My Senior Sermon - Vayigash

Each 4th year Rabbinic student at the Hebrew Union College gives a sermon. Mine was today: 

It was an ordinary day for Peter Smith. He got dressed, ate his usual breakfast, got into his car, and headed for work. Arriving a little early, Smith logged on to his facebook account. As he began moving through the site a strange ad on the side of the page caught his eye: “Hey Peter – Hot Single Ladies are Waiting For you!” Below the words was a picture of a young, attractive women with smokey eyes who happened to be…his wife!

After some investigating, Peter figured out what had happened. His wife, Cheryl, loved to play online video games and gave the video game company access to her Facebook profile, a usual practice in gaming circles. However, without her permission the video game company sold the information to a third party who in turn sold it to the dating service. The dating service took one look at her Facebook picture and began using her face to sell their product. It was a one-in-a-million chance that Peter would ever see the picture, however as luck would have it was the first thing he saw that morning.

As an aside, all parties involved were removed from Facebook for sharing and selling Cheryl’s information.

Today, because of Facebook, Twitter, blogging, and Google sharing information is easier than ever. We are better able connect with friends, and acknowledge their successes and losses. But every so often, we hear a story like Peter and Cheryl’s and remember just how hard it is to control our information. For anyone who has embraced the internet age, issues around privacy are a constant negotiation. On the one hand, the expectation today is to share, to give snapshots of our personal life: what are you thinking, feeling, eating? On the other hand, we know that as soon as we put something out there, it’s in the public domain. Who sees it, who uses it, is suddenly out of our hands.

For some of us, the answer is to avoid technology; don’t sign up for Facebook, cancel your Twitter account. But for most of us in this room who see the merits of this technology, it’s about accepting that if we make privacy a central battle today, we will often fail. Therefore, coming to terms with the world we live in means changing our focus. We need to reframe the conversation from one that values privacy to one that values intimacy.

Reframing notions of privacy is not easy, in part because the conversation has gone on for a long time. In fact, we have a number of beautiful sources that speak directly to the challenge of privacy. We all know the story of Balaam, how he stood on top of Mount Peor, ready to curse the Israelites. When he saw our tents in the valley he instead blessed us, “Ma Tovu Ohalechah Yaakov.” However, what we may not know is the Midrash that explains why he chose to bless our tents. It turns out that the ancient Israelites were extraordinary urban planners and because of their careful planning no tent door was opposite another. No one could stand at their door and look into another’s dwelling. At its core, according to this Midrash, Ma Tovu is a blessing in celebration of privacy.

In addition, we have a Midrash that teaches that when God commanded Moses to take a census of Israel at the start of the book of Numbers, Moses began to worry. What if I see something I shouldn’t? What if I walk into a tent and a women is nursing her child? God therefore commanded him to walk outside each tent and pause. After stopping for a second God’s voice would come to Moses and announce the number of people in each household. Accurate counts were important but the people’s privacy was paramount.

In both of these cases we see a tent as the prevailing metaphor for privacy. For the Rabbis, privacy was about limiting those who might see into the tent.

For centuries, privacy remained an important Jewish issue. However, it was not until the end of the 19th century that issues of personal information (in Jewish terms, Lashon Hara or Rechilut) were used in the larger privacy conversation. And predictably the first person to do this was Jewish, Louis Brandeis, writing about the subject in his Harvard Law Review article, “The Right to Privacy,” co-authored with Samuel D. Warren. Faced with a new media culture of newspapers and photography, the two took on the task of defining privacy as the right to control information about oneself. After Brandies, privacy would no longer just be who could see into your tent, but who could know what was going on inside as well.

Today we are still working off Brandeis’s model. We fear that too much of our information will get out. We put up necessary safeguards, but try as we might there is a lot of information floating around in cyberspace about each us. We may have made mistakes in the past. We may have shared too much and regretted it. However, the web means coming to terms with the fact that that all information is accessible, not just the stuff we like. In the words of Jeffrey Rosen in an oft cited article in the NY Times, “The web means the end of forgetting.”

Therefore, we need to frame a new conversation. We need to move away from fearing issues of privacy and move toward embracing issues of intimacy. It’s no longer about who can see into our tent, or who knows what’s going on, it’s about the person we invite inside of our tent and who is privy to the full picture of us.

