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Unetaneh Tokef — If We Give Our Attention
Rosh Hashanah Day 1, 5786
September 23, 2025
Congregation B’nai Jacob

Unetaneh tokef — so begins Rosh Hashanah’s central prayer. God ascends to His Throne on High in Judgement. The great shofar is sounded, a still small voice is heard. In the heavenly court, even the angels tremble in fear. We pass before Him like sheep before the Divine Shepherd and our fates are determined — who shall live, and who shall die. Who by fire and who by water, who by sword and who by beast… It is an awe-filled, heart-stopping moment. God is enthroned in majesty and might; we feel small and helpless.

Yet I am struck by the opening words of this prayer — u’netaneh tokef — we give this day power! You would expect it to say that it is God who gives this day power, but instead this prayer about God’s awesome power over life and death itself says that we give this day power. What could that mean? How do we do that?

If you think about it, though, you realize it’s true. If we observe this day, if we lend it sanctity and seriousness, if we pay attention, then the day has power. If we don’t, if we just let the day pass like any other day, or even if we come to shul but we don’t take the prayers seriously, if we don’t give this day our attention, it doesn’t have power. It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t matter.

Unetaneh tokef — if we give this day our attention.

But I am worried that we have given our attention away. I have been thinking about this a lot lately, in light of all the articles on smartphones, attention, and AI. I think it is one of the most important and urgent things I could talk to you about today. It is a problem we are all grappling with in various ways. Jonathan Haidt, the acclaimed NYU social psychologist, and author of the book, The Anxious Generation, calls the period since the invention of the smartphone, the Great Rewiring. Pretty much everyone is on their phones all the time, in a restaurant, in a meeting, while they’re driving, in shul. Everyone’s faces are straining over the small light-box in their hand, their attention flitting from this subject to that, while the actual lived life in front of them fades from view. How often have you found yourself talking to someone only to realize that they are not paying attention, that they are on their phone? How often do you reach for your phone when you’re bored or even feeling yourself itching for it as you try to avoid it? How often have you opened it up to check one quick thing only to find an hour or two has passed and you don’t know how? How often do you end up not talking to people you love who are in the room with you or not noticing what is going on outside or not paying attention to something you should attend to because you’re on your phone? How often do you interrupt whatever you are doing to look at the text that just pinged? How often do you forget what you’re thinking about or doing because you interrupted yourself to respond to your phone?

According to Haidt, this is a great social experiment — literally a rewiring of our brains — which we have all willingly entered without clinical trials or surgeon general’s warnings, with no knowledge whatsoever of how it will turn out. Sound scary? It is.

Here’s the data. Across the world, in the time since smartphones have become widespread, around 2010, we have witnessed an alarming rise in levels of depression and anxiety, particularly among young people. Incidents of major depression and anxiety among teens swung upward beginning in 2010. Since then, major depressive episodes among teenage girls have increased 145%; among teenage boys 161%. Anxiety among college students and young adults has increased at comparable rates. Haidt calls childhood today phone-based childhood. Kids interact with their phones instead of other people, leading them to feel bad about their looks or their lives, lacking the skills to make friends or engage with others. Haidt dubs smartphones experience blockers — pause a moment on those words — experience blockers — that’s such a profound description of what happens to us when we have a phone in our hands and we miss out on real life experiences. As far as kids are concerned, they play less — a lot less, especially in unsupervised play — which means that they don’t get the opportunity to test themselves in the real world, they don’t get to work out disputes with friends over a game or other interaction, they sleep poorly, and they don’t gain a sense of accomplishment for things they might have accomplished in the real world, things I did as a young person and you likely did too, like biking far away from home, or having an adventure, getting lost, and figuring out what to do without texting Mom. Many of our young people lack confidence in themselves and a sense of personal agency, turning to parents to solve problems they should be equipped to handle on their own, or university professors or administrators to protect them from minor insults or ideas they experience as threatening. Too often we see young adults today lacking the skills they need to navigate the world.

You may also have heard that there has been a worldwide drop in fertility but I wonder if you know that it coincides with the proliferation of smartphones. It has happened in countries with supportive policies toward parents; it has happened in countries like our own that provide little support for parents. While fertility rates have been declining since the 1950’s, there has been a precipitous drop since 2010, the year phones became ubiquitous, with rates going from 2.6 births per woman to around 2.1. In the US we are at 1.6 births per woman today, well below replacement level. Experience blocker smartphones are keeping young people tethered to their phones instead of out and about with their peers.

Think about it for a moment. If you want to go out, you need to get dressed — maybe in the right clothes or makeup, maybe not, leave the house, go to a party, talk to some strangers or acquaintances, meet someone, perhaps say the wrong thing or do the wrong thing, perhaps make a fool of yourself, or you can sit home, risk nothing, and have endless channels of entertainment including pornography served up any way you like it. The smartphone creates a kind of frictionless world — one never has to venture out of the house and suffer humiliation, embarrassment or frustration. All things come to you.

