 So, good evening, everyone. Welcome to the third session of this series. I want to thank the Village School for partnering with us and for hosting this series. And tonight's topic is called Weapons of Mass Distraction. And if you don't know what that means, it will become clear very soon. So it's undeniable that digital technology, the internet, social networking, even our smartphones have improved our lives in very real and significant ways. It's indisputable. Today you can have an entire Jewish library in your pocket, a bigger library than people could have dreamed about having in their homes generations ago. We have an instant access to what is important information. You could also help people in real time in ways that we could not have done a generation or so ago. Today, you know, we're able to, for example, send out a prayer chain. I mean, years ago, if you, God forbid, had a relative that was ill and needed prayer, you could ask the people that you knew that you actually met face to face. Today, if someone is ill and is having surgery and needs to be prayed for, you can literally have almost the entire world praying for them with the click of a button. And actually this happened a number of years ago. A cousin of mine was having very serious heart surgery. And I sent out, I don't usually do this, but I sent something out to everyone I knew. And it made the rounds and it circulated. And I'm sure that he had thousands of people praying for him. And thank God that surgery was successful. We're also able to help people in very real ways with the assistance of the Internet and social technology, social networking. A few weeks ago, I went away to Detroit for the weekend. And right before I left, I found out that a friend of mine lost her place to stay and had an emergency and immediately needed to find a place to live. It's not easy here in Toronto. So I quickly put up a notice on my Facebook page. I put it on a number of social networking sites here in Toronto. And by the time I got to Detroit, I already had messages I received for seven apartments. Within a day came up for this person. So we have, thank God, this ability to learn, to gain access to information, to help people. There are really very important and significant benefits and blessings that we have because of this technology. But as Tevion Fidel the Roof would say, on the other hand, and that's what tonight is all about. On the other hand, I just want to begin by saying that I'm not coming here to preach as any kind of saint. You know, the Baal Shem Tov used to say that if you go through life and you see someone that's doing something that you find to be wrong. So the Baal Shem Tov said that you should know that you actually have the same problem. That the fact that you're seeing someone else do it, that's important for you to see. Not so that you could point your finger at that person. It's really a mirror to help you understand that you really have the same issue. And so I find myself really suffering from the same kind of downside to smartphone addiction, internet addiction, social networking addiction that I think is rampant in our society. It's when I just came back from Montreal and I was on the train coming here and I was working on this presentation and I kept on finding myself checking my phone. And I was saying, what am I doing? I'm preparing a lecture on this topic of internet addiction and smartphone addiction. What am I taking it out for? But I kept on finding myself checking my email and my Facebook messages. This is something which I don't think many people are immune from unless they've decided to basically disengage and not have this kind of technology. But in the world today it's very, very difficult to simply cut your ties. So I should say that I'm not preaching to anyone out there. I'm really tonight preaching to myself, if anyone. What's so sad is that this is technology. This technology was really developed to help make our lives easier to free us, to free up our time, to free up our lives. And the irony is that so many of us have become slaves to these very devices that were supposed to give us freedom. These are devices that were supposed to give us more time to experience life and to experience the people that we love and to spend quality time with the people that we love. But we're bombarded by bells and chimes and buzzes and all kinds of notifications and we feel the need to respond immediately. Studies have shown that most people today will check their cell phones about 150 times a day. About every four to six minutes. People are spending often today at least five hours in front of their screens, at least five hours of the day. Young adults today are sending on the average, and this is an older study, but young adults are sending on the average of 110 texts a day. This is way more than it was just a few years ago. And I don't think this behavior reflects the idea that we get so much pleasure from our email or that we get so much pleasure from reading or sending texts. I think it simply reflects the fact that in many cases we've become addicted. We have become addicted. And the great problem is that for all other addictions, society does not approve. If someone cannot stop themselves from drinking or someone is a totally compulsive eater and can't stop eating, they don't get support or kudos from society. In many ways, people that are addicted to anything become in many ways outcasts. But when it comes to internet addiction and cell phone addiction, it's basically so rampant and widespread that it basically is sanctioned behavior. It