This summer, completely out of the blue, a friend texted me a bold declaration: “We have to start observing Shabbat.” She’d spent a few weeks living on a sustainable oyster farm/wildlife sanctuary/academic retreat, where she’d barely used her phone, and it had brought her calm and joy. She wanted to recreate the peace of being offline once she came back to campus, where phones can feel like ever-present stressors — and her pitch was that Shabbat could be a way to do this.
I couldn’t help feeling that my friend’s feelings had less to do with Judaism and more to do with the neo-Luddite movement. Would it even be observing Shabbat if the desire came primarily from wanting to get off your phone, not from a desire to engage with Judaism?
I might have discounted this as a one-off incident — another example of my friend’s quirkiness — if I hadn’t noticed others taking similar steps. There was my friend who grew up attending Shabbat dinners and services, but had just recently sworn off tech on the day of rest, something she didn’t do in her childhood. There was another classmate who rarely went to Shabbat dinners or services, but strictly shut his phone off on Saturdays. I heard of a recent law school grad who had, for the first time in her life, gone Shomer Shabbos — so her high-power firm wouldn’t be able to make her work on Saturdays.
For all my skepticism, the idea of ditching my phone for one day a week seemed appealing. Periodically checking my phone has become instinctual, a bad habit I don’t even know I’m doing, like chewing on my nails. I find myself scrolling when I don’t even intend to, wasting minutes that add up to hours. Sometimes I wish I could throw my phone into the river, never rely on it again. I logically knew that would be impractical, but a single day each week seemed like a manageable reprieve. I considered my friend’s request.
But I couldn’t shake the feeling that using Shabbat as a tech-cleanse was phony, so I asked the opinion of Harvard Hillel’s executive director, Conservative Rabbi Jason Rubenstein. Rubenstein is Shabbat-observant and has been since he was in college. But he didn’t do it from a place of wanting to get off his smartphone (he was in college in the early 2000s, after all) — he did it because of a desire to engage more deeply with Judaism. I was curious what he would think of my dilemma.
When I asked Rubenstein if a phone-detox was a legitimate way to practice Shabbat, he explained to me that historically, there have been two major ways to think about Shabbat. One is that Shabbat should be an ascetic day, where you refrain from enjoyable activities. The other is that Shabbat should not only be a day of rest, but a “full-on party time” where you avoid work in order to enjoy the fruits of your labor with friends and family.
In the second case, Rubenstein explained, Shabbat is “primarily instrumental to having a great time.” He continued: “There is a human good called relaxing and enjoying the fruits of your labor with the people you love, and Shabbat is a mechanism to do that.”
So, were the no-phone Shabbat users still doing Shabbat? “I think they’re correctly intuiting what Shabbat is for and creating it in their lives,” said Rubenstein.
That at least seems to be the case with Jonathan Schneiderman, my classmate who doesn’t attend services on Shabbat but still refrains from using technology and writing. Like me, Schneiderman sees his phone as a malignant force in his life. He says he’d get a flip phone if it weren’t for the fact that he really needs Google Maps. Instead, he settles for getting off all his devices on Shabbat.
“For me, Shabbat is a good habit, not a divine commandment,” he said.
But if that’s the case, why choose Shabbat specifically to get off technology? I asked Schneiderman what made it different from any other day of the week.
Schneiderman paused before extolling the values of moderation. He explained how Maimonides, the famed medieval Sephardic rabbi, saw value in moderation and saw Jewish law as a God-given regimen for people to find moderation. Schneiderman connects with the Shabbat mitzvah in that way.
“I inherited this tradition,” he said. “It seems like a useful one.”
Like Schneiderman, LA-based influencer Dia Chaimovitz — a self-described “Jewish girl who lacks a filter” — began performing the mitzvah of Shabbat in order to detox from her phone. But as she kept observing Shabbat, she also started to become more involved in the LA Jewish community and gained a new perspective.
“The more that I learn about Judaism and spirituality, the more I feel like these mitzvahs are not coincidences,” Chaimovitz explained. “I think that technology was a thing that God knew was coming.”
A useful tradition, indeed. After listening to Rabbi Rubenstein, Schneiderman and Chaimovitz extol the virtues of Shabbat, I decided to try it myself: 26 hours, no phone, no computer, no writing. Chaimovitz had told me Shabbat was something she looked forward to each week, and in the days leading up to Friday — as I ran up the down-escalator that is trying to keep up with all my texts — I too couldn’t wait until I had a chance to unplug.
When Friday night came, I stowed away my devices in my desk drawer, where they’d stay until Saturday evening. I didn’t perfectly observe the mitzvah of Shabbat: I rode a bicycle, I turned on the lights, I didn’t pray. But I did have a good time, un-distractedly reading a book and chatting with my friends — including the one who originally introduced the idea of observing a tech-free Shabbat to me all those months ago. I have to admit, when Shabbat ended and I could check my phone once again, I was a little disappointed to be able to do so.
