In 1926 Rabbi Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz advertised the opening of a new town in Long Island called Sabbathville. In those days it was not so simple to keep Shabbos and he came up with the idea of a totally Shabbos observant community. And, while there were ads for the community in all the Jewish newspapers, it appears that the community never came to fruition. But, every so often I wish I lived in Sabbathville. Or more like “tech Sabbathville.”
This town Sabbathville reminded me of the Technology Shabbat I had come across when I saw a link to a video by Tiffany Shalin on Technology Shabbat. She describes an entire movement, popular even among non-Jews, to choose one day to disconnect from technology and reconnect with the people in our lives. It is an opportunity to stop “phubbing,” or snubbing a person in favor of your phone. G-d was the first initiator of a Shabbat where He stopped creating and rested. G-d even paused at the end of each day to take the time to look around and say כי טוב- it was good. So too when we take a Tech Shabbat we mimic G-d and stop to enjoy and appreciate all that we have created throughout the hectic week. It provides us with the opportunity to rejuvenate, recharge and rewire our frazzled brains. We, religious Jews, are lucky enough to have this day built into our halachic system. But, perhaps we need extended Tech Sabbaths.
And, so it came to be...This past Monday for almost six hours Facebook had an outage which took down Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Oculus. This past Friday another outage which lasted about two hours impacted Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Workplace. The frustration was palpable. Simply based on my own experience, my ability to communicate with colleagues instantaneously or to speak to relatives in Israel was shut down. How frustrating! But, perhaps...how relaxing!
Rabbi Efrem Goldberg, (a Yavneh graduate!), in his article “100 Billion Messages A Day,” wrote about last week’s Facebook shutdown. He begins that covid forced us to separate physically from others and forced us to appreciate how much we needed to be with others. This past week, a bug in technology, at least temporarily, put a wedge between us and kept us apart from one another for several hours. Both were terribly unpleasant, uncomfortable, and even painful. But they also both presented opportunities to reflect, reset and recalibrate, the former on our connection with people and the latter on the role and dependance on technology in our lives.
Rabbi Goldberg quotes an interesting commentary by Rav Avraham Pam, ztl, who notes that until the time of Noach, people needed to work hard to grow their food by “the sweat of their brow.” There was no down time. But, Noach invented agricultural tools and the plow that would make it easier to grow crops. They then had downtime which they used for corrupt activity and led to moral decline.
We are blessed to live in the greatest era of technological breakthrough of all time. Simple tasks that used to eat up our time can now be accomplished in seconds, or through automation or even speech recognition, in no time at all. We long ago became accustomed to the washing machine, dishwasher, bread machine and microwave, but we now even take things like GPS navigation systems, or the ability to Facetime or WhatsApp video with multiple people in multiple destinations across the world, for granted...Perhaps it is no coincidence that Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were first wiped out and then flooded with messages in the week we read Noach as a reminder that a generation is defined by what it does with the blessing of progress it experiences and the free time it discovers...Technology can either enslave or liberate, free up time or eat up our time, move us forward, or take us backwards. Moments like a worldwide outage can and should be opportunities to consider our own relationship with technology and time, and hopefully inspire us to bring us closer to a place of true, earned noach.
What if we could bring a bit of “Shabbathville” into our everyday lives? Rather then filling the free time that we now have due to the technological breakthroughs of our time with technology usage, let us fill it with meaning. As parents, we can help our children disconnect by helping them set tech breaks into their schedule or by even loading the limitations onto their phones with them.
Some basic rules that can make it easier:
Eliminate mindless scrolling.
Set certain no phone times, i.e. dinner, family trips, homework time etc.
Don’t overdo social media consumption which inevitably, as research indicates, leads to lowered self-esteem and loneliness.
Model limiting your own media consumption.
Set no screen zones- i.e. bed. Whether the blue light which makes it harder to sleep or the temptation of technology to keep you up, having a device in the bedroom is very tempting for a teen! (Get an alarm clock!)
Tiffany Shalin recommends a full 24 hours each week disconnected. She is not religious, so for her Tech Shabbat (which she happened to choose as Saturday), she realized she needed items to take the place of her technology. She recommends remembering to install a landline, and to get a radio or record player, a watch and a pen! (Remember those?)
I believe last week’s outages reminded us “Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.”
Advisory Update:
Sixth Grade: Sixth graders talked about how to have a good discussion in Advisory and chose goals based on the tips that last year’s sixth graders suggested for success in middle school.
Seventh Grade : Students finished their introductory unit to this year’s theme in Advisory and challenged themselves to “change the world” this year.
Eighth Grade: Students learned about the power of grit and evaluated how gritty they already are.
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