From Screens to Souls: Reclaiming Our Emotional Priorities

by Ram ben Ze’ev

From Screens to Souls: Reclaiming Our Emotional Priorities

In an age of constant connectivity, many people find themselves grieving public figures as though they had lost a member of their own household. Social media feeds fill with tears, tributes, and declarations of personal loss. Yet in truth, the person mourned never knew their names, never sat at their table, never shared a moment of genuine life with them.

This is not shared life. It is confusion between image and relationship.

Torah recognises the human need for attachment. It commands us toward דבקות (devekut – attachment to G-D), and toward אהבת ישראל (ahavat Yisrael – love of a fellow Jew). These are not abstract ideals. They are directed bonds, rooted in covenant, responsibility, and shared destiny. Emotional energy in Torah is not random; it is sacred capital.

When we direct intense grief toward someone whose existence in our lives was entirely mediated through a screen, we must ask: what exactly are we mourning?

Often we are not grieving the person. We are grieving an image, a memory of how that image made us feel, or the loss of a narrative into which we had woven ourselves. This is דמיון (dimyon – imagination). The Holy Zohar warns that external lights can dazzle while lacking פנימיות (penimiut – inner essence). The Internet magnifies this effect. It creates simulated intimacy without covenantal relationship.

Tanya teaches that the נפש הבהמית (nefesh habehamit – animal soul) seeks identification and expansion. To feel “connected” to fame is to feel enlarged. When the celebrity falls or dies, that projected extension of self feels wounded. The grief may be sincere, but sincerity alone does not sanctify its source.

This does not mean we should feel nothing. Torah does not demand coldness. Compassion for human suffering is holy. But compassion must be ordered. If one weeps more intensely for a distant public figure than for a neighbour, a struggling family member, or the suffering of Am Yisrael, then the emotional hierarchy has inverted.

The Torah world is built upon proximity and responsibility. We are commanded to honour parents, to care for the widow and orphan, to strengthen community. We are not commanded to attach ourselves to curated personas broadcast to millions.

The danger is subtle. Celebrity culture quietly displaces real covenant with performative belonging. It replaces shared life with shared consumption. It persuades us that visibility equals relationship. It does not.

True connection requires reciprocity, responsibility, and shared destiny. That is why דבקות belongs with G-D. That is why אהבה belongs with those within our covenant. That is why grief has its proper place within lived relationship.

Our emotional lives are not meant to be outsourced to algorithms.

If we redirected even a fraction of that intensity toward our own households, our own communities, and our own people, the transformation would be profound. Visit the lonely.

Support the struggling. Strengthen the bonds within your home. Pray with greater concentration. Study with greater depth. Attach upward and inward, not outward and imaginary.

The Internet may simulate closeness, but Torah demands reality.

Let our tears fall where they are commanded to fall. Let our love be directed where it can be returned. Let our focus come back home.

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Bill White (Ram ben Ze'ev) is CEO of WireNews Limited, Mayside Partners Limited, MEADHANAN Agency, Kestrel Assets Limited, SpudsToGo Limited and Executive Director of Hebrew Synagogue