Internet technology is perhaps the defining issue of our time. And being so utterly crucial a small book or at least an extended essay is needed to even begin to explore it. In the space I’ve been allotted here all I can do is sketch the broad outlines of a few of the issues we must come to grips with leaving further elaboration for coming occasions.

How we conceptualize what we’re facing in technology’s onslaught is critical. We need to think of this in precisely the terms that three gedolei harabbanim used at the Agudath Israel convention plenary in November: As simply stated war. Not metaphorical but real and fierce. No paintball frolic this but a firefight with live ammunition.

That  characterization is important because it enables us to learn lessons from other wars.  The West’s regnant political correctness insists we are at war against “terrorism” not Islamic fascism. But one can’t wage war on a tactic like terrorism only on real people and ideas like radical Islamists and their Wahhabist ideology.

Rav Elya Brudny’s address at that convention session was so important because he identified the enemy by name. He put this conflict into a classical Jewish context of the war the yetzer hara in its manifold guises has waged against us ever since First Man’s fall in the opening skirmish mere hours after his creation.

Rather than some antiseptic-sounding “War on Technology” this is simply the latest — perhaps the last and hence most ferocious — episode in a war from time immemorial against a spiritual force the Torah calls simply ”Oyeiv”’ the Enemy. There’s nothing quite so energizing as knowing clearly who your enemy is and that you’re only the latest in a long line of warriors many very successful against him.

And as Rav Elya stressed this knowledge is infinitely empowering because it means we are guaranteed victory that the day will surely come on which this fearsome Enemy will be ritually slaughtered for all to see. It means too that he himself is naught but a faithful servant of his Master who as the Chovos HaLevavos assures us backs off the moment we stand firm and defy him (though he will just as surely regroup and come at us again on the morrow from a new angle). 

But understanding we are at war also evokes other parallels. Sometimes in war one side will be vulnerable to misdirection; the enemy for example signals an assault in the north only to launch a sudden attack in the south. I fear we too are at risk of a form of misdirection.

Let me be clear: The Internet has brought us unspeakable horrors leaving in its wake a long trail of both visible victims — crushed addicted individuals discarded marriages and families — and less visible ones those in whose souls the light has been dimmed by indelible images and words no Jew should ever see.

More: It has mesmerized us anesthetized us — pick your adjective — into making peace in a span of ten years with a state of affairs that our nation has spent literally 2000 years combating with all our hearts and souls. Chazal in their spiritual genius put in place safeguards to preserve our bedidus our existential aloneness in this world patterns of thought and deed that would constantly remind us of the chasm that should exist that does exist between us and even the most refined of gentiles.

Fast forward two millennia and now as Rav Elya put it the “global village” in which the entire rest of the world exults has brought shlomei emunei Yisrael to sit together and schmooze breezily easily — through chat rooms IM Facebook Twitter Skype e-mail texting and whatever tomorrow brings l’mineihem — in the digital living room of the geru’im shebe’umos the most morally and ideologically degenerate collection of human beings in all of recorded history.

And yet the exclusive focus on “the dangers of the Internet” in so many of the lectures and  articles we hear and read could perhaps be misdirecting us away from facing up to aspects of the technological tidal wave that are so deleterious precisely because they are far more subtle and appear more benign.

To invoke yet another military metaphor I still recall watching with amazement during the Gulf War as the US Army’s guided missiles would enter say a fifth floor window in the Iraqi War Ministry and instantaneously reduce the building’s innards to rubble yet leave its external shell unscathed. In analogous  spiritual terms technology plants in our midst a myriad of “smart bombs ”  that leave the Jew externally intact all the outer trappings in place yet hollow out the Jewish neshamah the essential humanity residing within.

There’s no one major point when this occurs just innumerable minor ones. When we text or e-mail instead of picking up a phone to call a friend or loved one that’s a choice conscious or otherwise to prefer distance to closeness sterility to emotion comfort to invested effort — and ultimately machine to man (my family humors my ongoing insistence on referring to texting only as “non-human communication”). When we allow a little contraption of copper and plastic to distract us with ephemeral nonsense from living in the here-and-now from seizing this moment of life and mining it for all it’s worth that’s a choice and a tragic irreversible one. And when we allow 24/6 connectivity to make us instantly reachable and forever on-call we’ve chosen to enslave ourselves and crowd out of our lives the simple but deep joys of living learning and loving.      

Using this incremental strategy the yitzra d’technologia has been able to get its operatives into the hands and pockets of the most upstanding yeshivish and chassidish individuals to parachute its agents if you will deep behind enemy lines completely unhindered. And that’s when these agents’ work first begins.…

This is in truth a global crisis. If New York Times’s 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 “$$c$$may be eroding characteristics that are essentially human: our ability to reflect our pursuit of meaning genuine empathy a sense of community$$c$$ ” that means this is an unfolding human catastrophe. But we Jews are the beating feeling heart of humanity and to us a loss of the capacity to feel and think deeply to seek meaning isn’t just another loss it’s everything.   

But we can win if we can find the mafteichos haleiv the words needed to open a conversation with the community of ehrliche Jews in all our diverse camps that awakens within them a desire to ask themselves the very same question that the Creator first asked Man at the beginning of time to look around them and wonder: Where am I? What has become of me? What have I allowed these trinkets — created by faraway people looking to make billions by controlling me what I think what I buy — to do to my brain and my heart? And if these questions disturb them enough they will come of their own accord to their rav or their rebbe and ask: What can I do to climb out of this deep pit into which vaunted modernity has cast me?

Until now I haven’t expended even a word on either the benefits that technology confers on us or the apparent indispensability of various technologies to commerce and other essential pursuits. That’s because those things may be true but they also ought not to be what the discussion revolves around. If the notion that we’re at war isn’t mere hyperbole but the unadorned truth then query: Has there ever been a war worth fighting that didn’t call for steep sacrifices?

What I’m essentially arguing for is a paradigm shift in the way we think and talk about the technological challenge. Instead of beginning by waving the rhetorical white flag of “Technology is here to stay now let’s figure out how to live with it by limiting and protecting against it” the opening statement ought to be this: Every generation in our history has had its unique battle in the milchama m’dor l’dor against the Enemy — various idolatries Greek philosophy Sabbateanism Enlightenment. These weren’t distractions from our national mission; they were its point. Now it’s our turn to engage with an epic challenge that we hope will usher in the Messianic Era. Will you join us braving the slings and arrows the cries of “Luddites” and “Cavemen”? If so let the battle be joined and then let every Jew who needs an exemption of some sort — a draft deferment if you will — take counsel with his moreh derech who knows him and his needs well.

I’ll close with an excerpt from the Afterword to Nicholas Carr’s best-selling Pulitzer Prize-finalist book on technology’s depredations The Shallows:

While … writing The Shallows I sometimes felt as though I were paddling a very small and very empty rowboat against a very strong tide. That impression … was mistaken. The boat may have been small but I was not the only one manning an oar. Two other books … raised concerns about the way the Internet is shaping and perhaps warping our intellectual and social lives.… More such books followed … A backlash against the Net it seems is underway and it is by no means limited to the scribbling of disillusioned middle-age authors.… Of course in conjuring up a big anti-Net backlash I may be indulging in a fantasy of my own. After all the Internet tide continues to swell…. And yet history tells us it’s only against such powerful cultural currents that countercultural movements take shape. 

Now those are stirring words but we really shouldn’t need Nicholas Carr to teach us about countercultural movements. We invented that concept. And right now before it’s too late we need to act on it.