New Zionist : News and Discussion on the Future of Zionism, Israel, and the Jewish People

While the media in the US has spent the last week debating the status of Britney Spear’s moribund career, news in Israel has been focused an unusual Israeli Air Force operation that happened in Syria about a week and a half ago.

According to the latest news reports, Israeli fighter jets allegedly entered Syrian airspace, allegedly flew across the entire stretch of Northern Syria, and allegedly targeted a nuclear facility being constructed in Dayr-az-Zawr in eastern Syria with support from North Korea. I use the word allegedly because neither Israel nor Syria has officially confirmed or denied anything. Syria has been silent about the Israeli air strike, probably to not show weakness, and Israel has been silent as well, so as to not stir the pot.

In addition, there has been wide spread speculation about this attack, with stories ranging from the probable to the ridiculous. Some say there were only two jets, some say there were ten, some talk about possible assistance from the Turkish military, some talk about Israeli ground forces being involved. One thing is certain: Israel definitely did something in Syria last week, and it was definitely major. How do we know that Israeli jets were definitely in Syria? Israeli fuel tanks were found in Syria and Turkey. Fighter jets frequently drop fuel tanks once they are depleted in order to increase speed. How do we know it was major? Considering a year’s worth of speculation about war with Syria, why would Israel risk all out war unless it was for a major reason.

Ever since the end of last summer’s war with Lebanon, talk has been about the inevitable war with Syria. Increased tension and increased military reports and speculation have made both sides reach a “kiss or kill” situation where something drastic needs to happen; either actual conversations about peace, or war. In this situation, many believe that the effort needed to truly pursue the path of peace is costlier than the path of war, which makes the military option unavoidable.

Then, amid all of the militant rhetoric from both sides, Israel decided to push the envelope even further with this unprecedented attack. Under any other situation, this act would have easily been the straw that broke the camel’s back to military confrontation. But contrary to conventional thinking, the last 10 days, while tense, have also been weirdly calm. Why?

There are many reasons why this recent air strike hasn’t blown up into massive regional conflict (yet). Firstly, there have been plenty of public statements from both sides discouraging war. Israel has been actively sending statements to Syria, via EU Secretary General Javiar Solana, that they are not interested in war. Assad has also been making calming overtures to the media, even going so far as to go on record in a televised interview with Katie Couric, stating that Syria does not want to destabilize the region. There is even some speculation that Israel actually warned Syria minutes before the attack in order to give civilians time to vacate the area (this is a tactic that has been used before).

But there are also deeper and more nuanced reasons why things have remained calm so far. Closer inspection of the news over the last week reveals that world-wide response, particularly from the Arab world, has been curiously muted. The only country that has (predictably) made public statements in support of Syria has been Iran. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey have all said absolutely nothing, and neither has the EU or the UN for that matter. The lack of regional uproar is definitely has dampened the aftershock of the air strike

It is also possible that the other major players in the Middle East are privately supportive of the Israeli air strike. It is no secret that tension between the Muslim countries of the region has been extremely high as of late. The power struggle of Iran-Syria-Hezbollah against everybody else is playing out in the streets of Baghdad. Media frequently overlooks how convoluted the relationship between Muslim countries actually is, and by keeping quiet, countries like Saudi Arabia might be making a stand against their Iranian rivals by giving clandestine support to the Israeli air strike.

Another reason could be that Syria, and Iran by proxy, are secretly somewhat worried about this attack. If Israel actually did accomplish what international news sources are claiming, it would mean that Israel can basically crisscross Syria undetected at will. There is even speculation that the attack was specifically meant to send a message to Iran directly. Regardless of what actually happened in Syria last week, Israeli silence on the matter creates the perception of success, which arguably may be more important than what actually transpired. In the game theoretic world of geopolitical posturing, perception of power is frequently more effective than actual displays of power (i.e. Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis). For the same token, Syria has made a concerted effort to display their power as well. Syrian Ambassador to the US, Imad Moustapha, has bent over backwards to try to convince the international media that Israel didn’t do anything, recently stating in Newsweek Magazine “The Israelis didn’t bomb anything. When they were detected by our defense systems and we started firing at them, they dumped fuel and turned around”. Of course, Moustapha could be stating these things, contradicting every single major news outlet in the world, as a last ditch attempt to cover up the fact that Syria is genuinely worried.

