Under the dinner table, my hands fidgeted with a clean napkin. Folding it, twisting it, turning it every which way. Above the table, conversation flowed, another family dinner. Until someone noticed something. I can’t tell you who pointed it out first, but suddenly my brothers and I realized we were all doing the same thing to our napkins. We looked at each other and laughed.
We had watched my dad do this at nearly every meal our entire lives. Somehow, without ever deciding, our hands had learned.
It made me wonder how many other things we carry around without realizing where we learned them. How many of the ways we speak, the ways we react, the things we notice or don’t notice, we practiced long before we ever chose them.
Judaism itself is something we practice. Not quite like a doctor who practices medicine- a profession that you eventually master. Practice like a musician does: something you return to again and again, not because you are bad at it, but because the practice itself changes what you are capable of doing.
Whether we realize it or not, we are practicing something every day: how we pay attention, how quickly we respond, how we argue, how we judge other people, how we decide who belongs.
Eventually, those practices become part of us. We are being shaped all the time – by the people we love, by our families and communities, by what we read and watch, even by what frightens us and what captures our attention. Much of that shaping happens without us noticing at all. And it doesn’t just affect how we treat other people. It shapes who we become when no one is watching.
So the question is not whether we are being shaped. We are. The question is whether we will become intentional about what we are practicing, and therefore, about who we are becoming.
Let’s start with an obvious example. I, personally, spend an average of four or five hours a day looking at my smartphone. I suspect I am not alone. And in those hours, I am surrounded by voices competing for my attention: news, social media, politics, advertisements, notifications—all of it insisting that it deserves our attention right now.
We live in an economy built around attention. News organizations compete for our clicks. Social media platforms compete for our outrage. Algorithms compete for our curiosity. Even our inboxes seem to demand immediate responses. And if we are not constantly reacting, it can feel like we are falling behind. The demand is clear: React now. Respond immediately. Do not let a moment pass unanswered.
We do not just become people who answer emails quickly. If we practice that long enough, something happens. We become more accustomed to reacting before we have had time to process. And eventually, we bring that same reactivity to our inner lives. The same impatience with a difficult feeling, the same refusal to sit with something before responding to it.
Into all that noise, Shabbat whispers something entirely different: not every demand requires an immediate response.
For twenty-five hours, we could let the email wait. We could let the news cycle go on without us. Casper ter Kuile writes in The Power of Ritual that choosing Shabbat is “profoundly difficult,” because stopping can feel like failing by the rules of competition we live under every other day—rules that teach us that our value comes from what we accomplish, what we produce, and how quickly we respond.
Whenever I receive a text or an email that upsets me, my immediate instinct is to respond, well, not just to respond- rather to explain myself, defend myself, make sure the other person understands exactly why I am upset. But sometimes, when I get such an email or text on Shabbat, I wait.
At first, I am angry. But then I replay the conversation in my head. I imagine every possible way I could respond. I give the feeling some time, and I start to notice instead of immediately acting on it, by Saturday night, what felt urgent on Friday afternoon does not feel quite so urgent anymore. I just stopped letting the feeling decide what I do next.
That is one of the gifts of Shabbat. Now I am not suggesting that we observe Shabbat including every traditional prohibition. I’m suggesting that we set aside one day a week when not everything gets an immediate response. One day to remember our attention is not infinite. One day to practice not living at the speed of whatever is making demands on us. And the more we practice that pause, the more capable we become of finding it when we need it most.
Our popular culture teaches us to react. Judaism gives us the practice of pausing.
When speed becomes our default setting, we stop taking the time to see the fullness of who is standing in front of us. Instead, we look for a classifying shortcut—Friend or enemy. Right or wrong. With us or against us. It shapes how we communicate online and how we talk to the people closest to us.
I felt this recently when, a few hours into a conversation with someone new, she looked at me and asked, “So, what do you think about Gaza?”
It quickly became clear that this was not an invitation for conversation. She was not asking about my relationships with Israelis and Palestinians, or the complexity I carry as a rabbi and a Reform American Jew. She wanted to know whether I would pass her test. Would she sort me into an “us” or a “them.” That is what polarization feels like up close.
