Why the Jewish story matters in the age of Wikipedia, TikTok and AI

Elul asks us to return. But return requires memory. A people cannot return to a story it no longer knows.

In my first Elul reflection, inspired by Rav Kook’s expansive understanding of teshuvah, I argued that one of the challenges facing the Jewish people after Oct. 7 is narrative resilience: the ability to confront criticism, tragedy and attempts at delegitimization without losing confidence in the truth of our history and the legitimacy of our national story.

That immediately raises a second question.

Who gets to write the story to which our children will return?

For most of Jewish history, the answer was relatively clear. We transmitted our story ourselves. Parent to child. Teacher to student. Rabbi to community. At the Passover seder, we did not merely remember the Exodus; we were commanded to see ourselves as if we personally had left Egypt. We faced Jerusalem in prayer, remembered it at weddings and repeated “Next year in Jerusalem” across centuries of exile.

Today, history is increasingly mediated for us. International institutions classify heritage. Academics and NGOs produce supposedly authoritative frameworks. Journalists adopt terminology. Wikipedia organizes knowledge. Search engines rank it. TikTok compresses it. Artificial intelligence increasingly synthesizes all of this into answers that sound coherent, balanced and definitive.

Why does that matter?

Because stories do not merely describe the past. They shape identity, legitimacy and eventually behaviour.

If Israel is understood as the restored national home of an ancient people with a continuous historical attachment to this land, then the conflict is understood as a tragic collision between peoples, histories and claims that somehow has to be resolved.

But if Israel is understood simply as a foreign colonial enterprise imposed upon an indigenous population, a very different moral conclusion follows. Colonialism is not something to compromise with. It is something to dismantle.

That is why narrative matters.

Rewrite the history, and you can change the identity. Change the identity, and you can weaken the legitimacy. Weaken the legitimacy, and acts of “resistance” that would otherwise be morally unthinkable can begin to appear justified.

Oct. 7 made this more than an academic concern. If Israel is reduced to a colonial project, Hamas terrorists crossing the border can be reframed as “resistance.” Murdered civilians can be recast as “settlers.” Kidnapping and massacre can be contextualized rather than confronted for what they were.

When framing becomes history

Long........

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