Your Wrist Is about to Start an Argument with Your Rabbi

If it hasn’t already.

I don’t have a “SmartWatch”. I like my Omega, Seiko, Bulova collection.

Over Rosh Hashanah, several people dinged, beeped, and had flashes on their watches. And I thought: we are nowhere near ready for what is coming.

This isn’t something new, but when the masses start adopting the technology, it is time to revisit halachah vs technology discussions.

Think about what Shabbat actually requires, in practical terms. No writing, no electricity, no carrying in a public domain, no creating or extinguishing fire. The rabbis of the Talmud worked out 39 categories of prohibited labor, melachot, because they were trying to define what it means to rest the way the Torah commands.

They did a remarkable job for people who had never seen a light switch. But they could not have imagined a device smaller than a matchbox, strapped to your wrist, that tracks your heartbeat, reads your messages, monitors your sleep, answers your questions out loud, and occasionally tells you to stand up and breathe. And dings, bleeps, and bloops.

What do you actually do with a smartwatch on Shabbat? Not the halachic (Jewish legal) technicality question, though that is coming for all of us whether we want it or not, and I will get to it in a few minutes. I mean the practical, human, daily-life question that anyone wearing one of these things is already quietly navigating without much guidance.

Why do you need it on Shabbat or Chag?

Right now the landscape looks roughly like this. Some people take the watch off before Shabbat and leave it charging. Simple, clean, no drama.

Some people put it in a mode where the screen stays dark unless you raise your wrist, figuring that passive display is not really the same as activating something.

Some people, and I will not name names, forget entirely and spend Friday night getting gentle haptic nudges from the universe reminding them that a close friend just liked their photo.

The spectrum of observance and interpretation is enormous, and we are hitting a precipice.

But smartwatches are getting better very fast, and that is where things get murky.

These devices monitor your health in real time. They detect irregular heart rhythms.

They can identify a fall and call emergency services automatically, without you doing anything at all. That last feature is not trivial. If your grandmother is wearing one and it calls an ambulance after she collapses, nobody is going to tell her she should have taken the watch off.

Pikuach nefesh, the preservation of human life, overrides virtually everything in Jewish law, and any serious posek (halachic decisor) will tell you so immediately. YMMV, about how far you want to use this reason to wear one.

The harder cases are the ones that are not emergencies. What about passive health monitoring running in the background all day?

What about a watch face that shows the time, the way a regular watch always has, but happens to be counting your steps and measuring your blood oxygen while it does it?

What about an always-on display that updates without you touching anything?

Jewish communities in the diaspora have not had to think carefully about this kind of technology-meets-religion friction at scale since the invention of the microphone in synagogue created decades of argument, and that argument is still not fully settled in every community.

We got over the refrigerator eventually, which was not allowed at first.

There is something almost physical about the transition into Shabbat for some people, and obviously for their things. The week stops. And then your watch buzzes because your step goal is ninety percent complete and it wants you to know, even on Shabbat?

Since Oct 7, many people have carried their phones with them on Shabbat, especially with their spouses, children, and relatives still on perpetual Miluim (Reserves) duty in Gaza, Lebanon, and other places. The majority solely for calls they don’t want, but some other people can’t live without knowing the latest news, mundane or not. Some do so so they are not caught in no man’s land should a siren go off, too. Long Shabbat walks in fields without alerts because fields are not populated.

The technology is not going away, if anything, it is creeping into our lives more.

We may end up like the Amish at some point. One can understand their world better when you look at it through this lens.

Within another 5 years, smartwatches or their successors will be even more ubiquitous than they are today.

The communities that engage seriously with this now, the rabbis willing to sit down with the actual device and understand what it does before issuing a ruling, will serve their people far better than the ones who wave it away as obviously forbidden or obviously fine without thinking it through. Both of those easy answers are probably wrong, and right, at the same time.

The conversation picked up again during and after Rosh Hashanah, a little awkwardly, in shuls and around Shabbat tables. I understand the technology, and even some of the Halachot, even people that say anything electrical or mechanical is Muktze(not to be touched).

But what is the real problem? People, left to their own thinking, don’t really think it out and then someone shows up with a watch on their wrist and the screen dark, and someone else raises an eyebrow, and suddenly you have a twenty-minute discussion about melacha, and automation, and what it means to truly rest. Which is, come to think of it, a very Jewish way to spend a Friday night, or just lunch at the shawarma shop near you.

Shabbat has survived the printing press, the railroad, the telephone, electricity, refrigerators, the automobile, and the internet.

It will probably outlast the SmartWatch too. Then again, timers came into being because of a practical need. No doubt you can get an app for your SmartWatch for Shabbat mode, but what’s the point? It is then just a watch, right?

But every generation has to figure out what rest actually means in their own time, with their own tools. My kids make fun of me because I like my “old” watches, although my son has come around to appreciate a nice watch. His platoon gifted them all a SmartWatch. But on Shabbat he wears his “old” watch, will see how long that lasts.