I left that conversation frustrated for so many reasons, but perhaps what frustrated me most was that this was not how I have learned to have conversations, or to relate to others. Since I was a child in religious school I learned a Jewish methodology of conversation.
Our ancient rabbis never imagined a world without disagreement. They assumed we would argue. The question was how. Judaism promotes a particular kind of disagreement: machloket l’shem shamayim, argument for the sake of heaven. Page after page of rabbinic texts preserve arguments without resolutions. Minority opinions remain alongside majority opinions. The rabbis do not erase disagreement in order to preserve community. They teach us how to disagree without making disagreement the end of the relationship.
A test demands that we prove which side we are on. Makhloket l’shem shamayim asks something harder: to disagree without making the disagreement the whole person.
That starts with a pause—a moment before we sort someone into the category we’ve already decided they belong in, room for the possibility that we do not know the whole story. But it doesn’t end there. We practice the discipline of saying, “I could be wrong.” Not because we have no convictions, but because being certain and being right are not the same thing. We can say, “I fundamentally disagree with you,” and still ask, “Help me understand how you got there.” We can hold a boundary and stay curious. We can reject an idea without reducing a person to it.
Think of the last time you disagreed with someone you love. Did you ask them anything? Did you state out loud- “we may disagree but that is ok” Or did you just wait for your turn to talk?
Our popular culture teaches us to sort. Judaism offers us the practice of remaining curious.
There is another way that we are formed by the world around us. We are taught to make permanent judgments based on a particular moment. Someone says the wrong thing. Someone does something terrible. Someone hurts us. To be clear, sometimes there are real consequences. And people need boundaries. But there is a step beyond that, one we can take almost without noticing: closing the book, deciding that whoever wronged us is exactly and only who they are on their worst day.
And underneath that decision is a much bigger claim: that people cannot change.
Judaism asks us to practice something harder: to leave room for teshuvah.
Yom Kippur is built around the Jewish assumption that we are not complete. Maimonides makes this concrete in explaining four steps of Teshuvah.
Teshuvah is not simply feeling sorry. It means naming the wrong, expressing remorse, making repair where repair is possible, and resolving to act differently. But the fullest measure of teshuvah comes when life presents us with the same choice and we choose another way.
Teshuvah is not a feeling we arrive at once a year. It is a practice we return to.
Our culture is very good at extracting confessions and much less comfortable with transformation. It is easier to ask, “Did they apologize?” then, “Did they change?” That doesn’t mean ignoring harm, abandoning boundaries, or assuming forgiveness is always wise. It means something more basic: a human being is not permanently reducible to one thing they have done.
Eventually, that claim turns inward. Because the person we most need to believe can change is actually ourselves. Yom Kippur asks us to believe that we, too, are capable of becoming different. We are responsible for what we have done. We are not finished.
Our popular culture teaches us to write people off. Judaism offers us the practice of teshuvah—the practice of leaving space for change.
Perhaps that is what these practices have in common.
Shabbat creates space between the demand and the response.
Makhloket creates space between disagreement and dismissal.
Teshuvah creates space between who we have been and who we might yet become.
In that space, we are not free from everything that shapes us. But neither are we entirely captive to it. We have a choice about what we practice next.
Judaism does not automatically make us patient, curious, or capable of change. It asks us to practice. Not to make us perfect. Not to accumulate enough Jewish practices until we can finally call ourselves “good Jews.” But to give us practices that shape us intentionally.
This is the invitation of Yom Kippur: not to prove you have perfected Judaism, but to take responsibility for what you are practicing.
My brothers and I didn’t choose to fidget with our napkins like our father. It took us fifteen years to even notice we had. Fifteen years before we could even ask: did we want that habit, or did it just move in and make itself at home?
Our culture is shaping us every day, whether we realize it or not—teaching us to react, to categorize, to write people off. Judaism asks us to push back, to practice something different. Not because we can escape the forces shaping us. Not because Jewish practice will make our lives easier.
It will not. It may make our lives deeper. Because we can decide those forces will not have the final word about who we become.
May this be a year where we practice with intention.
May our hands learn what we actually want them to know.
May our hearts take on the shape of who we hope to become.
And may we keep practicing, again and again, until it is who we are.
Ken yehi ratzon, May it be God’s will.
G’mar Chatima Tova