A version of this sermon was delivered on Kol Nidre, Erev Yom Kippur 5785, at Temple B'nai Torah - A Reform Congregation in Wantagh, NY.
I know it’s Yom Kippur, but the fast only just started, so I don’t feel so bad that my story tonight starts with dinner. Picture it, Vilnius, this past summer. There I was, getting off the train, worn down from a difficult day of sightseeing in Kaunas, and the mass murder site, the Ninth Fort, just outside that city. I walked the 15 minutes from the train station thinking deeply about how those tracks which carried me between these cities were probably the same ones that carried my grandfather a century ago. I got to the restaurant, asked for a table for one and was shown to a beautiful table outside under a tree. The sun was low, the temperature was pleasant, if a little muggy, owing to the rain that day. It was Friday, and my Shabbat plan was to enjoy a nice dinner to counteract the hard day.
I placed my order, poured my beer, and began
to watch what was going on around me. A
family to one side. A group of Russian
tourists that look like an extended family at two tables pushed together,
loudly interacting with each other, but more their devices. A couple of friends waiting for another
friend to join them and starting with some wine. A couple on a date. I take out my notebook and begin to journal a
little bit about my experiences that day, to try to write my immediate
reflections, and so that I don’t forget what I did and saw.
As I’m writing, I overhear a discussion at the
entrance. Another gentleman, by himself,
has asked for a table for one, in a German-accented English. Alas, the restaurant only has tables inside,
they tell him. His response sounds
disappointed as he tries to get a sense of how long the wait might be. I have only just placed my order, and I’ve
got a table to myself, I realize. I get
the host’s attention and offer to share my table with this stranger and fellow
single traveler, if he is willing.
I motion to him and he sits down. As he does, I introduce myself and I guess,
because his voice reminds me a little bit of Arnold Schwarzenegger, that he is
Austrian. And I’m right, so I have
impressed him, and we get to talking. He
tells me about his Belarussian wife and how he’s alone because you can only get
to Belarus on land, and Vilnius is the closest major city, so she went to see
her family and he stayed behind because his Russian can only last him about two
days, so he’s let his wife go on ahead.
We chat. We toast to traveling. We share about what we’ve seen. When the inevitable question of what we do
comes up, I decide that I will tell him—because I don’t tell everyone—that I am
a rabbi.
He is flabbergasted. “I’ve never had dinner with a rabbi before!” He tells me he lives in Vienna not far from
the Jewish Museum that some of us here visited together a few years ago. I know that this means he lives in the old
Jewish quarter, and I also know that the questions I want to ask about who the
building he lives in used to belong to are probably not ideal for our cordial Shabbat
dinner.
My food arrives and we continue to chat. We each order another beer and I share with
him about my life and he shares with me about his life. His food arrives just as it begins to gently
rain again. As I’m under the tree, and
about done with my meal, I decide to rough it out for a few minutes, but he
chooses to go eat indoors. We shake
hands, wish each other well, and part ways.
This is one powerful interaction that I had, and
I could tell you about the gentleman from South Carolina I met on my tour of
the Alpine castles who was traveling with his two daughters who were always on
their phones. I could tell you about the
German family from Hamburg I met in Munich on their way to New York for their
very first family trip here. The excited
daughters spent a lot of time on their phones and asked me about things in New
York that are TikTok famous and which, therefore, I have never heard of. They’re staying in Queens, and I don’t have
the heart to tell them how long their subway ride will be into the city. I could tell you about the French couple or
the Portuguese man who I met on a van tour of the Lithuanian and Latvian
countryside, or the Turkish woman who I toured part of Dachau with.
All of these encounters, fleeting yes, but
deep and meaningful moments of connection, happened not just because of my
sparkling personality. These
interactions, these powerful moments of connection and encounter happened, I
firmly believe, because I took social media off of my phone and because I made
a point this past summer to not experience life through a screen.
Yes, I took pictures; and I’ve shared some of those
with you. And I kept my phone away, as
much as possible. This helped me to
recognize and to understand that while our smartphones are powerful, important
devices that do much good, they are also a tool whose effects we are only just
learning.
The combination of smartphones and social
media that hit our pockets a little over a decade ago has changed the world and
the way we interact with it. They can,
if we are not careful, prevent us from fully encountering the world, IRL, in
real life, as God created it. They can,
if we are not careful, prevent us from the deep interactions that are required
for society to survive and to which Judaism calls us. They can, if we are not careful, cause us to
separate into bitterly divided factions, capable of believing the worst about
our neighbors. They can and they do lead
to mental health crises.
In his book, The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt describes what he calls “the
great rewiring of American childhood.”[1] These devices and the social media platforms
that they connect us and our children to are detrimental to development,
learning, and functioning in society. In
a great irony, Haidt assesses that many parents today spend too much time
protecting their children from possible discomfort and difficulty in the real
world and not enough time protecting them from the many harms in the virtual
world.
Haidt describes the effects of this
rewiring. While his research focuses on
children who are most affected as their brains continue to develop, the effects
on adults are similar. If we do the work
this day asks of us and consider our relationships over the last year, many of
us would recognize these effects in some ways.
Smartphones connected to social media cause
social deprivation. Since 2009, there
has been a precipitous decline in the amount of time people of all ages spend
with their friends in face-to-face interactions.[2] Facetime is not the same as time actually
looking into another person’s face while in conversation, which humanity has
evolved to need.
Smartphones also cause what Haidt calls
attention fragmentation. This has
affected me, and I have seen how it affects my family, our students, my friends,
and colleagues. You probably know it
from those times you’re in the middle of something and you hear that ding or
feel that vibration, and suddenly your mind is pulled away from whatever it is
you were doing. Or maybe you even feel a
phantom vibration. And then, somehow,
you’ve spent an hour scrolling. Haidt
cites one study from 2023 that shows that at the high end, a phone pings an
alert up to 192 times a day, up to 11 a waking hour.[3] I won’t ask you to raise your hands, but I assume
that at least some of us here in this room right now are doing everything we
can not to take out our phones, not to look at the score, not to see what text
or email or like just came through.
