Community and Society
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. What are 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 a new article here.
To access the Community and Society Archive, 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.
Is it Real or is it Memorex? A Shabbat Riddle
By Jennifer Krause
On a recent visit
to my hometown of Tucson, Arizona, I attended Friday night services with my family at our
local synagogue. Tucked away in my prayer
book was a neon green sheet of paper with various announcements. Alongside all of the
usual fare—the name of the bar mitzvah boy, the acknowledgment for the donated
bouquet of flowers gracing the bimah, and an
invitation to a brown bag lunch-and-learn with the rabbi—was a notice that caught my
attention: Videotapes of Friday night services
available.
Although I have
grown up in the age of video, this particular manifestation of the form was something new
to me. I assumed the idea behind the tapes was fairly simple—that they were primarily
intended for those homebound by sickness or disability, and probably most often requested
on a one-time basis by relatives of the bar or bat mitzvah who couldn’t attend.
Still, the image of people watching the Shabbat service on video struck me as somehow
curious, and as the service began, I found myself trying to put my finger on why.
What interested me,
I realized, was that the idea of videotaping these services suggested some interesting
dilemmas and possibilities for Jewish practice. What, after all, would be the torah for watching—the way to watch—a
videotape of a Shabbat that had already come and gone? Is it meant for participatory
viewing—like a Tae Bo exercise video? Do you follow along with a prayer book and say
the prayers? Or do you just watch it, as if it were a taped episode of “ER”? Do you really feel, watching a video from
your couch, as if you are experiencing a service? Or are you just catching up on something
you missed, sort of like watching the tape of a wedding you couldn’t attend? Is there
something odder about recording Shabbat than recording a wedding, a graduation, or the
nightly news? If Shabbat is exactly about distinguishing sacred time from weekly time,
about cordoning off a day of heightened awareness from the rest of the week, isn’t it
strange to try to save Shabbat and import it into another time—say, Wednesday
afternoon? Are these videos just the product of a culture so saturated in instant replays,
so obsessed with its own ability to record and re-broadcast events that it even tries to
capture something essentially uncapturable? Or are these videos—particularly for
those unable to attend the live service—helping make the synagogue a more open,
inclusive institution, one less bound by a brick and mortar existence than it might
otherwise be?
In other words, I
found myself wondering about how video technology might change our experiences of time and
of community. Of course, my questions about Shabbat videos are really part of a larger
public discussion about whether and how new technologies affect our daily routines, our
social patterns, and our sense of self. There is so much talk these days about new
media—virtual reality games, Internet, cyberspace, and what we do “there.” These conversations often assume that the virtual
media world is separate from what we would deem the face-to-face, or the real, world. They
assume that it constitutes some disembodied realm where time and space don’t
matter—a world that is appealing because it allows us to transcend our bodily
limitations, and gives our fantasy and imagination free reign. The downside, according to
this line of thinking, is that the virtual world isolates us from “the real
world” by cutting us off from our physical selves, from grounded social
relationships, and from the moorings of communal support and responsibilities.
Barbara
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett suggests that we rethink this dichotomous construction. The virtual
worlds we participate in do not constitute a separate universe. Even while we interact
virtually, she reminds us, we continue to exist in real time and in real physical space.
And our experiences of the physical world, in turn, are profoundly shaped by all sorts of
media, from telephones to public address systems to giant sports stadium monitors. The
question, she suggests, is instead: How do our worlds—virtual and physical, the
“real” and the “imaginary”—intersect and interact?
This is, in a way,
the issue at the heart of Shabbat: the plastic relationship between the real and the
imagined, the world as it is and the world as we imagine it might be. After all, Shabbat
observance is about setting aside time to enact and create, though briefly, a utopian
world, a world of plenty and peace. The “record-rewind-hit play” Shabbat might
seem like a pale imitation of the “authentic” experience, but Shabbat is, in
many ways, already a construct in and of itself. It
teaches us that we can move between profane time and sacred time, between the world of
work and the world of rest; in so doing, it deconstructs the dichotomy between the
“real” and the “imagined,” and helps us see the ways we construct both
of these categories. Shabbat is sacred, but
our own actions and imaginations are the key to making it so.
As much as the rhythms of time
shape our lives, we also shape time’s rhythms. Even as Shabbat demarcates temporal
borders, it teaches us that these borders can be fluid. By custom, we end Shabbat on
Saturday evening, but tradition acknowledges that we can extend the holiday as much as
another three days if we wish. The solar calendar may dictate that a certain Shabbat
starts at 7:58 p.m. on Friday evening. But I know that what 7:58 p.m. Friday evening feels
like depends a great deal on what I am doing. When I am lighting candles, closing my eyes,
saying the blessing, and then opening my eyes and seeing that it has become Shabbat, I
participate in creating, with light and dark, with sound, the temporal shift from
week-time to Sabbath-time.
The primacy of perception is so
critical to Jewish ritual that rabbis debate about “virtual reality” in the
Talmud. In Berachot 47b, they ask: If only nine are present,
can the Torah count as number ten to make a minyan
(a prayer quorum)? Rabbi Huna says, “When nine look like ten, they may be joined
together.” That is, if you experience the
Torah as the tenth of the group, and thus the group as a group of ten, then you have a minyan. The imagination of the people involved
plays a critical role, even in creating an experience that seems to be only about real
physical presence. The Torah, this passage suggests, can count as a “person” if
the conditions are right. In this discussion, the Torah—the quintessential media form
shaping Jewish life---does not stand for disembodied virtualness. Rather, it stands for
presence, for liveness; it helps knit together a live, embodied community. Moreover, the
debate reminds us that services already involve interacting with media—prayer books,
the Torah—even before we get to the question of the videotaping.
At the same time,
the rabbis’ debate also draws our attention to the fact that “live
community” is a more elastic idea than the ten-body minimum of a minyan at first suggests. Just as the debate
teaches us that the distinction between the “real” and the “virtual”
is not hard and fast, so it teaches us that what constitutes “groupness,” or
community, is always, to some extent, a question of perception and imagination. Ten people
do not make for a magical, critical mass that somehow forms an organic whole; rather, ten
people constitute community because it is understood that they do.
All of this is not to say that
distinctions between what you see on video and what you experience “live”
don’t matter. The fact that I was in
Tucson, after all, reflects the reality that I, like other people, still go to visit my
family in person. Because I live far away in New York City, I email them and talk on the
telephone, and this does, indeed, texture our relationships in certain ways. Nevertheless,
it is still important to me to see them, to touch them, and to sit with them during Friday
night services at our synagogue.
According to a
Jewish mystical tradition, human beings exist in two temporal axes simultaneously. The linear/historical axis is a string of finite
moments, moments that can never be recovered in any tangible way. The cyclical axis, on the other hand, is an
infinite circle of non-static moments that are replicable and/or recurrent throughout
time. Human existence is the intersection of
these two axes, and the heart is the hinge around which they turn. Because the heart is the crossroads, it privileges
neither axis and knows both in intimate detail. According
to this conceptualization, every being, every body, exists both in time and out of time.
Both axes are in play in our lives. Thinking of ourselves as beings who move between
different kinds of times and communities—with or without the aid of
technology—helps us think more richly about the ways our own understanding shapes our
experiences and perceptions of these realms, and of the borders between them.
To join the conversation at Community and Society Talk, click here.
To access the Community and Society Archive, click here.
To receive the Community and Society column by email on a regular basis, complete the box below:
