A few months ago, I came across a tweet by journalist Joel Berry: “If an 18-year-old kid has extremely strong opinions on Israel and foreign policy, something’s wrong there. That’s not an opinion earned through years of learning and life experience. It’s the result of a kid spending hours on his phone, being conditioned by an algorithm.”
Six million people saw that tweet. And judging by their reactions, it struck a nerve — because everyone recognized the person Berry was describing. Maybe you have a nephew like this. Maybe you’ve met him at a dinner table, or in a church hallway, or in a comment thread under a news story about Israel. He is eighteen, or twenty-two, or twenty-five. He has never visited the Middle East, never opened a history book about Israel, and never spent an hour with anyone who could challenge what he thinks he knows. But he has a phone, and the phone feeds him Tucker Carlson calling Christian Zionism a “brain virus” and “Christian heresy” — and just like that, without a moment’s hesitation, he dismisses an entire theological tradition that millions of serious believers have held for generations. Or he watches Carlson sit across from Nick Fuentes, who declares that “the Zionist Jews — like Dave Rubin, like Ben Shapiro, like Dennis Prager — are really controlling the media apparatus” and are “the biggest impediment” to saving America. The kid nods along. He’s been on his phone for four hours. He now has opinions.
Young people have always had foolish opinions, and strong ones. That is not new. But Berry’s tweet forces a question that our culture has completely lost the ability to answer: who actually gets to have an opinion? Not legally — obviously anyone can say whatever they want. But is there such a thing as an opinion that hasn’t been earned? And if so, what does earning one actually require?
In the Mishneh Torah, his magnum opus of Jewish law, Maimonides issues a warning that might surprise you: a person should not allow his mind to wander freely into speculative theological questions — questions about whether God exists, whether the Bible is divine, whether morality is real. Without proper preparation, he argues, a person who enters that arena is more likely to destroy his faith than strengthen it. As he puts it: “A person should not hasten to demolish the accepted views that are pillars of service to God before he has acquired wisdom and understanding.”
Maimonides is the greatest Jewish philosopher of the last two thousand years, the author of works that have challenged and inspired the finest minds in both Jewish and Christian intellectual history. Why would a man like that warn us away from thinking about the deepest questions of existence? Because he understood the difference between disciplined thinking and the illusion of thinking. He had no fear of hard questions. What he feared was the person who approaches those questions without the training, the language, the historical knowledge, or the intellectual humility to handle them — and who then walks away not with answers, but with the wreckage of whatever faith he started with.
This verse is far more significant than it initially appears. It is the foundational basis in Jewish tradition for the authority of the Jewish sages across every generation. The Bible assumes a living chain of transmission. Truth is not rediscovered from scratch by each individual; it is received, studied, debated, and passed down within a disciplined community of learners who build on those who came before them.
Many American Evangelicals are uncomfortable with the Jewish people’s fidelity to our sages and our tradition. The principle known as sola scriptura — the Bible alone as final authority, without dependence on tradition or interpretive institutions — emerged from a genuine concern: that human tradition had accumulated enough authority in the Catholic Church to obscure the plain meaning of Scripture itself. The desire to encounter the Bible directly, without layers of clerical mediation, reflects a real spiritual hunger, and there is something admirable in that impulse.
But there is also a real danger in this approach. I recently had an email exchange with a Jewish believer in Jesus whom I met at a conference. Her mission was to get me to reject my “Jewish idolatry” and accept Jesus as my savior. When I cited teachings of the sages in my response, she wrote back: “I simply read the scriptures with a curious mind and a heart that trusted God’s word 100%. I read God’s word literally and I read them without any doubts in my heart. The Scriptures are for all people, of all generations, of all intelligence levels. God did not intend for His words to be for a select group of sages to interpret for us. Why would God do that?”
She meant every word sincerely. But read that quote carefully. She is not describing humility before the text. She is describing total confidence in her own reading of it — despite having no training in the study of the Bible, no knowledge of Hebrew, the language in which the Bible was written, and no awareness of how centuries of scholars have wrestled with the very same passages. Not a trace of doubt. That is not faith in God’s word. That is faith in her own interpretation of it, dressed up in the language of faith.
The results speak for themselves. When every individual reader is his own final interpreter, you do not get a return to pure biblical faith. You get tens of thousands of competing denominations, each convinced it has finally read the text correctly. And there is a deeper problem that most readers never stop to consider: the English Bible they are holding is not the raw word of God. It is a translation, and every translation is already an interpretation. Every vocabulary choice, every grammatical call, every rendering of a Hebrew word into English reflects decisions made by scholars who spent years preparing to make them. The reader who thinks he is encountering Scripture directly is, without knowing it, encountering someone else’s carefully considered reading of it.
In Jewish tradition, this was never the model. The written Bible was always the beginning of a conversation, not the end of one. The sages of the Talmud, Rashi, Nachmanides, Maimonides — these commentaries are not obstacles between the reader and the text. They are guides into a depth that no individual reader, however sincere, can navigate alone. A student in the traditional Jewish world spends years acquiring the Hebrew language, grammar, legal principles, and interpretive history before he would even dream of offering his own reading of a verse. Intellectual humility is not a personality trait that scholars happen to have. It is a prerequisite built into the entire structure of Jewish learning.
Ben Sasse, the former U.S. Senator who recently announced he has terminal cancer, made a powerful point in a 60 Minutes interview: “One of the things that’s wrong with America is that young people don’t know old people and old people don’t get to serve young people. One of the things younger people need is to have 60-year-olds and 80-year-olds in their life. We have to do something to bridge the divide.”
Sasse was talking about American civic life, but he was making the same point Maimonides made eight hundred years ago. Wisdom is not generated by individuals sitting alone with their phones. It is transmitted from person to person, from generation to generation, through relationship and time. No algorithm can replicate what happens when a young person sits across a table from someone who has actually lived, failed, learned, and earned the right to an opinion.
That teenager absorbing Tucker Carlson’s latest monologue is not thinking for himself. He is thinking exactly what the algorithm designed him to think. And the consequences are serious. When unearned certainty about Jews, Israel, and the Bible spreads through millions of phones simultaneously, it poisons public discourse, emboldens antisemitism, and produces a generation that is not just wrong but wrong with total confidence.
Earning an opinion takes time, teachers, and the humility to know how much you don’t know. It requires sitting with people older and wiser than you, submitting yourself to a tradition larger than yourself, and accepting that genuine knowledge passes from person to person, from generation to generation.
The antidote to the algorithm is not more content. It is better teachers. This June, Israel365 is running a free 30-Day Bible Challenge on YouTube — all 24 books of the Hebrew Bible, taught by Orthodox rabbis alongside leading Christian voices, one book per day. If you are serious about knowing what the Bible actually says, subscribe to The Israel Bible YouTube channel, watch the videos, and share them with every young person in your life.
The Bible has been defeating ignorance for three thousand years. It can do it again.
