It tells of Joseph, now reconciled with his treacherous brothers, and his struggle to keep Egypt afloat during a terrible and prolonged drought. Disgruntled, the people come to Joseph and demand satisfaction. “Give us food,” they say. “Why should we die in your presence, since the money has been used up?” But Joseph is tough and effective. He collects all the remaining cash, barters food for livestock, and sustains the economy throughout a volatile period. He is a paragon of good government and the embodiment of personal responsibility.

Assange is not. The man who famously expressed his glee at crushing bastards has never specified just who the bastards might be, but his behavior leaves little room for doubt: While he does not appear to be a classical, ideological anarchist, Assange seems imbued with the lawless spirit that represents so much of what is good and what is reprehensible about the Internet; the bastards he enjoys crushing are people with power, and it is their power, more than any concrete fault or inherent flaw, that makes them worthy of crushing.

Rising to Assange’s defense this week, Glenn Greenwald criticized a column by my friend and co-author Todd Gitlin, who condemned Wikileaks. Taking offense with the assertion that the Wikileaks leak was an indiscriminate data dump, Greenwald argued instead that Assange and Co. acted responsibly and judiciously. “WikiLeaks has posted to its website only 960 of the 251,297 diplomatic cables it has,” Greenwald wrote. “Almost every one of these cables was first published by one of its newspaper partners which are disclosing them (The Guardian, the NYT, El Pais, Le Monde, Der Speigel, etc.). Moreover, the cables posted by WikiLeaks were not only first published by these newspapers, but contain the redactions applied by those papers to protect innocent people and otherwise minimize harm.”

But the partnership between Wikileaks and the media is not an easy one. How uneasy? The New York Times—as the paper’s Executive Editor, Bill Keller, recently told readers in an online conversation—is “not a ‘media partner’” of Wikileaks. It’s hard to imagine the Gray Lady going to such lengths to disassociate itself from, say, Pentagon Papers source Daniel Ellsberg, and for good reason: Before giving his purloined documents to the Times, Ellsberg sent copies to Henry Kissinger and Senators William Fulbright and George McGovern, pleading with them to reevaluate the Vietnam war. Only after none was taken did he turn to Times reporter Neil Sheehan. Assange, on the other hand, took a different route. As the AP reports, “days before releasing any of the latest documents, Assange appealed to the U.S. ambassador in London, asking the U.S. government to confidentially help him determine what needed to be redacted from the cables before they were publicly released. The ambassador refused, telling Assange to hand over stolen property.”

These are more than just divergent attitudes. To Daniel Ellsberg, whistle-blowing was the final step that came only after every other imaginable course of action has disappointed. Assange made no such concentrated effort. The invitation he extended the ambassador is as disingenuous as the one offered to the media: Unlike Ellsberg, Assange had the Internet, and, most likely, he intended to publish the documents no matter what and let his so-called partners in the press, the U.S. government, and just about everybody else scramble to cast themselves in the drama he was writing and directing.

Which makes Assange the anti-Joseph. While the ancient Hebrew, a high official in the Pharaoh’s court, used his power to protect the institution of government during trying times, Assange used his technological savvy to elevate himself to the government’s level, impudently offering the State Department a shot at a joint copy-editing effort as if the American ambassador in London and the founder of a website were equally endowed partners.

Herein lies the problem: To think that an individual and an institution—a government, an embassy, an army—are entitled to the same privileges and expectations and should butt heads on the same playing field, leveled by technology, is not only spurious but suggests a deep ontological confusion. Governments have their powers and responsibilities, and Assange seems envious of the former and oblivious of the latter.

It is a shame, then, that the often-astute Greenwald missed the larger point of Gitlin’s piece, namely that Assange and his fellow Wikileakers are interested not in reforming government but in subduing it. They want the machinations of military and diplomatic affairs—machinations that must, by definition and necessity, remain frequently unlit—made visible for all to see and inspect, but, possessing no understanding of how government actually works, offer no concrete ideas for enlightenment. This is the raw and terrible power of the data dump as metaphor; that Assange preselected a few of his many documents for publication does little to endow him with responsibility or respectability. In leaking the documents—be it some or all of them—without bothering, as Ellsberg had, to put them in the appropriate context and draw concrete conclusions and try first to bring them to the attention of higher-ups in the government, Assange is like a child who hurls a brick through a window and then boasts of having exposed the fragility of glass.

