The Future of Judaism Can’t Be “Crowdsourced”

In his book God Is in the Crowd, Tal Keinan examines the difficult situations into which Israeli and American Jewry have (in his view) fallen, and seeks to find a solution by appealing to the notion of the “wisdom of the crowd”—namely, that the aggregated opinions of a large number of people are often likely to be accurate. Thus, ask several hundred people to guess the number of gumballs in a gumball machine, and the average of their answers is apt to be very close to the correct one. Abraham Socher finds much compelling in Keinan’s book, but deems both its diagnoses and its prescriptions lacking—starting with the author’s ascription of Diaspora Judaism’s past success to a sort of crowdsourcing: