Thank you for a wonderful newspaper that connects us to each other and the larger community. It’s beautiful that teenagers are behind the initiative to get their peers to make Shabbat more serious and meaningful (“iKeep: Solving the Teen ‘Half-Shabbos’ Epidemic,” Dec. 11, 2019), and it’s wonderful that educators are supporting the teenagers’ efforts. But if 25% of the 400 high school students polled in Bergen County are indeed using their phones on Shabbat, one underlying issue may not just be their approach to Shabbat, but their approach to their phones. If you choose to allow a phone to control you and determine the trajectory of every move and thought for six days of the week, it is unlikely that putting the phone in a beautiful lucite box on the seventh day is going to solve the problem, even if the box is accompanied by sermons, discussion and encouragement. When people make the choice to allow social reality to be determined by Whatsapp, and the vicissitudes of life to be navigated by Facebook and the smartphone to become a bodily appendage, the problem is not an attitude only about Shabbos per se, but it is about the choice to elevate the phone into a deity when it’s not Shabbos. If children watch adults or society at large engage in such behaviors on a continual basis, it may be unfair to blame them from doing the same.
Shabbat is not merely a “break” from the world of technology. While Shabbat indeed presents a meaningful opportunity to connect with those around us without the benefit of technology, this aspect of Shabbat is just a part of a much larger picture. Fully appreciating Shabbat does not begin on Erev Shabbat by putting a phone into a box. It begins immediately as Shabbat ends and continues throughout the week, every day, through the end of the following Shabbat, forever continuing––as we maintain a constant awareness of what Shabbat means in the larger context of constant avodat Hashem. Benefiting from the huge blessings of technology does not mean that we need to allow technology to control us; making the choice to refuse to allow our phones to control us on Shabbat means that we first need to make the choice that our phones don’t control us during the week.
Wishing much hatzlacha to the innovative and inspired teens who are trying to spread the light of Shabbat.
May we all share nachat from our children and our community.
Name Withheld on Request