is sanctioned behavior. Any child born after the year 2013 will have spent an entire year of their life in front of a screen by the time they reach the age of seven. By the time they reach the age of seven, they would have already spent an entire year in front of a screen. I remember years ago I read a wonderful book from here in Toronto. A fellow named Mike Harris wrote a really special book about ours being the last generation of people who know what it's like to live before and after the internet. And he has a scene he describes where he's visiting with one of his relatives. I think he has a nephew that's two years old and the nephew is on the floor and in front of his nephew is a magazine, whatever it was. McLean's, I don't know the name of the magazine. But he's seeing his nephew taking his fingers at two-year-old and going like this to the magazine picture of the magazine. Here's a two-year-old already that is so comfortable and normalized to interface with digital technology. The Pew Research Center, one of the most important organizations studying our cultures, did a study in 2018 this year where they found that 95% of teenagers have access to a smartphone. And 45%, 45% say they are online almost constantly. Now this is almost double, almost double the 24% who said this in the 2015 survey, meaning between 2015 and 2018. The number of teenagers who said that they spend almost all their time online went from 24% to 45% just in those few years. There was one major study of students from ten different countries. And this study found that over 50%, over 50% experienced serious distress when they tried to go for 24 hours without their devices. As a matter of fact, we have now a term called Nomophobia which describes the fear people have of not having their device, not having their phone. It actually is an official psychological malaise or affliction called Nomophobia. When this study was done of, again, these young adults in ten countries, one-third, one-third of them admitted they would rather give up sex than their smartphones. Chew over that for a few moments. Now one of the great problems with this technology is the great danger of multitasking. There is a tremendous assumption that people make that they're able to do many things at the same time and they can do all of them well. And this is a tremendous misconception because every single study that was done has shown that when you try to multitask, you may be able to do a few things at the same time, but you will not do any of them well. My wife and I were in Israel a few years ago and we often would take cabs or a Sherut sometimes when you go from the airport to Jerusalem. You take a Sherut, a larger cab with many people and every time during this trip, just a few years ago, every time we got into a cab or a Sherut, the driver was texting on their phone while they were driving. We know today that 25% of accidents, 25% are caused by people that are texting. Textures are six times more likely, six times more likely to cause an accident than a drunk driver. In the United States, there are nearly 400,000 people that are killed or injured each year because of distracted driving. When people are on their phones while they're driving, their ability to steer the vehicle is reduced by 91%. That's how bad it gets. In Toronto, we know that there's another problem called distracted walking. There's been an increase of people that are hit by cars, people with pedestrians hit by cars, not only because the drivers are not careful, it's because people are walking with their faces glued to their phones and they don't see what's going on around them. One of the larger problems taking place in our society is the presence of smartphones in classrooms. There was a 2016 study which found that the average college student in the United States wastes 20% of their class time fooling around on their devices doing things totally unrelated to their class. 20% of their class time is just wasted with their phones checking their emails, checking their texts, sending texts, sending emails, looking at Snapchat, looking at WhatsApp, Googling things, checking Facebook, Instagram. Basically, we are exposed to endless distraction and we don't stay away from it. These are students that are paying good money to be in university and they know that their future depends upon doing well and yet they will spend one-fifth of their time fluttering away their class time in front of a device. When I lecture to high school students or students that are in university age students, I'm blown away by how many of them are on their phones while I'm lecturing. I mean, how is it possible to pay attention and learn? And incredibly, this topic is being debated. It's being debated about what should be allowed in middle schools and high schools. They're actually people advocating that it should be a fine for students to bring their phones to class. And not just high school, in middle school. One of the incredible downsides to this technology is that we've learned that these devices are distracting even if they're turned off, even if they're in your purse. We have found that this technology is distracting even if you don't answer a phone that rings. As all of you are probably distracted now because these beeps and these buzzes and these clicks and these rings, they call for our attention and they announce to us that there's a menu of things that are going on out there. And we have to understand that our brains are wired. This is actually part of our, it's almost a survival mechanism when you think about it. There's a survival