The meeting with the president was already under way. The Oval Office was packed with presidential aides and representatives of a major metropolitan Jewish education organization. The group had worked for months to secure the meeting. The issue on the table involved school vouchers for private schools. To lead the coalition that sought to get presidential support for a new law mandating vouchers, the organization had chosen a highly respected and well-liked spokesperson to make its case.
The spokesperson shook the president’s hand firmly, smiling warmly. But as he began to thank the president, his smartphone rang, the latest Shwekey tune filling the quiet space of the Oval Office. The spokesperson broke the handshake and answered the phone, leaving the president open-mouthed, his arm suspended in mid-air.
The spokesperson continued to talk on his phone, oblivious to the gestures and throat-clearing coming from the other members of the delegation. The president watched in disbelief as the representative continued his conversation, and when he turned his back on the leader of the free world and kept talking, the president had had enough. He signaled impatiently to his chief of staff, who quickly ushered the entire delegation out of the Oval Office. School vouchers were a dead issue as far as the president was concerned.
Preposterous scenario? Unrealistic situation? The incident occurred and I witnessed it. The only differences were that the “spokesperson” was a shaliach tzibbur and the venue was a Minchah minyan.
As we all began the silent Amidah, the Shaliach Tzibbur’s phone rang – and he answered it! He didn’t mute it. He didn’t put it on vibrate. He just answered it and started talking…and talking… and talking. No amount of shushing from the kehilla could stop him. He finally walked out of the room and finished his conversation, then returned to the minyan and completed his Shemoneh Esrei.
We are blessed with an unprecedented amount and quality of technology that has served to improve our lives in every possible way – socially, religiously, medically, scientifically. Smartphones can keep us in touch and they can bring a wealth of information to us instantaneously. But along with that blessing comes a potential curse. We are slowly losing contact with people around us. The very tool designed to increase our social interactions may actually be making us less sociable, less understanding of others, and more likely to distance ourselves from our fellow humans and from God.
An article at TechRepublic in 2014 asked “Are Smartphones Making Us Less Social?” The article concluded that the same argument that’s been applied to cars, guns, alcohol, and basically everything else can be applied to smartphones: “Some can use them correctly and others cannot.”
We’ve all seen people texting while driving, walking in public with their heads buried in their smartphone’s screen, sitting at a restaurant with their family and ignoring the conversation while they busily type away on their phone. The phone that could be a tool for efficiency, for information, for liberation from the mundane instead enslaves us as we find ourselves incapable of resisting its allure.
Rabbi Abraham J. Twerski, M.D., in his commentary to the Passover Haggadah, From Bondage to Freedom, writes: “…being enslaved by drugs is an example of the slavery of addiction. However, drugs are not the only taskmasters to which people may be subject. There are people who never use drugs, but are nevertheless slaves to money, or to power, or to acclaim, or to food indulgence, and yes, to cigarettes.”
Rabbi Twerski wrote those words in 1995, well before the advent of the smartphone. But if he were to update his commentary, I’m sure he’d add smartphones to the list of things that can enslave us.
I recently decided to switch from a smartphone to a flip phone. One major reason for my decision was that I was spending too much time looking at the phone. I was blurring the boundaries between work time and personal time, and I was tuning out my family. I was allowing myself to become enslaved to my phone. The smarter the phone, the dumber I got. I also found I was checking my phone for the latest e-mails, texts, WhatsApps, etc., even during davening. I was no different from the shaliach tzibbur whose behavior I had found so disturbing.
It was difficult at first. I kept wanting to look up information. Google had become my Urim v’Tumim, and I couldn’t seem to go more than a few minutes without knowing who won the 1957 World Series (the Milwaukee Braves); how many Israeli billionaires there are (18 as of 2016); and that according to Targum Yonasan ben Uziel, Eldad and Meidad were half-brothers to Moshe Rabbeinu.
An upside of switching to a flip phone was that I had somehow become a “retro hipster” as my kids put it (which somehow seems like an oxymoron) because I had gone “off the grid” by giving up my smartphone. And I’m apparently not alone; an article on cnn.com in 2014 (“Flip Phones Are Hip Again”) explained that “it’s about simplifying and uncluttering in a 24/7 plugged-in society.”
It’s been a few months and it’s getting easier, although typing out messages can be very 3-444-333-333-444-222-88-555-8 (difficult)! But the flip phone keeps its charge for weeks, not hours, and I’m no longer enslaved to a piece of technology.
Commenting on the Shulchan Aruch (125:2), the Tur quotes the Sefer Hekhalot regarding the Ashkenazi practice during Kedushah: “…their eyes should be looking upwards to the heavens…”
We can learn from this that Hashem wants us to direct our eyes toward the spiritual world, not the physical one. Putting our smart phones away may be the smart thing to do.