Mark Oppenheimer: I’m Mark Oppenheimer and this is Arc: The Podcast. Most weeks, this is Arc with Mark, but this week it’s Arc with David, as in David Sugarman, my deputy editor at arcmag.org. One of the running conversations that David and I have is the way in which technology and the fight to stay sane when surrounded by so much of it is actually a spiritual concern, something that religious groups have to take up. In this holiday season when so many of us are buying gadgets and toys for our loved ones, David had the idea of going to communities that are self-consciously anti-materialistic, religious communities, to figure out how they handle the perils and sometimes the promise of the smartphone and its many cousins. Here’s David Sugarman.

David Sugarman: Sometime in the sixth century B.C.E, the Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus was wandering about, wondering at the stars. He was so absorbed in the world, in his thoughts, in the cosmos, that he failed to notice the well right in front of him. He tripped, fell in, and died.

Two and a half millennia later, I read stories about people so absorbed by their cell phones that they get hit by cars. Stories about drivers so absorbed by their cell phones, they hit pedestrians. Meanwhile, the wonders of the world, the stuff that so amazed the ancients gets banished to the background. I feel the pull of my phone constantly. For a while now, I’ve wanted to reclaim that older feeling of absorption, of unbroken concentration, of feeling focused and present. A feeling enraptured not by my phone but by something more.

As we celebrate Hanukkah this week and Christmas next, people across the country are unwrapping new technological toys. Things meant to consume our attention. To take a stand against the gadgets, I wanted to make an episode about what different religious communities are doing to help keep the digital world out. I talked to Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn, to Latter-day Saints or Mormons in Utah, and to the Amish in Pennsylvania. I wanted to ask them, “How might we think about technology a little bit differently this holiday season? How have observant religious communities across the country been approaching some of these questions?”

Everyone I talked to shared the sense that these tools, these toys, carry tremendous risks. The risks include the spiritual hazards of social media, the envy, the materialism, the vanity, the corrosiveness of online pornography, of course, and the ever present distraction of the smartphone. These communities have been coming up with careful creative solutions to these problems for years. And even so, they feel they might be losing the battle. Yet they keep fighting, not only to avoid what they see as negative, but they’re also trying to preserve room for the positive. For minds, still capable of deep thought and deep wonder. Let’s see what they’re up to.

My first stop was South Williamsburg in Brooklyn. A little storefront called Talk Kosher. It looks like a Radio Shack from the aughts. Rows of flip phones and glass cases, a few older models hanging on hooks, plastic signs on the walls, advertising various carriers. But this is not a normal cell phone shop.

I was trying to find your website. Do you guys have a website

Jacob: We don’t have a website. We don’t have a website who only sell kosher phones.

DS: Behind the counter sits Jacob. He runs the place.

Jacob: Totally kosher. It means all phones we are sell only have talk. No text, no pictures, no music, no nothing. The only thing it have is the reason why a phone is born: to talk on the phone.

DS: No website, no texting, no photos, no apps. Just talk. South Williamsburg is one of the Hasidic capitals of the world, full of Haredi Jews who seriously regulate their relationships with technology. In a neighborhood where so much of life is structured by religious law, and I should add, by talking. The phone has been re-engineered to match. I asked Jacob whether this was some kind of formal rule from the rabbis.

Is this like a halakic thing from the rabbis that they say everybody must use just these kinds of phones?

Jacob: So you can do whatever you want. Nobody stand with their gun, but they’re not allowed to have open internet because everyone’s saying it’s not good. But if you need for business, you have all kind of technology with filters and you have only the good stuff on it, not the bad stuff. Smart people are taking only phones that who have nothing, only talk. And this we are selling.

DS: In other words, total bans where you can, heavy filtering where you can’t. If you’re a businessman, you might be allowed a smartphone with software that scrubs out social media, YouTube, pornography, whatever’s considered dangerous. For everyone else, especially kids, the safest thing is a phone that does almost nothing.

Jacob pointed to a row of plain black flip phones behind the glass.

There’s no text messaging even.

Jacob: No. You can also buy these kind of models in other stores that do text messaging, but over here, you don’t have and it have a hecksher.

DS: There’s even a kind of rabbinic seal of approval, like kosher food, but for devices.

And so who’s giving it that hecksher?

Jacob: So there are a group of rabbunum and they give the hecksher.