mechanism we have as human beings to notice things that are novel, that are new. Because if you miss things that are coming into your field of vision, they actually might be important. Imagine if you're in the forest and you're going for a hike, you don't want to miss the bear that might be lurking in the background. So we have this ability to notice things and when something pops into your field of vision, it's good that we can notice it. The problem is that it's very easy for us to be distracted. You know, there was a wonderful experiment done years ago. Many of you might have seen this. It was up on the internet where they had two teams playing basketball. One team were wearing white shirts. One team I think they weren't wearing shirts. They were small team. I think three people on each team and before people. And the video that was shown asked the viewer to count how many times the ball was passed back and forth between the people wearing the white shirts. So you would watch this video. I did it. I watched it and I was able to say, yeah, I saw that it was what was passed 13 times. And after you watched the video, they would say, you know, yes, 13 times is correct. But then it would say, did you notice the gorilla that came out in the middle of the basketball court and stopped for a few moments and beat its chest and walked off. And I said, what? I didn't see anything like that. That's because I was focused. My attention was focused on these people passing the ball. And I wasn't able to notice something right in front of my eyes. So this technology is extremely distracting and not just to ourselves. It's distracting to other people, meaning just the mere presence of a phone in a room, even if it's put on the table and it's turned off. Just the fact that it's there is distracting, not just to ourselves, but to other people as well. I was very happy to see in Toronto. I'm sure this goes on in other schools, but I noticed it at two schools here in Toronto that I visited where when you walk into the school, there are cubicles. And when you come into the school, the students would put their phones into the cubicles and they would pick them up at the end of the day. Meaning their phones were not near them during their day. They were able to go through their classes without having to be distracted by their phones. A second tremendous problem with this technology is that it makes it very difficult for us to be with ourselves. What happens during moments of downtime? What happens during the day when we have a few moments to ourselves? If you're waiting for a bus, if you're on a checkout line, or if you're waiting for the elevator, or you're waiting for a red light, or you come five minutes early for an appointment, or you show up a little bit early to synagogue for the afternoon prayers and you have two or three minutes. What happens during those moments? Do we pull out our phones and check our email? Check our Facebook messages? Check what's app? Check our texts? What's the harm? What's the harm? I have two or three minutes. Why not look at my email? Well, the harm is significant. Research has shown that these moments, when our minds can wander and just reflect and ponder, contemplate, these moments are vital for us. They're critical for us. Because during these moments, these moments of downtime, important ideas and inspiration can come to us. It's a time for us to reflect and plan. And if we fill up all of those moments and all of those blank spaces, we rob ourselves of this opportunity for reflection, for contemplation, and for planning. Daydreaming is not a bad thing. Ramoshechaim Luzato, the Ramchal in the 18th century, described what he thought was one of the greatest enemies that we have toward living a successful life. And he said that enemy is not being able to think and to contemplate, to think about our lives, to think about how we're doing, to think about what is my life all about? Why am I here? The Greeks already said the unexamined life is not worth living. But when do we do this? When do we have time to reflect for a few minutes each day about the quality of our lives and how we're doing? Are we living up to our potential? Are we living up to our ideals? And he said, the Ramchal said that this is such a critical thing for us to do every day. But he says, we don't. And do you know why we don't? Because we get too busy. And he said, one of the tricks of our evil inclination, of our inner adversary, our Yatesahara, is to keep us endlessly busy and occupied. So busy and occupied, we simply don't have time to think. And the Ramchal says this was the tactic that was used by Pharaoh in ancient Egypt. Pharaoh did not want the Jewish people to dream about freedom, to think about a life outside of Egypt, to maybe plan leaving Egypt. He didn't want them to think about these things. And so in order to prevent them from thinking, he just increased their labor and kept them busier and busier and busier. He wanted to distract us from thinking. The word paro, which is the name of the king of Egypt, the letters in the name paro are the same letters in the Hebrew word hafra'a. Hafra'a means interruption or distraction. That's what Pharaoh is all about. He is the grand interrupter, the grand distractor. And so when we don't have these precious moments to think, to reflect, we're losing out on life. Our smartphones can be a powerful and effective pharaoh right in our pocket. These distractions, these shimes and buzzes and blips and vibrations that call out to us into fear with our ability to simply be with ourselves and to get to know