It’s more than just the notifications that
cause distraction and pull us away from each other. Studies also show that even having the phone
nearby damages our ability to think at our highest level. In one experiment, students were best able to
remember and recall, and better able to complete math problems, when their
phones were in the other room compared to the phones being in a pocket or on a
desk next to them. Our brains work
differently when these devices are nearby.[4] All of this is why our school here at TBT has
banned phones during religious school. And
let me just commend our Religious Education committee and our parents for
understanding why we made this decision and agreeing to it. More and more school districts are banning
phones, and they are seeing reversals of some of the trends, particularly
around attention fragmentation, relatively quickly.
On the first day without their phones during their
15-minute break, our High Schoolers almost didn’t know what to do. By the second week, they were talking to one
another, interacting with each other, and planning to bring in some games and
cards to have something to do together.
A year ago, high school break was a bunch of teens in our beautifully
renovated youth lounge, all sitting near each other, but all on their
phones. Some with earbuds in. None of them interacting with each
other. None of them learning about their
classmates or sharing about themselves. None
of them navigating the social-emotional growth that is so necessary at their
age. Now, they look each other in the
face. They engage with each other and
encounter each other. This is not just a
choice for their physical and mental health, it’s also in keeping with what
Judaism values.
Face-to-face interaction is at the heart of
how Judaism has always understood the deepest of relationships. God tells Aaron and Miriam that only Moses
gets to speak to God face to face, owing to the depth of their relationship. Classical Talmud study is done in what is
called chavruta, where you sit across
from your study partner and you engage with each other and with the arguments,
fully immersed in the text. The Talmud
even says that when two are engaged in the study of Torah, the divine presence
rests between them. Two people studying
together are, indeed, able to accomplish and learn more than if they each
worked independently.
The most powerful of blessings, the Priestly Benediction,
taken from the Torah, is centered around God’s face shining God’s light toward
us. Face-to-face encounters lead to
blessing. And face-to-face encounters
lead us to feel God’s presence. Martin
Buber, one of the great Jewish thinkers of the 20th century,
describes God as present in relationships.
In his famous work, I and Thou, he defines the world of
relationships in two ways. We have
experiences with others, I-it interactions, and we have encounters with others,
I-Thou interactions. Experiences are low-level
interactions and are not necessarily bad.
These involve some kind of judgment or use. In these interactions, we are observers,
objective, analytical. We catalogue and
categorize the other. We describe and
define. And if these are the only kinds
of relationships we have, our lives are incomplete. In order to actually live, we have to find
deeper connections.
“All actual life is encounter,”[5]
Buber writes. To have an encounter is to
move from I-it to I-Thou in part through God’s grace. But it involves being fully present with the
other, seeing the depth of the other person, giving from our fullest selves,
and striking the balance between maintaining our identities and fusing
them. It is in these moments of
mutuality, in these moments of full mutual encounter with the other that we
feel God’s presence—because God is the eternal Thou. We seek to encounter God as we work to
encounter others.
Unfortunately, these I-Thou moments are
fleeting and hard to come by. They are
made all but impossible if there is a screen between us or when a phone
distracts us. How can we be mutually
engaged with another person if, while we are talking, we take out our phones to
check who just pinged us? How can we be
fully present if our minds are wondering how many hearts we will see the next
time we use our faces as a password rather than as a conduit to the
divine? We need to look each other in
the face. We need to encounter the
world, not just experience it. We need
to spend time with each other without the whole world beckoning us from our
pockets. We need to put down our iPhones
and focus on I-Thou!
For sins between a person and God, Yom Kippur
atones. For sins between a person and
their fellow, Yom Kippur does not atone.
Our smartphone-addicted lives lead us to sin against each other and to
sin against God. We sin against each
other when we fail to look in another’s face and fully encounter them. We sin
against each other when we live a life of experience and never seek
encounter. We sin against each other
when we’d rather reach one more level on the game. And when we sin against each other by
treating each other as expendable and not seeking encounter, we sin against God
because we prevent God from coming into our lives.
When Moses comes down from the mountain after
his encounter with God, the Torah tells us that his face is radiant with a glow
of light. Everyone can tell that it is
the glow of the divine which emanates from his face. It is so powerful and overwhelming that he
must cover his face from the community.
Each of us has a small part of that divine glow in our faces. Each of us is capable of seeing that divine
light. We have to want to see it. It takes work to see it. We have to seek out encounter.
We have just under 24 hours ahead of us to
consider every action, reaction, and interaction from this last year. Look back. What did you experience? What did you encounter? We have just under 24 hours to consider how
we will choose to live in this year ahead.
Will it be a year of experience or a year of encounter? Will we seek to share our tables and truly
meet others, or will we ignore those alongside us for the pings of our apps? On this night, let us commit to seeking to
meet others face to face rather than face to phone. Instead of the glow of our phones, let us seek
out the divine glow in faces of those around us. And in so doing, may we summon the divine to
dwell amongst us, to rain blessings upon us, and to seal us in the book of
life.
Amen.
G’mar Chatimah Tovah
[1]
Haidt, Jonathan. The Anxious Generation:
How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental
Illness. 2024. Penguin Press; USA. See pages 3-4, 7.
[2]
Ibid, see chart on page 121
[3]
Ibid, see page 126
[4]
Ibid, see page 128
[5]
Buber, Martin, I and Thou. 1970 Translation, Touchstone Press 1996 printing, p
62.
