Lets say I am sitting in the front row of a business seminar; or I am at a lecture; or I am in shul listening to a sermon.
I am also conspicuously ignoring the speaker because I am reading a newspaper or a book.
I am rude.
But if I am sitting in the very same place, and looking at my electronic device smart phone, iPad, Kindle, whatever I am not considered rude. (OK, hopefully one is not doing this in shul, but the analogy applies at least half way, because if I am reading while the rabbi is speaking, I am rude.)
Either way newspaper, book, or electronic device I am ignoring the speaker. But our mores have changed. Its become OK to ignore anybody, any time, to send an email, to flip a screen on an iPad, to check out a smart phone.
O my, how our humanity, not to mention our attention, has become segmented, fragmented.
This acceptability of rudeness is of a piece with a parallel disfiguration: the ruining of beautiful words through overuse.
In the first case, I cant sustain my concentration long enough to hear a 30-minute presentation without interrupting myself.
In the second case the word problem I corrupt my concentration by extracting the juice, the flavor, from a beautiful word by using it uninterruptedly.
Ill give you a few examples: Iconic. Robust. Passion. Cutting Edge. Emerging. Crown Jewel. Tikkun Olam.
Can you think of anything today thats not iconic? What a beautiful word when applied to a genuine, historical rarity: for example, Michelangelos David, an icon of Renaissance Florence. The David magnificent. Now, however, that everything is iconic, nothing is. The word has been robbed, devitalized, deadened, by being routinized.
One cannot concentrate on and be moved by a genuine icon anymore because theres almost nothing that is not an icon anymore.
In our mind-numbing society, unable to live 20 minutes without consulting an electronic message of one kind or another, the cutting edge is dull, the passion is not robust, the emerging market is flooded, and the crown jewel is dethroned.
The unusual, the shocking, the moving, the inspiring has become trite because no one can sit back and take anything in anymore, can let it ooze through ones being, let it percolate and overtake and overwhelm, then occupy ones mind or soul for an extended period. We perfect the anti-art of hurrying up and waiting, we peck away at our devices, we tune out, turn off or respond reflexively and unthoughtfully to thoughtful messages.
And tikkun olam? Real tikkun olam would be finding a way to end the violence in Syria, or stop Irans nuclear program, or end the one-child policy in China. After all, tikkun olam, as the Hebrew word implies, is to fixing the world.
Originated by the Biblical Joshua, the full phrase is tikkun olam be-malchut Shad-ai, the universal acknowledgement and acceptance of one G-d. Tikkun olam is big: the campaign to end apartheid, the drive to end human trafficking, the end of homelessness in America.
Alas, in our world of constantly flashing images before our overburdened eyes, we have reduced and overused tikkun olam; we have lowered our sights, substituting the small act of kindness for tikkun olam.
Every kindness and every mitzvah is a blessing, but we are bidden to aspire to, or at least pray for, the repair of the world.
That takes full concentration. That takes persistence very different from the unending farrago of emails, voice mails, text messages, web pages, Google searches and clickings that are confused with action.
An icon: Winston Churchills defiant pose.
An emerging market: Computers.
Tikkun olam: Princess Dianas campaign to end land mines.
A passion: Rabbi Yosef Shalom Eliashivs 102-year study of Torah.
If we were a little more polite, we might acquire the might to repair the world and ourselves.
Copyright © 2012 by the Intermountain Jewish News