DS: And it doesn’t stop at phones.

And then what about using computers? So how does it work with you?

Jacob: The same thing. We have filters. You buy the computer and you go to install a lot of filtering companies.

DS: There are a lot of filtering companies.

Jacob: You put it on the filter remotely.

DS: Tag is one of several companies that will remotely lock down your internet. The idea is that nothing in your house, phone, tablet, laptop, is allowed to be open. And the rules get even stricter when it comes to children.
At what age do kids in the communities typically start getting a cell phone?

Jacob: So they’re not getting a phone. There’s family phones. Every family have few phones when the kid needs to go out. Don’t go in school with it. It’s not their phone.

DS: The phone belongs to the family, not the child. You take it when you need it and then it goes back in the drawer. But of course, there are cracks. Plenty of people do have smartphones. According to Jacob, the solution for that is redundancy.

Jacob: Most people have two phones. Even people that have smartphones have two phones. One smartphone, like a computer, and one flip phone. When they come home, they use a flip phone. They’re around the people that will use the flip phone. They want to talk, they use the flip phone.

DS: So you carry a smartphone for work and a kosher phone for life, for home, for the street, for the synagogue. One phone lives in the modern world, the other in the moral world. But in the Jewish community of Williamsburg, most people do what their rabbis tell them too, at least most of the time. That’s not the way it is for the majority of American Jews. To think about how Jews in other communities are dealing with these questions, I called Rabbi Jon Leener, who leads the Prospect Heights Shul a few neighborhoods deeper into Brooklyn. His community is Modern Orthodox, open to the secular world in ways that Jacob’s community is not. How do these challenges look to him and his congregation?

Jon Leener: From a Modern Orthodox perspective, the challenge around technology and cell phones has been guided a lot by more of the conversation within the secular world than the religious world. Most people in the Modern Orthodox community have an iPhone, so it’s not like a quote unquote kosher cell phone. So it’s not a question of content that they’re encountering on it, but I think it’s a usage question and a question around when and how you’re going to roll out technology to children.

DS: I asked Rabbi Leener about whether he’s seeing community members deepen their commitment to Shabbat, or the Sabbath, when Orthodox Jews abstain from anything related to work, including technology like cell phones and computers.

JL: Yeah. I think people are going to lean more into Shabbat in the future despite the challenges of living in a more technological advanced world. It’s going to be more countercultural than ever, which is attractive to people. So I can see within the Modern Orthodox community where there’s definitely a variety of how people observe Shabbat, that that’s going to be an area that’s going to be more widely practiced.

DS: Listening to Rabbi Leener talk, I was reminded of something Jacob said when I visited his cell phone shop in Williamsburg about how his community feels that these technologies are impure in some way or corruptive. I asked Rabbi Leener if this is something he spoke with his community about or that they were feeling, a sense of spiritual degradation from social media and their smartphones.

JL: Modern Orthodox rabbis have very little influence in this sphere. In the same way that for sometimes some rabbis were like campaigning against people watching the Super Bowl and that just did not win. They were not successful. And why that is, I don’t know. That space of engaging culture, of society that isn’t related to Judaism, I think Modern Orthodox rabbis have very little influence.

DS: Instead of this kind of outright ban, Rabbi Leener suggests that we treat these new technologies with a kind of attention and care we bring to other potentially harmful aspects of our material lives.

JL: We drink wine and we make a berachah over it. We don’t abstain from like the physical wonders of the world, but we find ways to find meaning in it. Jewish spirituality understands human drive, I think, in a very profound way. We don’t forbid sex, but we put limitations on it. Food, right? We have kosher, which is not outlawing all food, but it’s creating boundaries. And I think that creates a certain, healthy dynamic between Jews in the physical world where you’re exercising more of your human will and choice by doing that instead of just saying it’s forbidden.

DS: Jewish leaders in New York seem to be adopting different approaches to the question of how to help community members navigate new media and digital technology, sometimes through top down wholesale rejections and other times through complicated and ongoing conversations. For members of the Church of Latter Day Saints, better known as the Mormons, the solutions are quite different.

Zach Davis: I’m Zach Davis. I am the Executive Director of Faith Matters, which is an LDS nonprofit that develops content and experiences to help people in their faith.

DS: Part of Zach’s job is paying attention to how Latter Day Saints are thinking about the internet, phones, and their kids’ screens.

