SUISSA'S OLAM: December 2010

Thursday, December 23, 2010

Miss Montreal-- This is my Life

Facebook Blues

My column this week in Jewish Journal:

Besides the mandatory Belgian chocolate pretzel challah from Got Kosher?, I always try to bring a little food for thought for my kids to our Friday night Shabbat table — either an interesting story or dvar Torah or an experience I had that week. Last Friday, I decided to bring something I’d read in Tablet magazine on the modern-day obsession with Facebook:

“What computers can do is think in code, a series of simple, mathematical statements. Human beings, on the other hand, can imagine and dream, hope and despair, hate and love with all their hearts. When they meet — truly meet, face to face and at leisure — with their friends — true friends, not an assortment of barely recognizable acquaintances living on the periphery of an enormous virtual network — they are capable of subtle wonders. If, instead, they opt for convenience, if they reduce their thoughts to brief posts, if they don’t bother finding out who they really are outside the bounds of their Facebook profiles, they’re doomed to wither into a virtual oblivion.”

It wasn’t a paragraph; it was a punch to the stomach. The writer, Liel Leibovitz, was doing a wicked riff on the Facebook Generation, which he believes is mired in a “thick but meaningless pile of likes and dislikes” and getting more and more disconnected from what really matters in life.

This is serious food for thought: Does Facebook disconnect us from real life, and if so, how?

I got one answer on Friday night. While I was reading the quote, my oldest daughter, Tova, a freshman at the UCLA School of Fine Arts, interrupted me: “Oh, my God, I can’t believe you’re reading this,” she said. “I just disconnected myself from Facebook.”

It turns out Tova was getting exhausted by the idea of having 935 “friends,” when in reality she has less than a dozen. But, more importantly, she just felt the whole experience was becoming empty and frivolous — that she wasn’t being very nourished by Facebook.

Yet there are 600 million people around the globe who apparently feel differently. How do we explain this phenomenon? Is it simply that people crave human contact? That we are fascinated by other people — what they look like, what they do, what they think, what they like, who they know? That in a chaotic world, we need the perceived safety of belonging to a group?

It’s certainly all that. Facebook is like a never-ending virtual cocktail party full of people you know, used to know or would like to know, with one irresistible advantage over a real party: you can eavesdrop on all the happenings while still in your pajamas.

It would be unfair to undervalue this experience. Facebook helps you reconnect with old friends (and old flames, but that’s a whole other story); share ideas, photos, movies, songs, videos, jokes, musings and articles; promote your work, causes and events; join movements; and so on. But beyond its utilitarian value, the real problem for those seeking human connection is that everything happens on a digital screen. This plays to our laziness. It’s so convenient to hang out at this “virtual” party that it can easily become a substitute for the real thing.

Worse, though, is that it also plays to our narcissism. Once you start posting personal statuses like, “I think I’ll make soup now” or “I can’t believe I have another headache,” you know you’re approaching the status of self-worship.

Ultimately, as I see it, it all comes back to the digital screen. You can “like” to paint or hang glide or read poetry or engage in deep conversation, but while you’re on Facebook, you’re actually not doing any of those things. You can crave human contact, but how human is the contact? You can create a profile that makes you look great, but how great do you feel inside?

You can be networking all day long — but are you living?

In a recent piece in Time Out New York, writer Sharon Steel exhorted her fellow New Yorkers to lessen their obsession with social networks: “Just keep in mind that anyone anywhere can thumbs-up a YouTube video of the Rufus Wainwright concert at Carnegie Hall, retweet a pic of the red-quinoa salad from Octavia’s Porch or comment on how insane the Pandasonic party looks. But you, lucky New Yorker, can actually go.”

No matter where we are, we can “actually go” to experience what Leibovitz calls the “subtle wonders” of the nonvirtual life, whether that would be walking barefoot on a beach or having a passionate conversation over lunch with a friend. Can a computer geek who designs “social network” algorithms ever replace those experiences for us?

As I was reading Leibovitz’s quote to my children last Friday night, it struck me that I was living, right there and then, an antidote to the Facebook experience. It was the Shabbat table, with its slow, unhurried pace, when everyone dresses nicely and everything is real — from the candles, the blessings, the singing and the chocolate challah to the safety of family and the stories that are allowed to extend beyond a few sound bites.

It also struck me that Facebook might be the most misleading name in the history of marketing. For all its virtual wonders, it comes with neither a face nor a book.

