Have you tried unplugging and plugging yourself back in again?

A conversation with David Zvi Kalman

David Zvi Kalman is the inventor of 20-sided dreidels. He is the world’s foremost expert on how Judaism has reckoned with advancements in timekeeping throughout history. His publishing house prints, among other volumes, the most definitive anthology of queer Jewish texts. roughly once a year he posts to Facebook (of all places) a hauntingly beautiful original Borgesian vignette about the ritual hut known as a Sukkah. His recent podcast guest is a theologian whose church in Lucerne, Switzerland uses AI to guide people through prayer. He has convened poetry slams for sermons, and written Talmudic exegesis on “Good Night Moon.” You can see more of David Zvi’s work by subscribing to his newsletter, Jello Menorah, or his podcast, Belief in the Future.

David Zvi and I spoke about our experiences of Shabbat, and why disconnection remains so elusive despite our societal obsession with it.

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There’s a truism among Rabbis that no matter how many sermons they give, they all essentially boil down to a single sermon with a single message. You aren’t a Rabbi, but you are an appreciator of the sermon as an art form. What would you say is your one sermon?

A lot of the work that I do is around what I call Jewish Futurism, which is the idea that the Jewish people ought to be looking at the future as not just a burden that we need to extrapolate ideas from the past onto, but as a place for real innovation, excitement, and development that are unlike anything that has happened before.

I wanted to talk today about Shabbat. Maybe we can start with the simple question: how would you define Shabbat, and how has that definition evolved over time?

What’s interesting about Shabbat is that it is always defined in relation to what work looks like in the surrounding society. So when people are mostly doing agricultural work, Shabbat is about ceasing physical labor. It’s about literally giving your muscles a rest. That’s the version of Shabbat that the Bible mostly understands. In the rabbinic period, abstaining from commerce becomes a much larger part of the Shabbat experience. And there’s also the introduction of the water mill, which is important because it’s one of the first times that people are able to get work done without human or animal muscle. And over the centuries the Rabbis start thinking in larger and larger ways about what it means to cease working when the work is not necessarily physical but is delegated, especially to machines.

Following the Industrial Revolution, work starts to be something that doesn’t have a necessary stopping point. You can work 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And factories are often optimized for working as much as possible. So Shabbat starts to be this kind of intentional ceasing of labor that stands in contrast to the push towards eternal work that you see in the rest of society. And then that again shifts in the 20th century to this philosophical idea of work not just as a thing that we do, but also as a way to move humanity forwards. Shabbat is where we de-center ourselves and stand against civilizational progress, at least for one day a week.

So there is a way in which Shabbat is more philosophically important now than it has been in previous centuries. And of course, there’s also the secondary element, around 100 years old, of Shabbat being defined by the kinds of technologies that we do not engage in on that day, which was not something that Shabbat was designed for. Shabbat took on this additional characteristic of being a place where it was actually okay to say no to technologies or to pause and think about how it should be integrated into daily life. Even though it was kind of accidental, that has made Shabbat one of the very few areas in American culture where there is a muscle for people to say, actually, “I have agency over my own use of technology,” at least for this limited period of time.

One thing that has dramatically shifted recently is that we do free labor all the time for the productivity of tech companies. When we post on Instagram, most of the time the only one profiting is the platform. How do you understand Shabbat in the context of that kind of labor?

Computers are tricky to regulate because they can be used for both work tasks and personal tasks, and it’s often unclear where one begins and the other ends. That blurriness makes it hard for computers to exist in a Shabbat environment. So sometimes the solution is just to say don’t use them at all, which seems kind of impossible to people. I know there is a phenomenon of “technology fasts,” but it's a lot harder to do if it’s not supported by a community that is doing the same thing. In that way, one of the things that makes Shabbat very interesting is that it exists not just within the context of law, but also within the context of community.

