The dramatic changes in my lifetime have come not only in the realm of technology, but also in attitudes

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wo weeks ago, we discussed certain cataclysmic events, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall or the collapse of the Assad dictatorship, which seemed to change everything in an instant. But apart from such high-impact events, there are also trends that have dramatically changed everything about our lives over a relatively short period of time, often without our appreciating the degree to which they have done so.

Social psychologist Jon Haidt has amassed an impressive array of evidence, for instance, pointing toward the negative impact of the iPhone on the mental health of young girls. And the ubiquity of the personal computer has changed almost everything about how we conduct our lives over the last 40 years.

Christine Rosen’s new book, The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World, explores the way that we are surrounded by “mediating technologies [that interpose themselves] between us and the world.” Instead of encountering the world through the immediate engagement of our senses, we do so through our screens and software. Ian Tuttle’s review of Rosen’s work draws on the insight of philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer: “Experience is the experience of human finitude.” Digital technologies, by contrast, are designed to negate the sense of limitation that is the core of all experience. Not by accident is Silicon Valley preoccupied with solving the problem of death, as if it were a defect of code.

Rosen’s concluding chapter recommends the Amish approach to technology, which consists of asking, “How will this impact our community? Is it good for our families? Does it support or undermine our values?”

Tuttle, however, points out that few people today live in communities with the stability and integrity of the Amish and capable of emulating the Amish decision-making process. The one community that does cultivate the Amish’s “robust skepticism about each new device and app” is the Torah community. And that is something of which we should be proud.

THE DRAMATIC CHANGES in my lifetime have come not only in the realm of technology, but also in attitudes. We recently had over for Shabbos an older friend, and we got to talking about her early days practicing law. She entered college at 16, after having won a full scholarship (which she desperately needed) to a top accounting program. She graduated first in her class, but received not a single job offer, while men who graduated with C averages readily found jobs.

Eventually, she was hired by one of the biggest national firms. But when she arrived for her first day of work, she quickly realized that much of her work would not be typical accounting. A future colleague welcomed by telling her how happy he was to see her, as “we’ve been saving all the lousy jobs for you.”

She attended law school at night while working in the accounting firm, again graduating at the top of her class. But when she took her résumé to the major firm where she spent her career, the receptionist directed her to the stenographic pool, so unknown were women attorneys at the time. Fortunately, the kindly Irish woman who ran the pool realized that she was not looking for a secretarial job and sent her for an interview with one of the hiring partners.

Her hiring did not end her status as a unicorn. In those days, secretaries who became pregnant were fired, and she feared the same would happen to her. When she became pregnant, she wore only black and dark blue suits to conceal her condition, until one day she fainted in the firm’s elevator.

In time, she became only the second woman to “make partner” in one of the so-called white-shoe firms. Even then, she could not attend the next annual partners meeting, because the exclusive club at which it was held did not allow women past the lobby. The managing partner assured her that such a thing would never happen again.

By the time she became a senior partner, many prestigious charity organizations sought her for their boards. But arriving at one such board meeting at an exclusive club, she was directed to the freight elevator. At least she had the presence of mind to ride down the main elevator after the meeting.

To someone who entered law school in the ’70s, these stories seem like fairy tales from a long-gone era. But even in 1971, two years before I started law school, women entering Yale Law School’s first-year class constituted only 15 percent of the students, and a few years after I graduated, it was only 28 percent. By then, however, none of the women had to worry that they would not be courted for top jobs.

Today, the entering class at YLS has a majority of women, and that is true in most top law schools and med schools. In many top colleges the ratio of women to men is 60:40. It is the men who are becoming the curiosities.

I’m not writing a brief for the feminist movement, which accelerated many of these changes. To a large extent, it has caused men and women to view one another as enemy camps, rather than as potential partners for building a family. Yet one of the best predictors of a country’s economic backwardness is the lack of educational and employment opportunities afforded the female half of the population.

Such broader societal changes never leave our own community unaffected, for better or worse. On the plus side, the vastly increased opportunities for women is a major driver of the expansion of long-time learning and allows many men from non-affluent backgrounds to continue their learning far longer than they otherwise could have.

At the same time, the three-headed hat of mother, homemaker, and breadwinner often sits heavily on the heads of the women who hold all three titles. Actually, the first time we met the friend described above was at a kiruv symposium in Monsey over 40 years ago. What I remember most about her presentation was a question from the audience: “How do you find the time to get your kids off to school, tuck them in at night, prepare Shabbos meals, and fashion beautiful Purim costumes, while maintaining the hours of a senior partner in an international law firm?”

Her reply was straightforward, though I thought I detected a slight quiver in her voice: “You can’t.”

Churchill and Me

The 150th anniversary of the birth of Winston Churchill has just passed. And as is to be expected, it has been the occasion of many encomiums to the 20th century’s “indispensable man.”

Many of those encomiums, however, begin by noting his numerous eccentricities and faults. “One Hundred Fifty Years of Churchill,” by Hillsdale College president and Churchill scholar Larry Arnn will serve as an example.

“He often spent more money than he had, although he earned a lot. Especially when he was young, his ambition showed all over him. He did not have the gift of some politicians, such as Abraham Lincoln, to be underestimated,” Arnn begins, before moving on to Churchill’s “obvious excellence at many things.”

He wrote more than 40 books, all worth reading and many of them great, for which he was the first non-novelist to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. And his collected speeches, which he wrote himself, run to 8,000 closely printed pages.

Above all, he, more than any other human being, is responsible for the fact that Adolf Hitler yemach shemo did not conquer the world.

Boris Johnson’s The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History is a great read, though not a repository of the vast research of other Churchill biographers, such as Martin Gilbert, Anthony Roberts, and William Manchester. Johnson devotes an entire chapter to assembling — and then refuting — the case against Churchill’s character, “a spoilt, bullying, double-crossing, self-centered bore.”

In the midst of that chapter, Johnson quotes one Pamela Plowden, who rejected Churchill’s marriage proposal but remained a lifelong friend. “When you first meet Winston, you see all his faults,” she said. “You spend the rest of your life discovering his virtues.”

Quite obviously, I share nothing in common with Winston Churchill, having never been the leader of anything or moved anyone to great deeds with my eloquence. But that quote of Plowden’s did serve as a tenuous link to him, and more importantly to my late brother, Rabbi Mattisyahu Rosenblum.

My brother was once talking to someone whom he respected greatly, who somehow got onto the subject of the faults he discerned in Mattisyahu’s oldest brother — i.e., me.

“Anyone can see my brother’s faults,” my brother told him. “But you are a lamdan. Why don’t you concentrate on discovering his maalos?”

May we all be zocheh to becoming lamdanim in the evaluation of our fellows and to be surrounded by lamdanim in their evaluation of us.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1943. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)