Why Is Religion Slow? A Conversation with Dr. David Zvi Kalman

Geoff Mitelman: I’m Rabbi Geoff Mitelman. I’m the founding director of Sinai and Synapses, and I’m very excited to be sitting here with a friend and colleague, David Zvi Kalman. And I learned from you, actually, at Limmud in New York. Now, this was almost exactly four years ago, and being able to study and learn from you about some of the talmudic work that you were doing. And now I’m going to give you a more formal introduction. David Zvi is the director of New Media at Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, where he researches Jewish law and the history of technology and the interplay of technology and ethics, material culture and Islamic jurisprudence. So, David Zvi, it’s wonderful to be sitting with you here this afternoon. Thank you for taking some time with us.

David Zvi Kalman: Thank you so much for having me.

Geoff Mitelman: So you’ve written a few different pieces over the last couple of years that I’ve been reading, and we’ve shared through Sinai and synapses of all these questions about technology and the interplay of Judaism and Jewish law and technology. And I want to start with. Actually, we’ll start with one that I know you were having a conversation earlier today – Miriam Anzovin – who is now a massive TikTok star, at least in the Jewish world, talking about Daf Yomi, a day of Talmud that we’re supposed to study in the Jewish community, but she is doing it on TikTok. And you wrote a piece about this, about how the technology, and how the social media and the sort of irreverence can actually bring a real depth to the conversation and bring people in who wouldn’t be thinking about these questions in different kinds of ways.

So I’d love for you to share a little bit of what excites you about the different ways in which technology and when we’re thinking technology, let’s be narrow to start of social media and where we are right now, how that interacts with questions of Jewish law and Jewish thought.

David Zvi Kalman: Yeah, that’s a great question. Judaism is always engaged with technology. You can’t be a multiple-millennial religion and not engage with technology. But the way that Judaism is engaged with technology has changed a lot in the last few years. Judaism and Jews, having been politically disenfranchised from most of their existence, have often not been in the position to be innovators in technological space. They’ve also not been in the position to write about technology, because it’s very often that the people who are engineering — they’re working for the king, or the sultan, or whoever it is. Those are the people who ends up kind of writing the major works of that technology. So even as Jews have interacted with it, they’ve very often been on the sidelines.

It’s obviously changed in the last couple of centuries. There are quite a few Jews who are engaged in both science and technology in the last few years. But I love thinking about Jewish law and its engagement with technology for a few reasons. One is that Jewish law has to engage with innovation in all kinds of different ways. It’s not just technology. Right? There can be social innovation. There can be political changes – all kinds of reasons that Jews have to change how they think about the world.

What technology does differently is that for most changes in the world – let’s talk about feminism, for example – you can have a change in the world, and one response to it is to say, “It’s not a change at all.” It’s either “It’s not a change” because it’s bad, which is the response in some quarters, or it’s not a change because it is simply part of some cycle that we’ve seen before. And so, the responses to that innovation are often masked by that attempt to negate the fact that there’s a negation in the first place – to say, like, “Actually, it’s not new. It’s just something old or something bad.”

Technology, you can’t really do that with. It’s very hard to argue that the printing press actually existed for a long time – although there were some attempts at the time to argue that, like, “Moshe had a printing press,” “Shlomo had a printing press,” or whatever. But it’s pretty rare to argue that. And so, because of that, because you are forced to engage with the fact of innovation, the responses to it are responses to newness, and they are self-aware as being responses to newness. So that I found itself very exciting.

The other thing is that if you think about what expands the boundaries of Jewish law, what makes Jewish law actually know? For a number of years, I was the producer on a podcast that Yeshiva Hadar comes out with called Response to Radio, and I did a graph of what are the topics that people are bringing to the table for the first 50 or 55 episodes. And around half the time, it’s some technology question. So this is really a driver of Jewish law. This is, like, “What is motivating rabbis and Jewish leaders to continue having conversations?” It is kind of the substance of much of Jewish conversations right now. So it, in some sense, cannot be disentangled from Jewish law in any meaningful sense. They’re well-connected, and they’ll stay connected for a long time.

Geoff Mitelman: Well, and what’s interesting — and this is a line that I’ve used a bunch in this show — is that almost by definition, technology outpaces ethics, because when a new technology comes into existence, by definition, it did not exist before. It is changing who we are as an individual, as a society, as what we’re able to do. And ethics and Halacha and Jewish law tend to be conservative with a small “c,” whereas technology, I think, tends to be very disruptive. And so there is a tension of, “Here’s what the technology is. How are we going to respond to this?” I think trying to respond to something that doesn’t exist – who knows if that’s actually going to change or not?

