ACRE Blog

In 1990, I visited my friend Rebecca at MIT. As we walked the halls, she described a form of computer communications which she and her friends used to share homework or to set times to meet for pizza. Puzzled, I wondered why they didn't just walk down the hall and knock? Two years passed and Rebecca, still at MIT, spent an evening showing me around her computer account. Loading a rudimentary program, she asked me to envision a newspaper that could focus stories about subjects I was particularly interested in, such as Israel. I simply could not see the value.

Nothing in our tradition speaks against technology. On the contrary, some innovations, such as the printing press and movable type, have played important roles in enabling more Jews to own and access the wisdom of our teachers. In many ways, these most recent innovations have a very familiar feel. The listservs that are favored by many in the rabbinic community resemble the letter writing that previous generations used to seek rabbinic counsel. And the hyper-linking of the web resembles nothing so much as a page of Talmud, which (while lacking the speed of point and click) uses key words and phrases to direct us to other relevant texts. The web is filled with treasures of Jewish knowledge, and the miracles of modern databases have been a blessing to all of us who search through rabbinic and scholarly materials.

In the almost twenty years since I first learned about email and the web, I have come to embrace these technological developments as essential tools, not just for communication and shopping but real Jewish learning. Over last the few years, the HUC-JIR/CCAR Joint Commission for Sustaining Rabbinic Education has had hundreds of rabbis study in one of more than two dozen online courses. I love that we are helping rabbis in small and large communities get access to the best in scholarship and study in a way that fits into their busy lives. Beyond my professional role, my personal study relies on materials that I receive weekly through the internet from another organization committed to continuing rabbinic education.

My difficulty in understanding what my friend Rebecca was proposing all those years ago was largely based in my assumption that this technology was meant to replace existing structures. To some degree it did and does, but much of the value of the web comes from capacities that I did not truly appreciate because I did not then envision the needs it could fulfill. True, you can call all your friends and suggest you go out for pizza, but you can email all of them at once to come to a group agreement on a time and place with amazing efficiency. As we consider how to utilize technology in our continuing rabbinic education endeavors, we should not expect the internet to replace or supersede traditional modes of learning and study, but to augment and expand the existing frameworks.

Quality content is essential for creating programming that will engage rabbis, but we need to go beyond simply replicating modes of learning or methods of presentation that exist offline. I recently participated in a class that billed itself as a webinar, but was nothing more than a live audio lecture. While I appreciated the opportunity to hear a great scholar who lives across the country, I found myself folding laundry, checking email and not really learning that much. I was left wondering why the organization had not chosen to take full advantage of some of the unique combinations of possible elements of a webinar, such as live video feed, interactive slides, live and typed question and answers, to create a engaging experience.

In creating educational opportunities that use technology, we need to acknowledge its limitations and embrace them. Teaching in a classroom provides us only partial control over what our students hear or how they interact with the content we share. Yet, when we sit face-to-face with our students, we are aware when their attention wanders, or when a particular topic excites, and we can adjust our teaching accordingly. Even when we write a book or an article, we are able to create a beginning, middle and end that directs the reader in a particular narrative arc. But the web-like nature of the internet and the disconnect created virtual learning remove even those minimal controls and modes of feedback. There is nothing to stop us from creating content that attempts to bulldoze through this challenge by presenting step-by-step learning, but we would be better served by creating materials that acknowledge the independence of the learner, encouraging each individual to put together their own narrative interpretations. Online, serious Torah learning cannot and should not replace the experience of opening a book or learning with your rebbe, rather it should stand as a complementary and or alternate educational experience.

We need to embrace technology not just for what it is capable of doing now, but for what it might do if we experiment, build and imagine. As a Jerusalem Fellow, I was taken on a tour of Second Life, a virtual online universe. We built a persona and then went exploring. We visited a virtual synagogue and even "the kotel." Despite some of the more absurd elements of the enterprise, like our attempts to don a kippah which kept landing on our pants, the exercise got our imagination going. Even without seeing an immediate application, we began to talk about how virtual applications might be employed in our work. Nothing that we discussed that day seemed worthwhile enough for us to explore further, but kernels of ideas were planted. Not every innovation will be useful, but with the rate of change that happens in the technological realm, we can never be sure which of today's kernels will blossom into real possibilities in no time.

Some of our online ventures might not pan out right away. Working in new media demands patience and tenacity as well as commitment. The blog is a wonderful example. In many ways a blog is not so different from the listservs that are well used by my Reform colleagues. Yet when our commission put together a blog to complement on online course this past Spring, we did not attract the attention we had hoped to get. The posts, made by different members of the community, were thoughtful and thought provoking. We did get some modest amount of traffic, but no one who was not actively solicited to write posted on their own. It is hard to know exactly why it did not take off as we had hoped. Instead of abandoning the modality altogether, we began to imagine how we might make changes from our side. But we also recognized that opening up a new approach to communication means that we will need to educate rabbis to embrace new modes of Torah study, and we will need patience before deeming an effort a failure.

Nor should we overlook the role we can play in modeling the uses of technology. If we create classes that use You Tube clips, highlighting the way this site can help us access historic and contemporary footage of Israel or take us on virtual tour of a synagogue in Eastern Europe, we will potentially inspire other rabbis to use these modalities in their own rabbinates. My understanding of the web comes not from a book or a class, but from my own experiences and exploring. As leaders in the field of continuing rabbinic education we have a pressing opportunity to do what my friend Rebecca did for me those many years ago, to help other begin to envision possibilities far beyond what they might come to on their own.

Rabbi Ruth Abusch-Magder
Director, Joint Commission on Sustaining Rabbinic Education, 
Central Conference of American Rabbis
Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion