COMMUNITY
JEWFRO
RED MEAD
magazine
T
he Isaac Agree Downtown Syna-
gogue was kind enough to invite
me to give the D'var Torah at Rosh
Hashanah. My thoughts:
The only absolute binaries that I
know — things that can truly be only
one or the other — are the following:
unique and non-unique, pregnant
and phew. Those can only be those.
Every other concept, group, pattern,
threshold or delineation I have ever
encountered allows for
some variation, however
small, between or around
the two alternatives.
So, other than being
unique or pregnant (FYI: I
am neither currently), any
binary can be broken. It
can be shattered into three
or five or infinite variations
and possibilities that can
be blended and combined
indefinitely.
And yet we love to re-
duce things to binaries:
Good or evil, right or
wrong, male or female, Democrat or
Republican, liberal or conservative,
east or west, north or south, with us
or against us, city or suburbs, pen-
sions or art.
This is a product of our time. The
most prominent binaries in our life,
after all, are the zeros and ones that
serve as the building blocks for every
digital expression, image, video,
program or application. In the digital
world, there is nothing that cannot
be accomplished with enough zeros
and ones.
Google has rewired my brain. I
was a beta tester for Gmail and my
inbox currently has 42.71 gigabytes
of zeros and ones. To say nothing
of Google Maps, Google Calendar,
Google Voice and Google Drive (no,
not that kind of Google Drive ... yet).
So I could both empathize with
and blame Larry Page, one of
Google's co-founders, when I read
this:
"Asked about his approach to run-
ning the company, Page once told a
Googler his method for solving com-
plex problems was by reducing them
to binaries, then simply choosing the
best option. Whatever the downside
he viewed as collateral damage he
could live with."
Other tectonic shifts have pro-
duced similar collateral damage.
Industrial mass production fueled
the military industrial complex and
sent Robert McNamara to run the
Defense Department. Catholicism
empowered the pope to divide the
New World between the Spanish
and the Portuguese in 1493. Imag-
ine how popular"torch it" must
have been in response to cave-man
problems.
The problem is that
binaries rob us of the nu-
ance of life.They deprive
our prefrontal cortexes
— our beautiful, evolved
prefrontal cortexes — of
holding and synthesiz-
ing complex information
in holistic and non-linear
ways. Instead, the reptilian
parts of our brain reduce
everything to friend or foe,
fight or flight, food or kale.
I am binary prone and I
am committed to the prac-
tice of noticing when I find myself in
life's optometrist's chair (Better now
or better now? Better now or better
now?) and pushing back on myself in
favor of more possibilities.
The most dangerous binary in
community service is that of bene-
factor and beneficiary: Everyone
involved is either serving or being
served. And here in a region that has
such sharp divisions, the course of
(or at least the narrative of) least re-
sistance is this: One group doing for
another what it cannot do for itself.
Shifting that — to everyone doing
together what no one could on their
own — has been the preoccupation
or occupation of my entire adult life.
And I have only begun to go beyond
the binary. It takes patience and
persistence and, maybe more than
anything, a willingness to fail.
So here's wishing you and yours
nuance, texture, contours, margins,
elasticity, alternatives, variations,
hybrids, syntheses, trial and error,
hypothesis and conjecture, mixing
and mashing up of all the elements
of life in the kaleidoscope through
which we view it.
That, after all, is what separates
us from the machines. At least for
now.
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RED THREAD I November 2014 37