Technology, as anyone who has lived on our planet in recent decades knows, is a knife, one that can be used to cut meat but can also be used to murder. It brings us to enormous achievements, and it lowers us to the bottom of the heap. The same car that saves lives when it is an ambulance that quickly arrives at a patient suffering from a heart attack, is also a murder tool when a drunk driver takes off and murders the person he collides with. But not all technological tools are like that – with balanced sides of positive and negative. There are those in which the positive outweighs the negative, and there are those in which the negative outweighs the positive.
Things are no different when it comes to both telephone technologies and the information revolution. In a column published here in the section The author believes that the technology reached the ultra-Orthodox public too late.
Only he is talking about a very specific type of technology, and precisely the type whose direction is beyond doubt: the negative outweighs the positive. The Haredi public knew well how to enjoy technology decades ago, with Bar Ilan's "Responsa Project," and later other Torah repositories such as "Otzar Hochma," "Hebrew Box," and the like. This is an example of technology and the information superhighway being transformed into a tool in the hands of Torah students.
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But a "smartphone"? The one that makes all its users increasingly stupid? From a universal perspective, there is no doubt that this device does more harm than good. Those who need email wherever they are have already used a "Blackberry" years ago, without all the extras that Apple and Android have brought with them. Everything that comes after is mostly a waste of time at best, and a host of serious offenses at worst, and slander outweighs them all. Does every snot-nosed child equipped with an iPhone really need endless access to the Internet at any given moment?
No thanks, not now and not ever.
As a software engineer, living in a world of technology, I know too few people for whom the smartphone is indeed a work tool, and far too many for whom it has become a destructive tool. We say "no, thank you," not now and not ever. Those who still need a device will still ask themselves what they use more: Facebook, or "Uriyta"/"Balakhteh Derech," Twitter or "Smart-Dat," "Candy Crush" or "Tefillon." If most of their choices are the first options, they can certainly give up their device.
For email, you don't need a "smartphone" in the broad sense. And the Haredi public did well to disconnect from it. Those who really need it can block all the apps that aren't the basic ones they need - I know people who have done this. For that, you don't need a "Rabbins' Committee for Communications Affairs.".
Similarly, all assumptions regarding the issue of culture are fundamentally flawed in my opinion. First, if there is a public in which books will never disappear, it is the observant public, wherever they are, and for a simple reason: Shabbat. Books for the Haredi public will continue to be printed, and in any case, there is no need to worry about the question of which device our children will read their books on.
Revenge of Monte Cristo, cruelty laments Doyle
As for the content of these books, the fact that there are a bunch of junk in an ultra-Orthodox guise does not qualify them for reading books from the wider world. The first are unacceptable, and even more so, and on a personal note I say that they will not cross my doorstep or be placed on my children's bookshelves, but the others have not become kosher because of that. Would the author really want his children to learn from The Count of Monte Cristo about how to dedicate their lives to revenge, from "The Hound of the Baskervilles" about what cruelty is? And no, I have no need for my children to know Fantine or Victor Hugo's Thenardier family.
The fact that the world considers someone a great writer does not qualify their books to enter a Jewish home, and often the other way around. To the same extent, the fact that the world considers someone an ultra-Orthodox writer does not qualify their books to enter a home, and the content of each book must be examined on its own merits.
Secular leisure culture is wrong. The fact that it bears the shiny title "progress" is no reason to bring it into our fold! In the name of that "progress" all the serious offenses in the Torah are promoted today, and it is this culture that promotes the three most serious of them. It is itself idolatry, it is laden with incest, and it brainwashes people into bloodshed.
I urge the writer to examine this again: Is this really what you would like to adopt into your content? That is, apart from the fact that the very existence of that "culture" is intended to waste time – a completely anti-Jewish concept. And was there no such progress in the time of our rabbis, the Talmudic sages? Then they called it theater, today they call it cinema. Why didn't we hear about the establishment of "kosher theaters" in those days? Didn't the sages think that it would be better to "progress" and that instead of our young people going to spend time in theaters, it would be better for them to establish plays on the purity of the Holy? There is nothing new under the sun, only the medium has changed. Now it is called "cinema", and the fact that it is more available does not make it more kosher, not even in the sense of "ultra-Orthodox cinema", and never will be.
Unless the intention is what Rabbi Yossi bar Hanina said (Megillah 6): "And he was a champion in Judah and a principle of conquest, like those theaters and circuses in Edom, in which the kings of Judah will teach Torah in public.".
And may it be fulfilled in us soon.