But when the printing press came into existence, as electricity became more prevalent in Jewish society – all these different new technologies – there was a question of, “What is this actually going to mean? How are we going to respond to this?” And I’m curious, is that a feature or is that a bug – that Jewish law and ethics tend to be a little bit slower to respond to technology?



David Zvi Kalman: So I want to separate between two things. I’m not actually sure that I agree that technology outpaces ethics. I think, for example, there are technologies that are on the horizon, which are not widely available, that people already have strong ethical impulses about. I think a good example of this is CRISPR – a kind of gene editing. CRISPR can be used – we can imagine that it can be used in different ways. One way it can be used is to remedy genetic defects – defects that mean that a child will not have a chance of survival, or maybe will be susceptible to a certain disease, whatever it is.

And then there are other kinds of edits you can make that improve features. There are enhancements – improve memory, or intelligence, or height, or whatever it happens to be. And if you poll people – and this has been done – about how they feel about these different kinds of modifications, people are divided. They are a little bit more willing to accept remedies as genetic edits. They’re a little bit less – not a little bit, quite a bit less willing – to accept enhancements as edits. And it seems that religion is a factor as well, in that Christians seem to be less willing to engage with either one of them. So I think people do have a native sense of how to engage with technologies. It’s not necessarily the right first impulse, but there is always some first impulse, and, in fact, the technologies themselves.

And within the field of philosophy of technology, like a constant conversation. Technologies themselves are always, in some ways, created by the people who are using them. So it’s not just like someone comes in with a spaceship and drops a technology down and then leaves, and then the technology does what it’s going to do. There’s always some deep engagement between the technology and the people around it. So that’s one piece of it.

That being said, religions are slow. Religious institutions are very slow. And I think one of the fundamental problems that we have in the 21st century in thinking about what it means to be a religious community responding to technologies is that religions are really not used to working at the pace at which technology is currently proceeding, and that is creating real issues for religious communities who want to be ethical leaders.

Now, I don’t know that there’s ever been a point in time when rabbis have been on the forefront of developing new rules for technologies. Rabbinic responses – when we were able to trace it, rabbinic responses to new technologies are often decades or even centuries behind the times. An example that I like to use a lot is rabbinic responses to firearms. So, firearms have been around for something like 700 years. Rabbinic responses take centuries to develop, even though we know that there are Jews who are manufacturing and selling firearms during that time. So it’s not like Jews didn’t know about them. It’s just that the rabbinic responses take a lot longer.

Part of that has to do with the fact that rabbis are often responding not on the state level, but they’re responding on the level of individuals. So, some of the first responses – a response that we have about firearms are about people accidentally shooting each other, and the question of who’s responsible in situations like that.

Today, it is still the case that rabbis are often not at the vanguard of technological ethics. I think that needs to change. I think it’s very important that that change. And I think one thing that rabbis and other religious leaders have the ability to do is take advantage of the fact that when new technologies come into the world, there is often a period when people have their instincts about what kinds of norms should devolve onto those technologies, but they aren’t certain yet. And there’s a kind of, like, a little window in which people are still trying to figure out what the rules are and what the lines of debate should be. And it’s actually in that window – that quick window – that rabbis and religious leaders have the ability to shape conversations. I don’t know that they’ve done it well so far, but I think it’s important. It’s an important part of being a religious leader in the future.

Geoff Mitelman: When you’re talking about the questions of firearms, I’m thinking about lots of different technological challenges that we’re grappling with now. And self-driving cars. You’ve talked, I know about facial recognition software, that when rabbis are looking at creating teshuvot, of creating responses to some of these questions. They can’t go to all of the halacha in there about self-driving cars, because there is no – they didn’t have that in the time of the Talmud, so they’ve got to analogize.

And I’ve seen multiple different ways in which people have drawn the analogy of firearms – for example, of being able to carry a weapon in a public space, or the questions of self-driving cars, of the analogy of an ox that gores. And so, how and why are rabbis able to try to create at least the best analogy that they can? Because my feeling [is], there’s got to be a through-line, at least, right? There is a rabbinic chain of tradition there. There is a Masorah. And so you can’t just make it up as you go along. You’ve got to be able to find some sort of traditional text and cite precedents there. How can rabbis – and how should rabbis – be looking at some of these traditional texts to be able to address some of these technological questions that we’re grappling with in the 21st century?