who we really are. One of the problems is that people today find it painful just to sit and be with themselves and do nothing. We get very nervous and uncomfortable and we almost feel compelled to pull out our phone and to just check things and Google things and look at things. Science Magazine wrote about an amazing experiment where the participants in this experiment were asked to rate how unpleasant it was to receive an electric shock. They were given electric shock and they were asked to rate how unpleasant this electric shock was and how much money they would pay to avoid repeating getting shocked. How unpleasant was that shock and how much money would you pay to avoid repeating getting shocked? And then people were asked to just sit alone by themselves with their thoughts. During this time that they were asked to sit alone with their thoughts, they were given an opportunity to press a button where they could shock themselves. Now men we should hold our heads in shame. 67% of the men, thank God only 25% of the women, eventually pressed this button to shock themselves rather than sitting alone with nothing but their thoughts. That's how hard it is for us. That's how hard it is for us to just sit quietly with our own thoughts. Why us men are so messed up in this area? Don't ask me. One of the most painful parts of our addiction, and we all know this, is that it interferes horribly with our relationships. I saw a cartoon recently that was circulating all over the internet of all places. Of a woman who was sitting with other guests at a dinner party and she's looking at the table in front of her and she asks her table mate, I can't remember, does the cell phone go on the left or on the right? Harvard University professor Sherry Turkel in a book that was a follow-up to Alone Together which is one of the more important books on this topic. Her follow-up book was called Reclaiming Conversation. Reclaiming Conversation. And she writes, face-to-face conversation is the most human and humanizing thing that we do. Nothing that's more human and humanizing than face-to-face conversation. It's where we develop the capacity for empathy. She writes that many young people are growing up without ever having experienced unbroken conversations either at the dinner table or when they take a walk with their parents or friends. Without conversation studies show that we are less empathic, less connected, less creative and less fulfilled. I know young people that will never answer their phone. You can't call them and speak to them on the phone. You can only text them on the train to Montreal a few years ago. There was a group of teenagers in front of me. They were heading to a debating competition in Montreal and I'd never seen this before but I was watching in horror that these teenagers sitting together were not talking to each other. They were texting each other even though they were across the seat from each other. I couldn't understand this. In Sherry Turkell's book Alone Together, the saddest moment for me was when Dr. Turkell describes a child running out of school into the car of a waiting parent and the parent doesn't even bother to look up at your child when the child comes into the car because the parent is too busy on their phone. That little moment when the parents can lock eyes with their child there's a psychologist named John Gottman and he devised a study where he observed couples interacting with each other in their natural settings. After just one week of observing these couples, he could predict with 94% accuracy which couples would divorce and which couples would stay together. And what was the key? The key was whether they would turn to the other's bid for attention. These are opportunities for closeness or the opposite message can be sent. If a couple is sitting together and one of them or even both of them are on their phone but one of them says, oh, look at that. And the other one doesn't really look or looks in a perfunctory way. That's a bid for attention. That's a calling out. I want your attention. I want you to share something with me. And John Gottman found that when one of the people, one of the people in the couple did not attend to those bids for attention that was a signal of doom for that relationship. I was once in a pizza shop here in Toronto. I was having lunch and there was a man with his son, eight or nine year old son sitting across from me. And I watched for over a half hour as the father said not one word to his son. He never even looked at his son. He was busy checking his emails, texting, speaking on his phone. And I watched the child who sat there with the most dejected, hopeless, pitiful look on his face. And I had an impulse to go over to the father and just scream at him, you're killing your son. I didn't and I feel bad that I did it. But that's what I really should have done. You were murdering your son. You watched parents pushing strollers while on their phones. Or parents that are at playgrounds supposedly staring at their children, but no, they're staring at their screens rather than paying attention to their kids. Children today are used to their parents or their caregivers only being half there. And studies have shown how critical it is for parents and newborns to bond. One of the things that happens during the first two years of an infant's life is that they learn about their own emotions and they learn how to interpret and read the emotions of other people by the face to face and eye to eye contact that they make with other people. If a baby smiles, no one can resist the smile of a baby. And