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The Cult of Self-Promotion Has Reached Sacred Spaces

by Ram ben Ze’ev


The Cult of Self-Promotion Has Reached Sacred Spaces
The Cult of Self-Promotion Has Reached Sacred Spaces

There was a time when dignity, restraint, and humility were virtues to be admired. Today, they appear to be relics. We now inhabit a society so consumed by self-promotion that even the holiest moments and the most tragic events have become stages for personal performance.


Take, for example, the weekly parade of Shabbat announcements. It has become increasingly common to see people broadcasting that they will be “offline for the next 25 hours” as if the world were waiting breathlessly for their return. Shabbat, a sacred time meant to step away from the noise of the world, has been reduced to a marketing opportunity. It is less about disconnecting and more about letting everyone know that you are the sort of person who disconnects.



Then there are the pious book posts—those who feel compelled to share which book they read over Shabbat, not because the book contained some transformative insight, but because announcing it affirms their own virtue. The act of reading is no longer private nourishment; it is content.


This performative impulse does not stop at the synagogue door. In the aftermath of tragedy, some have taken to recording conversations with politicians and posting them online, as though publicising their proximity to power honours the dead or comforts the mourners. It does neither. It simply centres the self in a moment that should be about others.


Imagine for a moment that it was your parent, sibling, or child who had been murdered. If, in the midst of your grief, you were confronted with a Rabbi more concerned with broadcasting his own involvement than with quietly supporting the bereaved, resignation of membership would likely be the least of your reactions.



The problem runs deeper than bad manners. It reflects a spiritual inversion: where once the focus was on G-D, community, and others, the lens has turned inward. Every moment is filtered through the question, “How does this make me look?” Silence is treated as irrelevance, and irrelevance as a kind of social death. And so people narrate their lives in real time, even when holiness or sorrow calls for quiet.


We need to recover the discipline of presence without performance. Shabbat should be a private covenant between האדם (ha’adam – the person) and הקב״ה (HaKadosh Barukh Hu – the Holy One, Blessed be He), not a broadcast opportunity. Mourning should be about honouring the victims, not elevating the status of those standing nearby. And leadership—especially spiritual leadership—must return to being about service, not self-promotion.


In an age of endless self-broadcasting, true humility may be the most radical act of all.



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