Torah of Intention for the Age of Distraction (aka Attention Economy)

Yom Kippur Sermon originally delivered at the Princeton Jewish Center October 9, 2019 (5780).

In 1998, two years after I graduated from college, I co-founded an internet startup company. 1998 was the year Microsoft released Windows 98, Apple introduced the iMac, PayPal was founded, and Google hired its first employee.

The story of our startup had all the classic features. There was the garage phase: working 24/7 from a grungy one-bedroom apartment, funded by $10,000 of personal credit card debt. There was the boom phase, raising and spending $150 million dollars to launch our product. There was the bust phase, when the tech market crashed in 2001, funding dried up, and we laid off half of our 300 employees in a single day — a day I will never forget. And there was the disillusioned founder stage, when I looked in the mirror and realized that it was time for me to move on.

We built what, at the time, was the world’s largest online library and marketed it to college students. It was called Questia. We digitized 70,000 academic books — the equivalent of a small college library — and created a state of the art royalty system so that copyright holders were paid for their work. Not only could you search every word of every book in the library for the first time, but when you pasted a quote into your paper, a footnote was added automatically in whatever citation style you wanted.

I found a copy of our business plan in my basement. We wrote that our product would not just revolutionize research, we claimed that it would represent an “advance in civilization.” We were going to bring the full contents of a research library to every person on the globe who had a computer and access to the internet.

Thirty years before we launched our digital library, an economist named Herbert Simon delivered a talk entitled “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World.”[1] Dr. Simon was a professor of Computer Science and Psychology at Carnegie Mellon. He had a Jewish father and self-identified as an atheist. And he saw something about the information age, in 1971, that none of us at the startup understood.

A few minutes into his talk, Dr. Simon shared a story about his neighbors who recently bought their daughter a pair of rabbits. He told the audience: “One was male, one female, and we now live in a rabbit-rich world.” If you have a bunch of rabbits, creating what we would call a rabbit-rich environment, then you will be lacking in whatever it is rabbits consume, that is: lettuce. A rabbit-rich world is a lettuce-poor world. He then applied that thinking to the information economy. These three sentences from his talk forever changed my understanding of the information age:

“…in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”

When Dr. Simon explained that in a world overloaded with information, our attention becomes a scarce and precious resource, he unknowingly articulated one of the greatest spiritual challenges of our time.

Those of you who are connected to Princeton University know that President Eisgruber chose a book about the attention economy by James Williams as the Princeton pre-read this year.[2] Williams worked at Google for ten years before heading to Oxford to earn a PhD in philosophy.

Williams tells the story of how a company whose mission was “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” was paying him to design advertising products that captured eyeballs. “I…came to understand,” Williams writes, “that the cause in which I’d been conscripted wasn’t the organization of information at all, but of attention.” (p10)

Williams was so good at creating advertising products and tools that he received the company’s highest award, the Google Founders Award. It turns out that some of the most brilliant minds of our generation are not designing tools to make our lives better. They are designing tools to capture our attention. Williams puts it this way: “the goals we have for ourselves and the goals our technologies have for us” are not aligned (p9).

Our phones, our tablets, our laptops, our TV’s, our fitbits, our watches: the designers of these devices offer us an exchange: this device will provide you with some information if you provide it with some of your attention. To maximize the attention they capture, designers developed alerts, badges, notifications; blinking lights, beeping sounds and vibrations. Williams and thousands of his technology design colleagues succeeded. The devices have captured our attention.

On Rosh Hashana, I addressed the spiritual challenge facing us as we try to steward the outer environment. On Yom Kippur, I want to address the spiritual challenge of stewarding our inner environment.[3]

The stakes are high. The issue is not one of being distracted during a meeting or even during a Yom Kippur prayer. And although nine Americans die every day from distracted driving, there is a threat that is at least, if not more, pernicious. The real threat is that we are losing our ability to focus on what matters most to us.

While I like to imagine myself as extremely disciplined when it comes to using devices, I have come to recognize my weaknesses. My biggest weakness in the information age is pre-purchase research. Instead of saving time by buying something online, I might spend an hour reading reviews about exactly which kids socks are the very best ones to buy. And when it comes to researching flights, I can easily spend multiple evenings looking at all the different combinations of airports, airlines, stops, times and prices. Instead of hanging out with my kids after dinner, I spend hours going down digital rabbit holes.

Although it can feel like a small trade-off, when we give devices our attention in exchange for a little information, I have come to believe that the risks are indeed great. When our devices steal our attention, a moment here and a second there, like death by a thousand cuts, they rob us, not just of our attention, they rob us of our intentions. Our devices, these weapons of mass distraction, persuade us to spend so much time with them that we lose sight of what it is we want.

Williams put it this way: “What do we pay when we ‘pay’ attention” to our devices all the time, he asks? “We pay [for our] attention with the lives we might have lived.”

As I dove into this spiritual challenge, searching for Jewish wisdom, I found one concept that might just be simple and powerful enough to address this twenty-first century challenge.

It was hidden in dozens of rabbinic stories about what to do when you are distracted during prayer.

It turns out that even though our ancient rabbis didn’t have smart watches or cell phones or even beepers, they still got distracted during prayer. There are many classic texts on this topic, starting with a Mishna [Berachot 5:1] that teaches that even if a snake wraps around your foot, you should not interrupt your prayer, which by the way, I am not convinced was the best halakhic advice.

