2 Tishrei 5787 / September 12, 2026
Rabbi David Edleson | Temple Sinai | South Burlington, Vermont
Narcissus and the Rabbis
I remodeled my bathroom last year.
We’d been planning it for years.
Tim and I had been schlepping Armenian painted tiles back from Jerusalem in our carry-on’s trip after trip for years.
I spent hours in the online shopping black hole looking at thousands of navy-blue tiles, thousands of faucets and sinks, shower heads, bathtubs.
I could tile a second bathroom with the number of samples I ordered.
It worked out well.
I love my bathroom…too much.
I love the navy-blue Spanish tiles.
I love the Jerusalem stone accents.
I love my enameled cast iron soaking tub.
But the thing I love most is a framed Armenian tile mural of a quote I love from a Hebrew poem.
It was my starting inspiration.
It is from a poem by the Israeli poet Dalia Ravikovich, aleiha shalom, that has stayed with me since I first read it decades ago.
The poem is “Atah B’vodai Zocher” - “Surely, You Remember”.
In the heart of the poem is this line:
Narkis ahav kol-kach et atzmo
Tipesh mi she lo mevin she hu ahav gam et ha-nachal.
Narcissus loved himself so much
It is a fool who fails to understand that he also loved the water.
I like the way that line makes a playful commentary on my profound love of taking baths.
But there is something deeper in it.
We all love what reflects us back to ourselves.
We all love what reflects us back to ourselves in the way we like to imagine ourselves.
Sometimes it’s a spouse that sees us the way we want to see ourselves.
Sometimes it’s our children or our parents.
Sometimes it’s a cause or a movement we join.
Sometimes, it’s how we present ourselves on social media and the likes and positive comments we get back.
Narcissus loved seeing himself reflected in the water.
Ravikovich’s poem reminds us that he loved the water because it reflected back to him a version of himself he loved but could never fully attain.
Like the way so many of us curate our lives on social media.
Here we are having an amazing time on vacation in Paris, at the Louvre.
Here we are having a purely loving and joyful moment with our kids.
Here we are the happy couple deeply in love.
Here we are doing great after divorce.
Here we are humble bragging about an accomplishment.
Rarely do we show the stress and exhaustion of travel;
or the hordes of people in line at the Louvre, taking selfies carefully to crop out the lines they are part of.;
or the melt-down the kids had just after you staged the photo;
or the fight you just had with your partner;
or the crippling insecurity lurking just behind that accomplishment.
Why would we?
Nobody wants to see that, but we all live it.
It is as much a part of these messy sacred lives as anything, and often more.
Social media invites us to curate our lives so that others see, and just as importantly, we see a version of our lives that we can fall in love with.
What happened to Narcissus, though? He ended up super popular, happy, and living his best life, right?
No. As he stared at his phone for hours and hours,
instead of making dinner,
instead of reading a book,
instead of playing his flute,
instead of hanging with friends.
He stared at that water as it scrolled by (finger swipe), and wasted away at the edge of the water, weak, hungry, mentally depleted, depressed and anxious.
Mirrors, as mythology warns us, can be dark: they can steal your soul.
Last night I talked about the loneliness that seems result from our lives on screens.
Today, I want to talk about the way our phones, social media, and the algorithms are not reflecting who we are, but distorting and reshaping who we are and what we and our societies are becoming.
This technology has surely changed our lives, made things like travel and staying in touch with friends so much easier and given us a sense of freedom and expansiveness, a sense of connection.
I have come to fear, though, that it is taking much more than it is giving.
Since this is our time of t’shuvah and confession, I confess I love my phone.
I do.
I said to Tim when we got our first one, “this is better than anything on Star Trek!
I love voice texting.
I love Facetime and WhatsApp.
I love podcasts on my drive to work.
I love having all my photos right there.
And I love scrolling on Instagram and Pinterest when I was planning the bathroom.
But the longer I have one, the more I am becoming aware of how much I am attached to it, how many times I day I think about picking it up even when I don’t.
I caught myself the other day sitting outside in my garden on a beautiful day my waters lilies in bloom and I was scrolling on the phone.
Spending so much time on screens is draining our lives of richness and color.
All that color is now on the phone, enhanced by digital apps and AI.
Look around a room at a café or restaurant these days, or in the line to get into the Louvre while on vacation in France, or at night on the couch.
So many people are on their phones.
It’s also like Star Trek but not in a good way. It’s more like The Borg, beings that had become half machine and part of a larger algorithm.
WE ARE THE BORG. YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE.
Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist and author of THE ANXIOUS GENERATION documents the clear and overwhelming evidence that links the rise of anxiety and mental health issues, especially among young people, with the rise of social media.
But now he admits that as bad as the mental health crisis among the young is, possibly more destructive is what the phones are doing to our ability to focus, our ability to give something our undivided attention.
He calls it ‘attention fragmentation’ – the systemic destruction of our capacity to focus.