Although the pernicious effects of smartphone use have been most pronounced among young people, the rest of us are subject to similarly deleterious effects. We order online, we stream, we text, we doomscroll, and we miss out on real connection.

The truth is that the best parts of life are not the things that come to us with ease, without friction. The best parts are the mountain we climbed, the book we read or wrote, the relationship we cultivated over a lifetime, the meal we lovingly prepared and served to friends, the friendship we repaired, the thing we built or fixed with our own hands, the thing we learned, the things we do that required sustained and focused effort. I wonder if we have too often settled for a Judaism that demands too little of us, and in turn, offers not enough? I am so deeply impressed by those of you who have decided to dig more deeply into your Judaism — you have learned to read Torah or haftarah, or how to be a gabbai, you kashered your house, you started making Shabbat dinner, you built a sukkah, you took a class, or even decided to read tomorrow’s Big Read. Choices such as these change us.

Smartphones have also negatively impacted democracy. A healthy democracy literally depends on considered discussion and debate among us, but such discussion has been reduced to soundbites in which we give our attention to the most monstrous, most contentious, most provocative, and most eye-catching story. Consequently, our political environment is degraded and we lack the attention to create sound policies to govern our collective existence. This isn’t just about national politics — it effects our state, our town, and even our synagogue. Constantly distracted and spending less time face to face with people who hold different views than we do, we have lost the ability to argue well, we are losing the ability even to think things through, instead settling for quick answers, and we lack the tenacity to make good collective decisions. We govern by soundbite.

Finally, I want to say something about the harm we are doing to our psyches on a spiritual level. As a result of our constant turning to our cell phones, our attention flits. We can’t remember what we were doing; we can’t read a whole article, much less a book, because we can’t sustain the attention required to digest what we are reading. There have been any number of reports about college students at elite universities who are unable to read a full-length book, never having had to do so in high school. With our smartphones ever present, we fail to connect to the moment, to the people we are with, to our children, to our spouses, to nature, to God.

The Christian theologian CS Lewis wrote a book eighty-five years ago called The Screwtape Letters, a kind of modern Job, in which Screwtape, a higher-up demon in the nether world, instructs his nephew Wormwood on how to lead people into sin. Screwtape tells Wormwood that the secret of leading people astray is to keep them bored and stagnant. In that state, they will forget all meaning and purpose in their lives, and they will easily be won over to the dark side. Numb to the world, they will be unable to summon the energy to push back against outside forces. They will become hollow. Kind of amazing and prescient that Lewis wrote the book in 1942!

In reality, our addiction to smartphones is antithetical to everything we are doing here in this sanctuary to build sacred community. When we gather together in prayer, singing and chanting in unison, we are lifting ourselves up toward the sacred. This is embodied practice — we don’t just think thoughts or read them; through song, chant and movement we embody them. And we do it together in real time. All of you know the difference between the disembodied, disconnected feeling of prayer on zoom and what it means to pray and sing together, regulating our very breath to one another.

I am not saying that any of this is easy or was easy before smartphones. It’s in Hebrew, the services are long, the words feel foreign, and who really wants to take a hard look at their failings. But with a phone in hand it is so easy to distract ourselves from what matters. It’s so easy to avoid digging deep, to stay closed to ourselves and to one another, to avoid feeling vulnerable, to go through the motions of High Holidays without doing the hard internal work. I fear we are settling for a frictionless Judaism. I fear that we are missing the opportunity to do the very demanding work of tshuva, of returning to ourselves and to God, for which we are here. Unetaneh tokef — will we give these days power or will we give our power away?

Jonathan Haidt instructed his NYU students to listen to a podcast about “awe walks,” a practice a friend of his began when his friend was dying. After listening to the podcast, the students were to go outside for 30 minutes for a slow walk without their phones and then write about the experience. He said their reflections were among the most beautiful he had seen in 30 years of teaching. One student wrote:

It felt as if the experience of beauty and awe made me more generous and drawn into the present. The petty concerns of the past suddenly felt dull, and to worry about the future felt unnecessary because of how secure and calm I felt now. It was like I was experiencing a stretch of time and saying to myself and my anxiety that “everything will be OK.” There was also a swarming feeling of happiness and simply wanting to connect and talk to people.

When we engage in spiritual practice, whether through meditation, prayer, or a walk in the woods, or even in the city, we are able to return to the profane world with more trust and attention for one another.

Think for a moment about a time you experienced awe — maybe at a beautiful place in nature, maybe inspired by something inspiring you saw someone do. Were you thinking about yourself in those moments? Self-transcendence quiets the egocentric parts of the brain that are always screaming out for attention. When we do that, we can connect to something beyond ourselves. We can experience ourselves as part of the vastness of the universe.

