6 Elul 5785/August 30, 2025
Rabbi Don Weber
Digital Divide

Before streaming music, before CDs, before cassettes, there was vinyl. Now, music lovers are embracing vinyl again.

No matter how high the sampling rate, reducing music to 1s and 0s can never preserve the richness of vinyl, because vinyl is analog. It doesn’t use bits and bytes, but instead the needle traces hills and valleys of sound. Sound from vinyl is never ON or OFF; it is a million variations and nuances per second, nonstop.

Digital conversations are no better than digital sound. RIGHT or LEFT, PRO or CON, RIGHT or WRONG leave no room for variations and nuance. Yet our society has pushed us into digital corners of us versus them, and the sound of our collective voices is less rich as a result.

Audiophiles know that analog music is richer, deeper and more alive than digital, and so are analog conversations. Hard-line “digital” positions leave no room for compromise, for meeting in the middle, because they don’t have a middle.

An argument for the sake of heaven does not require abandoning our beliefs. But it does require understanding the heaven – the holiness – on the other side. No matter how much we want to think it is true, “our side” does not have a monopoly on holiness, or on truth. 

In the year ahead, may we seek out the hills and valleys of ideas we see as foreign, that we may find holiness and humanity in the rolling, flowing music of the human mind.