Shavuot: Re-wilding our Attention

A few months ago, someone in the AJS community WhatsApp group commented about the difficulty she was having slowing down enough to connect to the latest festival because no soon as the celebration is passed, we are on to the next day of significance.  I know what she means. I have often felt that way too.

Then came Shavuot. 

I had been asked by my community to open the tikkun leil gathering with a one hour presentation on what had been revealed to me over the previous year, and how those discoveries materialised through my art practice. It was an honour to be invited, but it presented a big challenge. Preparing for the event kept me intensely focused on the upcoming chag for many weeks.  

As the evening of tikkun leil Shavuot drew to a close, I could feel my throat closing over. By the following morning, I was in the grip of a fully blown head cold, so in bed I stayed for several days. What a luxury - to be able to rest in bed. Not only did I have time to recover but I had space to deepen into the festival with its richly textured layers of significance.

And there were so many wonderful Shavuot offerings to dip into. As usual, I drew on the wisdom of teachers I have trusted and learned from for years, especially Rabbi Daniel Raphael-Silverstein and Sarah Yehudit Schneider. I came across someone new to me - Rabbi Adam Yitzchak Polinovskiy who shares the Ashlag Kabbalah legacy. He had some very interesting reflections on Shavuot as an opportunity to see, and therefore disarm, some of our dependencies, and hopefully see the sparks obscured by their shadows. I had been sent an article about exploring the links between the first and last commandments  which made me consider what triggers my own pattern of coveting and consequent veneration of false gods. And I was completely taken by an interview historian D. Graham Burnett on how “big tech” is fracking our attention on a delightful podcast series called Wonder Cabinet. 

So “attention fracking”? The phrase, new to me, immediately caught my…attention. 

To Burnett, attention is the language with which we can articulate something transcendent about our natures and our being.  According to him, “the anguish of our moment is the rising to predominance of a much thinner, track-and-trigger, quantifiable, metrical, instrumental concept of attention which has, more and more, cut us off from the existential richness of our inheritance. What's being commodified is literally the core indices of personhood — our ability to care, to desire, to be in contact with the people we love. All those things are being squeezed for cash value and compromised at the same time. It's no wonder that we feel unwell in new ways as individuals and as communities”. 

And fracking? “This hyper-intensive, technologically sophisticated, deep-pocketed project to commodify our attention and to turn our ability to be with the stuff we care about into cash money for a small number of large corporations is nothing short of fracking. 

“It is an apt metaphor. Petroleum fracking is about pumping down into the earth high pressure, high volume solvents, detergents, to break up the deep tectonic architecture of the planet and force to the surface a kind of monetizable product. In the same way, anytime you are in front of a screen, with information just coming at you in a way that’s too much to take in, as though it is going to kind of pulverize or chop your attention up into little tiny shards”. 

And the consequences parallel as well. “Hydrocarbon fracking leads to tectonic instability, mini earthquakes, groundwater pollution. Human fracking destabilizes us as individuals. It harms our kids. And the effects of these hyper-intensified extractive attention economies probably also destabilize our civic life, undermining our ability to function together in community”.

Phew. No wonder the phrase caught my attention. Who doesn’t feel fracked these days? What can we do about it?

Although Burnett does talk about solutions in some depth, he certainly didn’t mention Shavuot, but that’s where my mind was going. Afterall, Shavuot is our annual psychospiritual opportunity to reset, to refocus our attention on Torah, whatever that it means to you.

What Burnett names as “attention”, I think of as “da’at”/awareness/knowledge/consciousness, the hidden 11th sefirah of the Tree of Life, nexus between wisdom/chochmah and understanding/binah. And it seems to me that just as big tech does everything that it can to slice and dice our attention thus triggering the covet-gene and setting us up for dependence on false gods, Shavuot is the annual opportunity for re-set. 

Whether we think of Shavuot as a people’s wedding anniversary with the Divine, our personal recommitment to a Torah we uniquely need to receive or arriving at the dauntingly bright but firmly shut 50th gate only to realise that Ruth’s path of simple kindness is really the start and end of it all, I am so grateful for the bounty in our tradition. It gives me strength despite the onslaught of attention fracking. It allows me to re-wild my attention, bringing me back into relationship with sustainability, cultivation, nurturing and flow. Hence, this piece I created - Re-wilding our Attention.

Shavuot: Re-wilding our Attention: At the 50th Age.

Original creation by Chana-Toni Whitmont

30cm x 30cm mixed media paper craft collage created with various 49 and Market patterned papers plus other stencils, fabrics, textiles, embellishments - (no AI used in the making of this piece).

Text inclusions inside the openable flip pocket from Rabbi Daniel Raphael Silverstein, Rabbi Adam Polinovskiy, Sarah Yehudit Schneider and D. Graham Burnett

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Chana-Toni Whitmont is a collage artist, crystal sound practitioner, creative, teacher and student whose practice and passions are born from her spiritual connection to her Jewish lineage and the ebbs and flows in the annual calendar cycle. She lives on magnificent Bidjigal, Birrabirragal and Gadigal Country (also known as Bondi), on the Pacific coast of Australia.