But the real question in all of this is: What now? The most comforting part is that there has been no outcry for war from the countries in the greater Middle East. This factor alone could be enough to quell the threat of all out war. Syria is smart enough to realize that a war with Israel is not an isolated incident. Iran and Hezbollah would definitely be included in the fray, and with the US allegedly mobilizing for a showdown in the Persian Gulf, it is probably in nobody’s interest to reach wide-spread escalation of regional war. Israel has also played its cards right in this case, which is a rarity considering that Israel frequently suffers from Foot-in-Mouth disease. Israel has also correctly assessed the risk involved with this action, and subsequently has not lashed out in other directions, deciding not to take the bait of retaliation after the Zikim army training base was hit by a Qassam rocket last week, injuring 67 soldiers.

Israel is wise to continue its silence; even though someone will leak the full story internally sooner or later (Israeli politicians are notorious for not keeping things to themselves). Israel would also be wise to continue their stance of No War with Syria, and should make concerted efforts to reiterate this statement to every single media outlet that is willing to listen. The reality is that every single effort should be made by Israel to avoid the seemingly unavoidable war with Syria over the coming months. This means not retaliating to provocations from Hamas and Hezbollah. This means taking the upper hand and responding to rants and raves from the likes of Iran and Syria. This also means not abandoning Abbas and the Palestinians.

Unfortunately this incident is fairly serious, and will not go away easily. Fortunately, if any of this can have a fortunate side, the rest of the region is not keen on going to war, and response has been subdued. It will be very interesting to see how this develops, but I think Israel should make every extended effort to avoid war at all costs, even if it means swallowing some pride.

Shana Tova to all of our readers.

(Due to differing views of our recent review of “The Optimistic Jew”, we present to a different take on the book as our latest submission from one of our readers)

Review - The Optimistic Jew
by Claudia Chaves

Given the immense challenges facing the Jewish people today, a book entitled “The Optimistic Jew” would seem to be either a bad joke or wishful thinking. But it isn’t. The title and the content grew from decades of deep thinking and study by futurist Tsvi Bisk, who points to a truly possible future for the Jews — if we dare to hope for one and commit to making it happen. The author isn’t stuck on his version of a future, and invites the reader to create a positive future that includes her/his own self-actualization. He leads by example – and the power of his example derives from values dear to the Jewish people: breadth and depth of learning, the courage to hold a redemptive vision, and down to earth practicality. Analyzing present world trends, understanding Jewish history, and rooted in the Zionism and the pragmatism of Ben Gurion, Tsvi Bisk shows us a path forward.

Some of us work to understand and mitigate the present threats to Israel’s survival as a vibrant country and society, and the threats to Jews’ sense of security and dignity in a world again rife with anti-Semitism. I call this work the “anti” work. Hard and painful as it is, it is essential work. But it acquires new meaning when we also work as cultural creatives – I call this the “pro” work. With the very real freedom we have today as Jews, and preserving our internal freedom from encroachment by hopelessness and apathy; with the enormous strength, inspiration and learning we can draw from our history and ancestors, and with the wisdom and learning we draw from other peoples and traditions, we can create a beautiful and powerful future.

Some of us work in this “anti” and “pro” directions not just relative to the future of the Jewish people, but of humankind, of the planet and all sentient beings. This book focuses on the first of these but doesn’t exclude the others. Tsvi Bisk sees them as complementary. Depending on how comfortably and consciously Jewish identity fits for any individual Jew with the other levels of his/her identity, so will focusing on the future of the Jewish people complement their work for a positive future for all.

In my own experience of pointing out a path forward – a path which integrates but is not held back by the present obstacles – I have found that people very rarely dare to vision, and therefore also rarely dare to commit and act in a timely way. Staying within the herd seems to be a more powerful force for humans in general, than ensuring a good future for all. Leaders are generally far more interested in personal glory (requiring herd approval) than leading towards a good future for all. As a consequence, a bad future arrives – a deterministic future: determined by the forces that were at work in the present when people opted for inercia, apathy, divisiveness, powerlessness. Tsvi Bisk tells us that it doesn’t have to be that way.

