Ideas Not Images
Rabbi Sam Cohon, Kol Nidrei Eve Yom Kippur 5785
About three hundred years ago a new scientific characteristic of our natural world was discovered. A professor named Johann Schulze from the town of Coblenz in the Duchy of Magdeburg in what is now Germany demonstrated that light, not heat, darkened silver nitrate and produced images on a surface. The images created by this process were at the time only temporary, an intriguing but useless phenomenon. It wasn’t until 1822, over a century later, that a French inventor named Joseph Niépce [“nyeps”] applied this idea in a new way. He created the oldest surviving photograph, taken in 1826, almost two hundred years ago.
Niépce’s [“nyeps”] process used a camera obscura, an upside-down reflected image, to capture images exposed onto coated pewter plates. Exposures took hours due to the limited light-sensitivity of available materials, but they were permanent, if faint. A few years later, in 1829, another inventor and artist, Louis Daguerre, partnered with Niépce to improve what was then called the photography process. After Niepce’s death, Daguerre continued his work, and the process evolved into the daguerreotype, shown publicly for the first time in 1839, which quickly became a sensation. That same year a man named Robert Cornelius took the first self-portrait, and studios using daguerreotypes became immediately popular.
Now, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that some of the first photos ever taken were self-portraits. It seems clear that the ultimate invention of the selfie, and the selfie stick, was perhaps inevitable… At first, these 1840s era daguerreotypes were nearly as expensive as having a portrait painted, the old way of immortalizing yourself, something only aristocrats and other rich people could afford. But the process got faster, and prices came down quickly. Soon, it cost just $5 to get one made, equal to roughly $200 today. Not exactly free, but within the reach of middle-class customers.
By the start of the Civil War, in 1861, photographs were much less expensive and easier to produce. New technologies brought the price of the new glass-backed and tintype emulsion plates down to 25 cents in the Union states; it was more in the Confederacy, but still, the average Civil War soldier, who was paid $11 a month, could afford his own personal photograph, and nearly everyone had one made and sent it home. The portraits of most soldiers were small—about three inches squarish—and often it was the only photo these men ever had taken of themselves. Many thousands of these photos survive today in museums and in some homes. They are often the sole record of their subjects, whose names we often don’t even know, and some of whom never made it back alive from war. But their images remain.
Keeping a record of your existence became a standard feature of life by the late 19th and 20th century. Especially in Old Country Jewish families in the Pale of Settlement, where most people lived in shtetlach lacking a professional photo studio, it was common to have family photos made by an itinerant photographer, and these durable black-and-white images still decorate many an American Jewish hallway today. These were often large families—eight, ten, even twelve children were common—of multiple generations, the Zaidies and Bubbies in traditional garb, the teens in the most contemporary clothing, everyone staring stiffly at the slow-moving lens.
The cost of photos kept going down; in the 20th century new processes and cheap cameras like the Brownie made it possible for people to take a new form of photo, the snapshot. The development of the Polaroid instant photo, and of inexpensive consumer cameras and film eventually put color images in everyone’s hands—after you dropped your roll of film for developing and printing at the local photo shop or drive-through Fotomat kiosk. It wasn’t so easy to take photos of yourself back then; you needed to own and carry a tripod to do it. Of course, you could always inveigle a passerby to shoot a quick pic of you and your significant other, and hope that your eyes were actually open in the final print when you got around to having it developed.
The first hand-held digital camera was invented by a man named Steven Sasson, an engineer at Kodak, in 1975; it weighed 8 pounds, was the size of a toaster, and took black and white images in a mere 26 seconds for each shot. Sasson had to invent a technology to look at the photos, too. Of course, over the next four decades digital technology improved so dramatically that it has taken over the production of images. As Sasson says, “I have been very fortunate… to know that I was dealing with something important to people, which is their memories, which are precious to all.”
The very first phones that contained cameras date from the year 2000, just 24 years ago. Those cameras were more a novelty than a useful device. But within four years, by 2004, half the mobile phones sold had cameras, with Sprint leading the way. Soon smartphones all had cameras, which got better with each new generation of phone.
Fast forward to today, and you will not be surprised to learn that more photos have been taken in the last few years, the years of digital photography on cellphones, than in the entire 200-year history of photography that preceded it. Last year it is estimated that 1.8 trillion pictures were taken: that is 5 billion pictures each and every day, approximately 225 photos annually for every human being, man, woman and child, on the planet.
In the interests of full disclosure, I admit that I have contributed many photos of our toddler daughter, Ayelet, to that 1.8 trillion photo number…
It makes you wonder: who has time to look through all of those millions, billions, and yes, trillions of photos, when everyone is so busy taking more?
