I got into an argument with a poet in Lithuania the other day.
On Facebook.
It started with perfectly normal Facebook behavior. The poet — who, by the way, used to live on Warm Springs Road, but has since relocated to Vilnius — reposted an article from Slate.com about an Eighteenth Century Talmudic scholar called the Vilna Gaon.
I’d heard about the Vilna Gaon, a man whose life’s work was bringing modern analytical techniques to bear on key texts of ancient Jewish wisdom, but I was happy to read a little more about him.
The article was about the way centuries of Jewish students have been inspired by the Gaon’s academic genius, but how lately, the model of the scholar absorbed in his work to the exclusion of all else had fallen out of fashion.
I found the piece relatively harmless, but my Facebook friend, the poet, took exception to it. He made some pretty harsh comments, to the effect that the Gaon was a purveyor of useless knowledge.
I thought that the phrases “soulless learning” and “prissy hardass” were a little strong to attach to the Gaon, so I took exception to his exception with a few pointed comments of my own.
This triggered a heated exchange.
The poet elaborated on his position. I elaborated on mine.
As the conversation unfolded, I noticed that people were “liking” one side of the argument or the other. This is something you can do on Facebook with a click of the mouse, sort of like giving someone a silent thumbs-up.
At that point, something else occurred to me: I wasn’t in the middle of a private conversation; I was participating in a public debate!
And unlike a debate in a seminar room at university, or even in the Op-Ed pages of a newspaper, this Facebook conversation was being broadcast live and around the globe.
I happen to have Facebook friends in some pretty far-flung places, thanks to a year I spent studying at Oxford in a program that attracted students from all over the world. And the poet had his own stable of international friends, as one would expect from a man whose writing had taken him from Perry County to Lithuania.
It was strange, debating the legacy of scholar who died more than two hundred years ago, from the privacy of my own home, in front of friends and strangers on four continents.
Much has been made of the anonymity of the Internet; how people, freed from the constraint of having to deal with other human beings face to face, tend to unleash their worst behavior via keyboard.
But this Facebook conversation was the opposite! As the argument escalated, my responses came slower and slower, each word freighted with the knowledge that people I knew — and just as important, people I didn’t — would be reading my comments, weighing my arguments, and reflecting on me, judging me, as a writer and friend.
At the root of our argument was the idea of respect; i.e., how much respect you owe a figure who may be revered in another culture, but whose values, or whose behavior, you find repugnant. I’m no great fan of the Vilna Gaon; I don’t really have a dog in the race when it comes to Talmudic scholarship; from what I’ve read about the man, he was at best a brilliant legal mind, and at worse, an oppressive religious autocrat. Not to mention a terrible parent.
Nevertheless, he was a man of great learning, and where I come from, that counts for something, even if I don’t happen to value the learning very highly.
My friend the poet, on the other hand, had no patience at all for learning he didn’t value. He judged the Gaon harshly for his repression of the Hasidic movement, a religious rebellion which corresponded roughly in the Jewish world to Martin Luther’s populist revolt against the rigid hierarchy of the Catholic church. In my friend’s opinion, mastering the intricacies of Jewish law was nothing more than slicing and dicing “useless knowledge.” Why, he asked, by way of an extreme example, should he respect the kind of knowledge taught in an Islamic madrasa?
This may come as a shock to some readers, but I happen to respect that knowledge. Not the kind that’s used to indoctrinate and incite young Muslims to acts of terrorism. But “madrasa” is simply a word for a religious school where the tenets of Islam are taught, no different from “Sunday school” or “Hebrew school” for the other two great monotheisms. There are good ones and bad ones. And I do respect Islam as a religion, just as I respect Christianity and Judaism.
Although I will eagerly fight to defend myself against the violent, lunatic fringes of all three religions.
I was taught that respecting a foreign culture was a sign of strength, not weakness. I don’t happen to agree with Thomas Aquinas about a few things, but I’m not going to insult him in a public forum; just as I wouldn’t attack the great Islamic scholar Averroes; or, for that matter, the Vilna Gaon.
It’s not a matter of self-loathing, or being Politically Correct, or maintaining “false equivalences,” or any of the other malarky certain people might accuse me of.
It’s a simple matter of respect.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 07 February 2013
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
