Sam Lehman-Wilzig (PhD, Harvard U, 1976), www.profslw.com, is a professor of Communications at Bar-Ilan University. Professor Lehman-Wilzig was Chairman of the Israel Political Science Association in 1997-1999, and he served as chairman of Israel’s Education Ministry’s steering committee for establishing a Mass Communications program in the state religious school system. His research specialty is New Media.

It may seem strange to the modern mind to view print in general and the book specifically as a major communications “technology,” but they are arguably the most revolutionary of all communications technologies in history. Thus, one can state categorically that as the “People of the Book” Jews have never been averse to using communications technology for their national and cultural betterment. If we are to ensure the future of our people, the same must hold during the next historical stage that is already under way, where communications and computers have been joined together – the Compunications Age.

A cursory look at our Jewish past reveals its immediate relevance to our present, and perhaps our future. The Talmud with its seamless, manifold sources embedded and hyperlinked within the texts, enabled Jews to develop a highly complex and profound system of thought and law. Following that, the accretion of serious, systematic commentaries on the canonical texts (Bible and Talmud), is not unlike a type of legal-theological blogging. Finally, millennia of international response literature, which enabled a vastly dispersed people to maintain its unified nationhood – communicative unity through, and despite, cultural diversity – presaged communication found today in social network systems.

This perspective should help dispel the sense that Jewish education and compunication technology are incompatible. Many educators view “technology” as being “non-human,” even, dehumanizing, and certainly “unJewish.” However, as the historical record shows, nothing could be further from the truth.

How, then, can we utilize compunications to Jewish educational ends? Herewith a short list:

1. Social networking between Jewish communities near and far. Small Jewish communities need the contact and richer resources of their larger brethren – both on the macro level (school-to-school networking) and on the micro level (pupil-to-pupil networking for Jewish social and informational interaction).
2. Digital resourcing. The “book” need not be a physical artifact; indeed, for a people who has lived for so long disconnected from their homeland, prohibited from owning land and living off luftgescheften, there might even be an affinity to incorporeal forms of information – which may be why Israel is outstanding in computer programming, virtual media etc. Developing Jewish virtual libraries enables us to partake of the entire Jewish heritage, wherever they are located.
3. Technologically updating classic Jewish sources. Today’s students, at all levels of Jewish education, have grown up in a non-linear world of information (“kids today no longer read books…”). But they do read and write, just differently – in spiral, circuitous, associative fashion. Why not, then, technologically “modernize” some of the central Jewish sources to fit the communication zeitgeist? For instance, put the entire Talmud on the iPad (or other user-friendly device) with hyper-links between the rabbis and the sources they quote. Why not “package” the Bible and commentaries as a text with feedback, in which the students can add their own feedback to the commentators’ discussion?
4. Video-conference with… Today’s technology can bring the Jewish world to the classroom. Guest lecturers can be virtually “flown in,” Jewish book authors can do virtual readings or Q & A, and much more.
5. Web 2.0. Perhaps the most difficult thing for educators to comprehend and accept is that the days of “I teach and you listen” are over. Today’s youth have been compunicatively socialized to be “prosumers” – media consumers who also produce content (YouTube clips, personal blogs, Twitter tweets, Garage Band music, etc). Pedagogically this can be a boon, as students learn best not by listening but by doing. Let them produce a newspaper as if they were living in the time of King David, come up with a new tune for Shir hama-alot; push them to blog-debate the dilemmas involved in Chelsea Clinton’s “Christian-Jewish wedding,” and so on.

A final word: it is not the inventors of technology per se who make the big bucks today, but rather those who find the best way to exploit already existing technology (Amazon, Facebook). The same is true for educators – you certainly don’t have to be a technology geek. All you need is to figure out how to utilize the technologies at hand in new and educationally creative fashion. Just like the rabbis of yesteryear!