Those communities play a critical role in responding to technological development because they make it easier to counter whatever network effects make people feel compelled to engage with the technology of the day. At least in American society, many of the structures between the family unit and the state have fallen away. Because of that communal structure, Shabbat is able to draw people into a different relationship with technology than they would be able to accomplish as individuals.

In practical terms, how would you describe your personal Shabbat practice?

I don’t drive or use electronics on Shabbat. And Shabbat typically means spending the day with family, with friends, in synagogue, and a lot of reading books. As I've grown older, I’ve started informally thinking of Shabbat as “book day,” because it is much harder for me to actually read through a book on the other six days of the week, when my attention is fragmented.

If it’s true that “the purpose of a system is what it does,” then what is the purpose of Shabbat for you in particular?

I find that it is a very helpful reset to the week. I can feel it on Fridays when it’s getting close to sundown. It’s physically hard to actually put my phone down down and turn it off and start Shabbat. And by the time Shabbat is over 25 hours later, I feel that I’m in a different place. My ability to focus has returned to some kind of baseline.

Of course it changes over the course of the next six days. But I find that reset incredibly helpful in regulating my own life, my own existence. I also see it in my family. I see the way that my kids will store up things over the course of the week that get released on Shabbat, because that is the day when there is more space. And there are activities like spending hours talking with friends, reading, or resting that don’t fit into the rest of the week. So the ability to exist in more than one mode, not just on occasion, but on a weekly basis, I find incredibly valuable.

The truth of the matter is, I think everyone would find this valuable. It just happens to be that American society is not set up to support it. One of the things I find very striking every year is that the best parallel to Shabbat is actually Christmas. Christmas is one of the few days in the secular calendar in which the national culture galvanizes around not working. There are all these rituals, family gatherings, and communal meals, and songs written about how it’s the most wonderful time of the year. A century ago, there was a movement to codify Sabbath into American culture. But the idea ultimately lost. It persists in a subset of Jewish society in part because it is a minority religion only trying to regulate itself and not society as a whole. So ironically, because of American Jewish status as a minority, they were able to hold onto something that the rest of society ended up letting go.

You talked a bit about technology fasts. And as a Shabbat observant person myself, I’ve long been fascinated with this sort of fixation or fetishization of Shabbat that I’ve seen over the past decade or two. I see it in unplugging stunt journalism, in tech detox movements, and in digital wellness spaces. What do you think these conversations understand or misunderstand about Shabbat?

The difficulty in sustaining these practices really speaks to the lack of communities that are available to support them. It’s hard for a single person to say “I’m not going to use my phone for 24 hours” if they are not part of a system that supports that kind of activity.

When I think about my Shabbat practice, the things that I think about are hosting meals, gathering, and performing rituals. And although of course the way I’m abstaining from technology is a cause that is enhancing those experiences of community, it also feels like an ancillary effect of that community and not like the main thing that’s happening.

It’s interesting that Shabbat has become an “anti-technology” day, despite the fact that when Shabbat was first legislated, it literally was not thinking about machines at all, because there were no machines to legislate.

Shabbat is understood within Jewish communities as representing a certain set of values about community, about spiritual connection. Whenever some new technology comes along, the question is always how that fits into the Shabbat day. An example that I often use is the Shabbat lamp, which is a very strange device that allows you to block light from coming out of a lamp without actually turning the lamp off, because you’re not allowed to close or open a circuit on Shabbat, but you are allowed to block a light source.

The person that helped me understand this is Lindsay Ems, a scholar who writes about Amish communities. There are Amish communities in which people take devices that would ordinarily be plugged into a wall and power them using batteries: battery-powered lamps, battery-powered photocopy machines, battery-powered fans. Replacing batteries constantly is annoying, but within the context of the Amish community, it makes internal sense because what they actually care about is not being connected to the grid. The loophole is helpful because in Lindsay Ems’ words it acts as a kind of “speed bump.” It’s a way to harness electricity while reminding yourself that you are separate from a society governed by electricity.

