Tonight, I want to go deeper into the question I posed on Rosh Hashanah: “Do I matter?” As it is Yom Kippur, I must confess that I have a shortcoming when it comes to assessing whether or not I matter. It is my own shortcoming, yet, I suspect others fall into this trap as well. This is a multilayer shortcoming, so please be patient with me.
When I sit next to some new acquaintance at a dinner party or the like, I want to know why they matter. Only one question screams out in my mind, as if all other small talk is banished for the sake of this one question. It is, “what do you do for a living?” It is never anything else. Not “where are you from?” Not “what are your hobbies? Cognitively, I know people are more than their employment, but I can’t seem to silence the question. The Torah tells me that people are more than their professions, but I just can’t silence the curiosity.
As much as I would have liked to minimize the importance of the question of what someone’s profession is, I have only discovered that it is more important on the macro level. One of the most prolific social scientists of the 20th century, Ronald Inglehart, describes that the defining cultural change of the modern era has been a shift from a “we-centered” identity to a “self-centered” identity. Once upon a time, we all pitched in on the family farm. My parents grew up in a home where all the members of the family ran a restaurant. Our ancestors who settled in the prairies and ran family general stores, raised children who became doctors, dentists and lawyers. We went from working together as a family to having individual careers.
Inglehart collected data across dozens of countries through a World Values Survey. He found that as we become more economically secure, and we move from industrial economies to information economies, people place less emphasis on loyalty, traditional authority, religious obligation, and fixed social roles. They put more emphasis on personal choice, self-expression, and autonomy.
President Kennedy’s famous words – “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” – epitomized the we-centered ethos. Today’s commencement addresses are filled with self-actualization. Michele Obama at Tuskegee University advised, “Don’t shrink. Don’t bow. Don’t be anyone other than who you are.” Ellen DeGeneres told Tulane’s grads, “Follow your passion. Stay true to yourself.” Steve Jobs told Stanford “You’ve got to find what you love… my generation had it all wrong with ‘give up your dream, stay true to the team’.”
Inglehart’s survey was far-reaching. He recognized an “increasing emphasis on individual autonomy, self-expression, and free choice.” He described a global movement from “survival values” toward “self-expression values.” In short, modern identity has increasingly moved away from asking, “what does my community expect of me?” toward asking, “who am I, and how can I express my authentic self?
At the same time that the employment market was moving us to self-actualization, the structure of the media was dissolving our social capital, our gathering spaces, and our communal conversations.
Neil Postman wrote a landmark book in 1985 titled Amusing Ourselves to Death, in which he argued that television changed how we process information. Once upon a time people read through long arguments and sustained their attention to be able to follow complex arguments and logical flows. TV turned everything into entertainment, especially the news. Postman described a shift from news coverage on important questions like trade policy, nuclear war, and monetary policy to intense coverage of things like today’s stories of the Amber Herd and Johnny Depp trial or William and Kate moving back to the UK.
Postman had no idea that Instagram and X [specifically] were coming to take us to banality and echo chambers respectively. Two of the three most popular social media posts ever are the Kylie Jenner photo of her baby Stormi, and the stock photo of an egg which was initiated for the sole purpose of beating the Jenner baby post – hardly the pinnacle of human discourse. Discourse has devolved to momentary amusement.
We might hate to admit it (I certainly hate to admit it) that this sermon is itself a post-television social media product. If you were to read a sermon from 200 years ago, you would find it long, well sourced, nuanced, with biblical and Talmudic interpretations and profound novelty. [However] I know that I am competing with brains that have been trained on screen entertainment; I have to be at least as entertaining as your phones. I am lucky that those devices are not Yom Kippur-approved, but I seriously wonder how many people are scrolling their phones while streaming the Temple Emanuel Service on their computer.
Even thinking itself is under assault, a week ago MIT released a report about the effects of AI on education and described the affect as cognitive surrender. Students are not going to office hours, and are not participating in group study sessions. Here are a few more of the MIT findings. AI is increasing isolation, “undermining student mastery and confidence, eroding the ‘social contract’ between instructors and students, challenging decades of distinctive MIT community norms and values about rigor, the creative friction required for learning, collaborative problem solving, and personal integrity.
