Forgetting How to 'Browse'
A Message for Shavuot 2017
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A particularly intriguing facet of the
Torah’s description of ma’amad Har Sinai is Am Yisrael’s sensual
experience at that time:
וְכָל
הָעָם רֹאִים אֶת הַקּוֹלֹת
וְאֶת הַלַּפִּידִם וְאֵת קוֹל הַשֹּׁפָר וְאֶת
הָהָר עָשֵׁן וַיַּרְא הָעָם
וַיָּנֻעוּ וַיַּעַמְדוּ מֵרָחֹק.
And
all of the people were seeing the thunder and the flashes and the sound of the
ram’s horn and the mountain in smoke, and the people saw and they drew back and
stood at a distance. (Shemot 20:15)
Rashi (s.v. ro’im) explained that this
experience was unparalleled in its uniqueness. The people then saw the audible
– “the thunder” and “the sound of the ram’s horn” – a generally impossible
experience. R. Yisshak Ze’ev Soloveitchik z”l, the Rav of Brisk,
reportedly cited a verse from Mishlei (3:3) – “Write them on the tablet
of your mind” – to help clarify this phenomenon. Attentive to the imagery and
message of the verse, the Brisker Rav explained that “seeing the sounds”
represented the nation’s complete knowledge and understanding of God’s words at
that time.[1]
The Hakhamim further elaborated upon
the full-exposure experience of ma’amad Har Sinai. They envisioned the
first tablets, which were then presented, as miraculously encompassing all of
the Written and Oral Torah.[2]
The subtle wording of the text of the Torah,
taken together with the rabbinic depiction of the scene, gives rise to an
experience unparalleled in its revelation of content and understanding of
Torah. Our foreknowledge of the subsequent episode of het ha-egel therefore
begs the question: How could these very people – who had just risen to the
pinnacle of human perception of God and His words – then swiftly descend to the
depths of a most grave sin?
* * * *
Not too long ago, the Sunday Times
reported: “A non-virtual, real-life Amazon bookstore opened in Manhattan.” The
article explained that the store’s strategy is to use Amazon’s massive online
archives of reader data in order to bring the most popular books to shoppers.
The store stocks only 3,000 of the most popular data-driven titles, which have received
the highest-level ratings from Amazon.com customers. The bookstore is set apart
in other significant ways:
There’s
no café to indulge idle time, and the floors don’t invite flopping with a book
or a cranky toddler…Still, the store lacks the little handwritten employee
recommendations posted in independent bookstores as humanizing beacons.
Chris Doeblin, owner of several independent
bookstores in the city, was critical of the structure and general vision of the
store, remarking: “It’s weird – they keep talking about ‘discover,’ but how do
you discover something different in a process that channels people into a
smaller and smaller focus”[3]
Reading about this new store, I was reminded
of an article written several years ago by noted philosopher Leon Wieseltier.
In his “Going to Melody,” Wieseltier bemoaned the closing of a beloved record
store in his native Washington, D.C. Realizing the success and popularity of
colossal competitor Amazon as the cause for its closing, Wieseltier explained
that he wasn’t saddened by the loss of purchasable items – as he could still
purchase all of the discs online, but rather by the loss of his ability to “browse.”
He defined “browsing” as “active idleness – an exploring capacity,” which is
the opposite of “searching.” Wieseltier explained:
Search
is precise, browsing is imprecise. When you search, you find what you were
looking for; when you browse, you find what you were not looking for. Search
corrects your knowledge, browsing corrects your ignorance. Search narrows, browsing
enlarges. It does so by means of accidents, of unexpected adjacencies and
improbable associations.
The experience of “browsing” at the record
store exposed Wieseltier to new songs, artists, and genres – which he would have
never discovered by merely “searching” on the internet.[4]
Borrowing Wieseltier’s terminology to describe the new “Amazon Book Store,” I
would term it a venue for “searching,” or “limited browsing.”
* * * *
In a recent edition of The New York Times
Magazine published a similarly-themed article, entitled, “Where Did the
Great Hollywood Baseball Movie Go?” Noticing his loss of interest in watching
baseball games and a steady decline in the production of “baseball movies,”
writer Jay Caspian Kang pointed to “the informational clutter that accompanies
every baseball broadcast” as the core of the issue. He explained that baseball
has benefited least from high-definition technology, writing:
Even
supposedly helpful viewing aids, like the box that demarcates the strike zone
or the cometlike streaks that show you the path of a pitch, take baseball out
of its familiar, comforting settings – the laconic pacing, the simplicity of
one player throwing a ball that another player tries to hit with a stick – and
places it within intensely focused frames that promise, but rarely provide,
some new insight into the game.
