The Torah's Solution to Brain Rot
Tech Tribe Dispatch #278
💡 Think:
In this week’s Torah portion we find an interesting narrative.
It begins:
“Jacob left Beersheba and went to Charan. He came upon the place. He spent the night there because the sun had set. He took some stones of that place and placed them around his body and head and then lay down in that place to sleep.”
Fleeing his brother Esau, Jacob makes a mysterious stop in along his way to Charan, a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Spending the night in this place, he arranges some of the stones around his head… Rashi, the foremost Biblical commentator explains:
“He arranged them in the form of a drainpipe around his head because he was afraid of wild animals…”
Seemingly, Jacob’s decision to protect himself with stones, by only cover his head, seems counter intuitive. If he truly wished to conceal his presence, shouldn’t he have hidden his entire body?
In truth, Jacob wanted to avoid what Oxford has deemed the 2024 Word of the Year, ‘Brain Rot.’
Online, we are all to familiar with brain rot. As Oxford Dictionary puts it, brain rot is the “low-quality, low-value content found on social media and the internet, as well as the subsequent negative impact that consuming this type of content is perceived to have on an individual or society.”
Jacob was going out into the world. He had spent the previous 14 years ensconced in the walls of the yeshivah, but now he was off to the world at large.
He knew that when engaged in the marketplace of life, his limbs, his effort, toil and focus would be on base, mundane things. But to remain unaffected by the dross, base physicality of the world, he needed to protect his head.
The lesson is clear for each and every one of us. In life, we are engaged in the world at large. But that engagement needs to remain superficial… Even if our minds are in the labor we do, our hearts, our souls, our focus and true energy, is in the Torah we study, the good deeds we do.
🏃 DO:
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📚 Read:
👁️ Of Yiddish, Litvaks, and the Evil Eye - a look at langauge
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🔥 Lit:
This week, light Shabbat candles in NYC at 4:10 PM
For Shabbat candle-lighting time in your area click here.
🙏 Pray:
Please share good vibes, prayers and tehilim for Glikah Leeba bas Esther Shayndel for a complete recovery.
Please keep Esther Bracha bat Josiane Cochava in mind this Sunday for a successful surgery and complete and speedy recovery!
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