Among the more interesting news on the Wikileaks front this week was Assange’s announcement that he’d sent the cables obtained by Wikileaks—all of them—to more than 100,000 supporters around the world with the instructions to reveal them should something happen to Assange or his organization. The files, he assured worried souls, were thoroughly encrypted. Beyond the obvious irony on display—a hacker’s assurance that the information he wants protected is perfectly safe—this act calls into question Greenwald’s assertion that Assange never indiscriminately published his entire trove. Sending a file to more than 100,000 people, even if it is encrypted, is an act of publishing; that Assange’s lawyer labeled the file the “thermonuclear device” further suggests that the Wikileaks mindset is more reminiscent of the rogue bent on destruction than of the activist committed to change.

In his long lifetime, Joseph had his share of both activists and rogues. And he had the wisdom and wherewithal to bless the former—even when, like his brothers, they were guilty of terrible sins—and vehemently reject the latter. Let us follow his lead.

Isaiah is case in point. Even as he embarks on what is known as a haftorah of consolation, the old man is adamant not to allow the gleaming glories of the future to blind us to the dark vagaries of the past. The return of the exiles? The coming of the messiah? We’ll get to that in a moment, quoth the prophet; but first, let us figure out how we got into the spiritual mess. Before he praises and promises and exalts, Isaiah leads off with a stern sentence: “Those who destroy you and those who lay you waste shall go forth from you.”

At first glance, there’s something almost perverse about this assignation of blame. The same sermon, after all, ends thusly: “For the Lord shall console Zion, He shall console all its ruins, and He shall make its desert like a paradise and its wasteland like the garden of the Lord; joy and happiness shall be found therein, thanksgiving and a voice of song.” Why muddle such a pure vision of happiness with talk of destruction and waste?

Herein lies the particular splendor of the Hebrew prophets. To them, redemption is never divorced from responsibility, and it requires not surrender to some celestial force of good but a set of hard choices and harsh reckonings. In other words, it requires agency. This is why it is important to begin any talk of redemption with a mention of destruction: If we don’t know why we were doomed, there’s no chance we could ever save ourselves.

For affirmation of this principle, look no further than Julian Assange, the driving force behind the website Wikileaks. This week, Assange provided three newspapers with more than 90,000 classified Pentagon documents pertaining to the war in Afghanistan. As leaks go, this one is a deluge.

As is standard operating procedure for our shell-shocked media, the story was reported loudly and in brief, leaving anyone lacking the time or disposition to thumb through nearly a decade’s worth of field reports without any real understanding of what the hell had just happened.

To hear Assange put it, that’s precisely the point. The Australian-born hacker is an advocate of “scientific journalism,” a method of reporting that consists of releasing reams of data and documents; unfettered access to sensitive information, goes the theory, allows for empirical examinations and leads to uncontested truths.

In theory, this is a fine idea. And it’s an idea, Assange frequently argues, that’s been proven effective—just look at Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, another massive leak that contributed to major policy changes and ended a wrongful war.

But the Pentagon Papers are as far from Wikileaks as Ellsberg is from Assange. The Pentagon Papers, officially titled United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945-1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense, contained a coherent historical narrative and exposed the perfidy of the Johnson Administration and its deliberate obfuscation of the truth regarding the escalating war in Vietnam. They were compiled by men of great expertise and then studied for months by journalists at the Times prior to publication. Wikileaks’ data dump, on the other hand, is just that. Looking for context? Searching for conclusions? You’re going to have to do it yourself, which, unless you possess the skills, the training, and the experience, is a lost cause.

Ellsberg, of course, possessed all three. He attended Harvard and Cambridge, graduated at the top of his class at the Marine Corps Basic School, and served as a platoon leader before joining Robert McNamara’s staff. Assange is a hacker, arrested and fined for forcing his way into the computer networks of numerous organizations around the world, from an Australian university to a Canadian telecom company. If we take Assange’s “scientific journalism” metaphor seriously, we could safely say that while Ellsberg was qualified to analyze information pertaining to war, Assange’s credentials and qualifications should carry him no further than the lab’s cafeteria.

The silver-haired activist, of course, holds that everyone’s an expert, that experts are frauds, and that authority—any kind, anywhere, always—is oppressive and needs to be punished. In a now-famous turn of phrase, he explained the motivation for his life’s work thusly: “I enjoy crushing bastards.”