ZD: I pay a lot of attention to the conversation in Latter-day Saints spaces. Certainly technology is on everyone’s mind right now. We have a governor who’s a Latter-day Saint, Spencer Cox, who has taken a real leadership role in the fight to regulate technology companies in order to protect children and families. And so there have been some legislation aimed at making sure social media companies are held responsible for the harms that are caused due to their algorithms and their products.

There’s also been some pretty compelling efforts at trying to forge a middle path between complete anti-technology and complete full embrace of whatever latest gizmo Silicon Valley spins up next. A great example of that is the phone company called Gabb, G-A-B-B, created by Latter Day Saints, and it is meant to be child appropriate cell phones, and they have different kinds of settings so that it can grow with the child’s age and maturity levels.That has been a real success.

DS: If the Hasidum in Brooklyn are trying to build fences around the internet with bans and filters, Latter Day Saints in Utah are looking for a middle path, something between total prohibition and total immersion, but the concerns are familiar. I asked Zach whether all this is a reaction to things feeling out of control right now, or if it’s part of a longer tradition of being a little bit wary of the secular world.

ZD: When I was growing up, you would often hear the world having dangers and that we needed to be kept safe from the world. It used to be a lot easier to keep the world away. If you didn’t buy a VHS video, then the world was not inside your home. The internet changed all that and the advent of personal phones made that even harder to monitor for families.

DS: Like many religious traditions, Latter-day Saints worry about pornography and sexual content, but they also worry about something more nebulous: the way the internet can train us to be angry.

ZD: Our previous president was named Russell M. Nelson.

Robert M. Nelson: My dear brothers and sisters, it is a joy to be with you.

ZD: Probably the most influential sermon he gave was called “Peacemakers Needed.”

RMN: Civility and decency seemed to have disappeared during this era of polarization and passionate disagreements.

ZD: And he called on Latter-day Saints to become peacemakers and to stop participating in a culture of outrage and anger and hatred. It sounds very simple and it is, but it was delivered with a great deal of prophetic power. I do think their implication from that sermon was, if you are going online and getting mad at people and calling them names and fighting with the spirit of rancor, you’re not living the faith’s values.

RMN: The savior’s message is clear. True disciples of Jesus Christ are peacemakers.

DS: The LDS church is extremely hierarchical, even more centralized than the Hasidic world. But when it comes to phones and the internet, Zach told me, church leaders have mostly chosen not to dictate which specific devices or apps should be avoided.

ZD: There’s very little direct control. There has been no effort by church leadership to prescribe particular devices or particular websites. You teach correct principles and then people need to use their agency in order to make correct choices. When the internet first emerged and access to pornography became so much more common and easy, there used to be a lot more public sermons specifically warning against pornography and encouraging people to quit. And that has gone away, probably because it felt like a losing battle, but also because there was a recognition among the leadership that we teach the value of modesty, chastity, self-control, and then you have to just give people the space to make those decisions and you don’t have to be so on the nose about it.

DS: So instead of bans, you get sermons about peacemaking. Instead of lists of forbidden apps, you get a call to cultivate certain virtues and then to exercise your agency. Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Zach something slightly outside the LDS lane. I asked if he thought modern secular life even had the vocabulary to truly address these questions.

ZD: I think there’s a growing recognition among thoughtful people that neutral secularism is a bit of a myth. Liberalism nobly tries to say we will keep questions of ultimate value as a private decision and in the public sphere, as long as you don’t kill somebody, anything goes. The problem with that is it has a hard time articulating why gambling all day is a bad thing because it can really only conceive of individual choice, individual rights, and it doesn’t really have a vision of the common good, except for this very thin idea of tolerance. I mean, the internet, it is a machine for rewarding individual choice. Taken to an extreme, it can make us isolated and attenuated and unhappy.

DS: A machine for rewarding individual choice, a machine that never turns off. In Jacob’s Hasidic world, the answer is to strip the machine down until it barely exists. In Zach’s world, the answer is to surround it with talk of virtue and the common good, to teach people how they ought to use their freedom, even when their phones give them so, so much of it.

Okay. One last approach to the digital universe. This last approach, at least from the outside, looks like a more extreme version of Jacob’s, fewer gadgets, simpler lives, and a deep suspicion of modernity.