The rabbis introduced the concept of kavanah to talk about distraction during prayer. The biblical root, kaf- vav- nun- , often means “firmly established” as in Psalm 93, af tikon tevel, bal timot, the world stands firm, it cannot be shaken. But the root KaVeN can also mean to direct or aim, as in pointing a bow with an arrow in Psalm 7(:13). The rabbis created a noun from this root, the word kavana, which we might translate using the English word “intention.”

One place we will encounter this root this afternoon is in the Avodah service, during Musaf. On the one day of the year that the High Priest would enter the holy of holies and pronounce the ineffable name of God, our liturgy tells us that while the people recited their praise outside, the high priest inside the holy of holies — v’af hu haya mitkaven ligmor et hashem — that the priest would intentionally prolong the utterance of the name, before saying titharu, you shall be cleansed. If there is a day to reflect on our intentions, a day to consider our directions, Yom Kippur is that day.

Of all the rabbinic texts on the topic of distraction during prayer, my favorite is a passage[4] from the Talmud Yerushalmi. As the rabbis are discussing what to do if you lose your kavana while praying, Rabbi Hiyya the Great, an early third century Amora, admits, “I never once had intention [during prayer] my whole life. The one time I really tried to have kavana, I [got distracted by a] thought in my heart, wondering, if a tax collector and an Exilarch were both coming to visit the King [at the same time], who would enter first?” Perhaps trying to console his rabbinic colleague, Shmuel, who evidently also struggled with having kavana during prayer said, “I count baby chicks.” Then Rabbi Bon admits that the way he deals with distraction during prayer is to count bricks.

If you take only one lesson from this sermon, it should be that of all the things you should feel guilty about on Yom Kippur, distracted davening is not one of them. Losing kavana at shul appears nowhere on the list of sins we recite during al heyt and ashamnu.

Tucked away in these texts was a phrase that I found helpful for our distracted lives today. The phrase is, l’orer kavana, which we might translate as “awaken our intention.” Our sages offered a number of suggestions for awakening our intention during prayer: the use of the voice, certain head movements, even touching the Torah scroll. In fact, according to the Shulkhan Arukh, the reason that we say the first line of the Shema out loud is to l’orer hakavana — to awaken our intention.[5]

One thing I like about the rabbinic phrase l’orer kavana, to awaken our intention, is that it is does not chide us for losing focus as much as it invites us to re-find our direction, to recall our intention. Instead of slapping our wrist and yelling, “why can’t you just stay focused! You’ll never achieve anything if you keep getting distracted!” our tradition invites us to awaken our intention: to do something that allows us to get in touch with what our ultimate goals are in the moment.

What the rabbis applied to distracted prayer, we can apply to our distracted lives. The antidote to distraction is kavana, intention.

Many of my rabbinic colleagues have rightly suggested that Shabbat is a perfect Jewish model for dealing with our 24/7 lives of distraction. And they are right: practicing a technology Shabbat, of turning all screens off once a week, creates a profound space of intimacy and human interaction.[6] My family strives to do it in our own home and the results are powerful. But I am even more worried about how to take back control of our devices the rest of the week, when they are on all the time.

We should be kind and patient with ourselves and each other as we overcome the pull of our devices. Herbert Simon, the economist who taught us that information consumes attention, pointed out that for many of us, our attitudes toward information were shaped by a culture of poverty. We “are constitutionally unable to throw a bound volume into the wastebasket…Some of us are so obsessed with the need to know that we feel compelled to read everything that falls into our hands.” Today, we might just call it FOMO — fear of missing out. If I don’t check the news before bed or my facebook feed first thing in the morning, I might miss something important.

Another reason to be kind to ourselves is that we now know our devices were designed to capture our precious attention, they were designed to be weapons of mass distraction, they were designed to hack our minds.

Armed with this awareness, and inspired by the rabbinic notion of l’orer hakavana, of awakening our intention, we can ask, each day, as we pick up our phones and strap on our smart watches and open our laptops: “what is my intention in this moment? Where do I want to focus my attention right now?”

Rabbi Soloveitchik taught, “What man fails to comprehend is not the world around him, but the world within him…Man is surely aware of many needs, but the needs he is aware of are not always his own.”[7]

In the attention economy, in an age flooded by information, an age when we are almost never apart from a screen that calls out to us, we risk losing our will. We risk losing our intention. We risk losing touch with what our needs are. The Jewish response is l’orer hakavana: to awaken our intention.

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[1] Published in M. Greenberger (Ed.) Computers, communications, and the public interest. Johns Hopkins Press 1971. PDF at https://digitalcollections.library.cmu.edu/awweb/awarchive?type=file&item=33748.

[2] Stand out of our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy (2018)

[3] James Williams: “Future generations will judge us not only for our stewardship of the outer environment, but of the inner environment as well…Our mission, then, is to not only reengineer the world of matter, but also to reengineer our world so that we can give attention to what matters. (p127)

[4] Talmud Yerushalmi Berakhot 2:4; 5a. The reader may be interested in a sourcesheet and shiur that R. Elie Kaunfer at Hadar put together with this and many related texts.

[5] Orach Chayim 61:4

[6] As Heschel wrote in the Sabbath: “The solution of mankind’s most vexing problem will not be found in renouncing technical civilization, but in attaining some degree of independence of it.” Tiffany Shlain has been an advocate of “unplugging” one day a week for almost a decade and has a new book out on the topic, 24/6: The Power of Unplugging One Day a Week.

[7] Redemption, Prayer, Talmud Torah, Tradition 17:2 (Spring 1978), p62. Talk was originally given in 1973.