The years of dopamine hits from watching short-form videos and reels is making it hard for many of us to pay attention long enough to really get into a serious film or novel.
Much less boring tasks at work or home.
Task paralysis, where we don’t get needed things done because we keep picking up and checking our phones and going on detours, impacts us daily, and it definitely impacts our youth.
Our online lives also make real life seem messy and boring. Things can start to meaningless and flat compared to the curated, algorithmic world that is designed to hook us directly through our visual cortex right into our brains.
At a time of global climate crisis, a rise in authoritarianism and extremism, and the rise of AI, when we need to be paying attention and focusing on complex long-term solutions to complex long-term problems, we are instead distracted by every new drama or outrage.
Or by fitness videos, or dance reels, or Israel posts or decluttering, or cooking or my favorite: cute puppy videos. The list goes on.
We look in the mirror of social media to see ourselves as people who will get more fit, more done, have more fun, cook better food, live in a neater house, train our dogs – but that’s not what social media sees when it looks at us: It sees a commodity that it is monetizing by getting us to do less and watch more.
Like Narcissus, we are being drained by our own desires, and more and more, those desires are shaped by what comes across our feed.
We feel we are choosing what we see, but at a deeper level, we are indentured servants to algorithms and advertisers and influencers.
We are losing agency.
What we see is choosing us, using what is knows about us to grab and sell what attention we have left.
It turns out that Jewish tradition has a name for this.
It calls it theft.
The rabbis teach that there are seven kinds of theft, but the worse among them is “gneivat daat”, literally, theft of knowledge, by which it means theft of our awareness and agency.
It seems odd that they don’t put material theft first. But as Sara Wolkenfeld, the Chief Education Officer at Sefaria points out, “It makes sense if we consider the weighted word da’at (knowledge). Da’at is what sets humans apart. It is the tree of the knowledge (da’at) of good and bad, from which Adam and Eve taste, which results in human life as we know it. Rabbinic literature invokes da’at to indicate that someone is capable of informed consent and able to make uncoerced decisions. Geneivat da’at cautions us about the dangers of someone else seizing control over our internal consciousness and unique decision-making abilities.”
And as much as this technology is changing us, perhaps more disturbing is what it is doing to our society, particularly in pushing us to more extreme absolutist views, moralism, conspiracy theories, and polarization.
In 1995, a study asked people who identified as left-wing to rate their level of sympathy for right-wingers, and vice versa, with 0 being absolute hatred and disgust and 100 being love and trust. That year, the average score on both sides was 40. In 2015, the average score had dropped to 7. Within twenty years, Americans began to hate those who hold opposing political views, and the same thing is happening in many places, including England, India, Poland, Hungary, Brazil and Argentina.
Shaped by algorithms, little by little, we start to perceive those with different political views as not only mistaken, but as the enemy.
We find it increasingly difficult to understand how it is possible that our truth, which is so obvious to us and everyone we know, is not accepted by people from the other echo chamber.
And what group of people has historically been blamed for not accepting what other people said was truth?
What group of people has always been blamed for getting in the way of Divine Redemption whether it is Jesus or the great Socialist Revolution and the warmth of collectivism?
In a polarized world of finger pointing, inevitably, Jews will become the thing everyone can point at instead of at each other.
We shouldn’t be so surprised that we are being particularly harmed by social media and algorithms. It was inevitable.
Yes, we have access to things like Sefaria, and lots of amazing Jewish social media and learning sites. I love these.
But these same algorithms that sell us by capturing our attention with good things have found that antisemitism captures people’s attention in a way that almost nothing else does.
Antisemitism has always been as a political organizing tool, a way of uniting factions of fractious people by attacking and blaming the Jews.
It has worked for centuries, and because antisemitism is so old and so pervasive, so deeply rooted in Christian and Moslem society, people have an unconscious bias toward it and often don’t even recognize it when it is shaping their world view.
Antisemitism is its own form of “gneivat daat” because it convinces people that a big lie is a truth.
And blaming Jews sells.
If we want to understand why “No Jews No News” and why Israel gets such disproportionate attention from media, it is because it sells.
It gets clicks.
In fact, former executives at major NGO’s like Amnesty International and Doctors Without Borders have said that when they post things against Israel, they get more clicks and more donations. Their budgets depend on it, and so they have not published reports that show Israel in a better light because it impacts their bottom line.
And when these tendencies are multiplied exponentially by very sophisticated bot farms in places like China, Russia, Iran and Turkey that see antisemitism as a way of turning us against each other, it is no wonder that we are reeling from how much hatred against us has spiraled on both the left and right.
And where do we follow these changes and respond to them? On Social Media.
Indeed, if we want to fight the current rise in antisemitism, we need to focus on social media and on fighting to give us more control of the algorithms social media companies use to hook us and of the business model where our attention is being sold as an expensive commodity, and our only gain is “free” access to the app.