David Zvi Kalman: The interesting thing is you don’t have to go to those texts, even though it is true that today, many rabbis feel that that is the only way that they’re going to be taken seriously. It’s an unfortunate fact that even at this moment, when religious leadership, ethical leadership, around new technologies is more important than ever, we are also faced with a kind of crisis of rabbinic leadership in that people are looking to religious leaders less and less – not just north in Judaism – in deciding what they’re supposed to do. What that means, in effect, is that when rabbis come to trying to make decisions about new technologies, they often look instinctively to old sources, because they feel, actually, “People aren’t going to listen to me, they’re just going to listen to the sources that I bring, because those still have some amount of authority.”

And so what ends up happening is you have this weird situation where people dig around for – let’s say you’re talking about self-driving cars, figure around, “What thing can I bring that maybe has some relevance to this? Well, maybe if I talk about an ox that gores people and its owner, [who] maybe did not have reason to believe that it was going to gore people. Well, maybe that’s sufficiently close to self-driving cars that I can bring [that] to the conversation.”

Not saying that those are irrelevant. I think there are interesting conversations to be had there. But that’s not the only way that rabbis operate. And you can see this even within the 20th century, right? There are rabbis who, if you read what they write, it’s like a wall of sources, and they have an opinion, but they’re quoting everything under the sun. And then there are rabbis – a good example of this is Rabbi Moshe Feinstein. He’s a very important American-based rabbi who focused a lot on medical ethics and on questions of technology, who, if you read his response, actually quotes very few sources. He relies on the fact that people think he himself is an authority.

So, it’s a tricky situation, because the sources are both important, but also what matters is moral leadership. And the moral leadership, I don’t think, should be constrained by what the sources happen to be able to say, especially because drawing a straight line from a source about an ox goring somebody to a self-driving car is often quite difficult. And often, it’s clear to anybody reading those responses that the person writing it is trying so hard to make it work that it could actually kind of work in any direction – doesn’t need to work in direction they’ve laid out. So it’s a kind of problem.

And I am excited whenever – I’m not sure if you want to talk about this next, but I’m excited whenever you see rabbis who kind of go out of their way to not just say, like, “Well, what does the book say?” But actually try to prescribe rules that they feel are important, even if they’re not yet supported by new regulations. And that is why I’m excited about Impossible Pork, even though the prohibition on Impossible Pork, or the OU’s decision not to provide impossible pork with a Kosher certification – even while everything in Impossible Pork is actually Kosher, even though all the ingredients are kosher – because it represents a small, but I think, meaningful attempt by a rabbinic organization to say, like, “Actually, we’re going to decide this based on what we think is appropriate and not just based on what the ancient rules say should or should not be the case, and not just following an algorithm of saying, if you do x and y and z, but trying to think through what’s the larger cultural and social context.”



Geoff Mitelman: Right, because the algorithm is not going to take you there. The algorithm is not going to help you understand, say, what the rules are supposed to be for interaction in cyberspace – sorry, in virtual space. It’s not going to help you understand what kinds of regulations should be put around artificial intelligence. There has to be some rabbinic impulse that is doing something different  – where the challenging edge is for me. And as you’re talking, I’m thinking about the conversation that I know almost every rabbi, at least trained in the seminaries [has had], which is: How much do you read out of the text and how much do you read into the text?

And I think that’s been a challenge, particularly as, in many ways, politics has become the new religion – thinking about everything from firearms to reproductive justice to climate change, particularly, although those tend to be pretty solid around the more liberal Jewish tradition. But if you’re looking at things where there is some disagreement from the political left and the political right in the Jewish community, both sides will look for sources to be able to say, “Here is why what I am saying is accurate.”

I’m curious. I think there’s tremendous value in being able to have some innovative thinking and to be able to say, “Okay, these are the sources, and here’s what my interpretation is, and the moral leadership.” And yet, some of that is, “I am coming in with a preconceived political or ideological or philosophical perspective, and I’m going to find the sources that prove what my point is.”Sometimes I think that’s actually valuable, and sometimes that creates, I think, more entrenchment as opposed to more of a machloket, and being able to say, “I’m arguing it this way. What does the tradition have to say to us?”

David Zvi Kalman: Yeah. I don’t know that I’d say it as cynically as that, because I don’t know that in those moments, what is going on is just kind of attempts to search out the position you want and nothing else. I think part of what’s going on is that there’s a sense that Jewish law is a kind of language that people speak, a language that has existing and lasting power, and there’s an attempt to kind of, like, speak in that language. I think I see that’s what’s going on.