Friday, December 17, 2010

The Band-- It Makes No Difference

Can We Ever Admit Failure?

My column this week in the Jewish Journal and Huffpost:

Can We Ever Admit Failure?

The State of Israel was built on the very Jewish idea of taking personal responsibility. It was built not by whiners but by Jews for whom no miracle was impossible — whether that meant defending against an Arab invasion or turning a desert into lush fields of agriculture. Throughout its young history, this can-do attitude has been the life force behind Israel’s military success as well as its economic and cultural renaissance.

There is one area, however, where Israel’s can-do attitude has been a big failure, and that is in making peace with the Palestinians.

Success in business is clear — you create a product or service that people want to buy. But with the business of making peace, history has shown that it’s far from clear whether Israel has a product the Palestinians want to buy. This has thrown Israel’s macho swagger for a loop: If we can make or sell pretty much anything, why can’t we make peace with the Palestinians?

Because Israel’s can-do reputation is so strong, the country has been under enormous pressure over the years, internally and externally, to “do something” to bring peace. More often than not, Israel has been too embarrassed to admit that “we can’t solve this one,” that the parties are too far apart, that peace, no matter how desirable, is simply not in the cards at the moment.

But what if, in fact, this is the truth? What if there is nothing Israel can offer the Palestinians to get them to accept and deliver a durable peace with a Jewish state? What if the ugly, unbearable truth is that Israel can evacuate 300,000 Jews from the West Bank tomorrow and give up half of Jerusalem and that this would still not bring peace — and might even bring more war?

How does a macho country admit failure?

I got a glimpse of Israel’s dilemma the other morning at the Museum of Tolerance (MOT), where Yuli Edelstein, Israel’s Minister of Public Affairs and the Diaspora, was giving a briefing to the museum’s board of directors and other community leaders. After Edelstein’s candid but balanced assessment of Israel’s situation, the MOT’s dean and founder, Rabbi Marvin Hier, said something so simple and stark that it seemed to stun the room.

“What two-state solution are they talking about?” he asked. “It’s a three-state solution: Israel, the Palestinians, and Hamas in Gaza. What do we do about Gaza?”

Hier’s point was that even if Israel can achieve the impossible and make a deal with Abbas in the West Bank, a mortal enemy remains at its doorstep in Gaza. How do you convince a terrorist neighbor to cancel its charter calling for your destruction? How do you make them stop hating you? Apparently, not even Israel’s ingenuity can crack this code.

Lord Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of the UK, seems to understand the conflict behind the conflict. In response to a Jewish community leader’s recent admonition of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for lacking “the courage to move the peace process forward,” Sacks wrote that the debate is “deflecting us from the real issue,” which is that Israel’s enemies — Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran — refuse to recognize its existence as a matter of religious principle. And as long as this is the case, he says, “There can be no peace, merely a series of staging posts on the way to a war that will not end until there is no Jewish state at all.”

This is scary stuff. It suggests that even if we had the leaders of J Street or Peace Now negotiating for Israel, there would still be no peace. How painful is that?

The way I see it, Israel has one option left: Stop the swagger and start speaking the truth. The Palestinian demand for a “right of return” is a deal-killer. So is a return to nondefensible borders, and so is the presence of a terrorist state in Gaza.

Instead of looking so macho and responsible, Israel should just be candid. Netanyahu had no business calling Abbas his “peace partner” after the wily Abbas dragged his feet for nine months during Israel’s 10-month settlement freeze. He should have said, bluntly: “This is not the behavior of a peace partner.” By looking so darn optimistic while the other side looked so darn pessimistic, Bibi ended up looking so darn guilty.

The fact that peace is immensely desirable has nothing to do with the reality that it is immensely unobtainable. If anything, the more Israel has shown its desire, the more the price has gone up. The Palestinians have said “no, no, no, no” to every peace offer Israel has ever put on the table. Seriously: What are the chances that Abbas will receive a better offer from Bibi than the generous one he rejected from Olmert two years ago? With Hamas breathing down his neck, how likely is it that Abbas can even deliver on a peace deal?

Let’s stop faking it. The status quo may be untenable, but a fake peace process makes it even worse. There’s no deal at the moment. That’s the annoying truth.

Admitting this truth may not be macho or practical, but at least it’s honest. Israel should fess up that it doesn’t have the power to turn enemies into peacemakers. If such honesty spares us the pathetic spectacle of grown men pretending to make peace, that alone would be a miracle.