Your One Wild and Precious Life

For about a month, the last line from one of Mary Oliver's poems, "The Summer Day," kept appearing to me in books, movies, and even in a podcast:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? 

As I reread Parashat Ki Tisa, I began thinking of golden calves of 2026. This is a meaty portion with many important events. Notably, Moses receives the first set of the 10 Commandments while the Israelites ask Aaron to create the Golden Calf for them. Moses is SO mad when he sees the calf, he breaks the first set of the 10 Commandments and goes back up Mount Sinai to beg God to create another set.

Many folks have written commentaries about the Golden Calf, and for good reason: it's an amazing metaphor for the things people use to distract themselves from what matters. I challenge us to think about our own modern-day golden calves that may be stealing our time, attention, or energy while distracting us from the things that matter to each of us (I immediately think of my phone).

When used as a tool, my smart phone can help me organize my life in so many ways, but it can also be a daily distraction from many important things in my life. While I acknowledge that having access to a phone with unlimited data and WIFI is a luxury that many people don't have, I also realize that, for me, it runs the risk of becoming my Golden Calf. When I send that "one quick email" during the time I'm spending with my kids at night, it's a distraction. When I pull it out to "check one thing" or reply to a quick text during a meal, it's a distraction. We know from research that excessive phone use can negatively impact both physical and mental health.

As a URJ camp director, I see the positive aspects of unplugging from screens in real time. Our camps are screen-free and, although our staff carry their cell phones, we encourage everyone to be as tech-free as possible. Campers are asked to leave phones and tablets at home. During our family camps, women's weekend, and alumni Shabbaton, folks gather to connect. They talk about books, sing together, learn new skills, and connect over shared experiences. In a beautiful way, we kindly force ourselves to connect with one another panim al panim, face-to-face, without screens. In a world where even our camp team mostly interacts through screens, being together in person is a beautiful gift.

Time is our most precious resource. None of us know how much we have or when our time could abruptly come to an end. How would each of us spend the day if we knew it was our last? What would we do differently every moment of the day if we had someone sitting next to us, asking, "What are you doing with your one wild and precious life?" Would we doom scroll? Watch hours of reality tv? Perhaps ... or, maybe we'd make different choices.

This is why camp, unplugging, reflective experiences, and purposeful contemplation are even more important in our busy and noisy society today. However, we are being trained to be less attentive by forces around us. Johann Hari, author of "Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again," teaches 12 different reasons we have lost our ability to focus, among them social media, phone notifications, home pods, less sleep, poor diets, information overload, and task switching. Hari argues that our society is built to interrupt the flow of our thinking. For many years now, I have read articles and heard about the "culture of busyness" that we exist in. Collectively, we have lost our ability to relax, to luxuriate in slowness.

This is just one Golden Calf of today, but I would argue it impacts many folks and is especially prevalent with our teens and younger folks. How can we encourage them to focus on what truly matters to them from a young age? How do we take responsibility for the culture we have created by scrolling on our phones and the modeling we have already shown them?

One way is to take a phone sabbatical. Leave your phone off for Shabbat, or even just Friday night. We use the built-in helpers on our phones, such as screen time and focus settings. We go to camp, where we can lay in the grass for cloud watching, learn new skills, meet people, and learn about the world around us without a screen in our hands. We model a life filled with meaningful activities, less screens, and purposeful time connecting panim al panim. Like the Golden Calf offered the Israelites a sense of familiarity in a time of a lot of unknowns, my phone offers a similar sense of security, helping me stay connected with the world. However, by staying connected to the world, I sometimes sacrifice connecting with those who are right in front of me. One of my goals moving forward will be more purposeful use of my phone.

I challenge you to take some time to ponder, even for five minutes, your own Golden Calf. How can you fight distractions? Perhaps even answer for yourself what you plan to do with your one wild and precious life.