Jewish Values & Social Media
Roundtable
With David Zvi Kalman, Mordechai Lightstone, & Sara Wolkenfeld
Which Jewish values can best inform our social media habits and help us navigate technologies that consume so much of our conscious attention? To accompany and amplify Micah Goodman’s essay in this issue, Sources invited three writers whose positions at the intersection of Judaism and technology afford them unique perspectives to address this question. What follows are their clear-eyed reflections on Jewish responses to the ascendency of digital tools that we now take for granted even as they radically reorder the ways we relate to one another.
David Zvi Kalman
The Third Way: Social Media Regulation in Religious Communities
Sandra Valabregue, ‘Ilan I-1’ (Detail), 2018.
Can the addictive qualities of electronic devices and the network effects that make social media feel inescapable be countered by the norms of religious community?
In 2010, the University of Maryland conducted a study of almost a thousand participants to measure the psychological effects of abstaining from all electronic communication devices for twenty-four hours. The results were discouraging: many participants experienced withdrawal-like symptoms, including anxiety, cravings, and general misery. The majority were unable to complete the study.
In 2020, researchers in Haifa conducted a similar experiment, but selected a small set of religiously observant Jews and performed the experiment twice: once on Shabbat, and again on a weekday. They observed something striking: compared to the weekday abstinence, participants who refrained from using their devices on Shabbat were less anxious, less irritable, felt fewer cravings for their devices, spent less time reaching for their phones, and found the task significantly less difficult.
This is not a narrow attempt to argue for the benefits of Shabbat; rather, the study points to a powerful but underused mechanism for regulating social media. At present, regulation usually comes in one of two forms. Some attempt to limit the negative effects of social media today by better filtering content, by disposing of algorithms that promote outrage and misinformation, and by removing addictive elements of the experience. The success of these efforts is highly variable; problems with the platforms are not always immediately obvious, and for political reasons fixes are often slow to arrive.
In the absence of consistent top-down regulation, others advocate for better personal self-control: limit screen time, avoid platforms that will depress you, refrain from inflammatory behavior, and be vigilant against false information. These attempts at self-regulation have, at best, a mixed record. This is mainly due to powerful network effects, which make it hard to walk away from popular platforms and can cause those who do to feel stigmatized and excluded.
But there is a third way, which occupies a space between the individual and the state: communities—especially religious ones, which have time-tested practice in creating norms—can both alleviate the pressure to conform to societal expectations of social media use and provide alternative models for how one might relate to virtual spaces, if at all.
Religious communities act as some of the most important vectors of normative behavior in American society, second only to the family unit. On issues of social media, however, such communities are often conspicuously silent. One reason, at least among American Jews, is that we associate religious communal pressure around social media with ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities, in which use of smartphones is restricted and large parts of the internet are blocked. Most Americans find this approach, as blunt as it is effective, a distasteful form of censorship. But communal norms can be harnessed in several other effective ways. Let me briefly consider three.
On the simplest level, Jewish communal leaders can exert their moral authority to reinforce messages about healthy use of social media. They can alert community members, especially younger members, to the dangers of social media addiction, to the threats of radicalization and misinformation, and to the negative effects of social media on body image. Most crucially, they can affirm that it is appropriate to walk away from these platforms if they are causing harm. In other words, leaders can communicate that Jewish values must persist into virtual space, despite regular messaging from tech firms that virtual space is an unprecedented disruption of society and the norms of physical space therefore do not apply.
Second, to reduce the power of online community as the de facto center of communal existence Jewish leaders can emphasize the importance of physical gathering. The global pandemic complicates this immensely; still, we can create opportunities for small gatherings wherever possible, whether religious in nature (prayer, Torah study) or purely secular. Even when we cannot reliably gather in person, we can learn to regard virtual gathering as a concession, not an ideal. In the absence of such messaging, our social lives will increasingly default to being online.
Finally, without resorting to direct censorship Jewish communities can better set expectations about the use of smartphones in sanctuaries, study halls, and schools, and leaders can set examples about the healthy use of social media by modeling it in online activity and the decision to go offline more frequently.
Rather than promise a radical solution these strategies attempt to treat an endemic problem—a problem surrounded by rhetoric designed to make it seem untreatable. It is true that our regulatory system is broken. If social media continues to be regulated at only the corporate and personal levels, it will remain a toxic force. Yet if they so choose, communities—and religious communities in particular—can play a powerful and beneficial role.
David Zvi Kalman is Scholar in Residence and Director of New Media at Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, where he was also a member of the inaugural cohort of North American David Hartman Center Fellows.
Mordechai Lightstone
Can the Internet be Redeemed?
