My new American Express card came in the mail last week. Only for the first time, I noticed my card was different: there was an absence of raised account numbers on the front of the card. I read online that this is a new measure due to security. But more likely, it’s because the very reason for their very existence is no longer necessary.
Most people my age do not remember the credit card imprinting machine. The last time I saw one was the summer when I was at Camp Ramah and taking a bus from Honesdale, Pennsylvania to New York City. The woman running the depot, who must have been in her 70s, placed a small receipt with several pages of carbon paper on the machine. She then slid a mechanism across the machine that made an imprint of my raised name and credit card numbers onto the paper. I remember thinking how odd that was since at that time most credit cards already had magnetic strips. Reflecting back, it seems even more of an anachronism today.
In Jewish law there are two principles that are often at odds among our sages. The first teaches us that Jewish practice follows the rulings of older authorities. There is sound reasoning behind this argument. Older authorities were “closer to Sinai,” and therefore, are assumed to possess a wisdom of depth based on experience. As you can imagine, as a rabbi who strives to preserve tradition, I feel a strong affinity to this way of looking at the world.
And yet, if Jewish practice followed this perspective all the time, no doubt we would still be using a credit card imprinting machine. That is why there is a second school in rabbinic thought called halacha kebatrai, meaning that the law is in accordance with later authorities. As society evolves with new dilemmas, old assumptions are challenged and new ideas are developed to meet them.
When rabbis insisted people be buried with all of their organs in the Middle Ages, no one imagined the possibility of organ transplants. Today, new credit cards using microchips address increasingly complex issues of digital security that did not exist when imprinting machines were designed. Even the carbon copy itself has been replaced by the words “CC” on an email, used by billions of people who never even saw a carbon copy in the first place.
Looking at my new, shiny new card this week, I am reminded that there are times when it is appropriate to pay homage to the past. But we cannot always afford to do so if it comes at the expense of our future.
– Rabbi Dan Dorsch
