In an age where everyone is constantly connected to the Internet—to the extent that now some speak of “smartphone addiction”—Ephraim Mirvis, chief rabbi of the United Kingdom, argues that traditional Sabbath observance provides the perfect antidote. (Interview by John Bingham).

[W]e are finding that society is coming around to appreciate such a day at a time when everybody naturally wants to be connected. . . . [People today] don’t realize that sometimes the more connected one is [electronically], the more disconnected one is from everything that is important. . . .

We are finding that now in our Internet era there are particular advantages to the Sabbath; it is . . . our “digital detox day.” . . . On Shabbat you are dealing with real friends, real people, real challenges. . . .

I want to stress . . . that commercial activity is good; the Internet is good; social media are good; smartphones are good; they are a power for the advancement of mankind in a most spectacular fashion. But I think we need to have an element of self-discipline—and that’s certainly [part of] what Shabbat is about.

Contributing to the Jewish state’s current controversy over efforts to reform its judicial system, observes Peter Berkowitz, is its lack of a written constitution. Berkowitz encourages Israelis to seek a way out of the present crisis by looking to the founding document they do have: the Declaration of Independence.

The document does not explicitly mention “democracy.” But it commits Israel to democratic institutions not only by insisting on the equality of rights for all citizens and the establishment of representative government but also by stressing that Arab inhabitants would enjoy “full and equal citizenship.”

The Israeli Declaration of Independence no more provides a constitution for Israel than does the U.S. Declaration of Independence furnish a constitution for America. Both documents, however, announced a universal standard. In 1859, as civil war loomed, Abraham Lincoln wrote in a letter, “All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”

Something similar could be said about Ben Gurion’s . . . affirmation that Israel would be based on, ensure, and guarantee basic rights and fundamental freedoms because they are inseparable from our humanity.

Perhaps reconsideration of the precious inheritance enshrined in Israel’s Declaration of Independence could assist both sides in assuaging the rage roiling the country. Bold and conciliatory, the nation’s founding document promises not merely a Jewish state, or a free state, or a democratic state, but that Israel will combine and reconcile its diverse elements to form a Jewish and free and democratic state.