normally a parent or even a stranger will smile back at the baby. But that's critical for the baby to see their own smile reflected in the face of another. And usually that other is and should be their parents. And when those expressions are not reflected back, the infants become very anxious. And they're not able to learn about their own emotions. They're not able to learn these critical skills of interpreting how other people feel and reading the emotions of other people. Because this face to face, real time communication is not there. When a parent is busy on their phone, they miss these brief moments where their child might grimace or smile briefly. And if you're not paying attention fully, you're not able to fully attend to the child. We know that speaking to infants is critical for them to be able to learn themselves how to speak. My parents told me that I was speaking very, very early because I was the first one. And my mother spoke to me nonstop, nonstop my mother spoke to me. And I was told that I was already speaking full sentences before I was a year old. But that's critical. And then when parents are on their phone and not speaking to their own children, the children's development is going to be hampered. Jean Tweng, I'm not sure I'm pronouncing the name correctly. Jean Tweng wrote a critical book recently called I Gen. I Gen, about young people born between the years 1995 and 2012. She's studying this group of young people. And she calls them I Gen because they grew up with the advent of the iPhone. And she found and noticed dramatic and disturbing behavioral and emotional and mental health problems with this cohort of young people. Not slightly different than the previous generation. Dramatically different than the previous generation. Much less happy, much more anxious, much more depressed. And she proposed that this change was directly related, directly proportional to the amount of screen time they had. We've seen among this group that teen suicide rates have been skyrocketing. Girls are three times and boys twice as likely to kill themselves in 2015 than they were in 2007. Just between 2007 and 2015, the suicide rate of teenage girls tripled and young boys doubled. There are many reasons for this. One of the reasons is because when we live our lives on the phone, our lives seem lacking compared to other people. Nancy Collier, who's a psychologist that specializes in phone addiction, writes that our Instagram feed provides unceasing examples of lives being better lived and more enjoyed. Our life can only fail to compete. Expectations of life fueled by technology are that it should always be entertaining, always be satisfying, exciting, interesting, expanding and serving us. Life should give us what we want without pause. And when life isn't all that it's supposed to be, we're left feeling deprived, missing out, and also to blame for not being able to make life what it should be and clearly is for everyone else. So as I mentioned, there could be great benefit and great blessing in this technology, but it comes with its downsides. Let's try to understand one of the dynamics that fuels our addiction to this technology. There's a fascinating passage in the Talmud in the end of Tractate Nidarim, which deals with the topic of oaths. And the Talmud at the very last page in Tractate Nidarim has a story about a man that apparently is in a place where he shouldn't be. He's in a home of a married woman alone with her, and all of a sudden he hears the husband coming and he hides behind a door, he just makes himself scarce, and the husband comes in and he sees that the husband is about to eat some food. And he had seen earlier in the day that a poisonous snake or some kind of poisonous animal had also eaten from this food, possibly depositing poison in the food. So the man leaps out from behind the door where he was hiding, and he says, don't eat that. If you do, you're going to die. And the husband probably says, thank you very much. But what in the world are you doing here? But now we have a problem. There's a problem in Jewish law. And the problem is, can this husband continue living with his wife? Meaning, are we to assume that there was hanky-panky going on? And if there was, that would mean that he's not allowed to live with his wife anymore. She's an adulteress. So the Talmud had this as a case. This was a case that was raised. The great sage Rava ruled that they can live together. And his reasoning was that since this man saved the husband's life, it's indicative that nothing inappropriate was going on between him and the man's wife. Meaning that if he really was cheating with this man's wife, and he really was intending to carry on a relationship, he would have been very happy if the husband ate the poison and dropped dead, and then the wife would be all his. So that's the reasoning of Rava that said nothing inappropriate took place, and the couple continued living together. But you have to understand that the Talmud doesn't ever tell us stories, just for the sake of telling us stories. And immediately the Talmud objects and says, Well, duh, I think that it's sort of obvious, meaning isn't it obvious that if the fellow that was hiding in the house, if he really wanted to carry on an affair, he would have let the husband die and he would have had the wife. It's obvious. So why do they have to take this case to the great Rava and ask him to decide the situation? It's an obvious situation. And the Talmud never deals with obvious cases. So why do we have the whole case brought in the first place, if it's so