Just for balance, a recent study of 26,000 Chinese high-school students found that AI as a study aid led to an 18 percent increase in homework scores, but a 20 percent decline on exam scores. Yes, AI is making children less proficient on both sides of the Pacific.
When you combine individualistic culture with the personalized algorithm and bespoke media feed in each of our personal devices, you will find the perfect recipe for the elimination of conversation, the erosion of community, and perhaps the crisis of mattering.
When we think of Torah, we imagine a document originally carved in stone dictated from on high, rigid and unchanging. Yet, the narrative of the Torah is exactly the opposite. Torah always comes in we platforms. It is never a static lonely text. Even before Moshe comes down from the mountain, the stone begins to receive new lines written in conversation, before the narrative of Sinai.Yitro, Moshe’s father-in-law, suggests a novel structure for the court system, to which Gd agrees. When the Torah comes to deal with the laws of the inheritance in the land of Israel, the daughters of Tzlafchad voice a concern about the rules and their unfairness to women. Gd also agrees with the daughters of Tzlafchad . כן בנות צלפחד דוברות—indeed the law should be as the daughters of Tzlafchad have spoken. The Torah maintains this dual nature of conversation between the human and the divine, as the words of Moshe become the basis for the fifth book of the Torah, Devarim.
For the next 1500 years or so the essence of Torah study is exceedingly conversational. It retains the rigid backbone of a written Torah that must be faithfully adhered to, but it also doggedly preserves what is called תורה שבעל פה the oral Torah. In certain ways this is the living Torah, the Torah that dictates how the law is practically expressed in everyday life. This is the Torah that ultimately forms the Mishna and the Talmud. Ironically, the very act of writing and publishing oral Torah is a sin, it is forbidden. The publication of the Mishna and Talmud and every other Torah book thereafter can only be tolerated because of an emergency. The emergency was persecution. The Roman government systematically dismantled the authority of the Jewish patriarchate and the Sanhedrin during the reign of Theodosius II. Gamaliel VI was stripped of privileges, died around 425 CE, and no successor was allowed. The rabbis feared that Torah she b’al peh would be lost, so they permitted its writing. Absent the persecution, the Torah would have remained oral.
Nevertheless, Talmud continued to be studied via conversation. The pages of the Mishna and the Talmud rarely read as unchallenged statements; they read like active debates between Abayeh and Rava, Hillel and Shamai, Rabbi Yochanan and Reish Lakish.
The Talmud even records a story about Rabbi Yochanan and Reish Lakish in which they get into an argument and stop speaking with each other. In turn, they die because of their separation, and their isolated study of Torah. Rabbi Yochanan’s last words are היכן בר לקישא היכן בר לקישא “where are you Son of Lakish, where are you?” Conversation of Torah study was oxygen for these two famous rabbis; when they stopped conversing, they stopped living.
The Talmud in Brachot says
for the Torah is only acquired through study in a group. This is in accordance with the opinion of Rabbi Yosei, son of Rabbi Ḥanina; .. “A sword is upon the Badim which literally means the arrogant, but can also be read as those who study alone.
Even after the Talmud is committed to writing, Torah study was always conducted in groups or at the very least in pairs. The fundamental unit of Torah study is chavrutah, partnerships.
The Talmud tells the story of ‘Choni the circle maker’. He is the Jewish Rip Van Winkle, who falls asleep for 70 years. When he awakens, he goes to the study hall, where they are quoting him. He announces his presence to join the conversation, but the scholars question his identity. And he exits the study hall and asks Gd to take his life, announcing או חברותא או מיתותא –either companionship or death, either Torah in conversation or it will die.
Judaism was not immune to the inventions of the printing press. One of the great changes that came over the Jewish people came with the new technology for the printing press and the printing of a standard code of Jewish Law, known as the Shulchan Aruch. When it was first printed, some of the contemporary rabbis, Rabbi Shlomo Luria for example, decried that this code was going to put an end to the conversation. He was right and he was wrong. Jewish law and practice became narrower; there was now a text that constricted the spectrum of ritual and regulation. On the other hand, the way in which Talmud had been studied has never changed. Torah study remained a group activity; it remained something done in pairs.
