The sociologist Charles Murray has been writing important books about American life for decades. Recently he published another incisive work Coming Apart which diagnoses America as “coming apart at the seams — not seams of race or ethnicity but of class.” His argument is that a “new lower class” has developed in this country that no longer holds dear and lives by the four essential ingredients that since its founding served to make America great and indeed exceptional: marriage and family; pursuit of a vocation predicated on industriousness; community built on a bedrock of social trust and honesty; and faith. The large and growing welfare state Murray contends is disruptive in each of these areas.

And while a corresponding “new upper class” has formed as well which does subscribe to and practice these values it shrinks from promoting their importance to those in other social classes. This chasm between the classes is the “coming apart” of whichMurraywrites.

Recently a think tank asked five Modern Orthodox rabbis to viewMurray’s thesis through a Jewish lens and share their observations. Rabbi Yosie Levine made the point that Judaism has a built-in system for combating the phenomenon in which “[m]embers of the upper class are woefully out of touch with their lower class counterparts partly because contact between the two groups is simply too infrequent:”

For devout practitioners daily obligations require regular contact with people outside the immediate social circle [because] individual duties in Jewish law cannot be outsourced.… Mitzvot like visiting the sick comforting the bereaved lifting up the widow orphan and stranger and inviting guests into one’s home demand continuous interaction with people who are by definition in a different life situation.…

This would certainly resonate with those who daven at the Shacharis minyan I often attend which was frequently attended by Reb Zev Wolfson a”h as well. In the broader society this kind of daily proximity to a business magnate of his stature rarely occurs. Yet those at this minyan had the zchus to daven shoulder-to-shoulder with this titan of tzedakah v’chesed and to observe up close his family’s wonderful devotion to him with many different grandchildren taking turns to accompany and assist him in shul.

Strangely another rabbinic contributor argues contrarily that

the true middle class among [Orthodox Jews] has evaporated leaving behind two distinct increasingly isolated communities.… The growing socio-economic gap and geographic isolation help explain some otherwise perplexing Jewish communal realities.  For instance when time comes to give matanot l’evyonim (“gifts to the poor”) on Purim members of the “new upper class” increasingly find themselves in a position unfamiliar to previous generations: Because they no longer live side-by-side with those in need they turn to national or global agencies to dispense gifts on their behalf.

Frankly I don’t recognize the reality of which he speaks. I’m not familiar with his own community out west and perhaps in more Modern Orthodox communities there is a measure of truth to what he writes but in virtually every yeshivah or chassidic community I can think of people of widely disparate means and social standing live either entirely intermingled or at most just a short distance from each other and as noted above certainly interact with each other on numerous levels in countless venues.

And as for Purim the sums distributed on that day by residents of these communities to aniyei iram their own neighbors are nothing short of staggering.

MILLER TIME AGAIN It’s been a couple months since I wrote about my encounter at the Citi Field asifah with Paul Miller. He’s the professional techie who one day announced on the technology website where he serves as an editor “I’m leaving the Internet for a year.” But he has remained on staff there chronicling for readers his experiences with cyber-withdrawal.

So it was time to check in on Paul and I found that just two weeks ago he had written a piece (posted of course by someone else) entitled “Offline: How’s It Going?” that begins this way:

It’s all anybody asks me. I tell them I’m not using the Internet for a year and they just need to know: “How’s it going?” “It’s going great” I say. “Yeah?” they say dubiously. Their eyes glaze over: they’re trying to imagine what it would be like for them to leave the Internet for any span of time … ”I don’t think I could do it ” they admit.

“Well it’s not actually a realistic thing to do” I assure them. “I’m just really lucky and blessed that my work is supporting me … the weird thing is that writing about technology turns out to be the one profession where I can actually do this and get paid for it.”

Well yes although Paul might want to know there actually is a columnist out there who gets paid at least once in a while to write about how Paul Miller gets paid to write about having left the Internet.

Then he gets to talking about “how it’s going:”

And it is going great. The experiment that is.

Three months later I don’t miss the Internet at all. It doesn’t factor into my daily life. I don’t say to myself “ugh I wish I could just use the Internet to do that.” It’s more like it doesn’t exist for me.…

Wow does that mean that all that talk about “facing reality” “getting over it” and admitting that the Internet is here to stay as an unavoidable fixture in our lives from here on in might not be completely … true? That we can actually dare to challenge the conventional wise men and the naysayers and after a short adjustment period IT won’t factor into our daily lives — or even exist for us — either? Paul continues:

For me my time is no longer defined by the fact that it’s spent without the Internet. It’s simply my time and I have to fill it. The luxury that no Internet has afforded me is that I feel like I have more time to fill and fewer ways to fill it. It’s the boredom and lack of stimulation that drives me to do things I really care about like writing and spending time with others.…

Fascinating. It turns out that much of the pull of the Internet isn’t based on the medium being so engrossing or fun or edifying but simply on it being the lazy man’s way of filling huge blocks of time with nothingness all so he doesn’t have to do the truly worthwhile things in life which usually require some effort and commitment. But without the Internet we’d have two choices: to be painfully bored or to get up and out and do something productive and meaningful.

But along comes the Internet to resolve the dilemma by giving us endless ways to fill our time thereby allowing us to have it all: the utter meaninglessness of a bored existence sans the pain. The American adage has it that “time is money” but we Jews say “time is life ” and kicking the Internet habit gives us back our very lives in the form of newfound time which we must now fill with activities of substance lest we experience the alternative — dreaded boredom.

Mr. Miller’s quarter-year-point bottom line?

I have zero regrets about leaving the Internet. I’m only three months in and I can honestly say that this is turning into the best year of my life. I’m vaguely famous I’ve lost ten pounds and I’ve read a few classic books I’ve always wanted to spend time with. I think I’m on track to figure some stuff out about how to live in a modern society without being purely shaped by it.

Hmm “how to live in a modern society without being purely shaped by it.” It sounds almost frum especially if we just change that to “impurely shaped.” And as for the bit about vague fame: Ahem may I suggest — credit where credit is due and all of that — that at least a sliver of that amorphous prominence is attributable to a certain column in a certain magazine?