Shavuot, Twitter, Facebook, Blogs and Wikis

Shavuot is the most unobserved of Jewish Holidays except by the fully observant Orthodox communities.

For an overview of the holiday, read this

Shavuot in its modern form commemorates the giving of the law to the Jewish people at Sinai. It occurs to me that the form of the "giving' fits very well with the social media of today.

The Ten Commandments (or really, utterances) were given out over Twitter. Concise, clear, no BS.

For forty days, Moses heard the law from G-d, and and put it on Facebook, hoping that the Jewish people would friend him.

Moses started a blog which was ultimately redacted as the Torah - the five books of Moses.

The Tannaim started their own blogs (bloggim?). They blogged a lot  but some smart guy decided that something like a Wiki was needed, so the Tannaim built their version of Wikipedia called the Mishnah.

Unfortunately, their discussion pages were lost, so we are stuck with the Mishnah.

But the bloggers of the day were not content. For several centuries they blogged about the Mishnah and people commented on the blogs until a huge body of unorganized halachah and  midrash floated around the blogosphere.

Around 500 CE the folk in Babylon and Jerusalem decided that yet another Wikipedia was needed and they each did their own - the Babylonian Talmud and the Jerusalem Talmud.

So we now have two Wikipedias (Talmuds, Talmudim) - Babylonian and Jerusalem.

Since then we have had multiple cycles of blogging, commenting, and redaction. The process carries on.

We analyze, comment, complain, contradict. We try to make sense of life, but we give up and live anyway.

The social media of today are new in technology - not in fundamentals. We, the Jewish people, have always lived that way.