.

But as I noted in my letter much of the damage flowing from the publication of this bald untruth had already been done with numerous websites citing this falsehood with the Times’ imprimatur and many of them explicitly drawing an outrageous conclusion that was merely implicit in the Times story: that the organizers of the Asifa were hypocrites who convened it for financial gain rather than for communal betterment. What more powerful demonstration is needed of the harnessing of the Internet for doing real harm to real people? As we now go about sending the Times’ correction to these many websites in the hope that some will care about the truth a paraphrase of Reagan’s labor secretary Ray Donovan oft-quoted words rings in my ears: “To which office do I go to get my reputation back?”

Lesson Eight: The Privilege of Working for a Special People

My one regret is that due to the demands of the hour I didn’t sufficiently appreciate and convey to the media just how strikingly special those few hours of the asifah were. It wasn’t just the civility of the crowds that even security commented on; nor just the respectful attentiveness throughout many hours of speeches that many didn’t even understand; nor just the very phenomenon of a community streaming in by the thousands to engage in searching self-critique. It was the confluence of them all that stands as a remarkable testament to the uniqueness of a holy nation.