Our technologies can facilitate the spread of disinformation and vitriol. They require us to set clear and healthy boundaries. But to refrain from using these platforms is not only to cede them to those who corrupt them, but to deny these platforms the positive divine potential for which they exist. In that spirit, it is possible for us—indeed incumbent on us—to use the Internet to connect with others and accomplish transformative good.
When the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, entered 770 Eastern Parkway on the first night of Chanukah, in December 1991, he was greeted by more than the usual crowds of disciples and spiritual seekers. The large synagogue space was packed with thousands of children and teachers, and a cadre of cameramen. Despite the rain, an overflow crowd numbering about three-thousand people gathered outside to watch on a giant screen. Nearby satellite trucks broadcast the transmission, and shared incoming feeds from Melbourne, Hong Kong, Paris (where some twenty-two thousand gathered for a menorah lighting at the foot of the Eiffel Tower), and Moscow (where seven-thousand Jews filled the Kremlin Palace of Congresses to capacity). The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that “The two-hour event was broadcast on seventy public television stations across the United States and 1,400 cable stations in North America. Satellite-fed cable stations broadcast the ceremony in Israel, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Britain, France, Italy, Australia, Hong Kong, Japan and India.”
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That the medium of transmission used Cold War era technology was not lost on the Lubavitch leader. “Seemingly, Heaven and Earth are two disparate entities,” he said in a talk broadcast over satellite hookup. “How can it truthfully be claimed that at their core they are truly one?” Taking a lesson from the satellite hookup itself, he pointed to the underlying unity in Creation. “Jews on opposite sides of the world, in Moscow and New York, Calcutta and Japan, or Israel and Australia, are able to connect to each other—not just to send a message or talk, but to bring tangible relief for their most basic physical needs.”
In other words, a person in one hemisphere could both communicate with and instantly transfer charitable funds to someone in the other; ones and zeroes could be harnessed to render immediate physical assistance to someone else. A year later, the Rebbe would approve the opening of a Chabad house on the nascent World Wide Web.
The modern promulgation of Jewish teachings via communications technologies has deep roots. From Iberia to Italy, Jews engaged in the emerging art of printing.
A Chasidic paradigm can help us grasp the redemptive power of technology. “Everything that God created in His world,” teaches the Mishna in Avot 6:11, “He did not create but for His glory.” All of creation carries the latent potential to reveal its divine purpose. If we harness technological tools in the right ways, we reveal the holiness that pulses within them—and reveal the oneness of the transcendent creator in this world.
“The ultimate purpose for which these new technologies were developed,” Rabbi Schneerson said in 1982, “is that they be used for holy purposes…. The fact that they can also be used for mundane purposes, and even things that are the opposite of holiness, is to facilitate free choice… and God commands, requests and grants the capacity that ‘you shall choose life.’”
This view of technology’s divine potential and purpose informs not only how we use communication technologies but also how we create them. The algorithms that determine what we see online are hardly agnostic. How can technology—designed by limited, flawed humans—expect to transcend its creators, let alone avoid falling prey to their most destructive flaws? It can do so, I suggest, if the dataset we draw from is inspired by the recognition of divine purpose. Only if the inputs are guided by that recognition can the outputs be redemptive.
Mordechai Lightstone is the social media editor at Chabad.org and founding director of Tech Tribe, a community for young Jews in tech and digital media.
Sara Wolkenfeld
Stealing Consciousness
Imagine deciding to walk to a friend’s home, and mentally planning the route you will take to get there. During your walk, you exercise a certain amount of autonomy: you can decide whether to interact with the people that you meet, whether to linger at a storefront, or whether to hurry past someone you prefer to avoid. Yet you cannot control other external factors, such as who will appear in your path or what stores are located between you and your destination.
Now picture yourself opening Instagram, Facebook, or any other social media platform. As you scroll through your news feed, the experience may seem similar to the one described above. You select your friends or connections, and you choose how to engage and with whom. Perhaps you scroll quickly past the advertisements that pop up, just as you might hurry past the store windows along your walk. In fact, the online experience is inherently different; the sights you see were chosen for you, placed in your path by an unseen force designed to draw your attention in certain ways and provoke specific reactions.
As a society and as individuals, we are just beginning to reckon with the impact of these online social environments on our lives and our relationships. We are only starting to grapple with moral questions that arise when an unseen corporation controls the twists and turns of what feels like an open path to connecting with others. While this problem is universal, Jewish tradition offers a language and a lens for discussing the material culture we create and the digital structures that we build to connect with others.
