Divrei Torah and Podcasts – Perfect Together

by Joanne Palmer

We Jews aren’t called the People of the Book for nothing.

As a culture, we are known as constant readers and gifted writers, and of course the basis of everything we are is the Book itself, the Torah.

But, as we all know, before books were readily available the words of our sacred texts were transmitted orally. For millennia, we were largely an aural culture, until technology developed to the point where books could be produced efficiently enough for most people to be able to afford them.

As technology has continued to evolve, it has to some extent come around full circle. Centuries after the printing press was invented sound was recorded so it could be played back, and at around the same time the technology that captured images and allowed them to move evolved. By now, we now can use our advanced understanding of bits and bytes to bring ourselves spoken texts, music, and movement over the internet. All we have to do is click and the world of learning opens for our ears as well as our eyes.

United Synagogue has offered some videos and recordings for a few years. Now, though, we are devoting a section of our website to audio and visual clips and podcast links. Some of the material available through our website is housed on our own servers; we also have links to other sites. We hope to continue to add to the audio and video clips we have available online.

One of the services that United Synagogue offers to its member congregations is hosting their websites and providing them with technical assistance. Just as our own website has begun to include more links to audio and video clips, so too have many of the congregational sites we host begun to experiment with them.

Martin Kunoff, United Synagogue’s director of information technology, says that the technology is not so new, but its popularity is. MP3 files – the format for the audio clips – is where the technology that fueled Napster, the popular file-sharing system of the late 1990s that was later found to be illegal. Just as the legal decisions breaking up Napster came down, Apple was there with its iPod and its iTunes Music Store; soon radio stations, web sites, and other suppliers began offering podcasts. Apple’s products are sleek and chic, and they became as identified with the technology as Thermos is with vacuum bottles or Kleenex with paper tissues. But although podcasts take their name from iPods, MP3 files can work just as well on other MP3 players or on computers as they can on the Apple devices.

In fact, Mr. Kunoff adds, even before MP3 files were created, music was available on the internet. The old-fashioned websites that start blaring music as soon as they are opened used .wav files. “People could save and download those files, but they were huge,” he says. “MP3s became the standard because it’s compressed. People could record or take existing recordings and make them really small, so that even people with just dialup internet access could download them.”

As technology keeps changing, Mr. Kunoff says, the ways in which information can be delivered will keep changing as well, but one thing is clear: it will only become easier for people to see videos and listen to spoken words and to music through electronic devices. “We’re moving into the real video age. The quality used to be low, and it would take much too long to download even a five-minute video by dialup. Now that so many people have broadband and DSL and cable modems and even satellite through the phone, that will change.

“The MP3 player and the phone have merged,” he continues. “New phones are also MP3 players for audio and sometimes video.”

How do the advances in this brave new world affect synagogues?

“Some synagogues have used .wav files on their websites for some time, and local cantors have made their own CDs. And it’s the rabbis who have led the way, recording their divrei Torah and other talks, giving their congregants and everyone else with a computer material to ponder. Now both talk and music are much easier to record, and it can all be put up on synagogue websites. Some synagogues and some rabbis have even begun to offer podcasts.” This, Mr. Kunoff thinks, is a great medium for informal education, and will only grow in importance as the technology develops and people become more comfortable using it. In fact, he thinks that webcasting – live coverage of events, streamed over the internet – will become increasingly important, even though it will never be as good as actually being there.

“It used to be that you needed to have a lot of equipment to record; you’d hire someone to set it up and burn a CD. Now you can do it yourself,” he says.

“The music and the media have existed for some time, but it’s the distribution that’s much easier now,” Mr. Kunoff says. “And not all of the music is new. Someone could find an old album of Yiddish music, for example, and they get approval to digitize it, and then they get permission to put up a song or two on their synagogue website.”

United Synagogue is looking for more content for our audio and video clips. We encourage rabbis, cantors, and laypeople to send us links; if it is appropriate (and of course if the links work) we will link to it. Please send the links to info@uscj.org; for more information, email Marty Kunoff.