Too long we tried to fight antisemitism by arguing facts or explained the history and tropes of antisemitism - research shows it is utterly ineffective.
Or we’ve tried to show people how antisemitism is leading to an increase in violence against us and others only to hear that that we are exaggerating and our suffering is irrelevant.
This technology has weaponized freedom of speech and expression and turned it against itself.
Antisemitism is also being weaponized by these apps and commodified, while masquerading as a form of political expression and justice.
As a community, we need to become more active in promoting legislation that specifically addresses these algorithms and the way social media is feeding us more and more extreme and polarizing material, more hate material, and more material aimed at unravelling civil society.
Vermont and other states have begun to pass laws to try and regulate these algorithms and AI, but so far it has only danced around the edges; it has not addresses the core business model of algorithms and it is that model that is actively unravelling our civil society and liberal democracies.
I want UJA Federation, the Council of Presidents of Jewish Organizations, the ADL, the URJ and CCAR and other major Jewish institutions to focus on what these algorithms and business model are doing to our societies and how antisemitism is just one symptom of a much larger problem that becomes Orwellian if we don’t work together to find reasonable solutions.
We also have the opportunity to renew old alliances and create new ones because concerns about social media cross lots of the usual political divides and boundaries.
Child advocates. Mental health advocates. Educators. Nature lovers. All these share our concern and so instead of arguing, perhaps we can build alliances and consensus around these issues.
And while we are working to lead and build alliances on these larger issues, in our local lives, day-to-day lives we need to find ways to get away from our screens.
That’s hard. I turn into Gollum from the Lord of the Rings when I can’t find my phone. “Precious.” Where’s my Precious?
It’s hard, but it is needed.
We need - I need - to read more books and without our phones by our sides when we do. We need to have more face to face time with people, more dinner parties, more conversation that includes the hard parts.
We need to try “Digital shabbats” a Jewish initiative to let Shabbat be a technology free day. After all, unplugging is kind of Shabbat’s point. And by the way, a study found that while going 24 hours without our phones creates a good deal of anxiety in most adults, Shabbat observants Jews who already give up their phones one day a week had much less trouble giving it up another day. Baruch haShem.
Judaism is a tradition that demands attention, whether it is learning Hebrew, learning the prayers, studying Torah, or just sitting through High Holy Day services.
Judaism is a long form tradition.
This year, let’s try to put down our phones more, and look up from our screens,
This year let’s stay up too late talking with real people instead of scrolling.
And instead of AI memes and videos, take a walk in this beautiful state and let in the beauty of the world around us.
And see the beauty of the people around us, all made in the Divine Image, even the really annoying ones.
On this, the Birthday of the World, let us shake off the stupor of too much screen time, of doomscrolling and brain rot. Let the shofar wake us up to our lives in this world, in these bodies, with all our senses, with all our hearts and all our souls and all our strength.
Let us try every day to pray, to walk, to sing, to read, to talk.
And when the real world and real people call to us, let’s put down our devices and close our laptops, and say, “Hineini.” Here I am.
INTRODUCTION TO TORAH READING: Genesis 22:1-19
Last night I spoke about loneliness and how much it is part of the human condition. The section of the Torah we read this morning, the Akedah, or the near-sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham, is, I think, among the loneliest stories in the Torah.
The classical rabbis try very hard not to see that. They make this an unexpected story about faith and connection. In their reading, Isaac is an adult and aware of what is going to happen and so when the text tells us “the two of them walked on together”, it means they were in it together, spiritually united, a father-son team.
But that is not how I read it. Here we have a happy, successful, connected if complex family, and in our portion, it all falls apart. First Sarah “cancels” Hagar and Ishmael and demands they be sent away. Then God tells Abraham to sacrifice his other son. They arrive at the mountain, leave their servants behind, and start the hike up. How lonely that walk is! Sarah has been left behind heartbroken and betrayed and dies soon after.
Abraham must feel betrayed by God who promised his descendants would come through Isaac. Isaac, who never says much, asks where the ram is for the sacrifice, and when Abraham gives a vague answer, Isaac seems to shrug. He doesn’t say another word. Imagine the loneliness of that walk. There is betrayal by the people you love on every level; even God is now ghosting you. Abraham, Isaac, and Sarah never speak to one another again.
Perhaps the story is read on Rosh Hashanah not because it is a tale of obedience and faith, but because it is a lesson on how easy our closest relationships can rupture, and how lonely that is. And the Jewish antidote to that rupture, is “t’shuvah,” or reflection, forgiveness and change.
T’shuvah, which requires conversation, which requires taking responsibility, requires asking for forgiveness and forgiving others, is a Jewish spiritual technology to combat loneliness and self-isolation we see in Abraham’s family, and as we read it today, instead of focusing on God’s test, perhaps focus instead on the rupture of relationships, the lack of honest communication, and the inability of any of them to stop what was happening before an angel had to step in.
