Jewish advice for surviving the information wars

The most expensive currency in the world today is attention. Every company, politician, media organisation, advertiser, tech platform, and government is fighting for it. They’re battling over who gets into our minds first ‒ and who manages to stay there longest. And we are paying for it constantly. Not with money, but with clicks, scrolling, outrage, curiosity, and time. Where attention goes, beliefs are influenced, emotions are shaped, behaviour changes, and ultimately, identity is formed. 

Some of the largest companies are built almost entirely on this model. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is worth more than a trillion dollars, yet most of us have never paid it directly. This is because its business model is not really about selling products; it’s about extracting human attention and selling it to advertisers. You pick up your phone for five minutes and suddenly an hour is gone. That’s not an accident. Phones and apps are doing exactly what they were designed to do. 

As a war correspondent, I spent years covering physical wars. In the world we live in today, you no longer need to go to a war zone to experience conflict. You just need to log in. Most of us are now living in a digital war. In physical wars, violence destroys bodies. In digital information wars, the target is judgement. 

Years ago, I was reporting live from the Israeli-Lebanese border. Nothing much was happening and I said as much on air. My editor phoned me, exclaiming that I was standing on the “wrong border” because Fox News, as she told me, was reporting that the situation was incredibly tense. I looked to my right. A few metres away was the very journalist she was talking about! He was wearing a bulletproof vest and speaking in urgent tones about escalating danger and uncertainty. Same reality. Different framing. 

We don’t react to reality as much as we react to our interpretation of reality. And our interpretation is shaped by fear, identity, belief, experience, and emotion. 

I learnt another lesson about information during the Arab Spring. A colleague phoned to say that then Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was in a Cairo hospital and dying. He told me he had excellent sources. I reported the story live almost immediately and my network was one of the first broadcasters to announce it. A few hours later, my colleague phoned again. This time he said all the Arab media were now reporting that Mubarak was dying in hospital and that they, too, had good sources. He asked me, “Who is your source?” I replied, “You are.” The irony was obvious. Information had begun circulating rapidly because everyone was quoting everyone else. Speed had overtaken verification. 

This is one of the great dangers of the digital age. The pressure to be first often overwhelms the responsibility to be accurate. Social media amplifies this even further because people don’t share facts nearly as much as they share emotions. 

Judaism understood the danger of this long before social media existed. In the Torah’s Book of Numbers, Moses sends 12 spies into Canaan in the second year after the Israelites had left Egypt. Ten return with terrifying reports of fortified cities, giant inhabitants, powerful militaries, and impossible odds. Most of what they said was factually true, but they focused selectively on fear while excluding hope, context, and possibility. The result was catastrophic. An entire nation lost confidence and collapsed psychologically. As a consequence, the adult generation that left Egypt was condemned to wander in the desert for 40 years and die there before reaching the Promised Land. Joshua and Caleb, the two spies who resisted the panic and maintained faith, were allowed to enter Canaan. Jewish tradition also teaches that many women didn’t participate in the same collapse of faith, which is why among those who eventually entered the land were elderly women who had survived the desert years. 

What matters about this story is that the spies did not invent Canaan. They just exaggerated hopelessness. The facts they reported were not invented, but selected, emotionally amplified, and stripped of context. This feels very modern. One of the lessons of Shavuot, which we recently celebrated, is that receiving the Torah was not only liberation from slavery; it was readiness to step into responsibility, courage, uncertainty, and nationhood. 

The Hebrew word for truth, emet, is made up of aleph, mem, and tav, the first, middle, and final letters of the Hebrew alphabet. It suggests completeness, patience, endurance, and context ‒ the idea that truth spans the whole journey. By contrast, the Hebrew word for falsehood or deception, sheker, is made up of letters that stand narrowly and unevenly on the page. Jewish commentators explain that truth stands securely while falsehood is shaky. This is why Judaism places such emphasis on questioning, debate, and critical examination. Ours is a tradition that argues, interrogates, challenges, and asks questions. 

So what does Judaism teach us about navigating fake news and misinformation? 

First, slow down. In a world that rewards speed and reaction, Judaism pushes us towards reflection, questioning, and thoughtful judgement. We are living in a world of emotional activation. The first version people hear often shapes the version we remember. But the Torah reminds us that haste can distort judgement. 

Second, check the source. There is a Chassidic story about a young traveller searching for a famous rebbe. As he nears the rebbe’s town, he encounters a simple-looking man on the roadside and asks him where he can find the great teacher. “That rabbi knows nothing,” the man exclaims. The traveller becomes furious. He passionately defends the rebbe and argues with the stranger. Eventually, he arrives at the rebbe’s home and is ushered into the study, only to find ‒ to his astonishment ‒ the same man! The story is not about whether the rebbe is good or bad; it’s about how quickly we react emotionally without first examining the source. Today we should be asking the same question every time we receive information online: Who wants me to believe this and why? 

The battle for attention is ultimately a battle over human agency, our ability to reclaim ownership of our minds and choose what deserves our attention. Perhaps the deeper Jewish lesson for the digital age is this: slow down, question more, examine context carefully, and guard your mind as carefully as you guard your words. 

• Paula Slier is a veteran journalist and foreign correspondent who has reported from conflict zones across the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. She writes on media, geopolitics and information warfare.