Infatuation with Virality
Recently a young man came over to me excitedly. He explained that a video that he had taken had gone viral. It was a few second clip and for some reason it made it’s round on Jewish social media platforms. He was so exhilarated at this achievement. He was not even in the video, it was just that he had taken it.
I have been thinking lately about what actually makes a person happy. Not pleased, not entertained, but fulfilled, the kind of satisfaction that holds up on a quiet Thursday when nobody is watching.
Our generation has been handed a very clear answer to that question, and the answer is publicity. Virality is the currency. Clickbait is the method. Reach is the scoreboard. And so it follows, with a kind of grim logic, that the figure sitting at the top of our totem pole is the influencer.
Consider what that word actually describes. An influencer is a person whose opinion carries weight because a great many people have chosen to listen, and for no other reason. Not because of training. Not because of scholarship. Not because of any demonstrated moral compass that would make their judgment worth borrowing. The qualification is the audience itself. What draws the audience is volume, charisma, and a certain confidence in the way they narrate the world back to us.
There is something genuinely sad in this, and the sadness is not primarily about the influencers. It is about everyone else. If publicity is the measure of a life well lived, then the overwhelming majority of human beings have been quietly disqualified before they begin. The best that most people can hope for, within that rubric, is to be the one holding the phone. To have captured thirty seconds of something absurd that the internet loved for a day and a half, and that vanished the moment the next news cycle opened its mouth. That is the ceiling. A brush with a fame that was never really yours, attached to a moment that meant nothing.
The Value of Hiddenness
I want to suggest that the Torah proposes an entirely different ledger, and that it does so in a verse we read in Nitzavim (Devarim 29:28)
הַנִּסְתָּרֹת לַה׳ אֱלֹקֵינוּ וְהַנִּגְלֹת לָנוּ וּלְבָנֵינוּ עַד עוֹלָם
The hidden things belong to Hashem our God, and the revealed things belong to us and to our children forever.
There is an explanation of this verse that has stayed with me, because it reads the verse not as a statement about what we are permitted to know, but as a statement about where accounts get settled. What is revealed is settled here. What is hidden is settled there. And once you see it that way, it works identically in both directions, for our failures and for our virtues.
Missteps
Start with the failures.
A man backs out of his driveway and runs over his neighbor’s cat. He is devastated. He picks the animal up, carries it to the door, and stands there crying with it in his hands. The neighbor comes out, and the two of them bury it together in the backyard. That weekend he drives the family to the pet store and pays for the replacement himself. And every year, on the anniversary, a card arrives.
Ask yourself what punishment is left for this man? In a real sense he has already served it. The remorse was public, the repair was costly, and the shame was absorbed in full, in this world, in front of the person he wronged. V’haniglos lanu. The revealed account has been closed.
Now run it again. Same driveway, same cat. Except this time he looks around, notes that the animal was black and the hour was late, decides the neighbors should have kept it indoors anyway, nudges it into the bushes with his shoe, and parks the car. The cat turns up a few days later. He says nothing. He never quite makes eye contact again, and the subject never comes up. Hanistaros laHashem Elokeinu. Nothing has been resolved. It has only been relocated. There will be a time and a place for such an accounting, and it will not be here.
Goodness
Here is the part that I think we systematically fail to apply. The verse cuts exactly the same way for the good we do.
A fellow decides he wants to do more good. He does not want it known. He finds a group that packs food boxes on Thursday nights, and he shows up, and he drives a route, and he places the boxes on porches and is gone before anyone opens the door. He does this for years. His own children have no idea. Hanistaros laHashem Elokeinu. Nobody saw it, which is precisely the point, and the account is held by the only One who did. Every bit of the reward is awaiting such a person.
And then there is the man who does the identical route, but takes selfies on each porch with the box in frame, and posts the set with a hashtag about how good it feels to give back. V’haniglos lanu ul’vaneinu ad olam. He was paid. Not cheated, not condemned, simply paid, in the currency he selected. He took the reward in the form of admiration and there is no reason to imagine more reward is pending.
Reversing the Trend
That is the reversal, and it is a total reversal of how our culture teaches us to keep score. The public act is not the one that counts most. It is the one that counts soonest, and therefore the one that counts least. Whatever we cash out here in attention is no longer accruing anywhere else.
Which brings me back to the influencer, and to the vast majority of us who will never be one.
If meaning were really distributed through reach and sensationalism and rage bait and followership and loud voices, then meaning would be the most unevenly distributed good in human history. It would be reserved for a statistical handful and structurally unavailable to everyone else.
But that is not the real currency. The distribution runs through the hidden world. It runs through quiet empathy, silent support, through the call you made instead of the post you did not write. Through the check nobody traced and the favor nobody credited and the Thursday nights nobody knew about.
None of that will ever trend. That is not the flaw in it. That is the entire architecture of it. And unlike virality, it is available to every single one of us: quietly, humbly, and modestly.
Photo by https://kaboompics.com/ from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-man-wearing-white-striped-shirt-and-brown-beanie-thinking-on-what-to-vlog-6333688/