The Sabbath Manifesto is a
creative project designed to slow
down lives in an increasingly
hectic world.
The National Day of Unplugging is on March 1-2, 2019. Join us in taking the pledge to unplug from technology regularly. Take the pledge at NationalDayofUnplugging.com. We want to know what you will do when you UNPLUG. Download the I UNPLUG TO _____ poster, take a photo with it and upload your image to NationalDayofUnplugging.com. Share your picture on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
For our Sabbath Manifesto, we created 10 core principles completely open for your unique interpretation. We welcome you to join us as we carve a weekly timeout into our lives and to continue the momentum of the National Day of Unplugging throughout the year.
Mediaite’s Rachel Sklar signed on for the Sabbath Manifesto Unplug Challenge in May because while she admits calling her Blackberry her “life partner,” she also loves a challenge and she also believes that “If God can take a breather, then I’m certainly entitled.”
Read her pre-sign-off column here. And then tune back in to read her postmortem in the Huffington Post later this week.
Josh Radnor, star of the CBS series How I Met Your Mother and writer, director, and star of the Sundance Audience Award-winning movie happythankyoumoreplease (due out in theaters late summer) was the latest celebrity to take our Sabbath Manifesto “Unplug Challenge,” connecting to life without technology for 24 hours last weekend.
He wrote about his experience in the Huffington Post:
No Music
This was a big one for me. I listen to a lot of music. I’d agreed to do a weeklong workshop of a new play at the South Coast Repertory Theater, so I had an hour-long drive down to Costa Mesa Saturday morning. With no music in the car, I did the next best thing: I sang. Like the titular hot tub time machine, I found myself zapping back to my past, unearthing long forgotten melodies I learned in the Reagan era. The first song that popped into my head was the summer camp classic, “The Other Day I Met A Bear.” (“A great big bear, oh way up there…” Anyone, anyone?) I made it through a few verses and got bored. Next (and I have no idea where these were coming from), I hit the great Gershwin tune, “Our Love Is Here To Stay,” and was shocked to hear myself – on this day of all days – arrive at the following lyric:
The radio and the telephone and the movies that we know
May just be passing fancies and in time may go
But oh, my dear, our love is here to stay.
The song was written in 1938 (just Googled it, natch) and I find it amusing that even then, Ira Gershwin noted that all that newfangled technology could be a thorn in our collective side.
No E-mail, No Texting
Here’s the problem: I don’t like who I’ve become when my iPhone is within reach. I find myself checking e-mails and responding to texts throughout the day with some kind of Pavlovian ferocity – it’s not a conscious act, but a reflexive one. I’m not the first to point out that great modern paradox: the more “connected” we get, the fewer true connections we seem to be making. When my eyes and fingers are locked on the iPhone, yes, I’m connecting to people in my life, albeit connection of the electronic variety. But I’m intensely disconnected from whatever’s actually happening around me in that moment.
Whatever the case, I prefer 2010 to 1986. I’ve never cast my lot with the “things-were-better-way-back-when” crowd. If I favor integration over reversion – and that seems the only real option – the question is: how does one navigate a life in this wired world without turning into a robot? Technological advancements are always morally neutral and like with all things, there’s an upside and a downside. The trick, it seems to me, is to find a way to not go unconscious – to be, as they say, in the world, but not of it.
I’m still working out exactly how to do that, but some ritualized unplugging seems a good place to start. It really was a very nice 24 hours – I saw some friends, I sang in my car with the windows down, I rehearsed a wonderful play with some talented folks, I saw my niece and nephew and had a really nice dinner with my sister. Nothing flashy. But it felt real, slower. I could almost hear myself breathing. I’m pretty sure I was alive.”
Read his entire column here.
Eat bread. Drink wine. Light candles. Sound familiar? These three guidelines may resonate with any observant Jew on a Saturday night, but these three rules are also part of the newest online revolution: the Sabbath Manifesto.
Launched in March 2010, the Sabbath Manifesto is an online-based project that, paradoxically enough, encourages people to withdraw from technology. Bearing the slogan, “Slowing down lives since 2010,” it asks followers to take a day of rest from the digital world and engage in other activities.
Read the entire article here.