obvious? So the Talmud says, well, maybe it would have been more exciting for this man to be carrying on an illicit affair with a married woman. Meaning the reason he kept the husband alive, the reason that he jumped in and told him not to eat from the food, was that he preferred an affair with a married woman rather than having the husband die and just marrying the widow. So maybe that's why he kept the husband alive. And in that case, maybe you can't just simply say that this is an innocent situation and there was no hanky-panky and the woman can go continuing to live with her husband. And maybe that's why the Talmud raised this question and had a whole discussion about this. And the Talmud quotes a verse from the book of Proverbs, chapter 9, verse 17. Mayim genuvim yim taku, that stolen waters are sweet, meaning that something which is really illicit and it's something that you shouldn't have. It's even more delightful and more pleasurable. And that's why this man decided to keep the husband alive. So the Talmud says, maybe that's what you would think. And maybe that's why you would say, oh, they can't continue to live together as husband and wife because the fact that the man allowed the husband to keep on living is not indicative that nothing was going on. So Rava answers and says, no, we don't say this. Meaning we don't say that the person kept the husband alive in order to be able to carry on an illicit relationship. We don't say that and we are able to use the fact that he saved the husband's life in his indication that there was no hanky-panky and therefore the husband can live with his wife. But why don't we say this? Why does the Talmud reject this idea? So Tosaphot, the commentary on the Talmud says that the potential adulterer here, he's not aware of this psychological principle that stolen waters are sweeter and that's why maybe he would keep the husband alive and that's why, according to Tosaphot, the Talmud rejects this possibility. Rabbi Eliyahu Desler in his famous work, Myrtav Meliyahu, he explains it on a deeper level. He says that really all desire in life, all desire in this world is based upon not having something. It's based upon feeling that we're missing something, that we're lacking something. Sound familiar? The Internet world is called FOMO, Fear of Missing Out. And Rabbi Desler says that all desire in life, all the things that we crave and that we desire, it's because we feel that we're missing something, we're lacking something. We're looking to fill a void and our Yetzahara, our inner adversary, misleads us to believe that if only I had that thing, if only I was able to get that thing, everything would be great. The problem is that when we finally get that thing, it never meets the hype. It's never as good as we assume it's going to be. It's never as good as the picture in the ad. The ad, oh, it looks like I've got to have that thing, it's so amazing looking. And we finally get it, it really is quite disappointing. So when we have this desire for things, because we feel we're missing out on them, what is it that ends? What is it that ends our pursuit of that which we feel we're missing? What is it that stops me short from pursuing those things that we feel we're missing? What stops me short is getting it. Meaning that I have this desire for things because I don't have it. Once I have it, it's flat. It's disappointing and I don't desire it anymore. The ad, the commercial screams, you've got to get this. The ad always sells the sizzle and not the steak. But when you finally get what your desires have been driving you toward, it's always a downer. It's always disappointing. There's a mirage. We live with a mirage that this thing is going to fill a void. This is going to fill a void in my life. It's going to fill a vacuum. But it doesn't. It doesn't. And when you finally engage the object of your desire and you realize your desire, it doesn't really fill the void. And you've missed opportunities in life. And you've lost time that can't be made up. So Rabbi Desler explains that it's really true. It's really true that the entire source of desire in life, of those things that we crave, is this idea of Mayim Ganuvim Yimtaku, of stolen waters are sweet. That's true, Rabbi Desler says. And it's really true, he says, that the man would really prefer an affair with a married woman over a normal relationship with a single woman, the widow of this man that might have been killed by the scorpion's poison. It would be much more exciting to carry on an illicit affair because that's out of reach. This married woman is more out of reach than a single woman that's available. And this is the question that the Talmud has. This is the very question the Talmud tries to understand. And the Talmud rejects this premise that it's really more pleasurable. Because if the person really understood that his desire was based upon this principle of stolen waters are sweet and that he can't have her, it's just a mirage. Because once he has her, she's no longer stolen waters. And once he has her, what's the point? What's the big deal? Why give up his entire eternity for a mirage, for nothing? It's not really special. So this idea of fear of missing out is based upon the idea that I don't have and I seek what I don't have. So when people lose their phones, I'm sure most of us have had that happen. You misplace your phone, you lose your phone. What do we do? We panic. Why? Because we're thinking of all this important stuff that we're going to miss out on. I'm not going to be able to see all these important things, these critical things. But