Welcome to Soulful Jewish Living: Mindful Practices for Every Day with me, Josh Feigelson.
I’m grateful you’re here, and I hope you benefit from our time together.
There’s an old Jewish joke that goes like this. Four friends are sitting in a restaurant in Moscow. For a long time, nobody says a word. Finally, one man groans, “Oy.”
“Oy vey,” says a second man.
“Nu,” says the third.
At this, the fourth man gets up from his chair and says, “Listen, if you guys don’t stop talking politics, I’m leaving!”
Like most jokes, what makes this one work is that, if you laughed, it probably resonated with your own experience. It certainly does for me.
These days it can feel like we are facing a firehose of news. Half the time, it might feel like we don’t even know if it’s true. Everything feels politicized. I don’t know about you, but there are plenty of days when I’d rather hide under the covers than check what’s going on in the world, much less talk to someone about it.
Social scientists have actually come up with a name for this: News Avoidance Syndrome. In a study by Reuters last year, 40 percent of people around the world reported avoiding the news—with younger people leading the way. Partially it seems like that’s because people feel powerless to change things. A lot of people feel overloaded or worn out by the news. And many folks say the news just makes them feel worse.
All totally understandable. And yet, I hope you’ll agree that this is a problem. Maybe it’s because I remember my Dad reading the newspaper every day, or because I learned in school that paying attention to the news was part of being a good citizen (heck, freedom of the press is in the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution—so it seems pretty important). For a lot of reasons, it seems like it’s a good thing for people to know what’s going on in the world, and it’s a bad thing when we feel like we’re actively avoiding that.
Well I’ve got some good news for you: Judaism, and Jewish mindfulness practices in particular, are here to help. So this is the first episode in a series devoted to engaging with the news. (And, being a responsible reporter, I want to give credit to my friend Jane Eisner, former editor in chief of the Forward newspaper, who helped develop many of these ideas during an online course we recently taught together at the Institute for Jewish Spirituality.)
Over the coming episodes, we’ll explore what drives News Avoidance Syndrome, strategies for responding to it, and creating ways to engage with the news without losing our minds. I hope you find it helpful.
From a Jewish perspective, I want to start with a Hebrew phrase that occurs in several places in the Bible: Lo tuchal l’hitalem. This phrase basically means, don’t turn away. Here’s one way it’s used, from the book of Deuteronomy: If you see someone else’s animal and it’s lost, Lo tuchal l’hitalem: don’t ignore it. Instead, the Torah tells us, take it back to its owner. And if you can’t do that, take care of it. But don’t ignore it.
The Torah uses this expression in similar situations: when we come across something we might rather not deal with—a lost object that needs returning, someone or something that needs help, even when it belongs to someone we don’t like. Basically, the Torah seems like it’s saying: I know you want to hide under the covers. Don’t give in to those feelings.
To me this is a powerful way to understand our desire to avoid the news. Yes, I’d rather not deal with it. Yes, it can make me feel icky. Yes, it can be murky and hard and a mess. So many times, I’d just rather not. And yet, the impulse that’s driving me is the same one the Torah cautions me against: to avoid seeing and hearing, to just pretend that it’s not there.
There are a lot of strategies we can use—setting limits on how much news we consume, being mindful of the sources, and others. We’ll talk about those. But for today, I really want to dial in on this core issue of the emotions driving our behavior. Because that’s so much of what we talk about on this podcast: recognizing our feelings and then creating some space between them and our minds so that we can make an intentional choice about how we want to act.
So here’s a mindfulness practice you can try this week. It’s a journaling practice, so you’ll want to have a notebook or a place on your phone or computer where you can take notes.
For this week, I want to invite you to notice how you feel when you encounter the news—or even just the idea of the news. Note the time, the news source, where you are, and how you feel: 7:05 am on Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal, my kitchen, anxious. Maybe add a little color to that: “I’m feeling anxious because…” Fill in that sentence.
Try to keep track every time you engage with a news source. 12:34 pm, seeing a headline while I’m scrolling on the Wall Street Journal, I’m feeling angry because… Or, 7:25 a.m., feeling agitated after I listened to the ___ podcast.
See if you can do this for a few days. And then you might notice a few things. How often do you engage with the news? Are there times of day when you’re more or less drawn to it? What kinds of news sources do you engage with? And, most significantly, how do you feel?
In the coming weeks we’ll have other practices, but this one is kind of the foundation. It’s about paying attention and noticing our behavior. Once we do that, we can try to make some decisions and adjustments. For this week, just try to notice, and see if it helps a little bit.
Blessings for the journey. Know that I’m on it with you.
ENDING
Thank you for joining us for Soulful Jewish Living: Mindful Practices for Every Day, a production of Unpacked, a brand of OpenDor Media, and the Institute for Jewish Spirituality. This episode is sponsored by Jonathan and Kori Kalafer and the Somerset Patriots: The Bridgewater, NJ-based AA Affiliate of the New York Yankees. If you like this show, subscribe, share this episode with a friend, give us five stars on Apple Podcasts. Check out our website, unpacked.media for everything Unpacked-related, and subscribe to our other podcasts, and check out the Institute for Jewish Spirituality. Most importantly, be in touch–about what you heard today, what you’d like to hear more about, or to dedicate an episode. Write to me at josh@unpacked.media.
This episode was hosted by me, Rabbi Josh Feigelson. Audio was edited by Rob Pera and we’re produced by Rivky Stern. Thanks for joining us.