Similarly, the Shabbat lamp is a way of preserving the values of a day in which the relationship to labor is different. There’s a lesson there about responding to technology. We need communal understanding of what it means to live a good life. What kinds of relationships do we want to have: to each other, to work, and to our local and global communities? The more a community understands its values, the better it can respond to change. When communal values are obscure, technology is much more likely to win immediately.

I want to return to the resistance you feel to separating from your device going into Shabbat. It’s funny, I think a lot of people assume that if they were just able to develop a routine of taking a break from technology once a month or once a week, they’d suddenly be cured of something. But I don’t feel any more enlightened. The second Shabbat is over, I'm just as addicted to my phone as anyone else. I really experience Shabbat as a sort of separate timespace in the way that you describe.

You know, I think about all the Shabbat-observant engineers in Silicon Valley whose observance doesn’t actually have a major impact on the kinds of values that they bring to the technology they’re developing. It stays within the context of that one particular day. I don’t quite know why that is, why it doesn’t have a kind of broader impact.

What advice would you give to someone who wants to learn something from Shabbat and apply it to their relationship with their technology?

I would say start by imagining what it means to say no to a technology that is already in your life. For a lot of people there is a visceral fear associated with stepping outside of productivity. But people are also becoming increasingly skeptical of the nebulous, quasi-religious goals that many tech outfits claim for their own work.

The first step in being able to resist damaging technologies is to pull on that thread: Why do we want technology to keep progressing? Only then can you start thinking about what values you’re trying to preserve, and in what situations technology is actually useful for advancing those values.

My family’s choice of where to live required a lot of prior planning and is tied up in my desire to observe Shabbat and be able to step away from technology once a week. If a person’s sense of connection is tied to virtual space more than physical space, then they will be in for a huge shock when they step away for 24 hours and find their physical environment to be quite diminished and impoverished and less than they want it to be.

In your ideal world, what does the future of the internet look like?

I am increasingly nervous about the future of the internet because of AI’s involvement in it. I worry about people being able to trust the kinds of material that they see online as emanating from human beings, and what it means to spend most of your day in an environment in which you’re never sure whether you’re surrounded by people or bots.

That will ultimately lead to people devaluing humanity. And what’s actually going to be important is to make sure that we value physical reality properly. I have been starting to think about what it means to talk about shared physical reality as a value in and of itself, as a place where it’s easier to interact with other human beings, and not impossible but more difficult to deceive people.

There’s also a thread to be drawn from what you said about literally having to decide where to live based on an intention towards your relationship with technology. A natural consequence of that, in my experience, is that you then need to participate in that community at a local, physical level to allow it to continue to exist and thrive.

When you spend a lot of time online, physical reality feels incredibly inefficient. Talking to people in the physical world is inefficient. Physical gathering is inefficient and at times boring, and it’s messy and you can’t extract yourself easily when things aren't going well. That is hard when it seems like there's an alternative. I think it's actually good to live in that inefficiency.

There’s this thing that happens with Shabbat where you're trying to meet up with someone at a particular time, and there’s no way to contact them on the day itself. So you communicate a plan before sundown. And you have to trust that they’ll be there, and then be okay if they’re not. That fundamentally changes the experience of the day.

I think about it also in terms of what it means to have mindfulness. Often, one of the first pieces of mindfulness is simply situating yourself properly in your own environment. What is physically in the room with me? What are the sounds that I am hearing? What are the smells that I am smelling? Shabbat is in some sense an extended experience of groundedness, because there’s nothing else available to you. You just have to be in that space.

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Response to the ᵐⁱᶜʳᵒsupporter program so far has been absolutely overwhelming. Once a week I get to open my mailbox and be confronted with evidence of a relational space between myself and all of you. It’s a real gift! I am slowly working through the pile, gifting subscriptions, and adding photos/scans to my ᵐⁱᶜʳᵒsupporter archive. Today, I’ll highlight a postcard from Eva in Spain, and a jar of raw honey from Preben in Denmark. I plan on slathering the Danish honey on some challah on Shabbat morning and topping it off with gruyère :).

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