If you’ve ever driven through Lancaster, Pennsylvania, you’ve seen your share of horses and buggies. Many Amish and Mennonite families called a region home, as did their grandfathers and great-grandfathers. I went to Pennsylvania to talk with Amish families about the phones they use and the ones they refuse to bring into their homes. I assumed I would find solutions similar to those adopted by the Hasidic community in Williamsburg, or perhaps even more extreme, but what I discovered surprised me.

Hi. How’s it going?

I drove to the Lancaster Central Market, arriving just as the lunch crowd was thinning out. I walked through the large nineteenth century market building with high cross-beamed ceilings and dozens of tightly packed stalls before I found Farm to Table Creations, a sandwich shop owned by a local Amish family.

Yeah, I’ll do the Farm Table’s smoke turkey, cold, yes. With no bacon. Thank you.

While I waited for my food, I asked the shopkeepers, a mother, Bina King, and her teenage son, James, about their cell phone use.
Hey, Bina. Hey, James. Do you all have cell phones yourselves?

Bina James: I do not have a smartphone. James does not have a phone at all. I used mine as a home phone, but it was easier with the cell phone because of the disconnections in the back box, and so we switched to a cell phone.

DS: So the disconnections in the back box were … You had an outdoor phone that was getting disconnected often?

BJ: Yes.

DS: I see.

For years, Amish communities have kept their landlines in small sheds or cabins behind their homes. This way they could have a phone, but also have a home free of technological distraction. With the advent of the cell phone, however, that had clearly changed.

So then you switched to a cell phone, but a dumb phone, not a smartphone?

BJ: Yes.

DS: Was that change one that you were worried about? Was it a big change for you or a small change?

BJ: It’s a small change to me. I don’t carry it around in my pocket. I use it just the same as a homephone. It is in house, but it’s not carried around all the time. So it’s not a big change.

DS: The big change, however, is how this technology is impacting families and teenagers. Families getting rid of their landlines, being a king explained to me, was not such a big deal, but the teenagers starting to get phones was a totally different story. When I asked her about this, I could see immediately how worried she was.

Are parents mostly on their own trying to figure this out or has Amish leadership also been saying, like this is the best way for our community to…

BJ: Parents on their own.

DS: Parents on their own. Is that difficult? Yeah.

BJ: Because there’s some… Yeah, it’s just put to something. It’s hard to actually lay that out. And I mean, the discouraging thing is not even fully understanding how to educate someone. So it’s yeah, like I said, it’s a big concern.

DS: This was something I heard echoed by other Amish community members I spoke to. What’s your name, please?

Elmer: Elmer.

DS: Elmer. Ah, and this is your shop. Elmer bagged my fruit as he told me about how he used a smartphone for business, but avoided it otherwise, much the way the Hasidum in Brooklyn do. He also saw the same generational struggle that’s so worried Bina King.
Is there leadership that’s saying we should really avoid this and it’s younger people who want to have more access?

Elmer: Yes, that’s what’s happening right now is there’s the older leaders that see the trouble. Us younger people don’t always see that, “Oh, what’s their problem with this?” So we don’t always understand. That’s where we come into where we don’t always understand everything and have to try to still abide by the rules that the elder wants enforced because they see problems coming. In the future, if we look ahead, we want to conserve our community and our culture.

DS: Yeah.

Elmer: That we have to hold back a little bit.

DS: I paid with my phone’s Apple Pay and then continued perusing the market, which was full this time of year with gift ideas, handmade jewelry, interesting floral arrangements, and brightly painted wooden toys. As I browsed the stalls, I realized how complicated these questions about technology are, even for people of deep faith. For the observant, as for the secular, the call of these addictive and distracting devices and technologies is powerful. These are questions that most of us feel left to answer on our own. I left Lancaster to drive back to New York, hoping to make it home in time to light Hanukkah candles with my kids. I got them Amish donuts and pretzels for a gift and a bouquet of flowers for my wife.

Arc: The Podcast is produced by the John C. Danforth Center at Washington University in St. Louis. The director at the John Danforth Center is Abram Van Engen and the director of communications is Debra Kennard. This episode was written by me, David Sugarman, and edited and produced by Robert Scaramuccia and Mark Oppenheimer. Music is by Ben Tweel of Build Buildings. Thanks to our interns, Caroline Coffey and Ben Esther. Happy holidays, everyone, and see you next time.