Imagine you're on a family vacation half way around the world. You turn a corner and behold — your own life-size portrait beams back at you from a local storefront.
Impossible? Danielle Smith doesn't think so anymore. It wasn't Ms. Smith herself but an old college friend who spotted the Missouri resident and her family adorning a shop window as he was driving through the streets of Prague. The picture, sent out to friends by the Smith family on their holiday greeting cards, had found its way via the Internet to the front of a trendy grocery store in the Czech Republic.
The friend snapped a few pictures and sent them to Ms. Smith, leaving her scratching her head. "This story doesn't frighten me," she said, "but the potential frightens me."
In truth, the story shouldn't come as much of a surprise at all. With increasing frequency we hear stories of pictures surfacing on the Internet for all to see — often causing consternation or profound embarrassment, sometimes destroying marriages, careers, and reputations. In a world nearly bereft of personal privacy, where cameras hide in every cellphone and on every street corner, only the terminally naive imagine that any action can go completely unnoticed.
An office party, a late night ramble, a weekend in Fort Lauderdale over spring break a dozen years ago — any of these fleeting and forgotten episodes could easily come back to haunt us tomorrow, reminding us of a momentary lapse of good judgment in the most public and irretrievable way.
A WORLD GROWN SMALLER
Ironically, although the technology is relatively new, the identical lesson was taught nearly a century ago by the last great sage of European Jewy, Rabbi Yisroel Meir Kagan, in whose time two new devices began to gain popularity throughout western society: the telephone and the motion picture.
Always observing the world around him through the lens of Jewish philosophy, Rabbi Kagan pondered what the technological innovations of his day could teach the modern Jew about his place and purpose in the world. He concluded that these novelties might provide concrete examples of Torah principles for a humanity growing ever more desensitized to the presence of spirituality in the lives.
Before the invention of the telephone, most people depended upon hand delivered letters if they sought contact with people or places far from home. Slow and unreliable, the inefficiency of communication made the world a much larger place, with news of friends, family, and distant communities lagging days, weeks, or even months behind actual events. Conversely, the effect of one's own actions beyond the limits of one's village or neighborhood seemed insignificant.
Similarly, before the invention of motion pictures, the moments of our lives seemed particularly transient. The actions of one instant disappeared from consciousness the next, forgotten by others and often by us as well. Only acts that left something enduring behind seemed to have permanence: the building of a barn, the planting of a field, the birthing of a calf. But day-to-day existence left no mark upon the physical world and, consequently, no mark upon people's hearts and minds.
And then all that changed. Almost overnight people and communities across Europe became connected to one another. More gradually, but even more dramatically, the preservation of moving images wove itself into the fabric of the human psyche. The world contracted, collective memory expanded, and society began to think and act in ways never before imagined.
WAKE-UP CALL
Rabbi Kagan interpreted these inventions as a wake-up call. According to Torah philosophy, we live not in isolation but intimately connected to the Creator who dwells at the heart of the universe. Our actions do not pass out of existence from moment to moment but are preserved for all eternity. And so, just as the world was slipping over the brink of moral oblivion under the influence of nihilism and secular "enlightenment," Rabbi Kagan saw the telephone and the motion picture as gifts from the Master of the World, providing compelling paradigms of how our actions truly matter, how they can be perceived across the world and preserved for generations.
The phenomenon of the Internet magnifies Rabbi Kagan's lesson exponentially. After posting the story of the photo, Danielle Smith has had some 200,000 hits on her family Website. Today, news and images travel with nearly unlimited speed and circulation. A single picture can become a cause celebre literally overnight — bringing with it inspiration or humiliation, comic irony or personal devastation.
So too our actions. One small deed may send out ripples like a stone cast into still waters, traveling to the farthest reaches of the farthest shore, unrecognized for what it has wrought but no less relevant for its unseen origins. Nothing we do is meaningless, no action of ours goes unnoticed, and everything is recorded for the final day of reckoning we must all face when we reach the end of our lives, which we will look back on the accumulated moments of our existence. If we take Rabbi Kagan's lesson to heart, rather than burning with the shame of opportunities lost we will exult in the awesome potential we have achieved.
