This New Year, Maybe Less Noise and More Shabbat

What if one night each week wasn’t like the rest?

If you’re anything like me, your morning starts not with sunlight, but with a screen. A quick glance at the phone to check the time. From there: a harmless dip into email, a casual Instagram scroll, a sweep through texts to catch what you missed last night. A ChatGPT query about a mysterious spot on your cheek. Back to Instagram, this time for hot takes on the Jimmy Kimmel fallout. A detour into The RealReal for an autumn-perfect suede bag. A Substack essay about a woman who traded in her iPhone for a flip phone, where all you can think is, she must not have kids.

All before 8 a.m.

From there, maybe you roll over. Maybe you get up. Either way, you’re already carrying the shame of 45 minutes lost to the dopamine slot machine: endless scrolls, clicks and pings siphoning off your brain cells before your eyes have even adjusted to daylight. You try to redeem yourself with the actual newspaper — the one you pay to have delivered to your door, but the phone won’t let you. It sits beside you like a living, breathing organism, pulsing with need. PING. “Are the boys all going back to camp?” PING. “What time should we pick up Margot?” PING. A babysitter’s Venmo request. On and on it goes.

Which is why I can’t stop thinking about Shabbat. The ritual pause that occurs every Friday at sundown until Saturday nightfall - once a week, like clockwork, for thousands of years. The ancient permission slip to stop working, stop producing, stop consuming. To silence the pings and shut the tabs and put the device somewhere else for a while. Shabbat, in its purest form, is a gift of time - sacred, protected and yes, screen-free. And maybe that’s what all of us - Jewish or not, religious or not - are gasping for right now: a boundary, a rhythm, a weekly exhale.

Growing up, I didn’t “do” Shabbat. Sometimes we lit candles before my parents went out, but mostly, my Friday nights were spent maybe with a friend, almost always with a Domino’s pizza, and the company of Full House, Family Matters and the rest of the TGIF television lineup (if you know, YOU KNOW).

Then I married a man who made it clear he wanted to live a more observant life than either of us grew up with. We send our kids to a Jewish day school. We moved to the Upper West Side, still the heartbeat of Jewish life in the diaspora, where Shabbat isn’t just about shutting down for 24 hours. It’s about joy. You only need to walk up and down West End Avenue on a Friday night to see it: families spilling out of apartment buildings, children darting ahead in packs, parents balancing wine bottles and challah under their arms, neighbors calling across the street as they make their way to dinner tables that stay full until long after bedtime.

It’s Friday nights with friends. It’s kids running wild through apartments while parents drink wine and linger at the table. It’s tweens going out for walks, claiming the city as their own for a few hours. It’s social, it’s communal and it’s the hub of life in our community. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote that “Shabbat is not an interlude but the climax of living.” I see it. My kids see it. We’ll tumble out of someone’s apartment at 11pm, sometimes midnight, and my kids will already be asking, “What are we doing for Shabbat next week?”

I once overheard Margot’s friend say, “It’s impossible to have a bad Shabbat,” and it was so touching. Honestly, what do kids want more than being surrounded by their family and their friends? What do any of us want more?

Still, I’ve struggled with my own concept of what Shabbat should mean for our family. It’s hard to go from zero to sixty. There’s a tension there. If the concert’s on a Friday, I’m probably not going. That’s real. But I keep circling back to the question: what is so wrong - or maybe, what could be so right - about one night each week that isn’t like the rest? A night where you’re not hopping on the train, chasing down a reservation, carpooling to a practice, or squeezing in one last email. Instead, it’s slow. It’s intentional. It’s meaningful.

And when my kids - g-d willing - are living down the street from us as adults (cue the Jewish mom joke here), will they keep coming back for Shabbat dinner because it’s simply what they know? Are we setting the precedent now for the kind of family we want to be then? I believe, I hope, we are.

This week marks the beginning of the Jewish New Year. A time for reflection and examination, a time to ask who we want to be in the year ahead and how we want to enrich our lives. The way I’m feeling right now is that perhaps the answer isn’t more, but less. Less noise, less consumption, less of the endless scroll. More presence, more pause, more space for actual life to break through.

Maybe what we all need, in the year ahead, is a little more Shabbat in our lives.