This week’s Torah portion can be very instructive for us. In it, Joseph is ready to reveal himself to his brothers. Joseph takes measures to ensure his privacy only to fail. We read that when Joseph was ready to reveal himself to his brothers, he sends everyone away, crying out:

Hotziu kol ish me’alai
Have everyone withdraw from me

Alone with his brothers, Joseph begins to cry. However, no sooner do we hear about Joseph’s reaction than we learn that all of Egypt, including Pharoah, heard Joseph’s sobs. Even though Joseph speaks only to his brothers, others became privy to the conversation. As soon as Joseph was willing to share, his information was open to all those who were listening.

The commentators have a lot to say about why Joseph chose to send everyone out before revealing himself to his brothers. Some, like Rashi, claim it is to keep his brothers safe from embarrassment. Others like Rashbam, suggest it is because as a ruler he didn’t want others to see him at his emotional peak. However, Ramban’s interpretation is the most helpful. He writes that everyone, brothers and servants alike felt for Benjamin and pleaded with Joseph to let the boy go. Faced with this pressure, he tells all but his brothers to leave. However, his servants now have a stake in the outcome of the story. Will he release Benjamin or not? To find out, the servants walk slowly outside of the room and are standing in the courtyard when Joseph begins to cry. Joseph may have felt that he was alone with his brothers, but because he had given an indication that he had something important to say, his servants positioned themselves to find out the news. Privacy was impossible to achieve. His secret was out.

However, Joseph could achieve intimacy with his brothers. Today, we hear all sorts of private and hurtful information through the grapevine. Status updates tell us of breakups, Facebook tagging of pictures shows us the wonderful party that we weren’t invited to. Joseph’s brothers, however, didn’t learn about him indirectly. Joseph told them in person and stayed with them until he had, over the course of the conversation, made them feel at ease.

As soon as Joseph tells his brothers of his identity they are astounded. The Hebrew for this is “ki nivhalu m’panav,” they were “dumbfounded on account of him.” However if we imagine Joseph standing in front of his brothers bleary eyed and shaking we can read the text in another light. Read midrashically, “ki nivhalu m’panav” can mean, they were dumbfounded because of his face. In revealing himself to his brothers, Joseph allows himself to stand raw before his brothers, letting them see all the fear and sadness that he bottled up inside him all these years, which now was written on his brow.

But Joseph didn’t stop there. Rashi tells us that he knew how embarrassed his brothers must have felt, so before saying anything else, he asked them to take a step forward. Standing close, Joseph could smell his brothers and they him. The tears on his cheeks were more visible now, his labored breath more detectable. After telling his brothers about his past and his plans for them, he reached out and fell on Benjamin’s neck. Seeing the two of them weep together, the brothers finally got over their guilt and shock. Rashi tells us that seeing Joseph so open and raw was the proof they needed to know that their brother was “wholeheartedly with them.” It was only then that they felt comfortable speaking with him. Had the brothers only learned about Joseph from others, they might have never have gotten the courage to stand beside him. It was this intimacy that brought the brothers close.

For Joseph, as it is for us, the challenge we all face is knowing when to open ourselves up to those who are closest to us. It is scary, being responsive to other’s fears, concerns, and needs, and sharing our own. This is the price of intimacy. For Joseph, it took a number of false starts before he was ready to do so, but in the end, his reward was a love and closeness that would pervade the rest of the narrative.

The story of Joseph and his brothers teaches us that, while we can’t always ensure that our information remains private, we can always focus on something more important. We can choose with whom to share our innermost feelings. We can invite them into our tent and stand face to face. We can allow them to truly see us, not just hear or read about us on Google.

What does this look like for us? Today 80% of all children under two have at least one picture on Facebook. We might try to keep our children’s image offline, but that would be a losing battle. What we can choose is who holds our baby, who hears our baby laugh, and for those who are the most intimate, who can tell a hungry cry from a fussy one.

For my class, and I’m sure for many others, Facebook was an important way to get to know one another before moving to Israel. Before leaving, I was nervous, so naturally I studied up. I knew where many of my classmates lived, who they were dating and who our mutual friends were. However, I didn’t know how one classmate dealt with loss until I sat Shiva with him in Jerusalem. I didn’t know the face another made when he was deep in thought until we were in class together.

I learned a lot about these classmates before I even met them, probably more than they wanted me to know. That’s the age we live in. But the important things, the intimate details of their lives were not to be found in cyberspace. And it’s those things that I cherish and that really move a friendship forward.

As hard as it is to admit, we do live in a different world. Our tent is wide open for all to see. But as we have learned from Joseph, who we bring in to our tent and how we share is what’s important. You can learn a lot about others from a few clicks of the mouse. However, it’s intimacy that really turns other into brother.