That’s a swell attitude for a sophomore, but not very instructive for anyone hoping—as Assange repeatedly stated was the case—to influence policy and public opinion. And it explains, perhaps, the leak’s relative lack of resonance: As soon as serious students of the war had their chance to analyze Assange’s treasure trove, they realized—and we with them—that there was nothing new in Wikileaks’ tall stack of reports. The Pakistani intelligence service is secretly supporting the Taliban? A great revelation, unless you happened to read The New York Times two years ago, when a story titled “Pakistanis Aided Attack in Kabul, U.S. Officials Say” was clandestinely buried on the front page of the newspaper. Civilian death toll? A sensational scoop to anyone too lazy to have followed the detailed and often credible count offered by at least one human rights organization. In short, all that remains of Assange’s act, less than a week after his big reveal, is the echo, fast fading, of self-congratulation and the sulfuric whiff of self-importance.

Had he been just another Internet gadfly, another trader in cat humor or conspiracy theories or any of the other intellectual roadkill that clutters the information superhighway, it might have been easy to dismiss Assange, as one does a Breitbart or a Drudge, as a pernicious prankster. But Assange is made of different stuff. He is interested in sweeping reforms, not partisan trickery, and his actions do stimulate a much-needed debate about freedom of information in the digital age. For these reasons and others, he’s been honored with laurels ranging from an Amnesty International award to a TED talk. To many fawning fans online, his is the future face of journalism.

This is nothing short of a disaster. As the recent leak demonstrates, Assange and Wikileaks represent the Internet’s worst indulgences and most fatal shortcomings. Rather than contextualize and analyze, this new journalism hurls data, raw and incomplete. Rather than devote time to studying a subject in depth, this new journalism focuses on subduing its sources. Rather than act responsibly, this new journalism shoots first and asks questions later. After all, why take on the burdens of leadership or submit to the demands of research or brave the battlefield when “crushing the bastards” on a website is so much easier, so much more fun?

Which brings us back to Isaiah. This week, the prophet has two important lessons for us. The first is that responsibility precedes redemption and that both involve hard work. The second is that unless we’re careful, we’ll bring about our own downfall. Let us remember both lessons next time we read the news.

It was the lead obit, it appeared the day after he died, it featured a flattering photo, it ran to a respectable length, it accurately identified most of the highlights of his uniquely colorful and controversial career, and it didn’t mention his dropping the dime on Daniel Ellsberg, which caused the Times to blacklist him at the time, until three-quarters of the way down in the piece. Instead, the obit highlighted his lawsuit against the hospital he held responsible for his daughter Libby’s tragic death. It was fair.

But for me, it didn’t capture what made Sidney Sidney, which had to do with his unique take on both his journalism and his Jewishness. Since I was there, so to speak, at the creation, herewith my Sidney Zion, aka El Sid.

I first met El Sid in the fall of 1956, when we were fellow students at Yale Law School. I was attempting to launch Monocle, which we called “a leisurely quarterly of political satire.” (That meant it would only come out twice a year.) A classmate said that if I was starting a satire magazine, I had to meet Sidney. When I asked why, he said meet him and you’ll see why.

I met, I saw, and he conquered. In the obit, the Times called Sidney Runyonesque, and indeed the cigar-smoking, scotch-sipping, Hit-Parade-humming Sidney’s first story for Monocle—about the integration of a grade school in Arkansas, over the opposition of its governor, Orville Faubus—was called “The Day They Put the Snatch on Orville.” It included a cast of characters right out of Runyon, and it was written in Runyon’s trademark present-tense Broadwayese.

We immediately hit it off, and not just because we, as would-be journalists, were both fans of Yale’s odd-man-out law professor, Fred Rodell, who taught his seminars at Mory’s, a local bar, so that he could partake of their libations. What really impressed Sidney was his discovery that in 1946, when I was in the eighth grade, I had worked as a “volunteer” (actually, we were paid $2 an hour) to pass a contribution basket at Ben Hecht’s play, A Flag is Born, which advocated for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The money, although nobody said it out loud at the time, was going to support the Irgun Zvai Leumi, Menachem Begin’s militant underground movement.

Hecht, it turned out, was Sidney’s hero. Not just because he was a journalist’s journalist, playwright, screenwriter, and man about town, but because, as the author of A Guide For The Bedevilled—Sidney’s bible—he was a Jew’s Jew. Sidney, who kept track of these things, reminded me that after A Flag is Born closed, Hecht had used his own proceeds from the play to take out an ad in The New York Herald Tribune congratulating the Irgun on blowing up British trains, robbing British banks, killing British Tommies.

Not that we were in political sync across the board. We both saw ourselves as First Amendment absolutists in the Black-Douglas tradition, and we both had a healthy contempt for what we thought of as Harvard-inspired Frankfurterian judicial self-restraint. But Sid, it turned out, had been chairman of the Eisenhower for President Club while a student at the University of Pennsylvania, whereas I, in the argot of the day, had been “Madly for Adlai.” When I asked Sid how he could have supported the Republican, he passionately explained that Roosevelt, whom he considered an anti-Semite, “didn’t lift a finger” to save the Jews of Europe. As Ben Hecht had once put it, FDR was “the humanitarian who snubbed a massacre.”