Judith Shulevitz, author of the new book “The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time,” wrote in the April 16 Washington Post’s “On Faith” column that people have largely rejected the Sabbath because “there’s a light Sabbath and a dark Sabbath.”:
“The light Sabbath features community and festivity and what a famous professor of psychology once called ‘freedom from all slavery to the clock.’ The dark Sabbath bristles with rules and regulations, and at the extreme, fanaticism…Americans may recall the light Sabbath with a certain fondness, at least if they hanker after a calmer way of life. But they are mostly thrilled that over the past 50 years we’ve done away with the dark, coercive one.”
“But what if I told you that we could have some of the light Sabbath back, if we’d accept just a little bit of the dark one? We could have something to which we’d probably say yes–namely, more time for self and family and neighborhood–and all we’d have to do is let ourselves be governed by a few nos, a few rules about not working at a pre-arranged time. Conversely, if we don’t accept a no or two, then the kind of time that used to be protected by the Sabbath–time during which everyone leaves the office or factory and turns to one another for entertainment and sustenance–is in danger of disappearing.
Am I calling for a return to blue laws? Not exactly, if by that you mean the laws that forbid us to buy liquor on Sunday, as well as (depending on the state) to wrestle, box, race cars, play bingo, or go oyster-fishing. What I am saying is that we could learn from the Sabbath how to protect our time against the two grand addictions of the age–work and the Internet. What we’d learn is the immense usefulness, to society, of a structured period of non-productivity, as well as the need to enforce that pause. Putting teeth into a neo-Sabbath might involve legislation–tougher laws restricting off-hours and weekend work, or compensating it at a higher rate. Or it might involve the voluntary revival of old customs, such as the list of non-activities recommended by the just-launched Sabbath Manifesto Project: ‘Avoid technology.’ ‘Get outside.’ ‘Drink wine.'”
“The problem many Americans have with the Sabbath is that it smacks of religiosity. If the Sabbath is a strictly clerical institution, then any laws that help us to keep it breach the wall between church and state, right? Wrong. A mere half-century ago, in 1961, the Supreme Court upheld Sunday-closing laws on the grounds that they did not violate the constitutional rule against state sponsorship of religion. Justice Felix Frankfurter argued that though the Sabbath was first taught in the Bible, the American Sunday had evolved into a secular institution, a civic good, ‘a cultural asset of importance: a release from the daily grind, a preserve of mental peace, an opportunity for self-disposition.'”
The Bay Area news station, KCBS, aired a story on April 11 about the Sabbath Manifesto.
“When you think of the Jewish Sabbath, chances are you think of Hebrew prayers.. candles, wine, bread, and… a day of rest. For thousands of years that was the norm. But now with cell phones always ringing and text messages and tweets coming in, people are having a hard time unplugging,” KCBS’ Jeff Bell reported.
But the Sabbath Manifesto is inspiring people to do it, he said.
Listen to the entire story here.
Adam Clyne,said in his “Who Knew” blog on the PR Week website that the media buzz that developed around the Sabbath Manifesto
“showed that simple ideas can make the national news agenda.”
“It didn’t need a big budget. All it needed was a strong idea idea that captured everyone’s attention. The rest took care of itself.”
Clyne, who is a member of Reboot’s network and helped to craft the idea of launching the Sabbath Manifesto with a National Day of Unplugging, said it was an idea that resonated with him and the people around him:
“Our lives have literally become plugged in. And nowhere is this truer, than in the PR industry, where PRO’s are expected to be on the end of a blackberry night and day and be up to speed with every media, social media and platform.”
“Is it becoming too much? Are we becoming overly reliant on technology – at the cost of quality of life?,” he wonders.
Read his entire post here.
Time Magazine Columnist Joel Stein unplugged for 24 hours last weekend as part of the Sabbath Manifesto “Unplug Challenge” and — got lost because he had turned off his GPS, missed his wife’s friends at a party because he had gotten lost and couldn’t text to let them know and drove really fast to fill in the void of the radio — but he still found the notion of being unplugged addicting.
