Surfing for Torah

You don’t need to look any further than my synagogue‘s website to understand how the web has redefined religion. The website has corporate sponsors (Travel Dynamic Group), links to an ad journal, and a business directory. The web has clearly revolutionized the way religious communities function as businesses or at least how they get the money to sustain themselves. It has also drastically facilitated what observant Jews know as kiruv (the term loosely used to describe reaching out to unaffiliated Jews in an effort to show them what observant jews perceive to be the correct path).
My synagogue’s website sports links to recording of the Rabbi’s lectures as well as his weekly writings. Keep in mind that this is a synagogue which has incredibly stringent restrictions regarding eletricity and work on the Sabbath. As described in a previous post, we don't use electricity period. Most people walk to synagogue (some a few miles) and most of the Sabbath day in my community is spent eating, reading, and relaxing. Because of this, it seems almost sacreligious to listen to a sermon online, which is such a fundamentally technological activity, about breaking the sabbath...but of course there's nothing wrong it.
There are whole sites like torah.com which store hundreds of lectures and classes given by Rabbis around the world. Orthers like aish.com specifically target Jews who have less of a background. Askmoses.com has a Rabbi on call 24/7 to answer questions in a live chat format. I logged onto it the other night at 2 a.m. to give it a trial run and I ended up talking to a Rabbi in Australia about the Messiah. The internet allows Jews to connect to their religion in a way they simply couldn’t have 15 years ago.