Why Web 2.0 Is Good for the Jews

The emergence of Web 2.0 as a (arguably the) widespread posture within the zeitgeist of Internet technology opens a world of potential for the future of Jewish community in North America -- especially with respect to the younger generations, now in their 20s and 30s, who have fled the conventional synagogue organizations en masse. Why?

Web 2.0's central message is that the individual "average citizen" has a story to tell; and, furthermore, the story is publishable, with relative ease and lack of special knowledge of trade or technology. A tidal wave of self-expression from previously anonymous individuals has enthusiastically answered this bid to dignify and empower their voices.

This is good for Jewish community because its younger demographic's disaffection is directly attributable to the very experience of not having a voice, relative to the overpowering presences of the Boomers who reinvented Judaism for the consumer economy and their parents who survived the War and the Shoa. The "blogosphere" in particular, and Web 2.0 in general, has become a haven -- and a hotbed of creative activity -- for the same younger Jews who are absent from synagogue membership rolls, and this Jewish community-in-exile is conspicuously gaining momentum and numbers.

A strategic and respectful application of maggidut, the Jewish tradition that philosophically parallels Web 2.0 in valuing the individual's narrative as a critical component of the grand sweep of history, bears the potential at this moment to bring this Jewish energy incubated in the Internet back into integration with the rest of North American Jewish community. In other words, where the maggidic ethos and modalities of Web 2.0 are incorporated into our community organizations, dynamic young Jewish adults are very likely to follow.

thoughts on training up maggidim

B"H

A friend and mentor maggid asked me to write up my thoughts on requirements for training maggidim. As it is relevant to the conversation of just what a maggid is, and how maggidut differs from rabbinics, I'm posting it here. Some editing has been done to protect issues of confidentiality. All comments welcome!

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B”H

(--------), shalom shalom.

In my reply to your email I suggested that the first place to start for maggidic requirements is the ability to define what a maggid is. I wasn’t being funny. This is so important, without it I think a maggid is really dead in the water (so to speak.) In this reemerging field of maggidut there is a wide range of opinion about what exactly is a maggid, with each teacher/ school claiming its own definition. Storyteller? Rabbinic Pastor? Facilitator of Sacred Autobiography? Outreach Worker? Melamed? Personally, I think they are all true, since maggidut, like rabbinics or hazzinut, is A PROCESS. This is a very important statement, so important I’m putting it right up here at the beginning. Maggidut is a process that constantly informs the way that a maggid operates in the field. Understanding this from the start is crucial, as it also informs the way that a maggid learns the tools of the trade. When I study rabbinics, I am doing so through the eyes and needs of the maggid. I am learning (and teaching) the material from a different perspective than I would if I was studying to be a rabbi or a hazan, or possibly even a rabbinic pastor in the sense that institutions like ALEPH define that role. (Keeping in mind that there is a tremendous amount of crossover between the roles of rabbi/ hazan/ maggid/ pastor… and that the best rabbis are also maggidim, eh?)

What does this mean? A maggid’s primary job is to “Relate” to the people. To Relate. Everything must come through this perspective. When I am learning new material, I am constantly thinking about how to apply it in the field. Maggidut is not about performing, as can be the case with cantorial soloists, and not about executing, the case with rabbis who must form and hold the communal structure. The maggid must be a general practitioner whose skill sets and ability to perform on demand legitimate the maggid’s presence as a spiritual teacher and act as a vehicle for teaching. The maggid’s skills are not an end in themselves, but are vehicles to a higher end—being a relational mechanism between HaShem, the Jewish spiritual path/ tradition, and the everyday reality of people’s lives.

continued...

A Reminder of Why We're Here

Jewish blogger David Kelsey has opened a plaintive yet articulate discussion that should serve to remind us of just how urgently we need to bring our people and institutions out of the malaise of consumerism. In "Fading Judaism" David describes, in frank autobiographical detail, how for "many Jews who don’t marry, particularly [baaley tshuvah], there is often a slide away from religiosity over time," a tragic inversion of the inspirational thrill so many young Jews experience in "returning" to a Jewish religious practice that authenticates the experience of Jewish identity, only to find down the road that the spiritual and social rewards of this practice feel increasingly shallow.

What do you do when you have never regretted any move away from observance? But only regret you had not made the change earlier?

What do you do when you find every brake you press for the sake of observance has an annoying and debilitating effect on your life, replete with resentments and little or no payoff?

(Emphasis mine.)

Without fully developing the ideas here, I think it is worth noting some assumptions about the current State of Judaism that guide the work of Moshav HaAm:

• In the Modern Industrial Age, the overwhelming majority of Jews are more or less free to choose our religious affiliations and lifestyle, like choosing an employer to work for, a city to live in, and a make and model of car to drive.


• In this culture of Consumer Choice, the survival of power centers (be they communities, leadership figures, or institutions) is a function of Brand Loyalty, which is generally secured either by spectacle (arrest the consumer's attention with something shocking/exciting/etc.) or by monopoly (eliminate the consumer's other options) or, often, both.


• The latter marketing approach has rendered Jewish life a landscape of increasingly narrow orthodoxies. That is, "movement" Judaism tends to make the appeal that our movement is right while their movement is wrong, or that this lifestyle is authentic while that one is hollow, in order to ensure loyalty to the brand because there is no conscionable alternative. (Among these "movements," I am including humanistic secularism, which is the least institutionally organized within [Diaspora] Jewish community, probably because it is the best supported by host-culture institutions. It is distinct from the host culture itself, though, in that the religion being spurned is religious Judaism, not Christianity.)


• Consequently, division and provincialism characterize Jewish identity politics to a considerable degree, and creative communication between Jewish subcultures is systematically discouraged.


• For the born natives of any given Jewish "movement," the experience of this insularity is often one of security. However, it is just as often an experience of stagnation, lack of vitality, inflexibility, even claustrophobia. For those who have this experience, there is a very high incidence of jumping ship from one "movement"'s orthodoxy to another's.


• What is perhaps inadequately understood by those who market one orthodoxy to those disaffected with another is that, in the long run, the pickings aren't really so easy as they seem. Those who are open to abandoning one orthodoxy over its limitations will typically be of the sort who would abondon another orthodoxy over its limitations. Even if one would not abandon a second orthodoxy, disenchantment with orthodoxy itself is generally an intractable personality trait, and will manifest one way or another. (For this reason, orthodoxy-based power centers usually push new joiners to start families or otherwise establish covenantal ties that will make it difficult to leave after the honeymoon is over.)

As "Ilana B." writes in the poignant comments thread following David Kelsey's piece (emphasis mine):

For many of us (in addition to many "frum" from birth), we are fed up with doing some of the mitzvos over and over, and guiltily feeling empty.

[...]

Is it any wonder why so many of our brothers and sister who were raised Traditional or Orthodox just walk away? These are not stupid, un-intuitive people. Walking away from it, for some, is the only way to stay sane. I know it sounds harsh, but it's true, and we need to figure out what the hell to do about it, and now.

The first step in addressing the problem is, of course, to understand it as fully as possible. Moshav HaAm is fundamentally an organization concerned with application and action, but with the Maggidic goal that, whatever form of engagement we undertake, the product should be a more complete understanding of the Jewish narrative as it unfolds through our people's lives. There is very much to be studied, learned, and written about the ramifications of Industrial Market Consumerism in Jewish life*, and all Moshav HaAm associates are already dedicated in various concrete ways to addressing the problems we see. But it is worth taking specific consideration of our need to simply hear (and remember) the experiences of disillusionment, loneliness, and alienation that we all experience in community, and that some feel profoundly.


*In Spring 2005, I wrote drafts of some relevant pieces on Mishkaneer:

• Paper or Plastic?: A Rumination for Pesach 5765


• The Case Against "Modern Orthodoxy"


• On Consumerism and Religion

post-denominational Judaism orthodoxy consumerism

On Uniformity In Halakhah

From a very interesting comment in a lengthy discussion of peoplehood unity as a direct goal in Jewish-legal ruling on Mah Rabu:

Also in recent thought I have been struggling as to whether halachik constraints, which flow from this idea of uniformity, have normative value today. (note, value, not authority). As Rashi puts it “to prevent Israel from becoming groups and groups (agudot agudot) and it will seem like two Torot.” The notion and goals of conformity are dependant on multiple variables, including the present religious situation, as mitigated by cultural as well as spiritual factors. The goal of conformity is always unity; in this case the goal is to have one Torah not two. In those times they were able to accomplish unity by creating one standardized normative practice for all groups, even when already they were geographically separate, the goal was to keep a strong solidarity and communion through regulating culture and religious practices such that they reflected a similar manner to those in Jerusalem.

Today, I do not think that such conformity creates unity. Rather, perhaps it is becoming the case that a higher level of unity is being driven for today, one that creates unity through dialogue back and forth; in the way that Talmudic dialogue is modeled. And just as in Talmudic dialogue there is often no synthesis, which conforms the two previous opposing sides to one position, but rather the sugya is always pushing itself forward with questions in a search a new level of truth, one only gained through a never-ending dialectic, which will settle for no synthesis. For unlike Hegel, spirit can never become settled and captured in any one synthesis.

Holonic?

Holon (philosophy)
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(Redirected from Holonic)


In the philosophy of history, a holon is a historical event that makes other historical events inevitable. A holon is a controversial concept, in that some reject the inevitability of any historical event. A special category of holon is technology, the view that technology dictates history.

In some versions of holism and systems theory, a holon (from the Greek holos, "whole") is something that is simultaneously a whole and a part. The term was Coined by Arthur Koestler on p. 48 of his book The Ghost in the Machine (1967).
A holon refers to a system (or phenomenon) that is a whole in itself as well as a part of a larger system. It can be seen as systems nested within each other. Every system can be considered a holon, from a subatomic particle to the universe as a whole. On a non-physical level, words, ideas, sounds, emotions – everything that can be identified – is simultaneously part of something, and can be viewed as having parts of its own.

Since a holon is embedded in larger wholes, it is influenced by and influences these larger wholes. And since a holon also contains subsystems, or parts, it is similarly influenced by and influences these parts. Information flows bidirectionally between smaller and larger systems. When this bidirectionality of information flow and understanding of role is compromised, for whatever reason, the system begins to break down: wholes no longer recognize their dependence on their subsidiary parts, and parts no longer recognize the organizing authority of the wholes. Cancer is a good example of this breakdown in the biological realm.

This hierarchy of holons is called a holarchy. It is a natural hierarchy in the sense that it is objective rather than subjective.
Ken Wilber comments that the test of holon hierarchy is that if you were to remove a type of entity from existence, then all other entities of which it formed a part must of necessity cease to exist too. Thus an atom is lower in the hierarchy than a molecule, because if you removed all molecules, atoms could still exist, whereas if you removed all atoms, molecules would cease to exist too. Wilber's concept is known as the doctrine of the fundamental and the significant. An hydrogen atom is more fundamental than an ant, but an ant is more significant.

The same test is true for letters and words, or people and countries. This natural hierarchy contrasts with other types of hierarchy (such as human leadership) which are dependent upon consensus and may be subject to dispute or change.
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