By Rabbi DR. Moshe Dror
The last Cyber Or 27 ended with the ideas of a Cyber Hymnal and Cyber Piyut. These are texts and we mentioned that Texts are derived from the Latin for Weave—so we are talking about cyber weaving and dealing with all sorts of virtual /augmented / immersive reality—all modern and all the new stuff of Cyberia.
Right?
Well think again.
Many cyber enthusiasts are relating to some sort of techno-religious sensibility and are convinced that cyberspace is some new sort of spiritual space.
Any of you who are reading these blogs of mine would love to read a wonderful and masterful book by Margaret Wertheim-“The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet” (Norton, New York, 1999). She traces the history of Western ideas about space and how these have been informed by cultural and especially religious themes. From Dante’s Inferno to The Internet of today, the West developed a dualistic conception about the body and soul which are seen as two distinct realms. Within this tradition, the immaterial has always been equated with the spiritual.
Margaret Wertheim is a science writer and commentator and deals with the relationships between science and religion.
Much of these comments are found and interpreted from her last chapters ((seven and eight) from her book.
Wertheim writes that there is a lot of writing and explanations about cyberspace that deal with soul- data. We are indeed dealing with the “religious valorization of this term” to use the appropriate words of Mircea Eliade. As you are reading these words you are a CYBERNAUTE (the cyberspace cousin of the Astronaute and Cosmonaute) sailing along in the oceans of Cyberia.
Eliade also used the designations of sacred space and profane space in order to differentiate among different qualities of space and also time as well. There are many forms of space and time.
Religious dreaming about cyberspace –virtual spaces, is very prominent in the Bible, in the visions of The Heavenly City as described in the Book of Revelations of the New Testament. This “New Jerusalem” is that transcendent crystalline polis whose entrance is the mythic Pearly Gates…certainly a virtual space.
The connection between cyberspace and the New Jerusalem has been spelled out very explicitly by Michael Benedikt in an article in “Cyberspace: First Steps” published by MIT Press. In this essay, Benedikt explains that Like Eden, the New Jerusalem is a place where man will walk in the fullness of God’s grace: “ Where Eden (before the fall) stands for our state of innocence, indeed ignorance, the Heavenly City stands for our state of wisdom and knowledge”.
It is interesting to note that for at least a few thousand years Jews have believed that there are TWO cities of Jerusalem: the Yerushalayim Shel Ma’ala- the Heavenly city and the Yerushalayim Shel Mata- the Earthly Jerusalem. They are not the same and the heavenly Jerusalem is the equally significant. So here- which is the real and which is the virtual. The mayor of Jerusalem deals with buses and garbage collection, the heavenly Jerusalem deals with sacred space. If you have any doubt at all about which is the more important, just open any front page of any newspaper in any city in the world and you are likely to see some news about the struggle dealing with Jerusalem.
This New Jerusalem is a place of Knowing-like cyberspace a place rooted in Information. This is analogous to the idea of Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT media Lab who suggest that humanity is going through a major transformation from a civilization based on Atoms to a civilization based on Bits. This is analogous to the idea of the growing view that man is defined not by the atoms of his body, but by his information codes… the belief that our human essence lies NOT in our matter, but in an immaterial pattern of data.
It is interesting to note that for at least a few thousand years Jews have believed that there are TWO cities of Jerusalem: the Yerushalayim Shel Ma’ala- the Heavenly city and the Yerushalayim Shel Mata- the Earthly Jerusalem. They are not the same and the heavenly Jerusalem is the equally significant. So here- which is the real and which is the virtual. The mayor of Jerusalem deals with buses and garbage collection, the heavenly Jerusalem deals with sacred space. If you have any doubt at all about which is the more important, just open any front page of any newspaper in any city in the world and you are likely to see some news about the struggle dealing with Jerusalem.