after we're offline for a day, we realize that, you know what, all of that stuff that I worried about missing, it wasn't really that important. It actually was quite trivial. But fear of missing out should be an important principle of life. The cuts Gurebbe used to say, I don't avoid sin so much because it's wrong. He would say, I avoid sin because I don't have time. We should have fear of missing out. We should have a fear of missing out on life. We should have a fear of missing out on real relationships. We should have a fear of missing out on being able to know ourselves and to be able to grow. There are so many incredibly important things that we can be doing in life. We can actually be helping people, people that are desperately in need of our help and our attention and our love. And we just flitter away the time. We just kill time, precious time, scrolling through Facebook. And you could start off thinking, you're just going to do it for a few minutes and it's an hour later, two hours later. Or looking something up on Google. And then finding out, you're looking up a million things on Google that you weren't thinking about in the first place. But your curiosity took you through this rabbit hole. Remember Moshe Chaim Wutsato, I mentioned before, the Ramchal, says that we are alive, we're in this world to have the ultimate pleasure possible. That's why we're here. And he says the ultimate pleasure possible is the ability for us to connect with God. That's what we should be afraid of missing out on. We should be terrified of going through life and not actualizing that potential. Not being afraid of missing someone's text, which is usually nothing more than, hi, how you doing? We should be afraid of missing out on the delightful beauty of Shabbat. How many people are not able to observe Shabbat because they feel tortured right at their phone? But they should be terrified of missing out on the delicious possibility of being in heaven for 25 hours and not sabotaging it or doing on Shabbat the same thing that they do on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. People should be terrified of missing out on the opportunity that we have to grow as human beings. Our sages said that we were put into this world in order to grow as human beings, to work on our character traits, to become people that are more sensitive and more generous and more humble and have more patience and have more gratitude. That's what we should be afraid of missing out on. Of going through life and waking up when you're 80 years old and saying, I haven't done anything. What have I done? And we can flit away our whole life on these devices. The Talmud and tractate Avodha Zara has three stories which all have basically the same ending. The first story is about someone named Katia Bar Shalom, not a Jewish man. On page 10b in this tractate they say that the king decided to kill all the Jews in his kingdom. And Katia Bar Shalom came and said, you know, that would not be a very good idea. And he explained to the king exactly why it would be a stupid idea to kill all the Jews. And the king said, you know, you're right. But you know what happens when someone who argues with the king and tries to disagree with the king? You're killed. So they took Katia Bar Shalom out to be killed. It's actually a very strange story in the Talmud because the Talmud says that as he was being let out to be killed he circumcised himself and then he donated all his money to Rabbi Akiva's students. Anyway, as he was being killed his soul ascended to heaven. And the Talmud there says that Rebbe, Rabbi Yehuda Hanasi, the redactor of the Mishnah, Rebbe cried out, look at this. There are some people who work for their entire life to achieve the world to come and some people achieve it in just a moment. That's what his reaction to Katia Bar Shalom was. And then the Talmud tells a story seven pages later. Again, tractate of Arisara 17A about Eliezebendur Dai. Eliezebendur Dai, we're told, was someone that had an insatiable appetite for curl girls. And he visited every prostitute he was able to find and once he engaged his very expensive trollop and in the middle of their being together he has this awakening and he realizes that he's been heading in the wrong direction. And he leaves her and he sits on the ground and he prays for the sun and the moon to save him and they say we can't help you. And he prays for the mountains to help him and they can't help him. And he finally we're told he puts his head between his knees and he cries and he dies. He cries himself to death. And a voice came out of heaven saying Rabbi Eliezebendur Dai is destined for the world to come. And again Rebi Huran Nasi cries out there are some people who spend their entire lives working to get into the kingdom of heaven and some people are able to accomplish it in one moment and then he says beyond that and they're given the title of Rabbi like Eliezebendur Dai. And finally the next page in the Talmud Tracted of Al-Azara 18a the famous story of Rabbi Hanina Bentradion one of the great martyrs who was burned to death by the Romans. They wrapped him in a Torah scroll and in order to prolong his death they put tufts of wool on his heart and he soaked it in water. They didn't want the fire to kill him as quickly as it could. And the executioner the executioner, Roman executioner turns to Rabbi Hanina Bentradion and says listen if I remove those tufts of wool from your heart and I turn up the fire so it burns even harder when you guarantee that I will go to heaven with you. And Hanina Bentradion says I do and the