In the space we create together here, a phone is as distracting as it is in the theater. It breaks the plane, it screams me instead of us, and it interrupts the very sacred experience we are striving for. Are we here, after all, to attend to the call of the shofar waking us up to the truth of our lives, or to the noise of our phones, lulling us ever more surreptitiously to sleep?

How can we choose to live differently when phones are so integral to our lives? We can make sure that there are times and places — in the synagogue, right here, right now — at the dinner table, in the bedroom, when we we are in someone else’s company — where we silence our phones or better yet, leave them behind. We did survive before without them. We can advocate for phone-free schools and for laws that allow children to roam and play more freely outdoors. We can be mean moms and dads who don’t give our kids smartphones until they are 16 or at least in high school. We can silence phones at night and make sure they are charged in the kitchen, not the bedroom. We can limit our screen time — there are some good apps to help — I’m currently using screenzen — or get a smart dumphone — I am seriously considering this as well. Did you know that an average person spends 5.5 hours a day on their phone. That amounts to 2000 hours a year or over a lifespan of 70 years, say from the age of 10 to 80, we’re talking about 16 continuous years! 16 years without sleeping, eating, working or doing anything else other than being on your phone? Is that what you want to do with sixteen years of your life!

These small changes will, I hope, make a real difference, perhaps reclaim a piece of our own psyches or even a bit of our broken body politic. I am nevertheless fearful that we are putting our fingers in the dyke. After all, we are sitting here at the dawn of the AI revolution. People already enjoy AI companions who affirm them constantly and refrain from disagreeing with them. Soon, perhaps, there will be AI rabbis. I know someone in his 60’s who is exploring religion seriously for the first time. He asks AI questions like why is there evil or how do you lead a good life and with its assistance, he says he is creating his own religion. Reports are trickling in of teens committing suicide, essentially abetted by an AI therapist. Last week’s New York Times had a front page story about people confessing to AI priests. We are pretty far down the rabbit hole.

I understand the power of an algorithm. But, in the end, can an algorithm tell you whom to love or how to? Do you want it to? Can it teach you to connect to others or to yourself? Can it tell you what words to use to give voice to what is in your heart? Can it tell you how to be still or how to sit in God’s presence? Does it know what really matters? As more and more of our lives are given over to our devices, we sever our connection to real life. Like Wormwood’s victim in The Screwtape Letters, we become hollow.

For me, this makes what we are doing here that much more urgent. In synagogue we connect in real time. We synchronize our voices and our breath. Perhaps we ease our loneliness. We come in contact with all kinds of other people and we make room for them in our hearts. We solve problems and work on projects together. Brick by brick we build sacred community. What we do, in this moment, these moments is priceless.

In the Second Temple in Jerusalem, the Holy of Holies, the room beyond the curtain where the High Priest went only once a year, only on Yom Kippur, was empty! The ark of the covenant containing the original ten commandments which had been there for centuries, the ark that housed the original stone tablets from Sinai, was gone! It was carried off by the Babylonians when they conquered Jerusalem in 586BCE. Now there was no more ark — just an empty room, a charged empty space.

Alan Lew, in his book which we will discuss tomorrow, argues that that empty space symbolizes the empty space most of us seek to avoid in our lives, the empty howling truth that we will die. We spend our lives running from that truth, chasing all the shiny new objects, distracting ourselves with all the noise, never feeling what this moment and this life and this world demand of us. We do anything to avoid the truth of this day, the certain knowledge that we will die. And that we have only one precious and crazy life to live.

And yet, at least according to the biblical story of creation, our soul, our nefesh, arises out of that very nothingness, tohu v’vohu. It is, itself, a charged emptiness, like the Holy of Holies. And when we run away from it, when give up our connection to that place, we lose our very selves. We lose that thin line that connects us to the very mystery of our existence. We lose our connection to all-encompassing nothingness — heaven itself, if you will — the very thing, perhaps the only thing, that can restore us and make us whole.

We can run and we can distract ourselves but we will never succeed in filling that gaping hole with all of our busyness and activity, with our phones and apps, with all our clever evasions and distractions. There is only one way to fill the hole, only one remedy. Love. Presence. Connection. Real Connection. Real Presence. This moment. It is is the only place in which you are truly alive. It is the only place you can encounter God. Right here. Right now.

Shavat vayinafash — God stopped, on the eve of the Shabbat and did nothing. Literally, if we can say such a thing, God took a breath. God re-ensouled himself. Can we do the same, if we are present to this moment, if we reconnect with the nothing at the center of our lives, the nothing that itself gives our lives meaning? Can we turn off our phones and reinhabit our lives?

As EM Forster famously writes in the epigraph to Howard’s End, “Only connect.” It is what we strive to do here. If we take this day and our lives seriously. If we pay attention. Unetaneh tokef.