L'61-1ANA TOVAII!

Wishing our friends, family and community
a happy and healthy New Year!

corner then...

Unplug during Yom Kippur to connect
in a whole new way.

I

Joy Fields

Interfaithfamily.com

M

ost Jews, be they secular
or devout, practicing or
not, can agree that we have
enough rules. We have 613 command-
ments, for crying out loud. Actually,
I scanned the list and crying out loud
has no associated commandments, but
practically everything else does. "Shahs"
and "shalt nots" for dressing, eating,
praying, relating. Everything from
criminal justice to dermatitis is covered.
The point is, we probably have
enough ancient wisdom to follow
without adding modern rules, but I am
proposing one more for Yom Kippur.
On this Day of Atonement, there are
five traditional No-Nos:
• No eating and drinking
• No wearing of leather shoes
• No bathing or washing
• No anointing oneself with per-
fumes or lotions
• No marital relations
I would like to add a sixth thing to
this list: Unplug.
Yes, everything. Including the
phone.
I'm a reasonable person. It can be in
your purse or glove compartment to
turn back on in case of emergency. But
unless your tire blows out on the way
to synagogue or a passenger goes into
labor, keep it turned off. Not silenced.
Not set to vibrate. Off.
Yom Kippur is a day to reflect on
your soul. You do not need to know
what Groupons have become avail-
able. You do not need to know who
else liked your picture or what George
Takei is thinking. You can catch up
on all of that tomorrow. Provided you
are inscribed in the Book of Life for
another day. Today, it's time to pray.
Stock prices, sports scores, tempera-
tures, recipes and shark attacks can
all wait a day. You don't need those for
reflection or atonement.
If you must, spend the day before Yom
Kippur setting up brief messages on your
voicemail, email and frontal lobe micro-
chip, alerting the public that you will not
be responding to them the nanosecond
after they send you a message. Then
take a deep breath and turn it all off. The
Earth will continue to rotate.

Change Of Focus
On this holiest of holy days, you
have no appointments, nor are you
making future ones. Your music will
be cantorial, your commentary rab-
binic. Your cloud is on the bimah.
You will remain Tweetless, bumpless
and pokeless, while sharing in the
old-fashioned sense of the word.
Look the stranger next to you in
the eye and smile. Maybe even nod
and greet them. They will not follow
you tomorrow. They will not detect
your address and judge your house/
neighborhood/traffic patterns. They
may even smile back at you without
knowing your job title, alma mater
or potential for providing future
employment and/or purchases. You
might find yourself liking them,
even though no computer program
suggested you might.
During breaks between services,
you can have conversations uninter-
rupted by darting eyes and tapping
fingers. You can listen to and convey
complete thoughts — sentences,
even. You can glance around the
room during lulls and see if you
need to welcome a stranger, assist
an elder, guide a child away from a
potential disaster.
You can drive home paying com-
plete attention to traffic signals,
the car in front of you, pedestrians.
Maybe even roll down the window
for a breath of fresh late summer air.
I would dare suggest prolonging
the techno silence into your post-
Yom Kippur breaking of the fast.
Concentrate on enjoying the food,
the company. Your friends don't need
to see a picture of Aunt Irene's faux
chopped liver. It wasn't really funny
last year, either, by the way.
I think you'll find your day has
been more serene, your reflections
more intense and your anxiety
reduced from spending the day with
less interruption. You'll look forward
to unplugging again one day. Maybe
even set aside one day a week for
unplugging and relaxing. I think
there may even be a commandment
about that, too.

&ill on the corner now!

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Joy Fields is a writer and CPA living in

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September 5 • 2013 49