Rabbi's Musings

Edna St. Vincent Millay, a great poet of the early twentieth century, once observed:

Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour,
Rains from the sky a meteoric shower
Of facts… they lie unquestioned, uncombined.
Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill
Is daily spun, but there exists no loom
To weave it into fabric…

As the poet suggests, we have discovered or created so much information in the last century and a half. We have invented so many technological wonders. We have remade the world with the telegraph, photography, the telephone, the typewriter, the phonograph, the transatlantic cable, the electric light, radio waves, movies, the locomotive, rockets, the x-ray, the computer, the smartphone, and even the safety pin.

There is no question that the quality of our life has greatly improved because of such items. Undoubtedly the supposedly romantic lives of our eighteenth-century forebears were often haunted by the constant fear of suffering and death. Often, a hospital stay back then was worse than the disease itself. Until the advent of the telegraph, it could take weeks to have an urgent message delivered to a loved one. There was no refrigeration, no antibiotics, no incubators, and no modern sanitation devices. There is no question that our technological advances have created a better life for us.

But our technology has come with a price. The tie between information and human purpose has been severed. We have no loom to weave it into a fabric of meaning. And such a disconnection between information and meaning inevitably leads to anxiety. It’s even been suggested that the twentieth century began as a continuation of the Age of Enlightenment but quickly turned into the Age of Anxiety. What does that make the twenty-first century?

A hundred years ago, Western civilization felt it was on the verge of an era of peace and good feeling, produced by the advancements in science. And then came the bloodiest century in human history, complete with the perpetration of the Holocaust by the most technologically advanced society in the world. And then came the atomic bomb. So much for an era of peace. And hello, age of anxiety.

If it’s true that anxiety thrives on uncertainty and confusion about the future, then we should be very anxious people. Constantly we’re told we’re living in a post-modern culture, in a post-industrial economy, with post-traditional lifestyles. We are “post” everything familiar. We are “smack dab” between the familiar and the unknown. And this uncertainty frightens us.

Fortunately, we need not suffer alone. As a religious community, we can still pray together and study together, and remember that the fundamental things abide, even as time goes by! People. Justice. Peace. Kindness. Never will they go out of style!