The Information Explosion

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Saturday, May 31, 2008

We live in the midst of an information explosion. It’s a complaint people have expressed since the beginning of the modern era but somehow it seems even more acute right now. Who can keep up with all the voice mail, email, snail mail heading their way each and every day! And that doesn’t even include all the important articles and books we want to read, the movies that we mean to see, let alone the many blogs that contain important information that we should be noting.

I wonder if the rabbis of the Mishnah were thinking of information overload when, in the section of Pirke Avot that we are reading this week, the fifth of the six weeks between Passover and Shavuot, we find the following typology.

5:15 There are four kinds [of disciples] who sit before the sages: the sponge, the funnel, the strainer, and the sieve. The sponge soaks up everything. The funnel takes in at one end and pours out at the other. The strainer lets out the wine and keeps the dregs. The sieve lets out the flour [dust] and keeps the fine flour.

At first glance it would seem good to be a sponge, to absorb and retain everything we encounter. But a sponge shows no discernment, it has no way to distinguish the important from the non-important, that which is factual from the inaccurate or wholly made up rants that come our way. I know at least once or twice a week I receive some hysterical email with a capitalized header: THIS IS TRUE. This week it was one about the Jews of France. I checked it out with the rabbi from the synagogue from which it professed to come. He told me that this email had circulated so widely and was so misleading that they had to put a disclaimer on the home page of their website pointing out all of its inaccuracies. Being a sponge can make us prey to misinformation.

What about the funnel? In one ear and out the other. It’s a way of processing information, and I suppose it keeps the decks clear, but in the end one hasn’t gained anything. It is like the man who boasted that he had gone through the entire Talmud in just a week. “But has the Talmud gone through you?” his rabbi asked him. If we don’t absorb what we are learning and put it to some use in our lives, then our learning has no enduring value.

The strainer is how the media seems to me some days: holding on to the dregs and letting the good wine run through. How often it seems that the media is focusing on the trivial and covering that at great length, while important things go by barely noticed. This is the biggest danger of the information overload. While we are focusing on information that come to us in great profusion, millions and millions of words and images about the celebrities of our time, or about trivial aspects of the presidential campaign, much more important things may be going right by us.

Finally there is the sieve. It keeps the valuable and let’s the unimportant shake through. By its placement in this teaching, the Mishnah is letting us know that this is the gold standard, the level to which we should aspire.

Over and over in Jewish tradition, it is the ability to distinguish which is called out. Havdalah, the ceremony at the end of the Sabbath, reminding us to distinguish between light and darkness, between the holy and the profane is just one example of the process which we are to keep active in our minds at all times. This was the role of the ancient priest, to make distinctions between pure and impure, the kosher, that is fit, and the unkosher, improper, between right and wrong, between the holy and the profane. Since the destruction of the Temple the whole people are called mamlechet kohanim, a nations of priests, we as an entire people have taken on that responsibility to make distinctions.

Earlier in Pirke Avot we read: Rabban Yochanan the son of Zakkai had five students:

Rabbi Eliezer the son of Hyrkenus, Rabbi Joshua the son of Chananya, Rabbi Yossei the Kohen, Rabbi Shimon the son of Nethanel, and Rabbi Elazar the son of Arach.

He would recount their praises:

Rabbi Eliezer the son of Hyrkenus is a cemented cistern that loses not a drop;

Rabbi Joshua the son of Chananya---fortunate is she who gave birth to him;

Rabbi Yossei the Kohen---a chassid (pious one);

Rabbi Shimon the son of Nethanel fears sin;

But Rabbi Elazar ben Arach is as an ever-increasing wellspring. He is not a well, a cistern, able only to preserve what he has learned. He is a spring forever bringing forth new water, offering insights no ear had ever heard before.

[Rabbi Yochanan] used to say: If all the sages of Israel were to be in one cup of a balance-scale, and Rabbi Eliezer the son of Hyrkenus were in the other, he would outweigh them all.

Abba Shaul said in his name: If all the sages of Israel were to be in one cup of a balance-scale, Rabbi Eliezer the son of Hurkenus included, and Rabbi Elazar the son of Arach were in the other, he would outweigh them all.

Being able to retain information, that is praiseworthy, but to be able to discern and distinguish, to innovate and renew, that is the greatest gift.