24 Oct 100 BILLION MESSAGES A DAY

Most of us have
become accustomed to
using WhatsApp to
communicate and in
some cases manage our
family, social, and
professional lives.
Indeed, WhatsApp is used to send more than
100 billion messages a day (although most
of those are just in the group my wife and I
have with our children). To give you a sense
of how dependent we are on WhatsApp for
working for and with the BRS community,
for example, Rabbi Moskowitz and I are
currently in 206 groups together including
our BRS staff group, groups for organizing
shiva minyanim and chesed, sharing Torah,
and much more.
A year and a half ago, a virus forced us to
socially distance, quarantine, and lockdown
physically. This past week, a bug in
technology, at least temporarily, put a wedge
between us and kept us apart from one
another for several hours. Both were terribly
unpleasant, uncomfortable, and even
painful. But they also both presented
opportunities to reflect, reset and recalibrate,

the former on our connection with people
and the latter on the role and dependance on
technology in our lives.
While our generation is struggling to
navigate the unprecedented proliferation
technological breakthrough, we are not the
first to confront what progress should mean,
how it should impact how we spend time,
and what our ultimate goals should be.
The central story of our Parsha is the “hard
reset” that G-d performed on the world,
undoing all that He had created and
restarting the world anew. Hashem took
such a drastic measure because, the Torah
tells us, the world had become filled with
corruption and moral depravity.
The Gemara (Sanhedrin 108a) makes a
mysterious comment – “the generation of
the flood became corrupt as a result of the
great blessing that G-d had bestowed upon
them.” Which blessings are the rabbis
referring to and how did they corrupt
humanity?
The great Rav Avraham Pam zt”l suggests
that the key to understanding this Gemara
and what happened to Noach’s generation

can be found in his very name.
The Torah tells us that Lemech
named his son Noach saying,
“This one will bring us rest from
our work and from the toil of our
hands from the ground which
Hashem had cursed.” Rashi
explains that until that time, the
world had continued to suffer
from the curse that G-d gave
Adam, “b’zeias apecha tochal
lechem, you will have to work
with the sweat of your brow to
draw bread from the ground.”
Until Noach was born, man
labored from morning to night and worked
tirelessly with his bare hands just to have
food to eat, leaving no recreational or down
time.
Lemech saw prophetically that Noach was
destined to invent the plow and other
agricultural tools that would make man
much more efficient and would ease his
burden. Lemech therefore named him
Noach from the root nuach, to rest, because
his Noach would provide tremendous relief
to an overworked population.
Rav Pam explains, the inventions of
the plow and other tools were the great
blessing that rabbis referenced. Yet,
instead of becoming empowered,
liberated, or enriched by these
innovations, they became corrupt.
These inventions, these gifts from G-d
increased productivity, improved
efficiency, and yielded more free time.
This time could have been used
constructively, productively, and
meaningfully. Instead, the generation
used their newfound downtime for
corrupt activity. The breakthrough and
advancement could have brought
spiritual ascent, instead they brought
moral decline.
We are blessed to live in the greatest
era of technological breakthrough of all
time. Simple tasks that used to eat up
our time can now be accomplished in
seconds, or through automation or even
speech recognition, in no time at all. We
long ago became accustomed to the
washing machine, dishwasher, bread
machine and microwave, but we now
even take things like GPS navigation
systems, or the ability to Facetime or
WhatsApp video with multiple people
in multiple destinations across the
world, for granted.
Every single day, something is
invented which is meant to make our

lives more noach, easier. They are designed
to free up precious time. The question is, do
they? Do we fill that time meaningfully and
mindfully or is that time squandered on
mindless behavior? Perhaps it is no
coincidence that Facebook, Instagram, and
WhatsApp were first wiped out and then
flooded with messages in the week we read
Noach as a reminder that a generation is
defined by what it does with the blessing of
progress it experiences and the free time it
discovers.
The Mishna in Pirkei Avos (3:1) quotes
Akavya ben M’halalel who teaches that a
person should always keep in mind, “Before
Whom he will have to give Din V’cheshbon,
judgment and reckoning.” What is the
difference between din and cheshbon?
The Vilna Gaon explains that din refers to
judgment for mistakes, indiscretions, and
poor decisions we made. Cheshbon is not
about what we did wrong with our time, but
what we could have done right during that
time. We will have to give din for mistakes
we made but we will also be held accountable
even for the cheshbon, the calculation of
what we could have accomplished if we had
only taken advantage of the time we claimed
we don’t have.
Do we use the gift of greater time to binge
watch, to pursue frivolous activities and to
indulge in hedonistic experiences? Or, do
we use the time we are gaining with each
breakthrough for meaningful, productive,
and constructive activities? Are our greater
comfort and expanded time leading to moral
decay and decline or moral development
and progress?
Technology can either enslave or liberate,
free up time or eat up our time, move us
forward, or take us backwards. Moments
like a worldwide outage can and should be
opportunities to consider our own
relationship with technology and time, and
hopefully inspire us to bring us closer to a
place of true, earned noach.