The other piece of it is that I think for a lot of the new technologies, there actually isn’t that left-right distinction that doesn’t break down that way. I think people are more confused than anything else. There are a few exceptions to that rule. I think the hesitancy of certain rabbis to endorse COVID vaccines, for example – vaccine mandates – you know, to suggest people not use the vaccine at all – I think that’s an example where maybe you don’t have alignment, although even there, I don’t know that it’s always based in sources. I think it’s often more nakedly political than that. But yeah, I guess I’m not so concerned so much about dueling sources. I don’t see that as being the major [issue]. It’s interesting, because one thing that I really appreciate from what Shalom Hartman does, and I’ve seen – and places, particularly pluralistic organizations, Clal does this very well. And I find Hadar does this very well, of saying, “Let’s look at the big question, and let’s approach multiple different sources,” and to be able to say, “what are the key issues here that we need to be able to look at? And why is there disagreement, and why is that disagreement actually constructive?”

David Zvi Kalman: That’s right.



Geoff Mitelman: Well, you mentioned – I’d love for you to talk about it because this was something that I know you wrote about just recently, about Impossible pork. So for those who don’t know – I don’t know if it’s a whole company, of the Impossible company, but my wife is a vegetarian. So we have a lot of Impossible burgers, but it’s a lot of fake meat that is all based in plants. So I think it is much more ethically eaten, much lower environmental impact. And I think they created Impossible Pork that was supposed to taste like pork, but all plant-based. And the Orthodox union said they were not going to give it a hechser. They were not going to say it’s kosher, even though all of the elements in there are kosher.

And you talked about the cultural elements of this, of how critical meat is, and the signifiers that it has. And you even said this may be one of the most important Halachic decisions to have over for the next bit of time – that this is going to be a key kind of question. So I want to hear a little more of why is this such a challenging issue, and an important issue to be able to talk about.

David Zvi Kalman: This is definitely my least popular opinion, from what I’ve been able to tell since I wrote that. There are a couple of things going on. One thing is what I already talked about, in that it’s not about the decision itself; it’s the way the decision was made. It is not just based on calling balls and strikes. It’s a decision based on a sense of “How do we adapt an existing set of rules to a new technology which skirts the rules by simply having never been discussed?” And this is an issue [that] is not just unique to Impossible pork, but is a problem with technology generally, in that if you have a legal system [that] is very fine-tuned to a specific set of circumstances – that is really interested in the minutiae of what it means to grow barley or wheat in a field in the Mediterranean in a particular configuration – and then you move to some other system, then, very quickly, those very well-attuned rules simply become meaningless and irrelevant, and all of your careful efforts to regulate behavior and to regulate society just go out the window. This happens all the time, and rabbis are often there to kind of deal with it, and there are all kinds of different responses.

So I see this as a piece of that issue, as a way to try to avoid dealing with ethical obsolescence, then more locally. The reason that I understand the OU is making a decision like this is that it’s not just about pork as literally meat that comes from a pig, but it’s also about pork as having a certain kind of social status – given that this new wave of meat substitutes is trying to do something different from what previous waves of meat substitutes have done. The previous waves of meat substitutes – which, honestly weren’t as good – were trying to kind of be concessions to the vegetarian at your barbecue, but not actually trying to replace the main course. This new wave of meat substitutes is very consciously, explicitly, trying to replace meat. And because it is trying to do that, and then because that practice is being taken seriously by consumers and also by investors, by fast food companies – everyone takes this seriously. It’s clear that they are not, in fact, going to be involved in the abolishment of meat as a category. They are actually there to affirm meat as a category. They care about meat, too. If they care about meat too, do they care about pork as pork? What that means is that a product [that] markets itself as Impossible pork should have the same status within Jewish law as actual pork. Even if the product, even if the ingredients of it are different, the label itself actually matters in those circumstances, because the rules around pork within Jewish law are not just around scientifically.

What happens to you if you eat pork? I know there have been some attempts to explain away the rules for why Jews don’t eat pork as being connected to diseases that were more problematic at some point in time that are no longer problematic. I don’t think it’s because of that. It’s because pork exists within Judaism. It has a kind of social status. There is something to that I think there is also a second piece of it [that] is not discussed as much, in that there are some Orthodox Jews who actually see pork as disgusting. They’ve been trained to treat the product like that.