Monocle, it turned out, was a short-lived magazine. It graduated from Yale Law along with the rest of us, and after a number of years as what we called “a radical sporadical,” it expired in 1965. But it had a long-run impact on Sid’s life.

He met his wife-to-be, Elsa Heister, at a Monocle party. And in 1962, when the New York newspapers went on strike, Monocle put out a parody of the New York Post, called The Pest, to which Sid contributed a column in the cryptic style of the paper’s incomparable columnist, Murray Kempton.

Nora Ephron, herself a contributor to The Pest, tells what happened next: “The story was that the editors of the Post were in a rage. [They] wanted to sue. And Dolly [Schiff, the newspaper’s legendary owner] said, ‘Don’t be idiots. If they can parody us they can write for us. Hire them.’” And that’s what happened. After the Post, Sid went on to report on and cogitate about the law for The New York Times, to columnize for the Daily News, and to write for periodicals too numerous to mention.

I’ve already said that Sid had a love-hate relationship with the Times. Let me give an example. In his last years at the Times, Sid got a tip that Judge Henry Friendly, then perhaps the preeminent appellate court judge in the country and prominently mentioned as a possible U.S. Supreme Court nominee, many years earlier failed to disqualify himself from ruling on a case in which he had a conflict of interest. Assured by Managing Editor Abe Rosenthal that if he got the goods the Times would print the piece, Sidney spent the next weeks definitively documenting the story. But when the time came to print it, Rosenthal was overruled by James Reston, who was then running the paper. Reston summoned Zion into his 10th floor office, and from behind his imposing desk, explained that if Friendly actually received a Supreme Court nomination, the Times would run the story. But absent that, Reston was not about to run a piece that would cast a dark shadow on Friendly’s otherwise distinguished career.

“The difference between you and me, Mr. Zion,” Reston said, “is that you were brought up as a poor Jew on the scrappy streets of Passaic, New Jersey, whereas I was brought up in the Church of Scotland outside of Glasgow.” At this point, Sidney rudely interrupted. “I thought that the difference between us,” he said, “is you are sitting there, whereas I am sitting here.”

In 1971, after he quit the Times to co-found Scanlan’s Monthly with Warren Hinckle, Sidney made worldwide news and incurred what seemed at the time the everlasting enmity of his erstwhile Times colleagues because he named Daniel Ellsberg as the leaker of the Pentagon Papers. He was roundly denounced as a snitch, an informer. How could he do such a thing?

For better or worse, here’s how. From Sid’s perspective, the Times was campaigning for a Pulitzer Prize that it didn’t deserve. The man who took the real risks was the man whom the Times said the world would never know. Oh yeah?, said macho Sid, who vowed to prove his prowess as an investigative reporter and bragged that he could find out who it was in a matter of days, and did just that. After he announced his find on the radio, the world descended on Sid The Informer.

This all struck me as ironic, because Sid himself had long detested those who played the informer. In fact, one of the first pieces Scanlan’s ran was titled “Hello, Informer,” a reprint of Elia Kazan’s testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Scanlan’s sent him a check for $150, which he never cashed.

A few weeks before Sidney died, my friend Christopher Lehmann-Haupt and I had dinner with him at Frankie and Johnnie’s, one of his favorite haunts, and wouldn’t you know it, we had a long and loud argument about Israel. It was two against one—or three against one, since the woman at the next table vociferously took objection to my point that not all those who objected to the settlements or Israel’s failure to honor Palestinian human and civil rights and liberties were “anti-Israel.” There were cries and gnashing of teeth, but had there not been, it wouldn’t have been Sid. And now the world is poorer without his furor.

Although he fasted on Yom Kippur and went to shul on the High Holidays, I never realized that Sidney, who fraternized with more than his share of mobsters, who spent too many evenings commuting between the bars at Gallagher’s, Frankie and Johnnie’s, and Elaine’s, was particularly religious. So I was surprised to learn at his funeral that his daily ritual included the laying of teffilin. According to the rabbi, “totafot,” the word the Torah uses to describe the teffilin, is either untranslatable or means “immovable.” Now that I think about it, I am no longer surprised. El Sid was definitely untranslatable, and he was certainly immovable.

Victor Navasky, a political columnist for Tablet Magazine, is a professor at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism and the chairman of the Columbia Journalism Review.