Holy Tech!
Holy Tech!
This Dvar Torah was originally published in Torah && Tech, the weekly newsletter I publish together with my good friend Ben Greenberg. To get the weekly issue delivered straight to your inbox click here.
Note : This coming Shabbat, the 3rd of Tammuz in the Hebrew calendar, marks the 25th anniversary of the passing of the Lubavitcher Rebbe of blessed memory. While the Rebbe is no longer with us physically, his influence is still very much felt throughout the Jewish world and beyond. We dedicate this issue of Torah && Tech to his memory and inspiration.
The Lubavitcher Rebbe
In January of 1960, a controversy broke out. A Chabad Chassid by the name of Rabbi Yosef Wineberg started a weekly series of Torah lectures on the radio. Many in the orthodox world at the time felt it was inappropriate to spread such holy Torah thoughts over a medium commonly used for secular entertainment that often stands at odds with traditional Torah values.
The controversy reached the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson OBM, who couldn’t disagree more.
In a public gathering, called a Farbrengen, the Rebbe clarified his position on the use of technological advances:
“Our sages have said: ‘All that G‑d created, he created for His honor.’ This also applies to all the scientific discoveries of recent years — their purpose is to add honor to G‑d by using them for holiness, Torah and mitzvot…
“There is a particular advantage to using radio to teach Torah. Even if a person is not sufficiently motivated to go and attend a class in person, or even if he only turned on the radio to hear something else — the words of Torah reach him.
“Furthermore: also in a place where there is no human being to hear these words or not even a radio receiver to make them audible, the words themselves permeate the place, achieving the end of ‘spreading the wellsprings of divine wisdom to the outside.’”
This attitude was a trademark of the Rebbe’s leadership over the decades, and his followers embraced it wholeheartedly. At a time when a large part of orthodox Jewry viewed modern technological advances with suspicion, if not open hostility, Chabad Chassidim embraced them as a tool for spreading G-dliness through the world.
It didn’t stop at radio either. The Rebbe’s followers went on to pioneer the use of live television, satellite hook-ups, and eventually, the internet to try and make the world a more G-dly place.
In fact, Chabad presence on the internet goes back to 1988 and predates the creation of the World Wide Web itself! Chabad.org, Chabad’s flagship website was founded in 1993, before Google, Yahoo, or Wikipedia were online!
It is this attitude, that everything G-d created can, and must, be used for good that continues to inspire countless people worldwide to use all of the tools at their disposal to increase goodness and kindness in the world.