And so I think that’s also part of what’s playing here. It’s unclear to me exactly how much a piece that is of the picture. It’s not just Jews who are saying no to Impossible pork. There are halal companies that have also said, “We’re not going to certify this product.” I’m sure I don’t need to tell you the cultural cachet of pork within the Muslim community is also significant. I think it matters that pork – you know, pork products – are often used in taunts against Muslims, forcing Muslims to eat pork as a kind of a form of punishment. I think that matters. I think it matters that this product exists not just as like any other meat, but actually exists as part of American Christian culture. So asking Jews, asking Muslims, to eat pork, Impossible pork, encounters some resistance because of that social status. And that shouldn’t be discarded just because you expect Jewish law or expect Islamic law to just go by what it says in the book and ignore the surroundings.

Geoff Mitelman: As you’re talking, I have a thought that’s sort of formulating, so I hope it’s going to be clear – but some of what the goal of technology, I think, is designed to be able to do, is to level the playing field and democratize and be able to say, “People who didn’t have access to this technology before now will have this access to the technology.” It’s, “How do we make things cheaper and more accessible and easier to use?” I think that’s a lot of what technology aims to be able to do; it’s almost creating a flattening, whereas minority cultures, like the Jewish community, like the Muslim community – sometimes they want to heighten the difference there, of saying, “there is a difference here. There are sociological, religious, cultural pieces where we are different from other people.”

And so, Impossible pork on some way of trying to be able to reach as wide a market share as possible. And particularly for people who identify – who say, “I want to be more environmentally friendly, I like the taste of pork, but now I can eat in this kind of way that for some people,” it is saying, “wait a second, even if you are, even just because you could, doesn’t mean that you should.” [That’s] sort of floating in my head here. I’m curious as to your response to that, if that makes any sense, or any thoughts about that.

David Zvi Kalman: Yeah, I think it’s definitely true that both Jews and Muslims are dealing with technology today, not just dealing with the kind of consumer technology. And one of the big shifts to technology after the Industrial Revolution is that technologies today are not just something that is hidden away in a factory and you only know about it if you happen to be in the right guild, but are available to everybody. So, when Apple comes out with a phone that has a facial ID sensor – now everyone has that. That availability of new technology directly to the public is a new thing. Jews take advantage of that. There are all kinds of interesting gadgets that Jews have invented to not just engage with technology, but to actually enhance Jewish practice in various ways through the use of technology. There are electronic devices that attempt to kind of circumvent the rules of Jewish law. This is in some sense like a continuation of the existing American trend to treat technology as the solution to any problem – “no matter what it is, technology is always the solution.” So it’s saying, like, “Well, okay, maybe technology is also a solution to Shabbat being annoying. So I can have my Shabbat elevator, I can have my Shabbat light switch, I can have my Shabbat lamp, whatever happens to be.” Not to say all these things are bad, but it represents a kind of continuation of an impulse.

Geoff Mitelman: We had Rabbi Annie Tucker on a couple of weeks ago, who leads Temple Israel Center, which was one of the flagship Conservative synagogues, and really had to grapple with questions of Zoom. And on using Zoom on Shabbat, we actually had Rabbi Rachel Ain also, who’s a fantastic Conservative rabbi, and thinking about these questions of Jewish law and “What loopholes do we need to be able to make?” and what are the different elements where we need to say, “Okay, what’s actually a necessity versus what’s a convenience?”

And that links, almost, with what you’re saying with CRISPR. What is a medical condition versus something to be able to enhance people’s height? And if it’s the same technology, at least theoretically, that’s a question that the technology itself is not going to be able to answer. That you need decisors, you need post scheme, you need people who can say, “Wait a second, I’m going to look at what the tradition has to say, and I’m going to make this decision based on not just the ancient sources, but what I think makes sense for my community and who I’m a part of.”

David Zvi Kalman: Yeah, that’s true – although my sense is that, and I have a friend, Shlomo Zuckier, who’s at Notre Dame right now, who has written about this and knows more about this than I do. But my sense is that Jewish law wasn’t necessarily the constraint here – that actually, if you wanted to, you could have gone farther in terms of degree to which virtualization is acceptable as a medium for having communities together for religious purposes. And Orthodox communities and some Conservative communities didn’t actually take all the steps they could have taken. So there is some wiggle room there. But I think it’s obviously been a major consideration.

It’s also interesting in that this is one of the few technological questions that, if you’re talking about, “What’s the role of rabbis to play in creating new norms?” This one was put straight to rabbis, because it’s their synagogue. They have to decide what their virtualization policy is. And Conservative shuls, by and large, sided with virtualization. And Orthodox shuls have allowed for it, but not on Shabbat. And I think it’s a big emerging change that if you go to any Conservative shul, you are likely to see a camera trained straight at the cantor. And if you go to an Orthodox shul, you will not.

