Can the ideals and methods of the open-source movement be mixed with modern Judaism?

Author Douglas Rushkoff visits Monday to talk about his Open Source Judaism project and relate open-source ideas to religion. Here's an excerpt from his book, "Nothing Sacred."

Faced with the restrictive practices of the highly competitive software developers, and the pitifully complex and inefficient operating systems such as Microsoft Windows that this process produces, a global network of programmers decided to adopt a better development philosophy -- one based in the original values of the shareware software community. They concluded that proprietary software is crippled by the many efforts to keep its underlying code a secret, and locked down. As a result, many users don't even know that a series of arbitrary decisions have been made about the software they use. They don't know it can be changed; they simply adjust.

By publishing software along with its source code, open source developers encourage one another to correct each other's mistakes, and improve upon each other's work. Rather than competing, they collaborate. They don't hide the way their programs work. As a result, everyone is invited to change the underlying code, and the software can evolve with the benefit of multiple points of view.

A renaissance in religion, too, would demand that we dig deep into the very code of our myths and faiths, and then re-experience them in the context of full modernity. It will require us to assume, at least temporarily, that nothing at all is too sacred to be questioned, re-interpreted, and modified. But in doing so, we will be enabled to bring religion through its current crisis and into its next phase of expression. And, ironically perhaps, we'll be engaging ourselves in one of Judaism's most time-honored traditions.

An open source religion would work the same way as open source software development: it is not kept secret or mysterious at all. Everyone contributes to the codes we use to comprehend our place in the universe. We allow our religion to evolve based on the active participation of its people. We internalize and engineer holy laws and ideas as adults, rather than following them by rote, as children. We come to realize that the writings and ideas of Judaism, at least, are not set in stone, but invitations to inquire, challenge, and evolve. Together, as a community, we define Judaism as the ongoing resolution of our individual sensibilities.

This is the great lesson of holography, our current renaissance's allegory to perspective painting. A holographic plate -- like the little shiny picture on your credit card -- shows an image in four dimensions. As you move in relationship to it, it moves in relation to time. By strolling past a holographic image, you can see a 3-D photo of a woman wink at you, or a bird flap its wings. But more remarkable than this, if you were to smash a holographic plate into a hundred pieces, you wouldn't see the wing of the bird in one fragment, and the beak in another. No, the image of the entire bird is represented, albeit faintly, in each and every piece. By putting all the pieces together, we can resolve the picture into greater clarity. Each unit has one perspective on the whole, but only together can the whole be fully resolved.

An open source relationship to religion would likewise take advantage of the individual points of view of its many active participants to develop its more resolved picture of the world and our place within it. Instead of seeing blasphemy in the deconstruction of the Torah as a piece of literature, we come to understand that the document's true power is only unleashed when submitted to the simultaneous scrutiny of each member of our entire community. Encouraging people to develop and share their personal perspectives on the Torah in the context of its historically validated evolution does not challenge the testament's authority at all, but confirms it as a living document with an almost infinite supply of unharvested wisdom.

Taken from Rushkoff's book, "Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism"