The Facebook Generation January 19, 2009

By Joel M. Hoffman

I recently asked a middle-school student how many friends she has.

“Eight hundred and sixty,” she told me.

“That’s funny,” I replied. “I have about a dozen.” And then I added, “I guess we’re using the word `friends’ differently.”

She was talking about Facebook friends, and, for lack of a better way of describing it, I was talking about “real” friends.

Facebook is a “social networking” site, which I guess means that it’s a way of being social on-line. According to Facebook itself, its 140 million members spend an average of almost 20 minutes each day “on Facebook.” Taking into account the members who don’t use the site daily, that works out to well over half an hour for most Facebook users. Each day.

Facebook’s basic relationship is “friend,” which, it turns out, is both a noun and a verb. A “friend” is what you become when someone invites you, and when you want someone to be your friend, what you do is “friend” them. Facebook conveniently keeps a list of the people you have friended.

Once you’ve become friends with someone on Facebook, you can interact electronically. You can send your friends messages, which is just like the e-mail that now seems like last century’s technology. In addition, your can share pictures with your friends. You upload a photo to Facebook, and then all of your friends — and only your friends — see that it’s there. You can also share one-line updates about your life. “I’m going to mall,” you can post, and then all of your friends will know your plans. If you’re having a bad day, you can tell people. They know about your life, and you know about theirs.

But that’s not all. You can also send them, for example, plants.

That’s right. You click on the right buttons and you send your friends a living, growing, plant. Except that it’s not alive. And it doesn’t grow. And it’s a not a plant.

So what’s going on? And why are 140 million people doing this? Why are so many people, and, in particular, so many young people, practically addicted to “social networking”? What is the point of pushing a button on your computer so a message on someone else’s mentions a gift in the form of a virtual plant? Couldn’t this time be spent on something more productive?

In much the same way that teenagers usually think that they alone are going through the awkward changes of puberty, and that no one understands them, each generation thinks that the older ones wrongly judged them, but that they are justified in judging the younger ones. Our parents misunderstood our generation, we all think, but we understand the failings of our children’s. They text message instead of talking. Their music is terrible. They don’t even send real plants. And don’t even get us started on how they dress.

But if we really want to learn for our experience, let us remember that sometimes the older generation (us!) really doesn’t appreciate the younger one. Styles change. Different doesn’t have to mean worse.

My grandfather was convinced that the only appropriate attire outside the house was a jacket and tie. If he had known that I show show up at Temple wearing neither, he would quite honestly have been ashamed. Never mind the fact that I don’t even own a hat. But he would have been wrong in his assessment. Not everyone wears a jacket and tie, or a hat, these days, and we all know that there’s nothing wrong with that.

We should offer the same consideration to children. Let us be careful when we judge their behavior by our standards. Let us be careful not to repeat our parents’ mistakes.

After all, sending a virtual plant is one really good way of taking seriously the old adage that, “it’s the thought that counts.” And for a generation usually labeled as materialistic, this on-line Facebook experience is a remarkable way to interact.

When we open our minds and suspend judgment, it’s amazing what our children can teach us.

Vayigash January 2, 2009

By Joel M. Hoffman

Vayigash, this week’s Torah portion, opens with the nearly final stages of the drama of the misery and anguish of our ancestors’ family lives. But amid the sorrow we also find the promise of better times.

We read of Judah in Egypt as he begs for life-saving food from a man who will turn out to be his brother Joseph. Joseph, now the second most powerful man in Egypt, looks back at the man he knows to be his long-estranged brother Judah.

Both Judah and Joseph were victims of their father Jacob’s atrocious parenting skills, as evidenced, for example, by Jacob’s decision to give Joseph a fancy coat but to give nothing to any of Joseph’s brothers. (“Here’s a Hanukah experiment you can try at home,” Rabbi Larry Kushner teaches in this regard. “See what happens if you give an expensive present to only one of your children….”) So back in Canaan, Judah had helped sell Joseph to their cousins, the Ishmaelites, as a slave. Jacob was distraught at the loss of his son, Judah seemed not to care, and for a while slavery was too good for Joseph. He spent time in an Egyptian jail.

It is perhaps not Jacob’s fault that he never learned to be a good parent. His mother and father fought over which child they loved more, and Esau was always Daddy’s favorite. Jacob’s mother was conniving and devious. Jacob’s father quickly grew so senile that he couldn’t tell the difference between his son and a sheep.

Isaac, of course, learned from his own father, Abraham, the father who took him on a father-and-son outing where he almost sacrificed him on Mount Moriah.

In addition, Jacob inadvertently married the wrong woman. We can only imagine the sibling rivalry that results when your sister is also your husband’s favorite wife.

Jealousy, pettiness, and sibling rivalry seem to be the only family dynamics Jacob knew. So perhaps we understand why Jacob was unable to keep his family together. If Genesis is about families, it is about dysfunctional families, as Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob make abundantly clear, along with Ishmael, Hagar, Esau, and so forth. Not one of them lived a particularly happy life.