One rabbinic concept in particular provides an opening for a more thoughtful conversation about the implications of social media algorithms: geneivat da’at, literally, theft of another’s consciousness or agency. It is not merely the category itself, but the intensity of the language that is used, that I believe is instructive in thinking about modern media.
“There are seven types of thieves,” the sages teach, “and primary among them is one who steals another person’s consciousness” (Tosefta Bava Kamma 7:3). This may seem like an odd kind of thievery to place atop the list. Wouldn’t stealing someone’s belongings, physically taking what does not belong to us, cause greater harm?
The assertion makes sense, however, if we consider the weighted word da’at (knowledge). Da’at is what sets humans apart. It is the tree of the knowledge (da’at) of good and bad, from which Adam and Eve taste, which results in human life as we know it. Rabbinic literature invokes da’at to indicate that someone is capable of informed consent and able to make uncoerced decisions. Geneivat da’at cautions us about the dangers of someone else seizing control over our internal consciousness and unique decision-making abilities.
The Tosefta goes on to list behaviors that are included in this category. Some have a commercial or monetary aspect; for example, mixing lesser materials with more expensive ones to make the valued product appear more plentiful, or incorrectly weighing or measuring something. Others simply concern the social impression a behavior gives, such as offering gifts while knowing that the would-be receiver will not accept, or extending an invitation with profuse but false enthusiasm that is faked, as when the inviter knows that the invitee will refuse. In each of these cases, things are not what they seem; false sincerity leads the other to believe that they have a firm grasp on reality, when in fact the truth differs from what they are being led to believe.
Later scholars debated whether the prohibition of geneivat da’at is a form of stealing or a subset of the prohibition against telling falsehoods. Either way, the rabbinic tradition chose to articulate the problem as stealing someone else’s consciousness. When we speak about the ills of social media, we often speak about a lack of transparency, or about the “echo chamber” effect inherent in these platforms. Framing the conversation in terms of geneivat da’at, however, allows us to see the situation more clearly. The concept of geneivat da’at, as distinct from a mere lie, offers us the tools to articulate the importance of da’at to our daily lives. Our carefully honed consciousness, both of ourselves and of the world around us, gives us the ability to reason and choose. Environments that feed us false messaging and give off contrived signals undermine that ability, whether or not tangible harm is done.
As human beings we shape our environments and work to influence others; many of the stimuli we encounter when we walk through a street in real life—billboards, neat sidewalks, etc.—are calibrated to manipulate our behavior. But the world I see on social media is one that I have unwittingly had a hand in creating, through my clicks, likes, and searches. The algorithms are optimized to keep users on the site, to hold and monetize attention. Because the user’s desires and interests are at the center, we are in some sense complicit in this act of geneivat da’at. Michael Sacasas, director of the Center for the Study of Ethics and Technology at the Greystone Theological Institute, frames the problem as follows:
Our digital tools promise to monitor and manage, among other things, our relationships, our health, our moods, and our finances. When we allow their monitoring and submit to their management, we outsource our volition and our judgment.
(“The Tech Backlash We Really Need,” New Atlantis, Spring 2018)
Social media is an especially sensitive test case for giving up this autonomy precisely because it is ostensibly about forming relationships with other people. In any social interaction, what I primarily have to give is myself: my attention, my willingness to connect with another human being. To have so much of that engineered by an outside hand is to diminish our agency in creating those relationships. Geneivat da’at teaches that each of us bears responsibility for making sure that we have the information we need to accurately assess the world, and to adjust our behavior accordingly.
Some critics argue that our platforms for social connection offer greater transparency and control. A platform with better user controls, with no ads and perhaps a chronological feed, perhaps even one in which users create their own algorithms, might be better choices. And such products do exist, even if their audiences are small. If we take control of our virtual reality, we might reclaim the da’at that we have ceded.
I am not convinced that such platforms would entirely solve the problem of geneivat da’at. I suspect that most people will not switch away from their preferred social media, at least not any time soon. Instead, I suggest a shift in the way that we relate to and even problematize these technologies. Much of the discourse around social media focuses on the tangible harms these platforms cause, harms which are easily dismissed by individuals who feel that they simply do not apply: I am not being swayed towards political extremism, my body image is no worse than it ever was, and so forth. The language of geneivat da’at can sensitize us to the moral problems of cooperating with the illusions generated by social media. Rather than alert against any particular nefarious outcome, Rabbinic sources warn us of the inherent harm of ceding our capacity to exercise da’at. It is an urgent warning that the language of geneivat da’at helps us to heed.
Sara Wolkenfeld is Chief Learning Officer at Sefaria, the online database and interface for Jewish texts, and a Rabbinic Fellow of the David Hartman Center.
This article appears in Sources, Spring 2022