“Right before sundown on Friday, I used my printer more than I had the rest of the time I’ve owned it. I printed directions, calendars, phone numbers and notes for the book I’m writing, in case I needed to work on it. I clearly have lost all understanding of how long 24 hours is. And of the fact that I would never write anything longer than my name with a pen. A few minutes later, our babysitter showed up, and Cassandra and I headed off to dinner. We were 11 minutes into our experiment when, sitting in traffic, Cassandra suggested we call the restaurant to tell them we’d be late. Then she started singing Lady Gaga songs a cappella. Then she came up with a Twitter joke she wanted me to memorize so she could send it out the next day. Still, it was nice to talk, or sit quietly with the option of talking, without the other person typing. Or listening to Lady Gaga.
“When Sunday night arrived, I dreaded turning my computer back on. I knew it meant I’d have to do work or respond to e-mails from friends and family, i.e., more work. And while the main lesson I took away from my two days is that technology is a gift from God and should never be turned off — one simple text would have kept Cassandra’s friends at the party, which would have led to more drinking and Liberace-level candle lighting — I did learn that I’d rather hang out with my wife and son than find out every time someone retweets me. I don’t want to feel the need to respond to everything as soon as I can.”
That said, he’s back on the grid.
Read the entire column here.
TrendCentral, daily email newsletter and web site featuring relevant trends and cool social happenings of the day called out the Reboot Sabbath Manifesto’s National Day of Unplugging.
“After nearly a decade of wiring ourselves within an inch of our lives only to discover that technology and the Web may be re-shaping our brains, shrinking our attention spans and possibly even making us dumber, it was inevitable that one day we’d start to say ‘enough is enough.’ For some, that day may be here. Sure, everyone knows a few holdouts who never opted into the digital deluge to begin with, but the concept of unplugging is gaining traction among those who most definitely opted in. Unplugging can take many forms; it can be temporary or permanent, limited to specific technologies or all-encompassing. And the reasons for doing it are endless, from Big Brother-style fears to a growing awareness that our behavior is scarily similar to that of lab rats. We can envision a time when unplugging, in one form or another, could become as commonplace as plugging in is today.”
Read the post here.
We have announced in the Huffington Post that in the wake of the nation’s first ever National Day of Unplugging, Reboot is launching the Sabbath Manifesto’s “Unplug Challenge.”:
“Once a month, an “A-lister” will be asked to unplug from cell phones and PDAs, power down computers and tune in to the world. After the 24-hour experiment is over, the A-lister will report on the experience right here in the Huffington Post.”
“The first A-lister to take the challenge is Time magazine columnist Joel Stein, who will record his experiences in his Time column Friday, April 2. In preparation for the “Unplug Challenge,” Stein has already pondered the complexities of turning off his GPS in the driving-centered city of LA, and whether he can listen to his stereo. He will be taking notes on the experience in a way he says he never has – with pen and paper!”
“Look for upcoming reports. In the next few months, we will throw the unplugging challenge to Josh Radnor, star of the CBS series How I Met Your Mother, and writer, director and star of the movie happythankyoumoreplease, winner of the Audience Award at Sundance 2010; and Davy Rothbart of Ann Arbor, Michigan, creator of Found Magazine, a frequent contributor to public radio’s This American Life, and a writer for GQ, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and High Times.”
Read the entire post here.
Beliefnet asks readers on its Religion and Pop Culture blog, “Will you take this weekend as an opportunity to unplug? Read the 10 core principles and see if there are any you can connect with.”
“The 24 hours beginning this Friday, March 19 and extending to Saturday March 20 has been designated as the National Day of Unplugging – in which, ideally, the nation’s multitasking, hyperconnected, iPhone-waving, Tweeting, Facebooking, tech-addicted masses put down their devices and reconnect with the things that are really important.”
“The effort is also inspiring other creative media types; filmmakers Tiffany Shlain and Ken Goldberg – who previously produced “The Tribe,” a popular short film about Jewish identity – were working on their new film “Connected,” which “exposes the importance of personal connectedness in relation to understanding global conditions, ultimately showing how all of humanity is invested in today’s crucial issues” when they saw the Sabbath Manifesto video. Inspired by Reboot’s effort, they created ‘Yelp,’ with the subtitle ‘with apologies to Allen Ginsburg.'”
Read the entire post here.