From Amen to Amen

School districts around the country from New York State to Texas have instituted cell phone bands. In fact, through 2025, some 37 states have enacted laws or policies regarding K-12 classroom or school cellphone usage, with many mandating a ban or strict limitations. These policies vary from “bell-to-bell” bans forbidding phones for students all day long, to “instructional time” bans. These bands include locking ones phone away for the school day or placing one’s phone in a pouch or collecting phones in the back of a classroom. In New York State called the bill to be legislation, for example, Governor Huckle instituted that from the ringing of the first bell, indicating the start of the school day to the ringing of the bell indicating dismissal students for cell phones should not be seen were used for anything but pedagogic purposes. Her statement on this policy said, “I know our young people succeed when they are learning and growing, not clicking and scrolling.”  (see:https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/distraction-free-schools-governor-hochul-announces-new-york-become-largest-state-nation)

As an elected trustee of our local school board, I have sat at the table for the conversations about these policies and the conversations about the deeper underlying challenges of how we continue to engage and connect in the digital age. On the one hand are the very troubling reports and research about children in our digital age failing to thrive. These focus on an array of concerns, including sleep disruption, mental health challenges, and increases in social bullying and isolation.  On the other hand, are some critical benefits that smartphones have introduced to our schools, including adaptive technologies, better access to robust rigorous academic content, and an increase in a sense of well-being.

Mobile devices, like the digital era in which they have emerged – disrupt. They interrupt our routines and challenge us to be thoughtful and intentional about our engagement with them. In the absence of that thoughtfulness, we often find ourselves overwhelmed with the opportunities and allow the disruption to become a takeover. What is most interesting about the research on smartphones and the consequent bans on phones in school is that the positive gains are on the same continuum as the negative challenges. Students might gain a sense of well-being and yet research also suggests that students are facing increased social bullying and isolation. Students might be able to access better adaptive technology but also face increases in mental well-being. In the gaps between the benefits and the detriments is a space that might be filled by the intentionality of choices – when we choose to engage with the tools digital technology offers to improve our lives; and similarly choices when we set aside the technology, to improve our lives. Research has evidenced that while there are incredible benefits in having access to smartphones, that there are perils in succumbing to the overwhelming digital environment to the detriment of being present, in person, to the vibrant community in ones immediate surroundings.

Interestingly, our three major religions, Judaism, Islam and Christianity, all talk about the imperative of being present to one another, to your community but also to your neighbor, who you might not know as well. All three religions hold to the same Golden Rule – and it is this rule that might inform our practices in a digital era with smart phones and mobile devices – Love your neighbor as yourself.

The rest, as our Rabbis teach us, is all commentary. Ibn Ezra comments on this verse, that it means that we should act as, “le-re’akha is to be taken literally. Its meaning is that one should love that which is good for one’s neighbor as he does for himself.” How do we know what is good for our neighbor, what is good for the other, not only what is good for ourselves? We can only be cognizent of the collective needs of our community when we are deeply connected to one another, when we “know” the needs of the others among us, as much as we know our own needs. Our commentators lived in the real world, they were very aware that not everyone was acting with our best interests at heart. The love we have for our neighbors is not meant, so we are taught by other commentators, to be at our own expense either. When we encounter Rashbam on this verse, he teaches us, “If he is your neighbor, that is he is a good person like you.; however, if he is wicked you need not love him…”  The LOVE in the Golden Rule is not a feeling, it is an action, it is not dreamlike and unobtainable, it is concrete and operative. LOVE is not ephemeral, it is practical.

Love Your Neighbor as Yourself: it is actionable behaviors to create community and connect across it. Love Your Neighbor as Yourself: could it mean, in our Bell to Bell cell phones are off communities that it should also be: From Amen to Amen, cell phones remain off.

I often face some confusion, in the world of elected public school boards, as to how a clergy member might possibly serve diverse constituents of their district. Personally, this is part of my Rabbinate (anyone curious about being a rabbi and elected official, happy to talk). Our conversation about the place of smartphones in our daily communal lives offers insight into how and where the benefit is dialogical; here school district policies might bridge community needs and conversations that go beyond the K12 environment in ways that grow our language of and sense of strong community for our faith based communities.

And in this way this idea came into being: From Amen to Amen, cell phones are off. Simplistic in leaning on the language already in place in school districts around the country, easily executed. It is not a Rabbi challenge, it is a Clergy challenge. Dependent not on your religion but on Love Your Neighbor as Yourself, that we want to leverage the time we have together to show up, be present and connect.

Love your neighbor as yourself: From Amen to Amen, in every house of worship that from the First Amen of the service and until the closing Amen of our, your conversation should be with your neighbor, with your clergy and with your divine.

Love your neighbor as yourself: that opportunity to connect and to feel you belong to this robust community, From Amen to Amen. Connect to your devices in those times and places where it is beneficial to the work you are doing and to the ways you are navigating this world – from Duolingo to learn another language, to your GPS to find the house for a new friend for a playdate. Leave your mobile device off when you are sitting in community, from the Opera House to your place of Worship, from Broadway to the Classroom.

Love your neighbor as yourself: From Amen to Amen practice the intentionality of being present to your sacred religious community, to see the people in the room and to being prepared to lend your voice to the prayers and petitions to the divine. Turn off your phone when in worship, and turn your eyes upwards, and love your neighbors as yourself.