Sermon: Shabbat Va-yiggash – “Social Media: #BlessingsAndCurses”
Written by Writings & Sermons by others — 7 January 2017
It was not easy to work out what to do to make Chanukkah special for our Synagogue this year when the first day of Chanukkah was Christmas Eve. In most years we would host some kind of a Chanukkah party, great music with a live band, turning the Synagogue into a multiplex cinema, Chanukkah lightings in members’ homes throughout the community or even, as we did for a couple of years, a fireworks party in the Synagogue courtyard, billed as light up the sky for Chanukkah – renamed by a wag after what actually happened, light up the hedge for Chanukkah., the result of which was no more fireworks parties!
Given the date this year so many members of the Synagogue would be away, many on holiday, many visiting relatives, well over fifty of Alyth’s most active members were going to be at Limmud. How could we get our community together for this delightful Jewish festival?
Then Alyth Educator and Youth Worker Mike Mendoza had one of his increasingly brilliant brainwaves. That’s the point said Mike. Alyth members are all over the place this Chanukkah – abroad, with family, cuddling up at home on cold winters’ evenings. Rather than bemoaning this and how it makes creating a Synagogue Chanukkah celebration challenging let’s celebrate the reality and make the most of it. From this insight Mike designed #AlythChanukkah.
I still don’t quite understand how it worked but the idea was as follows. Take a photo of you and your family, or your mini community or yourself lighting Chanukkah candles and then hashtag the photo on Instagram. I don’t actually know what that means, but, as if by magic, what it came to mean, was that more than sixty lovely photos of Alyth members lighting their Chanukkiot, mostly on the first night of Chanukkah, were sent back to Alyth from all around Hampstead Garden Suburb, North West London and the Globe. From Jerome Karet and Dorothy Sefton Green came a photo of them lighting candles in Muscat, Oman, from Alyth’s Chair Noeleen Cohen, she and her family lighting candles on a boat in Knysna South Africa. There were photos from a number of Alyth members who happened to be in Israel, from members here at Alyth shul lighting candles together and from home after home. Mike has calculated that the #AlythChanukkah photos added up to a community of over 250 people photographed and thus effectively lighting Chanukkah candles together. Mike has used all of these Instagram feeds to create a beautiful slide show showing how a shul can celebrate a festival together even when we are far apart.
Social Media can be a blessing for something just lovely like this Chanukkah event and also for issues of very serious intent. Starting January 11th 2011, five years ago this week, a dictator was toppled by the effective use of Social Media. Wael Ghonim chose this day to put up his Facebook page entitled “We are all Khaled Saeed”, named for a young Egyptian killed by the police in Alexandria, encouraging his fellow Egyptians to begin the anti-government protests in Tahrir Square in Cairo. Wael Ghonim first made an announcement on the Facebook page on 14 January 2011, asking his fellow Egyptians to take to the streets creating what he called the “Revolution against Torture, Corruption, Unemployment and Injustice”. This was the first invitation and many others followed. He anonymously collaborated with activists on the ground to announce the locations for the protest. By February 11th 2011 Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak had resigned, ending 30 years of increasingly dictatorial and brutal rule. Mubarak was forced to let the Egyptians go by the power of protest.
Social media is powerful – it can be a force for good. But we all know that it can also be quite the opposite. Misused Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter and the many other incarnations of this powerful media can be enormously destructive.
Many young people with us today know that social media used cruelly can keep a victim of bullying in fear and dreadful misery twenty-four hours a day. It doesn’t stop any more when they get home from school. The Senior Rabbi to our Movement, Rabbi Laura Janner-Klaunser, as well as using social media to effectively spread the messages that the country needs to hear and which disperse Reform Jewish values, has to cope on a daily basis with the most awful vitriolic and even violent messages sent to her as comments on her posts and statements.
