November 21, 2013  / 18 Kislev,  5774

Full disclosure … my original title was “The Scourge of Self-Interest.”  But, somewhere along the line, I decided to soften the tone in the hopes of (eventually) finding something constructive and positive to a social trend that seems to have infiltrated the culture of religious institutions.

But, first to the rant.  It seems like, all of a sudden, we have lost the ability to be responsive to the call of others.

In the course of a month, I generate no less than ten invitations, meeting reminders, and notices about memorial services.  While these usually take the form of e-mail, these messages are sometimes replicated with either social media or that vanishing medium of "snail mail."

In a humorous piece entitled RSVP, RIP, blogger Anna Jane Grossman hits the nail on the head in her observation of the erosion of common courtesy:   …  The funny thing is that it is so ridiculously easy to reply to invitations these days. Whether you are using Facebook, Twitter, eVite, email or text, you can pretty much reply with just a few finger movements -- and we've truncated every element of our textual lives so that you hardly ever have to do more than click a box or type "Yes +1" or "No but tnx!" In this way, the death of the RSVP seems almost comical: Just when it couldn't get easier, we decide to stop doing it.

In chatting with some of my high school students about this, I derived the clear message that people are loathe to burden themselves with commitments that are beyond the lens of their radar.  Well, it's nice to hear a rational excuse, but why is this age of personal management any different from others?  What accounts for the greater volume in people's lives today that makes for such tentative planning?

I would aver that folks today - with the advances of technology - have more places to escape, whether or not they choose to ignore invitations and notices, and that they are emboldened by (or at least take refuge within) a culture of self-interest that protects them from taking too much responsibility. 

Those of us who are invested in healthy community life should have a way in which to weigh in on this, but I suggest that we do so with a keen awareness of the climate, and with a method that works with the shadow of self-interest.