Why They Don’t Tweet
May 8th, 2011 | By admin | Category: 2010-2011, Archives, E-geress 3rd Article
by Rabbi Yisrael Rutman
“I went to see the Maggid of Mezeritch, not to hear his words of Torah, but to watch him tie and untie his bootlaces.”—Hassidic saying
It didn’t take long for American business to zoom in on social networking to turn a profit.
The current issue of MIT’s Technology Review reports that “in the past two years, a handful of start-ups such as Klout and Peer Index have developed ways to measure a person’s social-media capital and then feed that information to companies in real time. By looking at data from Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, Klout’s algorithm determines who starts conversational trends and who gets people to click, comment, or retweet.”
The algorithm can enable a company to determine what product or service a customer is most likely to purchase, and then offer it to them. More deviously, it can feed a customer rep with a Klout score on the person who’s calling in to complain and then decide whether the call rates serious attention or a quick brushoff. Not on the basis of the validity of the complaint, but on whether the bad word might go viral.
TR acknowledges, however, that “the tool is not foolproof; Warren Buffett, for example, is not on Twitter but certainly is influential.”
It brings to mind the story of Rabbi Shach, who was the head of Ponevitch Yeshiva, and who one sunny day in 1988 emerged in the Israeli media as an influential political figure. At the time, most Israelis had never heard of Rabbi Shach. It came as a shock to them that he was a leading figure in the Orthodox community, revered by hundreds of thousands of people in Israel and abroad as a modern-day sage of the Torah. Nor could they easily understand the source of his power. He had hardly been active in politics at all. He was, rather, a scholar who devoted all of his time to studying and teaching Torah. Yet, without campaigning or appearing in the media, without a single tweet (internet as a public medium didn’t even exist yet), his influence was profound. Not a man of Klout; but certainly a man of clout.
Much the same is true of today’s Torah leaders. They are not to be found on the internet. Indeed, some can’t even be reached by telephone. No, I don’t mean their lines are always busy or unlisted; some actually don’t have a phone. If you want to see them, it’s often a matter of just going to their homes and waiting on line.
The anonymity of these individuals is deliberate. They don’t seek publicity, they are not interested in promoting themselves. Rather, they are interested in the truth, which they find in the Torah. Why waste time on social networking and other diversions when the truth is from Sinai, not Google?
One might ask, though, even if they aren’t interested in promoting themselves, aren’t they interested in promoting the Torah? After all, it says in Pirkei Avot (1:12) that one should emulate Aharon, loving people and bringing them to Torah? So why don’t they tweet?
It’s a good question.
But first, one has to credit these Torah scholars with knowledge of that dictum in Avot. If we know it, they surely know it, and much more. The question, then, is how it fits into their worldview.
The answer, I think, is like this: More than any of us, these individuals, who devote their every waking moment to Torah and mitzvot, appreciate the beauty and wisdom of Torah and want more than anything else to share it with their fellow Jews. That’s why they have chosen to be teachers, rather than politicians or marketing experts (pardon the redundancy). So they are, in fact, fulfilling the words of Avot in their daily lives.
But they eschew the internet primarily because it is not conducive to transmitting Torah. For Torah to be properly understood it has to be transmitted directly from master to student, not only so that the student can ask questions, but more importantly, can observe and interact with a Torah scholar who is a living embodiment of Torah values. Only in that way can one come to a proper understanding of what Torah is really about. Not a political or social program, nor a philosophy, but a way of life.
That’s why they don’t tweet. Because the message they want to send is essentially not tweetable.
But if you do go to see a Torah scholar, you get your money’s worth: an unmediated encounter with a possessor of unique wisdom. And that could change your life.
Note: To be sure, there are many fine Torah scholars who do use telecommunications to reach people who might otherwise have no access to Torah. It is also used by the Orthodox community for dissemination of lectures, information about kosher products and other services. The purpose of this essay was to explain why some do not use it, and to encourage our readers to experience the living Torah.
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