WE ARE LIVING IN THE MIDST OF THE MOST PROFOUND REVOLUTION THE HUMAN RACE HAS EVER SEEN!

Whatever one calls it — the information revolution, the computer revolution, the Internet revolution — the results are the same: tremendous, increasingly rapid change. That it should touch every sphere of life – political, economic, religious, everything – should come as no surprise. Some of its effects have been negative, even evil: clandestine communications that help murderers hijack planes and kill thousands of innocent people, creation of and access to weapons of mass destruction, the ability of spreading even the most psychotic ideas all over the planet in an instant…

I firmly believe that the possibilities for good in the information revolution can outweigh the negative ones. But this is by no means guaranteed. Technology is no better than the people who use it. That’s why I also believe that in order to use this wonderful technology to enhance human life, we need to have a very clear human operating system, a very clear moral operating system. For us, that operating system is Judaism.

We Jews are Linux, not Microsoft. We Jews are open source, not proprietary. We Jews are deeply involved in the causes of this revolution, not just those who experience its effects. And by now many of you are probably thinking: “What the heck is he talking about?” Let me explain.

Even if you’ve never touched a computer, and sending an e-mail strikes you as e-normously e-roneous, you still know that it’s now possible to send a message anywhere on the planet in a spit second — free! Even if you’ve never tried to download an inter-esting inter-view from the inter-net, you know you could. You know there’s this “thing”, this “web” that connects computers — and all the people sitting in front of them — all over the world. There is more information at our fingertips than has ever been available before. While writing this sermon, just for the heck of it I ran a search on Google — ask your kids if you don’t know what that is — for “Judaism” and got over 1,800,000 hits, or references, in 16/100 of a second. There’s a miracle sitting on my desk and yours.

Much of that miracle is controlled by Microsoft, the company that makes the programs most computers use. Bill Gates runs Microsoft, of course, and like his company, has become incredibly powerful and wealthy. As of a few years ago,

Bill Gates had an estimated net worth of $42 billion dollars. Since his birth he has earned an average of $32.31 per heartbeat, and this is escalating. [Ed’s Jokelist]

Then there’s little Linux, a small conglomeration of people that can hardly be called a company. It has to ask for donations to maintain its web page and many of its activities! Linux is another kind of software, a different operating system, an alternative to the monolithic Microsoft.

We Jews are Linux. We are living proof of what Mark Twain wrote about us in Harper’s in September, 1899, right around the time of the High Holydays:

Properly the Jew ought hardly be heard of; but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world’s list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and obtuse learning are also way out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. He has made a marvelous fight in this world in all the ages, and has done it with his hands tied behind him… The Egyptians, the Babylonians, and the Persians rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, and faded to dream stuff and passed away. The Greeks and the Romans followed and made a vast noise and they are gone. Other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time. But it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all. Beat them all, and is now what he always was… All things are mortal but the Jew. All other forces pass, but he remains.

As if to prove the point, the Nobel Prize was first given in the same year as Twain’s remarks:

Since 1899, when the Nobel Prize was first presented, Jewish people have received 16% of the overall prizes and 22% of the specific prizes for medicine and physiology -- even though we were only 3/10 of 1% of the world’s population. [TorahFax, Beraisheet 5758, Rabbi Jack Segal.]

We Jews are Linux -- an alternative moral operating system that’s used by less than one half of one percent of the world’s population but has a profound effect on almost everyone.

We Jews are open source, not proprietary. Proprietary products have jealously guarded secrets. Many of the companies that are part of the information revolution want to keep the codes— the incredibly complex strings of ones and zeros that make their programs work — secret and exclusive.

When you install just about any piece of proprietary software onto your computer you develop an intimate relationship with a strange new being named EULA: End User License Agreement. You have to agree not to sell the software, take it apart, share it with anyone, or try to figure out how the blooming thing works.

You don’t even own the stuff, although you’re the one who paid for it. It’s licensed, not sold. You’d better beware! EULA is watching you! If you don’t behave yourself, your permission to use the software you paid for can be terminated and the evidence, as in Mission Impossible, must be destroyed.