Since you no longer require a tripod to take your selfie—just long arms or a selfie stick—the number of self-portraits has undoubtedly exploded. We do not know exactly how many of those 1.8 trillion photos were taken of the photographers themselves, but some estimates are that only about 5% of all photos taken are selfies; some estimates, however, say that 58% of all photos are selfies! That’s a crazy range. Taking the lowest number, that means that a mere 92 million selfies are taken every single day. Wow.
In essence, a selfie is just a vastly more ubiquitous form of a very popular form of art, the self-portrait, something painters have been doing for a long time. It is an attempt to memorialize how we are at that very moment, or at least how we wish to be seen. Some truly great pictures take the form of self-portraiture: from Leonardo da Vinci to Raphael to Velazquez to Rembrandt to Van Gogh to Frieda Kahlo, great painters have rarely resisted the impulse to paint themselves. Some of them painted themselves many times.
Still, the explosion in the taking of selfies is a little daunting. My favorite statistic is that millennials are projected to take, on average, 25,000 selfies over their lifetimes; that is, 25,000 pictures of… themselves. Put simply, we love taking pictures of ourselves, and then sharing them with the world. Nowadays, every moment is a Kodak moment.
Wow. We all seem to be incredibly busy taking our own pictures. But what exactly are we seeing there?
Or perhaps the right question is a different one: how are all those images we experience—not just the selfies—this constant parade of visual distraction we all experience, how are these images affecting us?
Exactly 40 years ago, in October 1984, a Jewish academic and author named Neil Postman gave the keynote address at a conference on George Orwell’s famous futuristic book, 1984, which had given that year existential importance. As I recall, we read 1984 in Jr. High School, along with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, two contrasting, dark views of the future.
While this 1984 conference was supposed to be about the book 1984, Postman declared that it wasn’t the important reference point for people even then. Western liberal countries did not live under the shadow of Big Brother, as those in the Communist world did. No, the book that mattered more was the other book, Brave New World. Robert Zaretsky wrote about Postman recently in the Forward.
In Huxley’s novel, Brave New World, people were constantly exposed to televised images, nonstop entertainment, and lived under the influence of “Soma,” a mind-numbing pleasure drug. While George Orwell feared a world that banned books, Huxley feared a world where no one bothered to read books. In Orwell’s world, pain was used to terrify the populace; in Huxley’s world, pleasures were used to sedate it — both worlds shaped a citizenry that, either too deadened or too distracted, complied with the powers that be.
Forty years later we have some perspective to evaluate Postman’s insights. His 1984 address was turned into a book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, published the next year. It rocked both academic and popular culture.
Postman, who died in 2003, was born into a Jewish family on the Lower East Side, and in many ways he was a product of the deep Jewish love of text, from the Torah to today. Postman’s book was written to explore what the television screen had done to the world. Mind you, he was writing long before the advent of the Internet, iPhones, social media, and influencers.
In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman agonized over the rupture in human history between the written word and the televised image.
During what Postman calls the Age of Typography, the medium of the printed word cultivated the skills required to manage knowledge. There was nothing inevitable or natural about our direction towards the written word and reading. Reading entails the hard but essential work of staying still and focused while we draw meaning from markings on a page. Reading trains us to follow a line of reasoning and know when that line has been crossed, to distinguish between false and true propositions and to identify holes in logic before we trip and fall into them.
While Postman took this development from the beginning of movable type in the 1400s, he could have traced it back much further in Jewish experience—he did attend Hebrew school as a kid—since we Jews have been focused on the written word since the creation of the Torah, at least 2500 years. Reading has shaped our thinking throughout our entire history.
You see, the decoding of the markings on a page, drawing meaning from words sentences, and paragraphs, forms our perception of the world. But this particular form of understanding changed, perhaps forever, with the spread of the screen. The problem with television, Postman argued, is not that it is entertaining but that “it has made entertainment itself the natural format for all representation of experience.”
Think about the consequences of this dizzying pivot in human history. Serious activities like news reporting and long analyses, political debate and topical discussion — all essential for a healthy democracy — have been undone and made unserious by the nature of the medium of television. For Postman, the two most terrifying words uttered in this medium are “Now…this.” This phrase, uttered by talking heads on the evening news, marks the shift from one subject, even the most despairing, to another subject, even the most delightful.
This rupture in logical and ethical reasoning has widened with new forms of content providers like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. Coming of age in this fragmented world of images cascading non-stop across personal screens and disconnected from what precedes and what follows, many people today have given up reading entire books. And all of us struggle to make sense of the explosion of disconnected events unfolding across our various screens.
At Beit Simcha, every year we ask our Religious School students if they can name the 10 Commandments. They usually get just a few of them initially, and with some prompting they eventually can guess most of them. But one commandment nearly always escapes them.
