Dear Shalom,
I became aware of this phenomenon (of texting on shabbat, while observing most other prohibitions) about two years ago when parents of a teenager at a well-known NJ Yeshiva High School told me they asked their son how many of the class of about 100 students texted on shabbat. His answer was "about 80%". When they asked their son the follow-up question as to what he thought the faculty members would say to this statistical querie, his perception was that they would probably say about 20%. When asked what the son thought parents would say , he replied, "about 50%". I assume that according to his estimate close to 80% of those parents would say that their own children belong to the 50% who do not text. After the Jewish Week article perhaps this naive neglect of the issue will lessen to the betterment of educational strategizing by parents and teachers..
If the urgent discussion that needs to take place among parents and educators focuses exclusively on the isuue as "disregard for halakha" or as an addiction issue, they will, I believe, be missing the mark.
Marshall McLuhan, 50 years ago, warned against naïveté with regard to the pervasive effects of new media on cultural and personal thought, perception and behavior patterns. The contemporary discussion extends to actual rewiring of neural activity and changes in the structure and workings of the brain as a result of massive exposure to and use of new media. I would suggest that everyone on the list buy and read two books for a start -Nicholas Carr's The Shallows; What the Internet is Doing to our Brains and The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge. Then, someone needs to write a new book about the implications of all this for Jewish education and for cultural continuity in the Halakhic community.
I recently ventured into this thicket in a shiur that I delivered at the YCT Yemei Iyun on the stories in Bereishit that pit fleeting gratification and immediate satisfaction against long term patience and willingness to forego the immediate (like for 400 years in the brit bein habetarim) for the sake of depth attachments. At the end of the shiur, I spoke directly about the relevance of these parshiot (particularly the story of Yehuda and Tamar and the story of Esav selling his bekhora for broth) for today's students and educators. (I understand that the shiur will soon be available through the Lookstein center and through the YCT website as a video).
The reason kids cannot resist texting even on shabbat is related indeed to the issue of addiction and to a tipping point in social acceptability, but it is also related to a larger cultural issue that affects not only when kids are texting and what it is that they are texting, but to the problematic phenomenon of texting itself. This is not just about texting, of course, but also about surfing and blackberrys and Iphones and Ipads - resulting in humans who are constantly and ubiquitously connected to the instancy, and to quick linking from site to site, and to the around the clock availability of endless unfiltered information of electronic media.
It has implications not just for commitment to shabbat but for the idea of commitment and long term attachment to anything. It involves increased distractibility, loss of patience for processes, and preference for the easy, the instant and the shallow - at the expense of the struggle, the delayed, the complex, and the profound. I have noticed this over the years in my students who are college graduates as well as in those recently graduated from high schools.
In an interesting unintentional experiment, this past year I taught the same material and skills oriented classes to post high school students in an institution where computers were banned from the classrooms and the beit midrash where students spent most of the day and in another setting with post college students who were always online. At the end of the year, the younger students were able to spend enjoyable hours working out philological problems and going deeply into texts, whereas most of the older students remained severely limited by short attention spans, and distractibility. This may mean that cultural processes are not as inevitable as McLuhan thought.
What does all of this mean in terms of shabbat? It seems to me, that shabbat observance has become even more necessary for the well being of Jews and of humankind than ever. But to convince young people of this, yet another book needs to be written. It will be an updated version of Heschel's inspiring The Sabbath and it will argue powerfully for the need to disconnect once a week for 25 hours -not just for the sake of shabbat, but even more so for the sake of who we will become the 6 other days of the week. McLuhan, who loved wordplay, would tell the modern day Esau, "Don't sell your soul for a pot of message".
I will also be happy to engage principals of schools in offline discussions, should anyone want to be in touch.
B'vrakha,
Shmuel Klitsner
