Getting Our Lives Back

Following the Asifa, I wrote that it had “placed the issue of how to respond to technology’s onslaught front and center on the agenda of every Orthodox Jew across the religious spectrum. Modern Orthodox rabbis are issuing guidance to their congregations in response to the many inquiries they’ve been receiving post-Asifa. Websites… are featuring discussions of effective filters and safe computer use. Whatever one’s view of the Asifa… it is the talk of the Orthodox town. And all this would never have come to pass had the strategy been, as some had counseled, to simply hold numerous community gatherings on the topic, instead of one huge, audacious, impossible-to-ignore Asifa.”

But with the passage of years and the ever-greater entrenchment of the Internet in our lives, I wonder whether that Asifa could have taken place today.

But why the need for it, anyway? Haven’t we been winning the battle to some extent? Less than two years ago, I wrote here that although “It can be hard for the average frum Jew to accurately gauge whether the battle is being won or lost… vis-à-vis the never-ending, ever-multiplying challenges that technology poses for us… in fact, there are successes, many of them, involving many people and important institutions in frum life.” I went on to detail two of them, at such different points on the communal spectrum as Modern Orthodox Camp Morasha and Agudath Israel of America.

Right from the outset of the frum community’s engagement with the Internet, two suppositions took deep root in the public consciousness and have yet to be dislodged. First, that the overriding threat it poses is exposure to illicit sites, and second, that we must come to terms with the Internet as a reality that will only become ever more impossible to live without.