The Perils of Facebook (Is Aliyah Really a Good Thing?)

Widespread are reports that implicate Facebook as the culprit and instigator of much dangerous situations: cyber-bullying, sketchy hookups with strangers, etc.  I've had my share of such experiences, one of which I'll share below.

Take the following picture of a real facebook comment and responses from my Facebook account.  This was from last April.  (Names have been purposely blurred to hide the identity of the other facebook users involved.)

It all started with me posting a status: 

I am at a Yom Ha'atzmaut event in Baltimore.   

One of the features of the event was that all the families making aliyah from Baltimore that year stood on stage, and received an official farewell from the community.  After the event was over, I commented on my own status that:

Going up on stage [for the farewell at the Yom Haatzamaut event] was striking for several reasons. I was amazed how many kids there were. I think it's the first year that there are so many young families with little kids going on aliyah. yeah.....!

I go to sleep that night, believing that the conversation was over.  However, I wake up the next morning to 7 new emails from Facebook indicating that people had commented on my status.

First there was Jim (fictional name), who replied that:

Actually, it's too bad so many people are leaving to Israel because it hurts Baltimore's local zionist school and community

(Note: the person's status does not show up in the above JPEG because he erased it after he realized the commotion that it started.)

We all understood what Jim was getting at; it's reminscient of Reuven Spolter's 2004 Orthodox Union article that noted that modern orthodox communities in the U.S. were shrinking because of loss of community members to aliyah.  However, many of my friends are staunch Zionist, and they couldn't let Jim get away with speaking pejoratively about aliyah.

 Mike (again, a fictional name) replies to Jim

Unfortunate? Aliyah unfortunate? Get your emunah together, man. The Jewish future is in Eretz Yisrael. If you are truly a Maamin then you should WANT your US yeshiva's enrollment's to dwindle precisely because so many are making aliyah. Chasdei Hashem that we live in such special times and are wittnessing Kibbutz Galuyot. Get with the program. Hashem's program, that is.

Agreeing with Mike was Nancy, who previously had made aliyah from Baltimore and had stood on precisely that same stage during the Yom Ha'atzmaut ceremony, several years before:

 I'm happy to hear the numbers are going up again. Our year (07) we were more families than that all with 4+ kids. There is nothing sad about it except the families sitting in the audience who still don't realize that a successful Tzioni school can't and shouldn't be able to survive outside Eretz Yisroel. Am Yisroel belongs in Eretz Yisroel and there is nothing more special than that.  What a kiddush Hashem it is for the world to see the Jewish people return home after thousands of years because of choice not neccesity.

The rest of the comments welcomed my family to Israel.

It's beyond the scope of this post to discuss my view point of this matter, but it's worthwhile to note that this is just of many incidents in which a simple, and ostensibly innocent, Facebook status spiraled out of control, serving as a platform for a discussion of various opinions that I never intended.