March 7, 2010 Sunday 21 AdarI 5770 14:26 IST
(http://www.jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.aspx?id=170189#)
Haredim declare war on the Internet By JONATHAN ROSENBLUM
05/03/2010 Haredi concerns about the dangers of Internet would be
shared by most parents if they had not thrown in the towel on guiding their
children.
After the evening minyan on a recent trip to the United States, a
40-something man beseeched me
to write about a Web site called GuardYourEyes, which provides tools for
those who have become
pornography addicts through the Internet. He did not explicitly tell me he
was one such addict, but
the fervor with which he prayed suggested his personal torment.
Every Orthodox rabbi in North America with whom I have spoken in recent
years has his own stories
of homes destroyed by the Internet – whether it be through chat rooms, or
erotica Web sites, or instant
communications devices that make it easy to establish illicit
relationships. Sins that once required the
expenditure of energy and time, as well as the potential for humiliation
if revealed, can now be done
instantaneously in private, with little danger of detection. The Internet
not only facilitates the ease
with which one can act upon existing temptations, it has the capacity to
create
previously undreamed of desires.
AWARE OF the devastation caused by the Internet, and determined to prevent
it from becoming
completely entrenched, the leading haredi rabbis in Israel have declared
war on it. A conference
for haredi educators in Bnei Brak two weeks ago, attended by a rare
cross-section of the
most revered senior rabbinical figures in the haredi world, promulgated
several decrees
against home Internet use.
The baseline position was that no haredi family should have Internet in
the house. If one or both
of the parents need Internet in the house for business purposes, they must
first install appropriate
filters, preferably in combination with a server like Internet Rimon,
which both excludes the
most problematic Web sites – e.g., pornography and gambling – and has the
capacity to preview
and censor material even within acceptable sites. The password for entry
to Internet must be known
only to the parent who needs it for business purposes. In addition, a
rabbi must certify that there is
a need for Internet. These provisions will be enforced by requiring each
child in haredi educational
institutions to provide a form signed by the parents that they are in
conformity with
the above requirements.
Above all, these requirements are designed to convey an unambiguous
message that Internet constitutes a moral hazard that should be avoided and,
even
in cases of necessity, approached with the utmost caution and protections.
So great is the danger that it outweighs such considerations as
convenience or even educational value. Only economic necessity, coupled with
layers
of protection, can justify its possession.
The haredi leadership seeks to repeat with respect to Internet what was
done to television in America in the 1960s and ’70s: to make its possession a
defining social marker of who is within the haredi community and who is
not. Certainly Internet has already exacted a toll in victims far beyond that
of television in that vastly more innocent period when it required
prescience to forecast the degree to which it would degenerate.
Television, however, was nothing more than an entertainment medium – not a
necessity for modern life.
INTERNET IS something quite different. At the Bnei Brak gathering, Rabbi
Aharon Leib Steinman, the most respected of the senior roshei yeshiva,
admitted, “If we would be able to totally ban the Internet, that would be
fine.
But we can’t do that, since there are those who need the Internet.”
Increasingly, Internet is the principal means of conducting many of the
basic transactions of modern life, whether it be banking, checking bus
schedules, finding a site that calculates the proper times for prayers on
transatlantic flights, or just for shopping. In some cases it is only a
convenience – one can live without the information or obtain it less
efficiently. In
others, the difference is primarily a matter of time, though the hours
saved are no small matter for stressed haredi parents, who often must perform
chores with several young children in tow.
At one major hi-tech company that operates separate facilities employing
haredi women, visits to sites other than those needed for one’s work are
cause for dismissal. But the facility retains two work stations where women
can do some basic banking and other such functions while on break or after
work.
More important, Internet is essential for much modern employment. And at
one level, it even offers unique potential benefits to the haredi world. An
ever-increasing percentage of haredi women – and haredi men – are being
educated in computer-based fields. With the move of haredi women from
teaching jobs within the haredi educational system (in which the job market is
saturated) to hi-tech come a host of new concerns about working in mixed work
places. A number of companies have discovered that they can employ haredi
women at relatively low pay by providing sexually segregated work places and
mother-flexible work schedules in or near haredi population centers.
Ideally, working by computer from home offers a possible solution to
haredi concerns about mixed workplaces and the need for flexible hours, but
that
depends, of course, on having Internet in the house. That is just one
example of how the tension between competing haredi ideals may play out around
Internet.
Given the centrality of Internet to modern life, the attempt to impose a
ban (with exemptions) in the home might strike many as a futile attempt to
turn back the clock. And that might well be true in the United States, for
instance, where home Internet is nearly ubiquitous, even in haredi homes and
where every handheld device has Internet connectivity. There the emphasis
will likely be on damage control through Internet education, filters,
increased parental supervision.
But in Israel the haredi public has the market power to secure “kosher”
cellphones, without Internet connectivity. And the haredi leadership, it
turns out, might be more on target than most secular parents with respect to
what is at stake.
Every study of parents’ perceptions of their children’s Internet use
shows that parents are totally clueless about both the quality and quantity of
their children’s Internet use.
They have no idea how many of their children have shared personal
information or agreed to meet strangers over the Internet. And they are
unaware of
the degree to which their teenagers are living in a largely isolated,
alternative reality – about 55 hours a week for the average American teenager.
Education officials in the United Kingdom are exploring ways to limit time
teens spend on game sites. While parents would like to think that their
children are locked in their rooms exploring the reaches of human knowledge on
their personal computer, the greater likelihood is that they are at porn
sites – the use of which spikes in the afternoon hours when teens are home
alone.
One of Judaism’s six constant mitzvot is “do not stray after your hearts
and after your eyes...” While haredi efforts to preserve the “purity of
the eyes” may seem hopelessly quaint in our erotically charged society,
haredi concerns about the dangers of Internet would be shared by most parents
if
they had not thrown in the towel on guiding their children.
The writer is the director of Jewish Media Resources. He has written a
regular column in The Jerusalem Post Magazine since 1997, and is the author of
eight biographies of modern Jewish leaders.
(http://www.jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.aspx?id=170189#)
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