Just reading his understanding of Zionism is a balm to the heart and health food to the mind. (Zionism being a word so distorted and maligned in the world, that many Jews have become “closet Zionists”). Tsvi not only brings it with dignity out of the closet , but he is one of our best teachers on Zionism for the many Jews who know little about it and lack the sense of historical perspective. (His other book, Futurizing the Jews, goes into more depth relative to the historical origins of Zionism as a movement).

Bisk realizes that most Jews today live in a highly individualistic world. Collectivist cultural values and norms are on the wane in the experience of most Jews. (He likes the way the pendulum has swung. Others of us may prefer other combinations of individualistic and collectivistic cultural habitats). Zionism always held as one of its highest values Hagshama Atzmit, Self-Actualization, but the mix of individualistic and collectivistic values and feelings that brought about self-actualization for Jews 50 to 100 years ago is a different mix today. This is a fact, and Tsvi Bisk modernizes Zionism by acknowledging the real and potent integration possible today between what is meaningful for individual Jews and creating a good future for the Jewish people.

Having said all this, I don’t agree with Tsvi on every single point. Neither may you. But this book has convinced me to become his ally in the creation of the future, and I believe and hope that many others that read it will be inspired to do so also

I just completed reading Tsvi Bisk’s new book “The Optimistic Jew”. The book, subtitled “A Positive Vision for the Jewish People in the 21st Century”, is the author’s admittedly rose-colored vision of how the Jewish people can drastically improve the situation in Israel, the Middle East, and even the world, in the coming twenty years.

Bisk, director of the Center for Strategic Futurist Thinking, wrote the book in two unique sections, and each section deserves its own critique. The first half is a veritable State of the Jewish Union, examining the current condition of Zionism, Israeli culture, geopolitics, and more. Bisk, in a pleasantly readable style, describes a number of inconvenient truths about how Israel, Zionism, and Jewry in general have evolved over the past sixty years. In a strictly conceptual framework, Bisk states what many Israelis and many Jews already know, but still refuse to publicly acknowledge; namely, something isn’t balancing out between the ideological foundations of Zionism and Israel, and current status quo. In his own words “Can an ideology truly address the problems of a collective unless it is meaningful for the individuals who constitute that collective?”

Bisk continues, in the first half of the book, to outline specific problems that have evolved, or devolved, in the past six decades; Diaspora – Israeli relations, the Zionist-Post Zionist-Neo Zionist debate, Arab-Jewish relations, Christian-Jewish relations, the Settlement Issue, and Israeli culture. Bisk’s critique of these various issues are all derivations of his over-arching thesis that much of the current thought and practice pertaining to Zionism and Jewry is too heavily mired in the past to be applicable to reality and needs to be reinvented. Even though this journal agrees with many of his notions, the first part of the book offers little detail and no references about the how to address the issue of re-inventing many of the stagnant issues facing Israel and the Diaspora.

The second half of the book is a look back from an imagined future of 2020 to today, similar to Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, or even Orwell’s 1984. Bisk presents an exceedingly utopian future where Israel and the Jewish people have taken bold steps to fix all of the world’s ills, from Hasbara triumphing over terrorism to ridding America of oil dependence. Unlike Bellamy or Orwell, who wrote their novels as fictional social commentary, Bisk maintains an objective academic tone and presents a world that is so quixotic that it seems almost impossible. Yes, it would be great if Bisk’s predictions came true and Israel helped usher in a new era of moderate Moslem democracy in the greater Middle East, but reading about how it is going to happen in the next 13 years gives a sense of the ridiculous.

While Bisk is an admitted optimist about the future, there is scant evidence as to how to get to the Garden of Eden he presents. It is the question of “how” that makes much of our writing on the future pessimistic. The devil is in the details, as they say, and even though Bisk’s thoughts on the current state of affairs are generally on point, the lack of any concrete ideas about the process of getting to his version of the future severely hinders the credibility of the entire second half of the book.