The open source people are just the opposite. They want the codes to be available, free, to everyone, so they simply publish them along with their software. They encourage exploration, experimentation, and ongoing analysis and discussion. Nothing is finished. Conclusions are simply the springboards to new ideas.

We Jews have been open source for at least the last two thousand years, a fact that other nations of the world knew quite well. As Douglas Rushkoff relates in his provocative new book, “Nothing Sacred”:

Third-century Romans… purchased ancillary memberships in Jewish synagogues just so they could take part in intellectual conversations that weren’t over-shadowed by sacrifices and other parochial rites. [Douglas Rushkoff, “Nothing Sacred”, Crown Publishers (New York, 2003), pg. 10]

The most open of our open source documents is the Talmud, as anyone who has ever looked at one can see in an instant:

We Jews wanted no secrets. We wanted all our people, and anyone else who cared to, to read our texts, our operating codes, for themselves, and to think for themselves. To that end, we were the first people in the world to promote universal literacy. Our texts are studied, and commented upon, and the comments are commented upon, and the comments to the comments are commented upon -- in a dialogue of exploration and interpretation that never ends. With the Internet it has even accelerated.

We Jews are Linux, not Microsoft. We Jews are open source, not proprietary. We Jews are part of the current revolution, and probably a good part of its cause. Ongoing change, even revolutionary change, has always been a central part of our Judaism:

· We taught that tomorrow could be different from today and not eternally the same, and that was a revolution.

- We taught that there should be no work at least one day a week so that human beings could be fully human, and that was a revolution.

· We taught that human sacrifice should be replaced by animal sacrifice and then that animal sacrifice should be replaced by prayer; that learning is the pinnacle of human endeavor; that nothing ever stays the same and isn’t supposed to, and that our primary function as human beings is to help repair a broken world. All are revolutionary, and we are by no means done creating and teaching.

These are just some of the things we helped teach the rest of the world. Right now, we Reform Jews are in the midst of teaching the world that authority in Judaism, and indeed in all religion, should go from the bottom up rather than from the top down, that each individual should make and accept authority for their own religious decisions.

But you can’t make decisions for yourself if you’ve never seen the codes, the information upon which decisions need to be based. There is a Talmudic dictum to the effect that,

If you are new to a town and learn of a synagogue, walk there. If you learn there is a Beit Midrash, a house of study, run.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy you’re here, and happy to see you whenever you come to worship. But to deal with the information revolution taking place all around us, it is even more important that we involve ourselves in the incredibly important moral and religious operating system that Judaism was and still is.

So I’d like to challenge you: read our codes. Read the ideas that most of the world’s moral systems are based on. Read the discussions that gave our entire planet the ideals of abstract monotheism, universal social justice, even the very concept of progress. Don’t take my word, or anyone’s, for what our sources say. See for yourself. Then decide for yourself.

Do you play golf, mah jongg, cards? Do you watch television? Then you have the time. Do you read the op-ed columns in the newspapers to see what the commentators have to say? How about taking an hour a week to see what Judaism has to say? I promise you that what you find there will amaze you.

The material is immediately available, and in English. It’s on line. It’s in books. You might want to start with the red Torah volumes we use in Temple on Shabbat. As in all things Jewish, as important as the text itself is the commentary that surrounds it. If you want my help, I’d be more than happy to provide suggestions of things to read. I’d be thrilled to meet with you, singly or in groups. And the ongoing Torah study and other programs in our Adult Ed syllabus are always open to you.

As part of my challenge I’d like to leave you with one final thought from Dennis Rushkoff:

…although the Jews had no nation of their own, their commitment to open systems, iconoclasm, and literacy has enabled them to thrive as long as, or actually longer than, any Western civilization. While many of the Jews’ deepest-held beliefs have become obscured by an understandably fearful reaction to persecution, inquisition, and extermination, these ideas are still quite accessible, in all their universal applicability, to anyone who opens the Torah or Talmud. It is high time these core values were exhumed and revived. [Rushkoff, pg. 12.]

I couldn’t agree more. I hope you do, too.