I read an article in the New York Times recently in which an author and copywriter named Brian Groh explored his recent experience of being outsourced to AI. He found that his copywriting work all but dried up, so he asked ChatGPT, with his background and skills and location in a smaller town in Indiana, what he could do to make some extra money. It told him to become an arborist—which he did, sometimes making more than his copywriting afforded. The switch was distinct: from keyboard life to outdoor work.
That same day, I read a different article about the positive mental health effects on young people of taking a one week break from social media. In the experiment, participants aged 18-24 reported symptoms of anxiety dropping by 16 percent, symptoms of depression by 25 percent, and symptoms of insomnia by 15 percent. This joins many other studies and theories about the impact of social media and smartphone use on youth and adults. Other articles I’ve seen detail young people’s efforts to live a dumb-phone existence. One of the hardest parts of this is that their peers are all using social media and smartphones to communicate, and so they are excluded from social community if they opt out of these communication streams.
Over the last several years, as there’s been growing attention to the issue of digital oversaturation, an internet term has become popular: “touch grass.” As in, you’re online too much, touch grass. As in, you’ve gone down an internet rabbit hole and care too much about this online thing, go touch grass and connect with the real world. It’s both a recommendation and an insult. (Some organizations have even taken the call seriously, providing advice on how to touch grass.)
But “touching grass”—getting outside a screen-based existence and into the physical world—if it actually works, can only reset one person for a short time. It’s not a long-term solution. Even if one made a regular practice of interrupting digital isolation and going outdoors, it would still be alone. To change the way we interact with the digital sphere, we would need a collective, not just us as individuals on our own. With such powerfully addictive technologies, both in design and due to being socialized throughout our relational networks, we need others to be with and connect with outside of technology.
This is where spiritual practice can come in. Jewish holidays and traditions as we practice them now were established between Biblical times several thousand years ago and the time of the Talmud, concluding around 1,400 years ago. (Of course, Jewish practice has continued to evolve and change since then, but the basic forms we practice today are rabbinic Judaism as established by the Talmud.) Sitting in harvest huts and shaking vegetation on Sukkot, chanting for hours in harmony on Yom Kippur, eating our way through the story of our freedom on Passover, setting up a whole day out of each week to just be on Shabbat—these are pathways established way before anyone ever thought of a screen. And their performance decidedly requires a community of people. They therefore provide a bedrock of communal practice to come back to in direct contradistinction to online existence.
During the pandemic, many synagogues put their Shabbat and holiday services online in an effort to help Jews continue to observe. I know many people who loved these services, even forming connections with synagogues in other provinces and countries through attending online services. I officiated a virtual baby-naming, led virtual high holiday services, and taught classes online. Yet I myself didn’t attend more than a few online services in the over 3 years that synagogues here in Toronto were basically closed. The first indoor Shabbat service I attended after synagogues opened, I wept off and on throughout the three hours, I had missed it so much. For me, the bodily, IRL experience of prayer and community couldn’t be substituted.As AI continues to infiltrate various parts of our lives (some people are even falling in love with their AI companions), the need to touch grass will only increase. Luckily for those of us in Jewish community, we have a robust, millennia-old practice waiting for us.