In sum, “The Optimistic Jew” sits at an odd intersection between an academic critique and fantasy fiction, and unfortunately fails on both counts. Bisk, who clearly cares deeply about his country and his people, and writes in a passionate and pleasantly readable style, does not give his own ideas the credit they deserve by writing a book that glosses over all of the profoundly difficult means of getting to his utopian ends. The idea of thinking about the long term, and specifically thinking about it in a positive light, is a welcome break from the short-term doomsday scenarios that grace the newspapers, but it is the overabundance of rhetoric and the lack of facts that leaves the reader wanting more. This book would have been significantly more powerful if Bisk focused only on one specific idea, like Hasbara or the Settlements Issue, and ran with it the entire way, from the past to the present to the future, and flushed out all of the details and the intricacies of how to solve the issue. As it stands right now, all of the good critiques he gives in the first half are lost by the impracticality of the second half.

(The book can be ordered directly from the website of the publisher)
(Also feel free to check out a different review of the book here)

An interesting little article about Jordan appeared recently in Slate. It caught my attention because Jordan is country that is frequently overlooked and rarely pops up in the media. It is a small country with few resources and negligible geopolitical interest. In addition, it is trapped between two countries, Israel and Iraq, that are incessantly in the news. Therefore, I was somewhat surprised to see something about Jordan in one of my favorite online journals.

The article itself is about Jordan’s inconvenient position between its two infamous neighbors. Specifically, the past three decades have been seen very little change regarding Jordan’s stability, and the current situation today is somewhat reminiscent of the situation in the early 1970’s. Back then, the 700,000 Palestinian refugees who settled in the country after the 1967 war started vying for power within the country. The violent uprisings claimed tens of thousands of lives, and ultimately lead to the expulsion of the Palestinian militants to Lebanon in what is referred to as Black September. The presence of militant Palestinians in Lebanon (which were then Fatah under Arafat’s leadership), created its own issues as well, and was one of the main reasons for the eruption of the 15 year long Lebanese civil war (Syrian intervention is another major reason). The presence of externally funded foreign militants in Lebanon persists to this day, as does Syrian intervention (in different forms), and is still a major source of internal strife in Lebanon, even to this very day.

I share this brief history to illustrate two points. The first is how delicate the stability in the region actually is, and how minor incidents can explode in calamitous ways. The second reason is to show how breaks in stability have a strong tendency to spill over into neighboring countries and create years of ripple effects. Now fast forward to present day Jordan. 750,000 Iraqi refugees have spilled in to Jordan, and show no signs of moving back. On the assumption that the situation in Iraq will further erode, more refugees are expected to arrive in the coming months. The fear is that the sectarian strife between Sunni and Shiite in Iraq will morph into sectarian strife between Sunnis and Hashemis in Jordan. There is even talk about mobilizing the Jordanian military to block the border with Iraq for fear of repeating events in the early Seventies.

Lets pretend for a second that Jordanian fears are founded, and the near future will include power struggles and Sunni uprisings within Jordan. If this is the case, then there is the definite potential for negative spillover effects to the larger region, specifically in Syria, Lebanon, and Israel. Israel might be put in a position to intervene, like it almost did back in 1970. In September of that year Syria was threatening to attack Jordan in support of the Palestinian refugees. Israel subsequently threatened to intervene against the Palestinians, and de facto in support of Jordan. This unofficial pledge of military support solidified the special relationship between Israel and Jordan that has existed for over forty years.

Jordanian and Israeli leaders were holding clandestine meetings all throughout the Sixties, and it was King Hussein’s secret visit to Golda Meir in 1973 that gave Israel the warning that Syria and Egypt were planning to attack on Yom Kippur. Back then the warm relationship between the two countries was limited to political spheres only, but today it is a proud part of public dialogue. Tourism (limited almost exclusively to Israelis visiting Jordan and not the other way around) is actually thriving and growing, more and more cooperative industries are planned (though few are executed), and Israel has five times more trade with Jordan, which has little to offer in terms of resources, than with Egypt, which has plenty to offer. It is this special relationship that has served as the few beacons of hope in an otherwise glum and stagnant status quo for the entire region. The former King Hussein and his son, the current King Abdullah II, deserve a large bulk of the credit for maintaining this relationship on solid grounds throughout all the difficulties over the years (their respective wives, Queen Noor and Queen Rania are also awe inspiring).