But you know which commandment truly stymies both groups?
You might expect that they wouldn’t remember “Don’t covet your neighbor’s wife” or “Don’t take God’s name in vain.” Some of them are definitely challenged by “Honor your mother and your father.” But after a few hints, they always get all of the Ten Commandments. Except one.
That is the Second Commandment: You shall have no other gods before me, nor make any image of any of those gods, in the form of any depiction or reproduction. This prohibition, repeated many times in the Torah, and perhaps even more often in the various books of the prophets, simply doesn’t make sense to students today. Why can’t we have images? Why can’t we create visual icons—& emojis, and videos—for that matter?
Lance Strate, a professor at Fordham, made a nuanced case for the Judaic worldview of Neil Postman, his late teacher and friend. He highlighted an early passage in Amusing Ourselves to Death, where Postman references the Second Commandment. Postman writes, “I’ve always been perplexed that God would insert a prohibition against the making of graven images in what otherwise is a series of ethical laws.” Perhaps, he suggests, “God knew that to accept an abstract and universal deity, the Israelites first needed to break the habit of drawing pictures or making statues. If the God of the Jews was to exist in the word and through the word, iconography had to become a ‘blasphemy.’”
Whether the images are graven or pixelated Neil Postman taught us forty years ago, through the printed word, to grasp just how blasphemous these images have become.
Because life is not about surfaces and superficiality, not about photos and images and video clips of us. Life is about who we are fully, completely.
The High Holy Days arrive each year to teach us, yet again, that we are more than the sum of our many photographs or videos. We are in reality—not reality TV, but you know, actual real reality—we are the sum of our actions, the depth of our emotions, the grandeur of our ideas, the beauty of our creativity, the courage of our convictions. We are something much better and holier than any selfie can capture, or any Facebook short or TikTok or Instagram feed can reflect.
We are each fallible human beings, but we are also each created in God’s own image. Partially we are the ego-centered, self-serving creatures we appear to be in our posts and webpages. But we are also sacrifice and love, sacredness and service, loyalty and dedication. We are true accomplishment and noble failure. We are holiness and happiness, mourning and remembrance. We are the first cry of a baby and the last sigh of a dying man. We are, each of us, much, much more than electrons displayed on video screens.
And Yom Kippur comes every year to remind us of that fact.
For twenty-four hours we are commanded to look inward, to compare our lives with our dreams, to measure our actions against our ideals. We are compelled to look hard at who we are and who we wish to be, our successes and our failures, our bullseyes and our missed targets.
On Yom Kippur we are all, in a way, taking a selfie. But it is not the posed, artificial image we create with a phone. The image we seek to capture is deeper and more complex than that—it is the whole person, the reality of each of our lives, the person we each meet in the private sphere of the soul. That is who we each seek to find tonight and tomorrow.
The very real you.
What God wants to see tonight and tomorrow is not the selfie—it’s the self. It’s not the constructed, posed, photoshopped version of you. It’s just you. Without makeup. Without pretense. Without shtick. Without Instagram or TikTok. Just you.
You know, the real you. The one who has to apologize directly to the human beings you hurt in the past year. The one who didn’t pray enough, study enough, breathe enough, give enough, care enough. That one. The one who was selfish and thoughtless and narcissistic. The one who didn’t really work hard, just pretended to, who overcommitted and underperformed, who wishes he or she was a better person but didn’t make the effort to actually become that better person. The one who was often passive aggressive, who engaged in gossip, who let anger get the best of him. The one who let helping herself get in the way of helping others. The one who let himself be too busy to help his wife. The one who ignored her husband. The one who spent more time shopping than visiting the sick, more time on sports than supporting friends. The one who gave more money to Amazon than to tzedakah, who pretended he couldn’t afford to help when he just didn’t want to, even though it was the right thing.
That you. The one in the mirror each morning.
Over this Day of Atonement may we each come to know that person well, and help that person grow in teshuvah and holiness. May we drop our obsession with self-presentation and focus instead on self-awareness. May we shed our preference for self-absorption and remember how to reach out to those we love, to reconnect with them, to help them find their best selves, too.
If we can do that, tonight and tomorrow, if we can find our truest self and resolve to repair it, if we can honestly evaluate our lives and put our moral houses in order, if we can search our souls and seek the spark of divine sanctity implanted within, then we will need no selfies to remember the moment. We will need no posts to prove our moral merit. We will require no tweets to tell our tales.
Instead, we will find God, who takes no selfies at all. And in that finding we will discover goodness and holiness, comfort and redemption.
May this be our resolve on this Yom Kippur, and may our wills unite with God’s own will to make this a day of authentic and very real teshuvah.
Gmar chatimah tovah—may you be sealed in the Book of Life for a good year.