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When mainstream society wants to create a tool for resisting the creep of technology into daily life, it often simply appropriates religious traditions. One frequently cited spiritual “cure” is Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest during which Orthodox Jews like myself refrain from using anything powered by electricity, including computers, phones, and TVs (we also don’t travel, cook, or tear toilet paper).
It’s not hard to see why social media-weary folks view the concept as a tantalizing panacea for the Instagram-ization of life; in the past decade, so many essays have been published proclaiming Shabbat as the answer—not only to tech saturation but to work-life balance issues and the mental fraying caused by both—that they nearly comprise their own subgenre. Here’s Andrew Sullivan, in his 2016 New York Magazine essay “My Distraction Sickness”: “We can, if we want, re-create a digital Sabbath each week—just one day in which we live for 24 hours without checking our phones.” And Samantha Mann, over at Romper: “I’ve always liked the notion of purposefully slowing down … [so] Why not try a social-media-free Shabbat?” And this one, from the Reverend Doctor Donna Schaper, on infusing all aspects of your life with a Shabbat energy: “We find ourselves ready for a spiritual transition for the realities we face. We find ourselves seeking—and needing—new ways of keeping Sabbath.” Social media is rife with people invoking the practice of the Sabbath, often against the soothing pastel backgrounds beloved by yoga aficionados or alongside pictures of paintbrushes or self-help books. By the look of it, Shabbat is undergoing the same secularizing process as mindfulness meditation and psychedelics, 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 boundaries around tech usage, which are sorely needed and have proven very difficult to formulate and enforce. But efforts to invent a Shabbat outside the religious paradigm are largely doomed to fail, for a host of small practical reasons and one really giant, philosophical one.
First, the observant Jewish community has successfully maintained Shabbat over thousands of years precisely because it’s practiced in a community, one that operates with particular norms and expectations. On any given Shabbat, my family will attend synagogue, take naps, read, and engage in religious study. We have friends over for long, leisurely meals or are welcomed as guests ourselves. During this time, we can be confident that because our neighbors are largely shomer Shabbat as well, no conversation will be interrupted by persistent beeps signaling the arrival of a text message, and no one will be forced to sit like a bored schoolchild as their companions take a moment to scroll through Facebook updates.
There is a serendipitous nature to the day, when you can bump into someone en route to another location and decide to stroll together, be spontaneously invited over for a meal, or lounge around drinking coffee with friends, agenda-less, as the afternoon light wanes. But as a freelance Shabbat practitioner, you would likely experience only a pale imitation of this. The first few years of my Shabbat observance, I lived in a secular Brooklyn neighborhood and spent a great deal of time explaining to my largely nonreligious peers what they should do if they couldn’t find me at the designated meeting spot at the park on Saturday afternoon, or trying to suppress eye rolls when a friend held an iPhone aloft because I just had to see a recent meme that was making the rounds. And trust me, such an adulterated repose is simply not the same. Many Jews refer to Shabbat as an “island in time,” a riff on an idea in Abraham Joshua Heschel’s love letter of a book, The Sabbath. But if you do Shabbat alone, your island is a deserted one.
Perhaps you don’t really mind this isolation, as it’s better than the alternative, which is all doomscrolling, all the time. Perhaps you’ve read somewhere that Shabbat is a “day of rest,” and so the only thing that really matters to you is that your eyes get a vacation from brain-deadening blue light. But a shallow knowledge of the practice will likely lead to its ultimate collapse because you’ll be aiming for the wrong thing, the rest itself. I’ve always thought that “rest” was a rather misleading shorthand for the purpose of the day because when people hear it, they think of “relaxing,” which isn’t exactly correct. Shabbat is restorative, but it isn’t necessarily relaxing, in part because the lead-up to it tends to be frenetic—ironing tablecloths, cooking multiple meals in advance—but also because it usually involves a lot of socializing. Instead, I think of Shabbat as more like exercise: It can feel daunting to carve out time for it, you don’t always instantaneously achieve a meditative flow state, but you recognize it as an objective good, and you always feel better when you’ve done it.
“Rest” also implies that decompression is the ultimate purpose of Shabbat, like a spiritually inflected massage. But if your own personal unwinding is the goal, you are less likely to stick to your commandment to keep Shabbat on days when you feel it’s just too hard, or you’re already centered enough that your prefrontal cortex can stand the dopamine hit, or endless viewing of Instagram Stories is exactly what will calm you down.
The rules created by you, for you, become easy to bend, so “no phone at all” becomes “no social media,” and “one day” morphs into “one hour.” If Shabbat is for the sake of your own mental flourishing, in other words, you can cast nearly anything that makes you happy as what Jews call oneg Shabbat, in the spirit of the day, even if that thing—be it binge-watching TV, juggling multiple WhatsApp text chains, or diving into the recesses of Reddit—might make you psychically flabbier in the long-run.