I personally believe that current Jordanian fears of a Sunni uprising are unfounded. Not because the greater region is more stable (it isn’t), but rather because the current Sunni Iraqi refugees are nothing like the Palestinian refugees of the Sixties and Seventies. The Palestinian refugees were admitted terrorists. Remember, back then Fatah was an extremist militant group, and not the current Fatah of today which is seen as a voice of sanity under Abbas as compared to Hamas. The Palestinian refugees of then were vying for power through violence and fear. The Sunni Iraqis of today are not a part of a militant political faction. They are normal civilians that left their home country because they simply could not wake up and go to work in safety. They have not galvanized into a political force to be reckoned with, armed to the teeth with Kalashnikovs. As the Slate article points out, they have gotten jobs, opened businesses, and generally tried to have the normal existence they cannot have in Baghdad or Mosul.

Therefore, the special relationship between Israel and Jordan is probably not at risk. Even so, Israel needs to be more of an active partner in what seems to be a one way friendship. The two countries have a remarkably similar background, similar populations, and similar demographic issues of immigrants, refugees, and illegal foreign workers. I hope that the Iraqi presence in Jordan does not ruffle feathers, but I also think that Israel needs to take this tenuous moment in hand and reassert its friendship with the one country in the region that is not threatening to “Crush the Zionist Entity”. This is a great moment to re-institute all of those agricultural, industrial, and financial cooperatives that have been lying dormant. This is a great moment to publicly show support for King Abdullah II and renew the commitment to the only warm relationship Israel has in the region.

This past week Haaretz ran four little articles on the environment in the same day. Maybe they ran the four articles as a publicity stunt, maybe to create awareness, but it was certainly not a coincidence. The four articles touch on topics that we have covered in depth on this site, particularly in our series called “On Collapse and Impossibility”. The issue of the environment in Israel is one that we feel is going to become increasingly more pressing in the near future.

The first of the four articles describes how Israel is trying to push through a quick environmental face lift before OECD representatives arrive to inspect. As we reporter previously, Israel is up for OECD membership, and therefore must adopt many mandates and policies in order to be allowed in to the elite club. Some of these mandates are environmental, which forces the country to do a quick clean up job over the coming year. As the article points out, most of Israel’s efforts are purely aesthetic for the purposes of wowing the OECD watchdogs, and unfortunately very little true policy change will be implemented. As stated in the article: “Israel has no long-term strategy regarding energy policy, and isn’t seriously trying to reduce the impact of its energy production and use”.

The second article in the series deals with renewable energy. Israel, like pretty much every other country in the world, is completely dependent on non-renewable energy like coal, oil, and natural gas. There are five broad categories of renewable energy: Solar, Wind, Biomass, Nuclear, and Hydroelectric/Geothermal. As the article points out, given Israel’s geopolitical issues, and their technological comparative advantage, Israel should be at the forefront of all these, or at least one of these, but unfortunately any initial steps the country made in harnessing renewable energy has been largely discarded. Israel was the first to harness the sun’s energy, nearly 50 years ago, but as the article points out, “Yet with the same alacrity that we grasped the potential of solar energy, we abandoned it in favor of the politics of oil and the filth of coal”.

The third article in the series is about desalinization. Historically, whenever there was one of the cyclical droughts in Israel, the country would respond with water-saving policies designed to decrease public water consumption in times of scarcity. More recently, the country has decided to pursue the desalinization route instead, overcoming water scarcity by pumping out salt water from the Mediterranean. As the article points out, desalinization is extremely costly, dirty, and harmful to the environment. Considering this, Israel has decided to pursue the option of desalinization rather than change consumption habits through education and public awareness. The article cites Dr. Peretz Dar, stating “Two years ago, in the midst of yet another water crisis, Israel managed to reduce water use by 12 percent simply through publicity and education efforts. This is a savings of hundreds of millions of cubic meters of water within a few years”.