Kang opined that the overload of information
has caused a situation wherein, “No room is left for the imagination.” He wrote that it was the silent spaces in
baseball that used to be filled in by novelists and filmmakers, but those
spaces have vanished from the present-day game.[5]
* * * *
Though grappling with entirely different
issues, these several thinkers and writers touched on an identical point: An
increase in exposure and information is prone to a decrease in imagination and
creativity.
Though the unparalleled revelations of ma’amad
Har Sinai were necessary for cultivating the nation’s appropriate emotions
of fear and awe of God,[6]
they were perhaps accompanied by a downside. Am Yisrael’s edifying
experience of “seeing sounds” suffered the concurrent loss of an ambitious
“browsing” faculty.[7]
Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg similarly envisioned a mental block that grew out of
the excessive inflow of information at that time:
It
is not that they cannot retain an impression, a memory, but that they are too
much in the grip of successive impressions, of the successive shocks of
information. Frenetically registering the images of the moment, a necessary
process of assimilation never takes place.[8]
Indeed, the Hakhamim hinted to the
nation’s inability to think freely at Har Sinai when they described the scene
of God raising the mountain above their heads and definitively threatening
them, “If you accept the Torah, it is well; if not, there shall be your burial”
(Shabbat 88a).
Het ha-egel was a crisis of theological
doubt. Confronted by the unexpected absence of their leader, Am Yisrael felt
abandoned, misled and confused. A nation untrained to think critically about
their principles of faith now found itself with a severe disadvantage for
appropriate tackling a situation of uncertainty. And they succumbed to its
pressures.
* * * *
Living in a “search”-dominated generation, it
is worth taking pause to appreciate the lost beauty of “browsing,” and to seek
out new ways and methods through which we can appropriately return it to our
lives.
[1] See, e.g. MiShulhan R. Eliyahu Barukh
(Jerusalem, IS, 2014), pg. 328-9.
[2] See Beit ha-Levi, derush no. 18 (printed at the end of Responsa Beit HaLevi) and HaAmek Davar to Shemot 34:1 and Devarim 9:10. Recall, as well, our explanation of the difference between the first and second tablets in the devar Torah for Parashat Ki Tissa earlier this year, “True Leadership.”
[3] Francis X. Clines, “At Amazon’s Bookstore, No Coffee, but All the Data You Can Drink,” The New York Times, May 27, 2017. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/27/opinion/sunday/at-amazons-bookstore-no-coffee-but-all-the-data-you-can-drink.html.
[4] Leon Wieseltier, “Going to Melody,” The New Republic, Jan. 11, 2012. Available at: https://newrepublic.com/article/99526/melody-records-amazon-flaneur.
[5] “Where Did the Great Hollywood Baseball Movie Go?” The New York Times Magazine, May 23, 2017. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/23/magazine/where-did-the-great-hollywood-baseball-movie-go.html.
[2] See Beit ha-Levi, derush no. 18 (printed at the end of Responsa Beit HaLevi) and HaAmek Davar to Shemot 34:1 and Devarim 9:10. Recall, as well, our explanation of the difference between the first and second tablets in the devar Torah for Parashat Ki Tissa earlier this year, “True Leadership.”
[3] Francis X. Clines, “At Amazon’s Bookstore, No Coffee, but All the Data You Can Drink,” The New York Times, May 27, 2017. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/27/opinion/sunday/at-amazons-bookstore-no-coffee-but-all-the-data-you-can-drink.html.
[4] Leon Wieseltier, “Going to Melody,” The New Republic, Jan. 11, 2012. Available at: https://newrepublic.com/article/99526/melody-records-amazon-flaneur.
[5] “Where Did the Great Hollywood Baseball Movie Go?” The New York Times Magazine, May 23, 2017. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/23/magazine/where-did-the-great-hollywood-baseball-movie-go.html.
[6] See Shemot 20:17 and
Devarim 4:10.
[7] Contemporary scholar R. Yoel
Bin Nun in fact suggested that the experience at that time was similar to our
own “sight of sound” via electrical transmittance – wherein the phenomena of
sight and sound emerge at the same speed. See Mikra’ot – Iyun Rav Tehumi
BaTorah: Yitro (Rishon LeZion, IS, 2017), pg. 122.
[8] Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg,
The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus (New York, NY, 2001),
pg. 458.