As Wael Ghonim himself says “the internet, especially social media, is being held captive by the worst of human behaviour. It is driven by our human behaviour, then goes on to shape the behaviour itself and magnifies its impact.” Ghonim, a man who has seen the best that social media can achieve, has identified five problems with social media which he says which are going to make it a force for bad if they are not addressed. (TED Geneva 13-1-16 “Let’s Design Social Media that Drives Real Change”)
Firstly, we don’t know how to deal with rumours on social media. Once they are spread they get given the same credence as if they are carefully evidenced findings of research. Secondly, through social media we create our own echo chambers communicating only with the people we agree with. The algorithms that social media providers use to ensure that we are brought material we are going to want to engage with have the effect of keeping us in a loop of mutually reinforcing ideas. It’s why you rarely saw any social media from someone who disagreed with your position on Brexit. You were being fed opinions that agree with yours.
Thirdly online discussions quickly descend into angry mode as if we forget that the people on the other end of our computer screen are real, with real feelings. They become objects not people, we do not see the shock and hurt in their eyes nor feel their vulnerabilities and we lose our interest in caring. Fourthly social media makes it hard to develop our opinions in a thoughtful way due to the speed and sharpness of the delivery of the opinions that confront us. Once we have put out our own opinion on an issue it lives forever on the Internet and we are then less motivated to change them even if there is new evidence. Fifthly, and finally, Wael Ghonim notes that our social media favours broadcasting more over engaging deeper. We are encouraged to make our own posts rather than to discuss what we see or read, and we are encouraged to make pithy shallow comments rather than engage in conversation.
Ghonim is concerned that the result of the social media way of communicating with each other as it gets ever more popular will create dangerously polarised societies, where, in the words of the encounters between Joseph and his brothers in last week’s Torah portion just before his brothers left him for dead then sold him into slavery – they simply could not speak peaceably to each other (Genesis 37:4).
As he says what is behind this is human behaviour and human behaviour can change. We could reward thoughtfulness with appreciation, rather than cheer on vitriol. Joseph and his brothers managed to make a remarkable change. By the end of the part of the Torah portion that Ben read for us today a remarkable transition has happened. Through Joseph’s determination to forgive his brothers for what they did to him and their willingness to accept him just as he has now become they “just speak brother to brother to each other.” (Genesis 45:15)
There is a doctrine in Judaism which tell us that the way we communicate with each other is a mitzvah- a negative mitzvah – that we must avoid spreading Lashon HaRa – literally evil speech. Back in the first century our Targum Jonathan, and early Torah translation compared Lashon HaRa to striking your neighbour in secret (Targum Jonathan to Deuteronomy 27:24) Your social media violence cannot be seen but it is just as damaging as physical violence.
The Chofetz Chaim, Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan (1835-1933 Lithuania) was the foremost authority on avoiding lashon hara in his day. He did not try to stop people disagreeing with each other, nor rebuking each other when something was clearly wrong but he said you have be very careful how you do it if you are not to be guilty of lashon hara. He wrote: It is permissible to speak negatively about a person: to help the person or to help anyone victimized by the person; to resolve major disputes or to enable others to learn from the mistakes of that person Provided that: your remarks are based on first-hand information and careful investigation and it is very clear that this person was in the wrong and the person has been spoken to but refuses to change his or her behaviour and the statement to be made will be true and accurate and the intent of the speaker is for a constructive purpose (and there is a reasonable chance that the intended goal will be accomplished) and there is no alternative means by which to bring about the intended result and no undue harm will be brought about by the statement.
Otherwise taught the Chofetz Chaim, don’t do it. His words are important and instructive whatever the media – direct speech, printed matter or electronic social media.
May we have more of the community and people connecting #AlythChanukkahs and the like, and the campaigns for real justice organised by connecting people sharing values together, and none of the vitriolic bullying. May our online behavior be of as good a standard as our face to face behaviours and may all be guided by principles that enabled Joseph and his brothers to overcome what might have been irreconcilable differences and learn to speak in peace to each other for the rest of their lives.