Now, whether that lasts after the pandemic, I don’t know. I suspect it will last in some synagogues, because once you open to the door to saying, like, “Well, actually, accessibility is important,” then people will say, “Okay, well, accessibility is not just important in pandemics. There’s people who have trouble going to shul when it’s not a pandemic also.” And so it may stick around. But I think that question of whether, how seriously, we want to take virtualization as a form for religious meeting, I should say, is a big and open one. And I think that question of whether religious communities want to treat virtual space and real space as being of equal importance, or want to prioritize one over the other, is a question where religious authority actually has an important chance to weigh in.

Geoff Mitelman: And I think what’s different in the Jewish community and Muslim community from, for example, the Christian community – there was an article in the New York Times, there was an op-ed about a week ago, by Tish Warren, who I think is a beautiful writer and wonderful thinker, and wrote a piece that said that we should – it wasn’t quite as strong as this, but essentially, virtual church is not really church. You need to actually hear the babies crying. We’re embodied creatures. We need to be able to sing together – that, yes, we needed this for the last couple of years, and now we should get rid of it.

And I think there was a lot of reasonable pushback to that. There are some people who are home-bound; there are some people who are immunocompromised; there are some people for whom that is needed; and there are some where there’s a concern of, “well, it’s easier for me to do this right now.” And Judaism has often required a little bit of sacrifice and some high barriers to be part of the community. And I think a lot of communities have that as well. And it’s creating a lot of challenges that are also in Christian communities. There’s not a Halachic question, right, of like, “Am I going to stream this or not? Am I going to have this piece of electricity on or not?” That technology is. And because so much of the interplay – and thinking of Rabbi Heschel and the first lines of many of his works is “Shabbat is almost over” and “Against Technology.” Shabbat is designed to be a day when we are not using technology. We’re not trying to change the world, which is what technology aims to be able to do. So it forces these communities to really think about “What are the different values to be able to look at here from a technological perspective? How are we changing what our community is going to look like? How are we going to engage? What are we allowing individuals to do? What are we allowing the community to do?” It’s hard. It’s a hard conversation.



David Zvi Kalman: Yeah. I haven’t read this particular piece, but I remember there was an article in, I think, First Fruits, early in the pandemic that suggested something similar about communion not being virtual and things like that. So I understand the pushback. There certainly is space for some amount of virtual contact in religious spaces. That being said, the revealed preferences of millions of people who go to church and shul and mosques is that people actually do not want virtual services as their primary ritual space. Maybe they want a broadcast of a real space that’s a little bit different, but I can’t tell you how many articles I’ve read over the last ten years that are about, “Check out this new virtual reality church, check out this new virtual reality synagogue.” And it’s always one guy, and “great, interesting,” and then it doesn’t go anywhere. And then, like three years later, they do another profile about the same person, basically in the same space. People do not want that. And maybe it’s because the technology is not there, although it seems like there’s a lot of resistance to virtual reality gear itself. So I’m not sure if we’re going to get there, but it seems like people are saying pretty clearly, despite the enormous pressure for everything else to go online – right? Like, shopping has gone online, lots of kind of social gatherings have gone online – religious spaces have really resisted going online. And I think that tells us something. And I think if they resisted going online, maybe we should listen to that – that there is actually a real value in having religious communities, even as the rest of us move our existences to virtual space, continue kind of adamantly, stubbornly, to remain in physical space. I think there’s something to be said to that, even as we make accommodations for people who have difficulty accessing those spaces for the reasons that people have, for the same kind of accessibility reasons that people have for any physical space that they want to attend.

Geoff Mitelman: When you’re talking about the virtual reality church, and that’s either –  it seems to be for however many years. I mean, people have been thinking about this for 20 years. I remember seeing a news story when I guess it was the metaverse was going to be an example of people interacting in virtual space, and it was somebody walking down the aisles of Walmart, except they had the goggles on, and all they could imagine of virtual reality was what actual reality is, but not as good. And that there are religious communities. Religious communities almost have – it’s because they have their own inherent value, right? The goal of being in community is to be in community. It doesn’t have an instrumental value in the way that technology is designed to be able to get us to a different goal. Coming together at church, at synagogue, at mosque, wherever we are, in many ways, that’s the goal in and of itself.

David Zvi Kalman: Yeah, I think that’s right.

Geoff Mitelman: And recognizing what’s legitimately able to be mediated through technology, using that term very narrowly, versus what needs to happen actually in person and being able to interact.

