Boundary Crossing – Paradigm Busting

This is a series by Dr. Rabbi Moshe Dror. He was a futurist, lecturer and teacher. In this series he explored the hidden meanings of the great stories of the Bible. In this time of profound changes

Dr. Dror helped unpack some of the hidden gems waiting to shine light through the inspiration of the revealed text. We hope you will be inspired by this series and encourage your comments.

INTRODUCTION:

Hello

Greetings

Welcome

I would like to invite you to join me on a journey.

I have been on this journey for about forty years or so.

Half of the world’s population has been on this same journey for about 4,000 years.

And now most of the world is joining this analogous journey now and into the future.

What am I talking about?

I am referring to the Journey that Abraham began when God told him

“Lech Lecha” (Genesis 12:1).

This has been translated into many different English phrases:

Go Forth…

Walk yourself away…

Go unto yourself…

My journey is basically a Midrash- a commentary on this phrase for the Cyber world that we all are living in. My journey is a Cyber Midrash on this theme.

This midrash is a set of personal meditations, ruminations, musings , and probes to seek out and to inquire what this might mean for us now in 2009 living in our the post Digital world.

I personally like the comment from a Chasidic source that suggests that this means: “Go Unto yourself-that is go to yourself; go find your own potential; become your authentic self.”

What does “authentic” mean? It suggests an ongoing appreciation of tradition. It also has a root meaning that is similar to “author”. To live authentically is to be the author of your own life- to have full power over your life.

This quest is not just limited to the Bible.

One of the most famous aphorisms comes from ancient Greece. The phrase “Know Thyself” was inscribed in large golden letters on the lintel of the entrance to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi,

Greece.

So, this project is a response the question of what might it mean to be an authentic human for the 21st century.

Now, what does this have to do with Abraham?

Abraham was the first Hebrew. There were neither Jews nor Israelites at that time. Now about half of the world’s population is part of the faith communities of Judaism, Christianity and Islam—

Abrahamitic religions.

What does the word “Hebrew” mean?

It is derived from the term meaning-“crossing over”.

In the days of Abraham, the crossing over was of a river or a desert.

So basically Abraham was a “boundary crosser”.

The personal significance of Abraham was to cross over conceptual boundaries

And develop a new world view.

Every living thing has some sort of boundary. What lets it be alive is that the boundary is a semipermeable membrane that lets certain information, chemicals to selectively enter the cell. It lets some information to enter and other information to leave.

What Abraham seems to have done is to let some of the culture of his period to enter his living organism and to block and keep others out and develop radical new ideas.

Dr. Rabbi Moshe Dror z”l –

Cyber Or The Boundary

Crossing

CYBER OR II

Abraham’s journey was in geographic space– ours is in cyberspace. His frontier was the desert –our frontier is Cyberia… our journey of the 21st century. We are all aware that we are in a conceptual shift from the  modern world to a postmodern world. I want to suggest that we are in a

post-post modern world, what is called a Trans- modern world. We are all part of the Net generation and we are all Netizens of Cyberia.

Welcome.

I want to suggest that our generation is the one that is a boundary crosser of being in the digital world. As Nicholas Negroponte suggests we are the generation that is shifting from seeing the world as atoms and learning how to see our world in terms of bits. This shift from atoms to bits is probably one of the most significant and powerful boundary crossings in human history.

Negroponte is the author of the significant book “Being Digital” and the director of the Media Lab at MIT.

As Negroponte writes:” the best way to appreciate the merits and consequences of being digital is to reflect on the difference between bits and atoms…”

The transition from an industrial age to a post-industrial or information age has been discussed often. Basically, the industrial age was an age of atoms based on the manufacturing of material.

The information age is based on bits of data that have less regard for space and time. We are now in a post-information age, a post digital age. All of the vast amount of words, images, sounds, videos, music that goes over the internet –all are grouped into trillions of combinations of eight

bits that make up what we call bytes and are encoded in sequences of zeroes and ones.

Consider this. The shift from primitive humans into hunter- gatherer culture took tens of thousands of years. Later, the shift from hunter-gathering to agriculture took thousands of years.

The shift from agriculture to the industrial age took many centuries. Still more recently, the shift from the industrial age to the information age took about two centuries. From the information age to the post- information age and the digital age is taking one generation only. This is the famous “Third Wave” theory of Alvin Toffler.

I still find it difficult to know that half of the ten richest people in the world got so much wealth from an industry that is younger than I am. I am older that the first computer.

At MIT there is even a Center for Bits and Atoms, -which is an ambitious interdisciplinary initiative that is looking beyond the end of the Digital Revolution…CyberOr and my journey is about how this major human transformation can impact on the Jewish world and on Judaism as we live through the rest of the 21st century.

THE “CYBER OR” PROJECT The word or is the I lebrew term for light. Light is a fundamental spiritual metaphor in Jewish tradition. It is a common figure of speech for God-“lirrah- Israel. “God is my light and my salvation” (Psalms 27:1); “‘I’he commandment is a lamp, ‘li>rah is light” (Proverbs 6:23); “A light unto the nations” (Isaiah 42:6). 1 Ience, our term (,yber Or, a powerful metaphor by which we might relate to cyberspace in a creatively Jewish way as we proceed to reinvent Jewish learning. External developments may have anticipated this objective. Steven Spielberg, being interviewed on Actors Studio, was asked about his pervasive use of light in his films. He answered that, for him, light symbolizes life. This is a Jewish view. Technological developments also present us with Jewish educational opportunities. The most recent information technologies are based on powerful systems that manipulate photons, which are packets of light. Creative Jewish educators could use this technological fact as an educational hook for Jewish Net-Geners. Assuming that Marshall McLuhan was right, that the medium is the message, the question arises: is there a unique Jewish medium? We answer, yes. The Jews have organized information and knowledge in special ways, congruent and consistent with content. The goal of the Cyber Or project would be to develop Jewish knowledge-organizing systems appropriate for Jewish learning in cyberspace. These would build on the foundations of traditional Jewish knowledge-organizing systems, but could also use the raw materials provided by popular culture, such as Spielberg’s movies and their use of light.

Bisk, Tsvi (Howard); Dror, Moshe. Futurizing the Jews: Alternative Futures for Meaningful Jewish Existence in the 21st Century (Function). Kindle Edition.

So- we are connecting the various forms of light:
The light of Day One of the creation narrative,
The lights of Day Four of the creation,
The photons of the Big Bang,
The light of photosynthesis,
The light of Abraham’s blessing,
The light at Sinai,
The light in the Mishkan (Tabernacle) Ark,
The light in the two Temples,
The lights of the Gothic cathedrals,
The lights we know of the electromagnetic spectrum,
The lights of the fiber optics of our broadband technologies…
(There must be many that I am leaving out… so if you can think of some, let me know through this blog-