If I understand correctly, Jews aren't supposed to go to the library anymore

That's all I can make of a ban by various ultra-Orthodox sects from using the Internet. The web is turning out to be the world's largest and most important library, and in October, leaders of the Belz Hasidic sect barred their followers from using it. Since then, the leaders of other ultra-Orthodox Jewish sects throughout Israel have been diving into the ban like fully clothed Elk's Club initiates into a hotel Jacuzzi.

K'Tana Yeshiva in Passaic also followed suit, though in a less extreme way, by keeping the Internet out of its classrooms and discouraging students from using it at home -- as if the Internet didn't have so many child-protection and blocking systems that I can no longer even get on my own home page.

The argument is that the Internet has become a chaos of pornography, hate speech and Britney Spears chat rooms. So not only should young impressionable Jews be protected from this, so should old impressionable Jews -- who might otherwise wander into the wrong news group and show up the next day to their chavarot (synagogue social group) with an automatic rifle and a copy of the Unabomber manifesto.

So they willingly cut themselves off from what is likely to be the most significant source of knowledge in the 21st century. Whenever anyone does this, it's a guaranteed laugh riot. But when it's your own people, you want to start throwing chairs.

Sure, my passion may seem misplaced. Getting worked up over the ultra-Orthodox seems a little like getting ticked off at the Amish. It's not as if conservative, reform, regular Orthodox or even the Chabad Lubavich Jews are likely to drop their ``Fiddler on the Roof'' fan pages or those irritating chain e-mails my parents send me with Poe's ``The Raven'' written in Yiddish.

It's not as if I'm even religious myself.

The ultra-Orthodox, of course, can do what they like. And if they want to live in their own strange, private little worlds, they're no different in that respect than most of the people I knew in graduate school.

But unlike graduate students, ultra-Orthodox Jews actually have some influence. Because Jews have always been something of an island in Western culture, we tend to identify with our most conservative elements, even during times (such as now) of great assimilation. So this withdrawal from the information age is a bad sign -- a further rift, a separation from the rest of us. Those ultra-Orthodox. . . They never write. They never call. They never visit our Oil-Wrestling chat rooms anymore.

Worse yet, if you righteously forbid a source of literature, that implies you can validly bolster your beliefs with ignorance. That's bad news for everyone, Jew and gentile alike. Try arguing with a man who keeps plugging his ears and singing the alphabet song. Then ask yourself how that sort of polemic tactic might affect, say, the mid-East peace process, where ultra-Orthodox Jews have had an enormous influence.

No matter who you are or what you believe, nothing good comes of hiding from what's out there. Sure, the Internet is nuts. So is life. The web is nothing but a gigantic collection of our thoughts, creations and aspirations -- good or ill -- girded in all sides by ads for eBay. And Jews, most of all, are the people of the Book. Our culture and thoughts have survived -- despite our having no homeland, security or much encouragement throughout most of our history -- because we wrote it all down.

We shouldn't play hooky from the next stage of communications.