Roman executioner did exactly that he took off the tufts of wool from Rabbi Hanina Bentradion's heart and he increased the fire and then he himself jumped into the fire with Hanina Bentradion and again a sound of voice came out of heaven saying that they're welcoming Hanina Bentradion and the executioner into heaven. And again Yehudaan Nasi cries out some people they spend a whole life trying to earn their place in the world to come and some people are able to achieve it just in a few moments. The question is why is Rebbe crying in these stories? The Talmud says in these three stories Bacha Rebbe, Rebbe cried in each of these cases he cried and he says look some people spend an entire lifetime to earn their share in the world to come and some people achieve it in a moment. Why was he crying? He should have been thrilled for these people he should have been happy for them and one famous explanation of this story is that he was crying because he saw what it's possible to achieve in just a few moments. It's possible for a person to achieve to become worthy of life in the world to come and so he was crying because he said to himself look at this every single moment of life is so precious it's so precious that a person can gain entrance into the world to come in a manner of moments and he was crying because he probably himself realized did I use every moment of my life to its ultimate potential or did I waste these precious moments of life? And I think that's what's so critical for us to think about when we spend five hours a day on our phones is that making use of our life to its full potential or are we taking precious moments of life and just throwing them away like anything else in life like eating, like working we have to learn to exercise moderation I don't think it's reasonable to say to ourselves we're gonna throw out our phones but we can turn off the push notifications on our phones we don't need to get the beeps and the buzzes and the bells and the chimes every two seconds we don't need to go online first thing in the morning it might be a good idea to start off the day with praying, with meditating, with studying Torah not the very first thing to go online put that off and maybe do something more important first thing in the morning we don't need to take our phones to bed with us we should put our phones away when we're having meals when we're at a class when we're at a synagogue go to a synagogue sometime during the week and look at how many people are on their phones there's no place for a phone in the synagogue if you're speaking to a friend for God's sake put the phone away how many times am I speaking to someone and they're now looking me in the eye they've got most of their attention on the phone and once in a while the head bobs up to look at me and I'm sure it's happened to all of you I mentioned before Nancy Collier who's a psychologist specializing in internet addiction and she has a wonderful book called The Power of Oath The Power of Oath I once heard her interview here in Toronto on the radio I was driving up to Thornhill for a class that I was taking at night and I heard from the middle of the interview I didn't hear from the beginning I didn't even hear her name and I was listening to this woman and I was saying this woman is amazing she was giving the most incredible advertisement for observing Shabbat that I ever heard in my life and she was saying that just like our computers need to reboot we need to reboot we need to spend a day where we turn our devices off and we have a media fast we have a phone fast a Shabbat media Shabbat the Lubavitcher Rebbe once had a meeting with a family and the family brought along their five-year-old daughter and the family came to discuss some serious problems they were having and on the way out the little girl indicated that she had something she wanted to ask the Rebbe and the parents were embarrassed the Lubavitcher Rebbe is extremely busy and he's got a million people that want to see him and the parents wanted to usher the kid out quickly but the Rebbe said you have a question it's important what's your question he asked the little girl so the little five-year-old girl asked the Lubavitcher Rebbe Rebbe do you think that nuclear power is dangerous? is it something that we should be concerned about and the Rebbe was very very impressed with this serious question from this little girl and he said to her that's a great question and he turned to the little girl he smiled and he said let me ask you do you have any knives in your kitchen? you probably have knives in your kitchen right? and the little girl said yeah we have many knives and he said to the little girl are they dangerous? so the little girl said well it depends what you use them for she said you know God forbid you can use a knife to hurt someone but otherwise knives can be very useful you can't eat a lot of your food without a knife you can't prepare food without a knife so the Rebbe said to this girl well the same thing that you've said about knives we can say about nuclear power it depends on how you use it it can be very very destructive and very dangerous on the other hand it can be extremely useful and so the same judgment applies to the internet to smartphones to this digital technology it can be very dangerous it can be extremely destructive to our lives it can wreak havoc in so many ways on the other hand if we use it wisely with moderation, with wisdom it can be an incredibly powerful and wonderful tool to do amazingly wonderful and positive things in life let's pray all of us that we choose wisely