Television reorganized Western society. It dissolved volunteer organizations, emptied churches, and eroded the relationships between neighbors. But it did not dissolve the Beit Midrash, not those places where Jews come together and remain in active dialogue. Social media is not only restructuring our society, it is also reprogramming our brains. Yet, the Torah conversation is still growing. For example, on June 6, 2027 it is likely that over 1 million Jews world-wide will celebrate the completion of the Talmud in the Daf Yomi cycle. There is a fundamental sticking power to this study phenomenon and its dogged allegiance, not just to the study of Torah, but to doing so in pairs and in groups.
Rav Kook speaks of it in ways that I think address the question of mattering vitally and centrally,
The Supernal Teshuvah comes from a flash of the General Good, the Goodness of G-d which abounds in all the worlds, … The Soul of All appears intimately before us in Her Splendor and Holiness, as much as the heart can absorb.
והטוב שבנו הלא הוא בא מהתאמתנו אל הכל
The good within us comes from our faithfulness to the Whole? How could one be torn from the Whole, like a strange crumb or a single imperceptible grain of dust?
Rav Kook understands Teshuva – repentance – as a connection to the whole. He sees our shortcomings as an atomization, a breaking away from the whole. Alone, we are dust, maybe we don’t matter. For Rav Kook, the entirety of Israel, Knesset Yisrael, is a surrogate for Gd’s presence. When you connect to Kenesset Yisrael, you connect to the shechinah.
In a way, the mattering problem, the mattering emptiness may be a byproduct of the trend toward individuation. People ask if they individually matter, but almost never ask that question in the plural. I have never found that anyone has ever said, I don’t think my family matters. I have never heard anyone muse, does the Jewish community matter? Do we ever ask, does Israel, the country, the Zionist enterprise to preserve the Jewish people matter? We instinctively answer: of course, it matters. It matters a lot.
There is a Midrash that I have come to appreciate deeply. It is found in the Sifri, and is attributed to the famous Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, author of the Zohar, who spent 13 years in a cave and lived off the fruit of a carob tree as he studied Torah with his son isolated from the world. These details are important relative to his interpretation of Moshe’s blessing.
רַבִּי שִׁמְעוֹן בֶּן יוֹחַאי אוֹמֵר: מָשָׁל לְאֶחָד שֶׁהֵבִיא שְׁתֵּי סְפִינוֹת וּקְשָׁרָם בְּהוֹגְנִים וּבַעֲשָׁתוֹת וְהֶעֱמִידָן בְּלֵב הַיָּם וּבָנָה עֲלֵיהֶם פַּלְטְרִין
This blessing is comparable to one who tied together two boats He tied them to anchors and iron weights, placing them on the high seas, and he built upon them palaces. As long as the ships were tied to each other, the palaces lasted. When the ships were separated from each other, the palaces did not last
Moshe’s last blessing to all of us is that our spirituality, our connection to Gd, be simply a byproduct of our ability to keep our respective ships tied to each other. The rabbi most associated with the Zohar – that famous mystical text – teaches us that the foundation of spirituality is not the mysteries, but rather the person sitting next to you. The rabbi who himself retreated from society to immerse himself in Torah and spiritual pursuits announces that being emotionally bound to the person next to you is the foundation of religious assent.
If there is one sin that I want us to repent of this Yom Kippur, it is the sin of separation. What is the sin of separation? It begins with one’s construction of their identity. Do you define yourself by those experiences and qualities that are you unique to you: your looks, your finances, your profession, your social media profile, your golf handicap, your marathon medals?
Your identity needs to be built on a broader notion of we: family, community, Jews, Israel.
Judaism has never been just a religion of beliefs alone. Belief by itself is not enough. There has to be action, regular action. There have to be spaces and places where you build that group identity. Usually at this point, I offer a variety of ways to stay connected. Not this year. I think our collective action needs to be more unified. We need to literally take a page out of the Daf Yomi Book. We need to be studying together, in the shul, in living rooms, and in dining rooms. The key is doing it together. The solution to our mattering problem is shifting from the me-centered journey to an us-centered journey.
I ask you to help reform the us-centered journey by forming classes and study groups. I want you to form a group in your living room, invite one of the members of our team or each of us in succession into your living room, to teach and discuss. Invite your teenagers and young adults to argue with us, challenge us, give us their versions of things. We can do this in the format of a book club, a classical class, scotch and Talmud, Parshat HaShavuah, ethical questions, Israel-related subjects. The only necessary ingredients are a group of people and some Torah. We matter, and we especially matter as us.
