Kanye West, a Hologram, and a Walk on the Beach

Only in crazy mad 2020 can a presidential candidate offer his wife for her birthday a surprise appearance from…her dead father.

Rapper superstar Kanye West, running as an independent candidate for president of the United States, interrupted his campaign this week to give his wife Kim Kardashian a hologram “performance” from her late father, Robert Kardashian, in honor of her 40^th birthday.

Don’t laugh, please. The hologram was unbelievable. Actually, I take that back—it was believable.

“You’re 40 and all grown up,” Kardashian — who died of cancer in 2003 — tells his daughter in the nearly two-and-a-half-minute clip. “You look beautiful, just like when you were a little girl. I watch over you and your sisters and brother — and the kids — every day.”

I guess that’s what happens when you let tech geniuses go nuts in their digital labs. The technology keeps getting better and better and better until, one day, a famous daughter with 67 million Twitter followers sees her dead father on a digital screen and gushes: “It is so lifelike! We watched it over and over, filled with emotion.”

2020 has been the year of loss. Everyone’s lost something. Above all, lives have been lost. That’s why it was so eerie to see the Kardashian hologram. It was like humanity telling Mother Nature: “Don’t think you’re so powerful. We can take you on. You thought Robert Kardashian was dead? Look at him now!”

If ever there was a year when humanity has wanted to take on Mother Nature, 2020 is it. Labs around the planet have been working around the clock to conquer a tiny virus that is trying to conquer us. We’re all rooting for them. We want the losses to end.

If ever there was a year when humanity has wanted to take on Mother Nature, 2020 is it.

So many of us are desperate, each in our own way, to get back what we’ve lost. Some have lost their daily routines and human connections; others have lost their loved ones and their livelihoods.

Everyone’s lost something.

Technology has done its best to come to the rescue. For starters, it has kept us all connected through digital screens, small and big. But those faces we see on these screens are alive — they’re not holograms!

Kanye West, in his typical high-handed fashion, acted like the ultimate big shot, like some messianic-like figure with the power to bring someone back to life.

But the Kardashian hologram, like other recent holograms that have caused a stir, are only extreme expressions of the dangers and limits of technology. Even at its best, technology can easily delude us into forgetting what we love most. Those digital connections are wonderful, even miraculous, but we know, deep down, they can never compare to the real thing.

As I was walking on the beach last night in Santa Monica, I was assaulted with this feeling of the real thing. The wind on my face, the smell of the ocean, the feel of the sand and water, the view of the setting sun — it was all the very antidote of a virtual experience.

Technology will never bring back the dead, and it will never give us the feeling of real life. Staying connected to that real life is how we can conquer Mother Nature.

Shabbat shalom.