New technology to spread old lessons
TODAY’S Jewish education has to keep pace with the “abundance of opportunities presented by prosperity and technology”, according to a New York rabbi who is about to visit Australia.
TODAY’S Jewish education has to keep pace with the “abundance of opportunities presented by prosperity and technology”, according to a New York rabbi who is about to visit Australia.
Rabbi Yossi Yitzchak Jacobson is a man of many talents – teacher, online lecturer, orator to America’s military chaplains and newspaper editor.
A weekend retreat on the theme “Empowering Your Child to Be a Mensch” will be convened by Rabbi Jacobson, whose trip is supported by Daminyan, a division of Chabad Youth.
Modern technology “opens up a world of opportunities that are blessed, but also a world that’s often challenging and sometimes harming”, Rabbi Jacobson said by phone from New York.
“Another question today is: ‘How does one maintain a healthy balance between discipline and freedom?’ There are many challenges, but these two would be enough to drive parents mad,” he mused.
Rabbi Jacobson runs TheYeshiva.net, an interactive teaching website that uses 21st century methods to enhance traditional discussions of Judaism.
“I was travelling around the world for many years and spoke everywhere, and then I realised that with today’s technology we can create a global yeshivah,” he said.
He is the first rabbi to have presented the annual religious keynote address to all 4000 United States military chaplains.
Rabbi Jacobson was invited to speak to an annual chaplains’ retreat after chief of chaplains, Major General Douglas Carver, decided to broaden the range of speakers from the traditional choice of Christian leaders.
Major General Carver asked a Jewish chaplain, Rabbi Jacob Goldstein, with whom he had served in Iraq, to find him a dynamic Jewish speaker.
Rabbi Goldstein, senior chaplain of the US Armed Forces and who visited Australia this year, recommended Rabbi Jacobson – and, after a punchy keynote address, he was tagged “the Jewish Billy Graham” and “Jewish Martin Luther King”.
Major General Carver, a Baptist, quipped afterwards that the New York rabbi must have studied with Baptists. “He said it in jest, but I gently interrupted and said: ‘I didn’t study with the Baptists, the Baptists copied us.’ The whole crowd instantly started applauding.”
Rabbi Jacobson took over from his late father Gershon Jacobson as editor of Algemeiner Journal, one of a small number of Yiddish-language newspapers in the United States.
PETER KOHN
Photo: Among other roles Rabbi Yossi Jacobson is the editor of a Yiddish newspaper.
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