Community and Society Archive

Welcome to Community and Society where you will find the latest thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on the changing nature of community and society in America today and on the challenges and opportunities these changes represent for the Jewish people in America at the dawn of a new century. Every other week you will find something new and (hopefully) engaging here!

To access the Community and Society Archive, click here.

To join the conversation at Community and Society Talk, click here.

Our authors are especially interested in hearing your responses to what they have written. So after reading, visit the Community and Society Discussion Forum where you can join in conversation with CLAL faculty and other readers.

One day it was the park, the next the parka…

By Jennifer Krause

It was the first Shabbat of the month of Nissan, the month of Passover and new beginnings. I spent the afternoon reading in Washington Square Park, getting reacquainted with the sun. It seemed as if every bench, patch of pavement, and strip of grass had sprouted people, happy people, rejoicing in their liberation from dark apartments and dark clothes. If this had been a musical, one of these folks might have jumped up, taken a swig of Poland Spring, and burst into a stirring ballad, lyrics inspired by the Song of Songs (music, of course, by Elton John and Tim Rice, complete with gospel choir): Rise up my love, my fair one, for yea the winter has passed!

Or not. The next morning, I awakened to snow. Lots of it. I watched from the window with a mixture of wonder and betrayal. Down below, unsuspecting young tulips opened themselves to large, defiant flakes, expecting a sip of sunshine, yet getting a big gulp of ice cubes instead.

While winter and spring continued their ugly turf war outside, I waged war on the chametz in my apartment. I flung open the cabinet doors with a "take-no-prisoners" attitude and a large-sized Hefty bag, and began the messy work of ferreting out hidden boxes of pasta, rogue oatmeal packets, and unused traces of flour masquerading as regular household dust.

Every once in a while I took a look out the window. Maybe it was my focus on leaven, but the snow made me think of manna. I kept thinking that it must have looked something like this when God sent the Israelites manna in the wilderness. Blue skies and sunshine one minute, and puffy, gray clouds the next. A food front rolls in, and before you know it, it's manna, manna everywhere.

Manna from heaven is the ultimate symbol of plenty and infinite access. Of course, it can have its drawbacks. Like all recently freed captives reared on scarcity, the Israelites figured that the only thing better than plenty was more. So they tried to stash away as much manna as they could - far more than they could possibly consume. In no time at all, what was rich and nourishing became spoiled and maggot-ridden. Soon after, the Israelites learned how to harness the manna's energy, focusing less on more and more on enough.

Having experienced an exodus of our own out of the confinements of real space and through the miraculous Cyber Sea, we have entered the wilds of technology. The possibilities abound, streaming down like manna from heaven. Every day is something new and unimagined. Have we ever felt freer, more liberated, less constrained? It could easily be said that we are journeying through the bravest of brave new worlds, and all we have to do is make sure our umbrellas are turned upside down.

Not so, says Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig in his book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Lessig dismantles the myth of cyberspace as the great libertarian frontier, necessarily free from the intrusions of government regulation. Lessig contends that if we succumb to this myth we will fail to take the steps that are necessary if we are to protect the new freedom that we find so exhilarating. In other words, if we think we are gathering more and more manna from the sky's-the-limit world of cyberspace, the manna is bound to spoil. The only solution is to figure out how to use and control it, how to harness its energy and its possibilities. He writes:

We stand on the edge of an era that demands we make fundamental choices about what life in [cyber]space, and therefore life in real space, will be like…. And when they are made, the values we hold sacred will either influence our choices or be ignored….

If there are choices to be made, they will be made. The question is only by whom. If there is a decision to be made about how cyberspace will grow, then that decision will be made. The only question is by whom. We can stand by and do nothing as these choices are made - by others, those who will not simply stand by. Or we can try to imagine a world where choice can again be made collectively, and responsibly.

And cyberspace has not cornered the market on tough choices. As Bill Joy, Chief Technologist at Sun Microsystems, comments in a recent Fortune magazine article:

By 2030, we are likely to be able to build machines, in quantity, a million times as powerful as the personal computers of today…. As this enormous computing power is combined with the manipulative advances of the physical sciences and the new, deep understandings in genetics, enormous transformative power is being unleashed. These combinations open up the opportunity to completely redesign the world, for better or for worse.

One thing is clear: we have only just begun the journey towards the technological and scientific revolutions that will make today's most astounding discoveries into footnotes in the long story of progress. Nothing will be unchanged or unaffected. Day after day, we fill our baskets to overflowing with the unprecedented knowledge and capabilities streaming down upon us. Now is the time for us to start determining how we will properly harness the power of this plenty. So much knowledge, so much power, can nourish or spoil. Used right, it can empower us to move towards real freedom - towards life in a world that we have designed to reflect and advance our deepest values, to nurture and encourage our highest selves. And what better time than Passover to clean out what Joy calls "our early-21st century chutzpah," to pause amidst our frenzied stockpiling of the manna we call knowledge and information and ask ourselves a question: How will we make this century different from all other centuries? Stopping to ask the question, and taking the time to respond, is the privilege and responsibility of being free.