When mainstream society wants to create a tool to withstand the intrusion of technology into everyday life, it often simply embraces religious traditions. A commonly cited spiritual “cure” is the Sabbath, the Jewish holiday during which Orthodox Jews like me refrain from using anything powered by electricity, including computers, telephones, and televisions. we tear toilet paper). ).
It’s not hard to understand why people who are tired of social media see the concept as a tempting panacea for Instagram; In the last decade, so many essays have been published proclaiming Shabbat in response – not only to the saturation of technology, but also to the problems of work-life balance and mental disintegration caused by both – that they almost encompass their own subgenre. Here’s Andrew Sullivan in his 2016 New York Magazine essay, “My Distraction Sickness.” And Samantha Mann from Romper: “I’ve always liked the idea of intentionally slowing down … [so] why not try a Shabbat without social media?” And this, from the Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper, about infusing all aspects of your life with a Shabbat energy: “We are ready for a spiritual transition for the realities we face. We wake up looking for – and need – new ways to keep the Sabbath. ” Social networks are full of people who invoke the practice of the Sabbath, often against the soothing pastel backgrounds loved by yoga enthusiasts or with pictures of brushes or self-help books. After his appearance, Shabbat goes through the same process of secularization as mindfulness and psychedelic meditation, in which an ancient spiritual practice is drained of its religious substance and repackaged as a wellness mechanism.
I understand that everyone is hungry for limits on the use of technology, which are extremely necessary and have proved very difficult to formulate and apply. But efforts to invent a Shabbat outside of the religious paradigm are largely doomed to failure for a number of small practical reasons and a truly huge, philosophical one.
First of all, the observant Jewish community has successfully maintained the Sabbath for thousands of years precisely because it is practiced in a community, one that operates with specific rules and expectations. On every Sabbath, my family will go to the synagogue, take a nap, read, and engage in religious studies. We have friends for long, leisurely meals or we receive ourselves as guests. During this time, we can be confident that because our neighbors are largely on Shabbat, no conversation will be interrupted by persistent beeps signaling the arrival of a text message, and no one will be forced to stand as a bored schoolboy as a companion. . take a moment to go through Facebook updates.
There is a random nature nowadays, when you can run into someone on the way to another location and decide to walk together, be invited spontaneously to a meal or relax drinking coffee with friends, without an agenda, like the light after -noon. decreases. But as an independent Shabbat practitioner, you will probably experience only a faint imitation of this. For the first few years of my Shabbat celebration, I lived in a secular neighborhood in Brooklyn and spent a lot of time explaining to my mostly non-religious colleagues what they should do if they couldn’t find me at the meeting place on Saturday. designated from the park. in the afternoon, or trying to suppress my eyes when a friend was holding an iPhone up, because all I had to do was see a recent meme circling. And believe me, such an altered rest is simply not the same thing. Many Jews refer to Shabbat as an “island in time,” a riff to an idea in the love letter of Abraham Joshua Heschel’s book, “Sabbath.” But if you do Shabbat alone, your island is a desert.
Maybe you don’t mind this isolation, because it’s better than the alternative, which is always doomscrolling. You may have read somewhere that Shabbat is a “day of rest,” and so the only thing that really matters to you is that your eyes benefit from a blue light-absorbing brain-numbing vacation. But a superficial knowledge of the practice will probably lead to its final collapse, because you will follow the wrong thing, the rest in itself. I always thought that “rest” was a rather misleading shortcut in the sense of the day, because when people hear it, they think of “relaxation”, which is not exactly right. The Sabbath is repairing, but it is not