May / June 2006:

Slaying Goliath
You say you want a revolution? Call it upstart Judaism.

Essay by Steven I. Weiss



What if your Judaism were your own? Instead of finding a synagogue, prayer, or charity that fits you, you’d create your own version of those things and others.

It sounds like a lot of work — perhaps too much trouble. And yet, if in 1985 you were similarly tasked with making your own music album, news publication or beer, those could seem like daunting tasks, too.

And the same could be said for Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee who discovered that as technology and markets changed, it was entirely feasible for him to make his own music album (in defiance of the large record labels), news publication (in defiance of the mainstream media), and his own beer (in defiance of Budweiser). In each case, he found the process and the outcome satisfying.

While I can’t speak for the beer and music, his news publication certainly has been satisfying to a readership larger than that of many metropolitan daily newspapers. Instapundit, his blog, is one of the most-read on the Internet, and he’s used that experience as a launching point for the argument in his new book, An Army of Davids, that while the industrial revolution brought about a couple centuries’ worth of big organizations using big factories and big employment rolls to give us many of the things we need and enjoy in life, some of those things don’t need the big organizations anymore — and sometimes small even turns out to be better.

This is no surprise to those of us who’ve gotten better service at a small store, gotten better food from a small producer, or heard an indie band we loved far more than anything on the radio. These small Davids are beating the Goliaths in the battle for many of our everyday things.

But Reynolds doesn’t concern himself much with religion in his book, even though a parallel revolution is going on there, too — and it just might get you hooked.

In much of the religious world, you’re either in or you’re out. This is the way it’s always been, and it makes a lot of sense that it became that way: With a bunch of large buildings as the headquarters for religious conduct, you had to be in the building to be in the religious practice. Then the widespread availability of Bibles, prayer books, and other religious texts in the 20th century made it much more possible to be religious, explore religion, and learn about it on your own, at home.

But the cost for engaging religion — certainly for being an expert in it — was still pretty high. Religious books are expensive and hard to understand, and the lessons to get up to speed are even more expensive and occasionally harder to understand.

That’s all changing. The musty basement of a synagogue is no longer the easiest or even the cheapest way to access something like the Talmud. The entire text of it is available on the Internet, as are tons of guides explaining how to study it. This is hardly news to most who understand what’s going on with the web, but the revolutionary potential it brings is.

If you can find any religious text on the Internet, you can also create your own for free after a couple minutes of setup on a blog — even if it’s only a paragraph about why you hate Passover. And that’s the killer app of our religious age: The novelty is not that the same old Jewish message from the same old sources gets delivered to the same old people, but that the people who want to challenge that construct, to pave their own way, to sling rocks at Goliaths — are entirely capable of doing so. Indeed, many already are.

Almost the entire message of what’s going on in the Jewish world has, for the past several decades, been produced by one organization — the Federation. It sponsors newspapers all around the country that present the picture of Judaism you’d expect a house organ would. But thousands of Jews are writing on their own blogs about the Jewish community they see — and their picture is often quite different. Where controversy, scandal, and debate are rarely seen in almost any Jewish publication, the Jewish blogs eat it up. So, while the standard-bearers of Jewish information show by their front-page placements that the biggest news in your area that week is a fundraising dinner, the J-blogs in your hometown might reveal that the real talk is about an abusive rabbi at the local synagogue, a gathering of artists, or a child in desperate need of a bone marrow transplant from someone of Ashkenazic ancestry.

And the fundraising dinners face a challenge, too. There’s a reason why the large institutions are seeing donations dry up, and it has a lot do with technology. The ease with which charities can be researched and donated to on the Internet has made it possible for upstart groups to get a larger part of the pie. Here, too, a tailored approach is key: it’s no longer necessary to send a check to a monolith whose agenda you only agree with part-way, because smaller organizations can have a very specific agenda and still expect to reach enough donors to keep going. So, if you’re into promoting Conservative text study in Israel, but not Orthodox outreach in Russia, your donations and volunteerism can be increasingly tailored to that, instead of sending all of your tithing to one place and hoping for the best.

There are countless more ways that today’s environment is allowing for Judaism to be better tailored to Jews. There are the many alternative prayer services that meet in some member’s apartment that consist entirely of what the members have decided; the increasing number of Podcasts on Jewish topics; the Jewish texts — like the Passover Hagaddah — created by individuals who wanted compilations of selected portions from what’s already out there to present a specific viewpoint.

Of course, I can’t get to all of it here, or even a small part, and that’s the point. No longer is all the information about anything in Judaism coming from any one source, and if you want to get an idea of how Judaism’s changing, you’ve got to do it yourself and make it your own.


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