David Zvi Kalman: I mean, one thing that you bring up is, there is a difference between virtual reality and augmented reality. The jury is out on augmented reality. I think virtual reality is probably not going to be the big new technology in the near future. Augmented reality might be. Sometimes I feel like virtual reality’s main purpose is to kind of move the Overton window for us on augmented reality, so that we feel more comfortable for it when it comes along. I know Apple’s, right now, developing augmented reality glasses. I think the last time this was tried, when Google Glass came out – people, there was a very strong reaction against it. Maybe it’ll be different this time. I think that was more interesting, to see to what degree people are willing to accept a kind of overlay of virtuality giving meaning to the physical reality. That would be interesting. I mean, it’s happening to a degree, but I think to have it in your eyesight is something else. We’ll see what happens there.

Geoff Mitelman: I think that’s also interesting. You talk about facial recognition, of the importance of our eyes and what we’re able to see. That’s something that’s deeply rooted in our evolutionary history, of being able to see. But that comes up in the Torah all the time, and rabbinic literature, of, “What are the prophets able to see? What obscures our vision?” That’s both a very direct conversation, but it’s also a metaphor of “What are we able to see? What are we not able to see?”

Before we come towards a close in a few minutes, I know another thing that you’re really focused on is questions of environmental justice, and that also certainly plays into questions of technology. And we’ve talked with a few different people who have been involved in the environmental justice movement in the Jewish community. And what’s interesting is, in the Jewish community, questions of climate change – those are not as hot-button as they are in other religious communities. My experience, at least in the Jewish community, is that people understand this is a crisis. We have a responsibility. Sometimes being able to motivate and do something that is a different kind of question. But what are some of the topics that you’re looking at in terms of environmental work and Jewish law and Jewish thought?

David Zvi Kalman: Yeah, I’m not sure how to quantify how much Jews care about this versus other religions. Certainly, as a minority religion, our ability to move the needle on this is a little bit smaller.

 Geoff Mitelman: Right.

David Zvi Kalman: And given the fact that Jewish political clout is mostly focused in a couple of countries – so, that’s a piece of it. I think, to be frank, religious and environmental thought needs a major update. And I think it needs a major update because there are three things that [they’re] doing that need to change. One thing is that religious environmental thought very often tries to be as universal as possible. You see this in Jewish circles all the time. You ask a random person to find for you a part of the Bible that is relevant for Jewish memorable thought. If I ask a Jewish leader to do that, they’ll probably direct you to a story about Noah, right? A story about a flood, people doing badly. “There’s a flood, the world’s destroyed.” Great. Okay. It’s there. It’s a part of the Bible that’s pretty disconnected from other parts of the Bible, and doesn’t really engage with most of the Jewish traditions. So there are, like, not so many places you can go with it, but it is nice because it’s compatible with other traditions. So that’s useful.

There was also a focus on stewardship. This has been a long conversation. Lynn White Jr. wrote about this decades ago, about how the same verses in the Bible – about Adam being kind of charged by God to tend the garden and to kind of have dominion over nature, I guess – [would] give us a kind of charge to take care of the environment, but also means that it’s ours to do with what we please. And his accusation, which lots of people have responded to, is that this is actually part of the reason why you have Christian-majority countries kind of being at the forefront of developing technologies [that] are damaging to the environment. So this is another piece of it, that kind of that problem of stewardship.

And the third piece of it is that a lot of Jewish environmental thought, religious environmental thought, is still stuck in the prevention phase. It’s still stuck in the phase of like, “Well, if we just shout loud enough, then maybe it won’t happen.” And honestly, it’s too late. It’s going to happen. It can be mitigated, but the first environmental casualties are already here. The Syrian war, Syrian Civil War, is not even new at this point. There are so many people who’ve been affected by that, who’ve been killed, who have been displaced. There are parts of the United States that are regularly on fire, that are flooded. The shape of Louisiana is different from what it looks like on a map because of the constant flooding. So it’s not – it’s here. So given that it’s here, it’s no longer responsible to keep speaking in the mode of just prevention. There also has to be a mode that allows to speak about dealing with ongoing long-term damage, and thinking “Not just how do we preserve the world as it is, but how do we restore the world to a place that in a century, people are not even going to remember that it was ever in?”

And then, one of the kind of the tragedies of climate change is that people’s lives are so short that people don’t even recognize the world that they are trying to get back to. And religions have a pretty good ability to remember things. I think that’s something that religions can be called on to do. They can also be called on to deal with that stewardship problem, deal with the problem of continuing to believe, continuing to push the point that human beings have dominion over all of nature, as opposed to treating us as kind of like being in conversation with nature. It can also dig more deeply into their religious traditions, into their text, to think, not just like, “What are the texts allow us to speak to each other. What are the texts that actually speak most clearly to the people within our own faith?”Because those are often the ones that are more impactful. So I think there’s a lot that needs to be changed. I think there’s a major update that needs to happen.