The last article in the series is actually positive, as compared to the others. It describes how Prof. David Feiman, director of the National Center for Solar Energy in Sde Boker, is on the verge of what could be a semi-major breakthrough in solar technology. Recently his team developed a new technology for photovoltaic cells that could greatly reduce the cost of solar energy and increase the efficiency and output. There is also a plan in place to build a huge solar plant in the Negev. As the article points out, solar is the only non-renewable energy that Israel truly has the potential to foster, and with increase help from abroad, both financially and politically, this is the one area that truly could make headway in the future (see House Resolution 3221, which passed August 4th and calls for increased US-Israeli collaboration on non-renewable energy projects). There are already plans to take Prof. Feiman’s developments on a global scale, with involvement from such corporate giants as PG&E.

These four articles give some interesting details about specifics of the many overlapping environmental issues that face Israel and the greater Middle East in general. Unfortunately, they do not paint the full picture of how potentially calamitous the coming two generations might be. There is one small glimmer of hope… In order to begin addressing these issues, the greater public needs to be aware of these issues, and more importantly, needs to care. If the talkbacks of Haaretz can serve as a litmus test for anything (and for the most part they should never be considered a part of any serious analogy) at the very least there is starting to be recognition of the environmental issues. More importantly, as can be seen by those horrible talkbalks, it is the one issue that transcends religious/political/ethnic divides. If there is one cause that can hopefully galvanize Israeli society it is the environment. With more media coverage, education, and awareness, there is potential to overcome the fractured nature of Israeli politics and actually create some progress.

There are plenty of reasons cited for why the number of Jews worldwide is stagnant, and arguably dwindling. Many claim it is the fault of two generations of assimilation and mixed marriage, some would argue that it is the stringent conversion laws that prevent new members from joining the faith, and we have argued that it is simply a statistical issue of birth rates. Recently, pop-culture Talmudic phenom, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, arguably the most famous Rabbi in America, threw out another theory in an interesting little article he wrote last week for The Jewish Press.

In the article, Rabbi Shmuley throws the blame for the low mating rate on single Jews themselves, referring to the X and Y generation of 20 and 30 year olds as “love-immune”. Even though coupling is commanded by the Torah, the anti-coupling trend he sees has been backed up by a number of recent academic studies. According to a great summary article from the New York Times, 66.2% of “marriage age” men (35-44) were married in 2005, down from 88% in 1960. The numbers for women in the same age group are pretty much the same, 67.2% in 2005, vs. 87.4% in 1960.

According to Rabbi Shmuley, the reason behind this trend is the overt superficial materialism that has permeated into the hearts and minds of our most fecund members, from the secular to the orthodox. The focus on the external as opposed to the internal, by both males and females, makes it easy to defer marriage until the perfect person comes along who can check all of the requisite boxes of Pedigree, Income, Looks, Education, Apartment, Height, Weight, and so on. In doing so, argues Shmuley, modern day Jewish young adults defer marriage indefinitely due to the fact that they never find someone who fits all of their cosmetic requirements. As he states it: “Superficial people seek superficial qualities, and men today, when it comes to women, are about as deep as a crack in the sidewalk”.

His solution to the whole issue is to “cultivate spiritual depth” by refocusing efforts on things that are less concerned with the external, and more giving of the internal, like reading a book or volunteering with the elderly. His other idea is to practice the long lost art of humility. He states “Frequently singles remain single because, without even being aware of it, they are arrogant. They want to marry only the best because they perceive themselves to be the best”. In other words, get over yourself, you selfish bastards. Shmuley even throws his hat in to the online dating ring by creating his own website that “is not focused on the questions of ‘What does she look like?’ and ‘What does he do?’ but rather, ‘What is her heart like?’ and ‘How selfless a person is he?’”.

Before I continue, I want to give Rabbi Shmuley Boteach the praise he deserves. Even though he and I practice different streams of the same religion, I have a high degree of admiration for what he has done for the faith in general. Shmuley has opened the discussion to issues and topics that were previously taboo in some religious streams, like with his book Kosher Sex. More importantly, Shmuley has made concerted efforts to make Judaism approachable and present the religion as more than a weird secret society, which an overwhelming amount of Americans still believe it is. But even considering my normally positive feelings toward Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, I feel that there is a lot he has overlooked in the discussion of Jewish dating.

First we need to dissect the issue of why people stay single longer, and second we need to address the issue of what to do about this trend. With regards to lengthened single-hood, I feel the issue is deeper than what is described by Rabbi Shmuley. The past two decades have fostered a major paradigm shift in the preferences of young adults. You can blame globalization, MTV, the internet, mobile telephony, economic growth of the upper middle class, whatever; the end product is that the young adults today thrive on the mantra of Instant Gratification.

This culture of Instant Gratification has two side effects that directly impact the issue of dating. The first is the constant feeling of disappointment. Whenever the desire for instant gratification is not satiated, the immediate response is disappointment. Now, this is true in general, but with respect to today’s Young Adults, the feeling of being let down is much more pronounced, affecting things that would normally seem trivial. With dating, instant disappointment is manifested by snap judgments about the other person, compartmentalization, the inability to give second changes, and a methodical focus for red flags. As Shmuley describes it: “I’ll set up men with women whom I know to be attractive and charming, only to have the guy call me back the next day and complain of a lack of chemistry, by which he always means, she wasn’t pretty enough. The poor woman never had a chance. Before she opened her mouth, her body did her in”.

The more subtle, and arguably more important, side effect of the Culture of Instant Gratification is what I like to call “The Constant Upgrade Cycle” (trademarked!). This refers to the constant pursuit of increased gratification from new and improved aspects of your life. Young Adults today are in a constant cycle of finding a better version of what they already have. They look to upgrade their job, their salary, their apartment, their electronic equipment, their wardrobe, the bars they go to, and ultimately the people they surround themselves with. With regards to dating, Young Adults exhibit restlessness about settling down because they are perpetually on the lookout for a better model, saying “Cindy is good for tonight, but maybe Jennifer will be at the party tomorrow night”. Ultimately Shmuley is correct in that Young Adults have a noticeable problem when it comes to appreciating what is in front of them, or as he states “your focus shouldn’t be on all the people you’re missing out on.”

In sum, Rabbi Shmuley’s assertion that twenty somethings and thirty somethings are superficial, and therefore perennially single, is the end result of a larger change in mindset that has been brewing over the last decade and a half. Therefore, addressing the issue is not as easy as recommending that young adults read books to residents of the Hawthrone Retirement Community. The reality is that reading a book or attending a Talmud class do not offer the same instant gratification (or instant disappointment) as television or speed dating, as contrived as it is. Paris Hilton is simply antithetical to the Pentateuch. One requires nothing more than a quick mouse click to TMZ, and the other requires long term devotion.

Creating an additional online dating site, as Rabbi Shmuley suggests, is not necessarily the right way to go either. Online dating is the result of, not the cause of, the culture of Instant Gratification. Why bother trying to make legitimate conversations and form new friendships and relationships, when you can simply send e-flirts to the few Jdate members who tickle your fancy? Another online dating site will not change this paradigm, people will still only choose to click on those members they find immediately physically attractive.

The other reality is that maybe this isn’t such an issue after all. We live in a world where 50% of marriages in the US end in divorce, but of the 50% that are married, probably half of them should not be married anyhow. Marriage should be reserved for those who truly are willing to make the commitment to another human being, and those that continuously shop around clearly are not ready yet to make that commitment. In addition, there is nothing wrong with taking the precious few truly selfish years you have to shop around, not just for a mate, but also for a career and for experiences in general. Granted, there is a point where this goes too far, but that is a different matter. As for the biological concerns, we are currently going through a punctuated equilibrium where women can bear children for much longer periods of time, thanks to the miracle of modern technology and the amount of hormones that are pumped in to the food we eat. Annie Leibowitz had a child at 51.

Maybe we should try a different approach toward increasing the marriage rate. Maybe we should try to ease up on the pressure of getting married, and let the young adults of our generation ripen at their own pace. Maybe we should simply try to encourage people to interact in normal settings as opposed to contrived meat markets like online dating and singles events. Maybe we should set up a “Tent of Consent” in the backyard of every Holocaust Museum in the country and guilt people into procreation, as Gary Shteyngart suggests in his recent novel, Absurdistan. Or maybe we should let the whole thing sort itself out naturally and focus on more pressing issues, like the 2008 election, or like Paris Hilton’s alleged feud with her sister.

(Now, if you were a single heterosexual 26 year old male, which would you prefer?)

(Hat tip to Joanna for the initial article)