Still, never one to learn from his mistakes, Jacob gathers all of his remaining children together when the family is faced with famine:

“I want all of you to go down to Egypt to try to get us some food,” he instructs his children. But then he clarifies what he wants: “All of you except Benjamin, that is.”

Why not Benjamin?

“Because I love him,” Jacob tells his children.

The message is clear.

Eventually, Benjamin must join his brothers in Egypt, and that brings us to this week’s installment of “what else can go wrong.” Joseph, now viceroy of Egypt, demands that Benjamin stay behind and not return to their father.

But that’s not an option, Judah knows. “If my father sees that Benjamin is gone, he will die,” Judah tells the powerful Egyptian leader.

Judah has understood the situation fully. Daddy will die if Benjamin doesn’t return. But Daddy doesn’t care about him. “Let me stay in his place,” Judah offers. “Daddy won’t even miss me,” he knows.

In offering to stay behind instead of Benjamin, Judah recognizes his father’s failings, and, more importantly, he accepts them. This is the moment he breaks the cycle of family dysfunction that plagued the first four generations of our ancestors’ lives.

Genesis, of course, is about us. For we are Abraham, sometimes angry at our children, and we are Rachel and Leah, jealous of our siblings. We are Judah, still trying to understand why our parents cannot be perfect. We are all of them.

Let us not forget that things turned out very well for Judah, a fact we mark at every wedding when we quote the prophet Jeremiah: “Once again there will be heard among Judah the sounds of joy and happiness, the sounds of the bride and groom.”

Let us pray that God give us the courage to learn from Judah and accept reality. And let us look forward to the joy and happiness that await when we do.

Shabbat Shalom.

There’s a Famine in the Land January 1, 2009

By Joel M. Hoffman

Genesis is about families, creation, where we come from, and what our lives are like. But it is also about famine. In fact, famine was so common that Genesis 26:1 begins, “there was a famine in the land,” but then the text has to clarify that it wasn’t the first famine, it was another famine.

Abraham and Sarah endured a famine. So did Isaac and Rebekkah. And so did Jacob, Rachel, and Leah, along with their children. Joseph was spared hunger, but that doesn’t mean that the famine didn’t impact his life. In fact, it was the famine that led to his rise in the ranks of the Egyptian power structure. Whether for the better or for the worse, famine shaped our people’s early life.

Three things about famines are important.

First, they always happen “in the land.” Even though some people suffer more than others, and even though some people, like Joseph, actually benefit, no famine is a personal famine. Famines belong collectively to everyone in “the land.”

Secondly, famines are not sent by God. They just happen. Our text does not read, “God sent a famine,” or, “God punished Abraham with a famine,” or even, “God tested Abraham with a famine,” but rather the clearer and more accurate, “a famine happened.”

Thirdly, when our ancestors suffered during a famine, they didn’t try to hide their pain. Their only reaction was to acknowledge their undeserved misfortune and try to make things better. They looked for food. Genesis 12:10 reads: “There was a famine in the land, so Abram went down to Egypt” to get food. He didn’t sneak out of the house (well, tent) trying to hide his situation. He accepted the problem and set out to try to solve it.

All of this seems suddenly relevant in 2009 America as our own savings accounts dwindle and as some of us lose our jobs. Most of us haven’t descended into actual hunger, but there are those who fear that it’s not far off. We are like our ancestors, unexpectedly faced with uncertainty, unsure of the future and sometimes even afraid of the present.

Unfortunately, we are also unlike our ancestors, for we have brought something into our modern misfortune that never plagued our forebears: shame. It’s not that they didn’t know about shame. They did. But in the Bible shame was reserved for vile actions. Judah’s episode with a harlot is a source of shame. So too is building the idolatrous golden calf. More generally, shame is tied up with behavior, not circumstances. Do something wrong to someone else, and you should be ashamed. If something happens to you, you should not. We seem to have forgotten this basic fact.

When the bottom fell out of the Argentine economy several years ago, when half of that country reverted to the barter system, synagogues there did two things. They collected food for members who couldn’t afford to feed their families. But the synagogues also left their doors unlocked at night so people could sneak in under cover of darkness and find food, avoiding the shame they would otherwise have felt when people saw their poverty. Why was this second step necessary?

In this country, too, though most of us still have food, shame has crept in where it doesn’t belong. Synagogues are offering job services, but most are trying to do it anonymously. Some people who lose their jobs don’t even tell their spouses or children. Again, why?

We live in an unredeemed world, our sages teach. Life is good, but life is also hard. That’s just the way it is. Perhaps we can learn from our ancestors that misfortune is part of life, and, more importantly, that we have no reason to hide it.

The coming months and perhaps years will be hard enough on their own. Let’s not make them worse by adding the unnecessary burden of shame.

After all, there’s a famine in the land.