Geoff Mitelman: And when you’re talking about stewardship on some of these texts, the other thing that I think that’s valuable in religion – and thinking, obviously from both of us in the Jewish community, of the role of communal action, because so much of American society is based on viewing individualism, I think a lot of the problem of what’s created the climate crisis is there’s been a shunting from the commercial and business sectors to be able to say, “Let’s make these individual choices.” Right? “If you recycle, that’s going to help the earth. If you’re going to plant a tree, you’re going to help the earth.” And there’s very little that we can do as individuals, but as a society, there’s much more of an impact. It’s multiplicative – it’s not additive. And yet, as you bring up, the Jewish community is on the small side, so that it’s harder to move the needle. But some of that is being able to be a moral voice.

David Zvi Kalman: Yeah, although, I mean, on that point, I think one thing that’s been so perplexing to me is why there is not more of a religious outcry about cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrencies use an incredible amount of energy. One bitcoin transaction uses around 700 kilowatt-hours, which is around as much energy as my house uses in a month. So think about every environmental decision that you’ve made for your house within the last month being negated because of one transaction – one buy or sell. So, of all the things that religious leaders can focus on, pushing that point – that there is a moral choice here, this is not just about “is it a scam or is it not.” Is there value here? But actually, there are real costs in the environment that can be mitigated either by not engaging in cryptocurrency trading or by putting a lot more pressure on traders, on developers, to focus on coins that are more environmentally-friendly, more environmentally conscious. Right now, the two most popular coins, Bitcoin and Ethereum, are really not bitcoin. Probably never will be. Ethereum may be in a few years, but it’s still not there yet. So there is a chance for more leadership there. And it is, frankly very surprising to me that the leaders that I have seen who are even savvy enough to understand what cryptocurrencies are, either say nothing or are kind of like NFT enthusiasts.

Geoff Mitelman: That’s interesting. And I think probably some of that is that it’s almost like climate change, where it’s invisible, right? You don’t necessarily see it. I was not aware of the environmental [impact] – I know that Bitcoin and cryptocurrency have an environmental impact. I was not aware it was that big. And it’s also something that it’s not on my radar screen because it’s not anything that I or my friends or colleagues – it’s even on the radar screen here. That is a fascinating question. I don’t know why there’s not knowledge about this. And I’m wondering, is that information? Is that because we’re bombarded by so many different crises as it is? I don’t know the answer to that question.

David Zvi Kalman: It’s kind of a busy time. Yeah, maybe that’s part of it. But I think besides that, part of it is lack of knowledge. Part of it is just a general sense that technology is inevitable, that it’s going to happen whether you want it to or not. There’s no point in expending political capital on this. But I think that’s a thought that has to change.

Geoff Mitelman: Well, that leads nicely to the end here. And to thank you for the work that you do, of thinking so deeply about the interplay of technology and Jewish thought and Jewish law, because technology is not going away, and Jewish tradition has also viewed technology generally pretty positively. And so there is that question of: How do we think about those questions ethically? What are the impacts going to be? Who’s at the table making those? And both you individually, and as part of Shalom Hartman, of trying to make sure that these conversations are broader and deeper than they would have been.

So, thank you so much for your time today, and for all the thinking and writing that you’re doing on all these really fascinating and challenging questions.

David Zvi Kalman: Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.

Geoff Mitelman: So if people want to follow you on Twitter, if we’re talking technology, I believe you are @DZKalman, correct?

David Zvi Kalman: Yeah, that’s right.

Geoff Mitelman: So they can follow you there and be able to find some of your writing and some of the work that you do. We didn’t even get a chance to talk about all the games that you’ve created. I’m sorry we didn’t get [to that]. But you can look at some of the terrific games that David Zvi has created. They’re really thoughtful and a lot of. So next time we’ll talk about all those different things. So I want to thank you all for joining us here today. If you want to follow me, I’m on Twitter @RabbiMitelman. You can follow me on sinai and synapses. We’re on all the social media channels as well.

Next week, we’re going to be talking with Michael Dine, who is a cosmologist and the husband of a Reform rabbi who was part of Scientists in Synagogues, thinking about cosmology and how that can inform our sense of meaning. So we hope you will join us again next Tuesday at 02:00 p.m.. Eastern. But David Zvi, thank you so much for taking the time, and thank you all for joining us.