But if Shabbat is not designed for your own mental flourishing, then what is it about? Herein lies the potentially insurmountable problem with trying to secularize the practice. Orthodox Jews do not observe Shabbat as a way to spend more time with their families or to prevent burnout induced by living under the tyranny of modern capitalism or to stick it to Zuckerberg once a week. Shabbat does allow us to do those things, and it’s an extremely effective tool for all the above. But no, we do it for a very unfashionable, very simple, supremely awesome reason: because God told us to. The Torah is often terse and cagey about the reasons underpinning certain demands, but it does shed a little more light on why we observe Shabbat: It’s a behavioral manifestation of the covenant between God and the Jews, a way of imitating God’s own cessation from creation in the Book of Genesis, a reminder of our calling to be holy and sanctified. God is a pretty central element in all these things, and it stands to reason that when you cut the core out of something, what’s left will probably rot.
When we light the candles before sundown on Friday, we surrender to a higher obligation to give God a temporal dwelling place, just as the historical temple was His physical one. We let go of the “profanity of chattering commerce,” as Heschel writes, and enter a separate, holy sphere, an atmosphere of peace that can be hard to describe to those who haven’t experienced it. If Shabbat is framed as something you are doing for yourself, whether for the benefit of your mental health or so that you are rested enough to be the busiest busy worker bee the rest of the week, it’s demoted to handmaiden to your Sunday through Friday life, rather than held as the highest time.
It loses its transcendent target, which means it doesn’t provide the true release that actual submission gives, and submission is the very thing that allows us to reap all those ancillary benefits. Put another way, a major reason everyone is so exhausted is because we have been taught to always strive for better, even if we have only the vaguest notion of what that “better” would look like, and even if it means viewing everything in our world as raw material that could potentially be utilized toward that end. But obedience to something outside yourself allows you to truly let go.
Done in the trendy, secular way, Shabbat becomes yet another instrument in pursuit of an earthly ideal, like a Fitbit or a dopamine fast: something to be endured like a juice cleanse rather than savored like wine, something defined by absence—of like buttons, pithy tweets, and DMs—rather than the fullness of spirit it provides. In the wellness-ification of Shabbat, an ancient religious practice that enables joy, yes, but also requires sacrifice and self-discipline and a great deal of practical knowledge is reduced to the same category as “a DIY facial, bath, and a book,” per one wellness aficionado. Even if you replace the goal of holiness with another one, like reaching a state of mental equilibrium, achieving the latter usually requires exactly the kind of relentless effort and self-focus that drive us to press “pause” in the first place. Striving for mental equilibrium, after all, is still striving.
When the people doing the appropriating are of the very-much-online, Goop-product-loving, allergic-to-God variety, the prophetic nature of the religious ideas they’re borrowing often goes unacknowledged. In 2012, for example, thousands of Haredi Jews gathered at Citi Field in New York City to “protest” the internet, to the round mockery of the plugged-in class; seven years later, those same denouncers were singing the praises of Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing while tweeting about “Digital Shabbats” and streaming Tristan Harris’s TED Talk on how to make tech less addictive and more ethical (how’s that going?), all while en route to phone-free weekend retreats.
Those Orthodox Jews—viewed as odd-looking and backward-thinking—uttered warnings about the power of the internet: that children would feel like “technology orphans” when their parents paid more attention to their phones than to them, that it allowed very loud laypeople to drown out the voices of qualified experts, that it would deteriorate real-life relationships in favor of digital ones. These ideas are now so often invoked by the mainstream that they’ve become almost boring. In Samantha Mann’s Romper piece, she describes Shabbat as “... a set time … to check out of the regular stress of the week, to be present with your family (and, OK, connecting with God and studying Torah, if that’s your thing).” She forgets, presumably, that without the silly people committed to the latter, she and other proponents of digital Sabbaths would have nothing to filch.
Believe it or not, I’m a proselytizer for Shabbat—real Shabbat, not just “screen-free time.” It’s unequivocally the best thing in my life, and I’d encourage anyone who wants to practice it fully to study the myriad texts on the subject and learn how to observe it. Figuring out how to escape the tentacles of Meta and its ilk is also a necessary endeavor. But these two things are not the same. Ultimately, unplugging your phone for an hour while you enjoy a bath bomb and labeling that me-time “Shabbat” won’t remake society’s deeply unhealthy relationship with technology, and it won’t give you a true break from the obsession with self-improvement endemic to our culture, one that loops directly back to burnout. According to Heschel, an ancient Aramaic translation of Genesis 2:2 reads not the familiar “God rested on the seventh day,” but instead that He “coveted” the seventh day. As long as we think we can remake Shabbat in service of our own ends, the rest it promises will remain deeply longed for, but rarely achieved.
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