Sometimes an interview does the work of a whole essay in three minutes. In this clip from Moments from the Valley, Rabbi Daniel Glatstein is asked about leadership — and within thirty seconds he lands on phones in shul, and doesn't move off it.
The story he tells is small and precise. A well-meaning man walks over to him one morning to show him a beautiful new tefillah project he's been working on. He pulls it up on his phone. Rabbi Glatstein looks at him and says, essentially: the problem started when you brought the phone in.
Then he goes further. He says he has personally gone to rabbanim and asked them to make a rule — no phones in shul. And the answer he keeps getting, in his telling, is: I can't. People don't like it.
His response is not gentle. "So why do you have the job? To make money? Go buy a nursing home if you want to make money."
The rest of the clip circles the same nerve. He sees people watching Netflix during davening. He sees banking apps open. He sees the Knicks game. And he asks the question that turns the whole scene on its head:
If somebody wheelbarrowed a big-screen television into shul and sat with a bag of popcorn during Kedusha, we would all know that was wrong. So why is a phone different? Because it's smaller?
He is not measured. He does not soften it. He believes rabbanim have a responsibility to teach — plainly — that God is real, that prayer is real, that a phone does not belong there. And if that requires being disliked for a while, that is what the job is. "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen."
He also isn't optimistic. Asked whether change should come in stages, he shrugs. He says he has walked into shuls he first stepped into forty years ago, and the same thing is still happening. Same programs. Same appeals. Same phones.
What Our Davening Asks of Us
Rabbi Glatstein is naming something almost everyone in shul feels but few say aloud. The phone in the pocket during davening is not neutral. It is a doorway. It is a live connection to work, to news, to alerts, to the score, to whatever is louder than the amidah at that particular moment.
He is right that the strongest fix is the one nobody wants to make: leave it in the car. If your work and your family and your circumstances allow you to walk into shul with nothing in your pocket, his approach is the honest one.
For most people, most of the time, that is not the situation they are actually in. A parent might genuinely need to be reachable. A doctor is on call. A grandparent is waiting on a phone call from a hospital. The phone will keep coming into shul, whether or not a rabbi eventually finds the courage to name it from the bimah.
Which Is Why the Individual Act Still Matters
You do not need a rule from the front to make a decision about your own phone. Sealing it away for the length of davening — physically, so a stray notification or a wandering hand cannot pull it out — is a personal act of the same seriousness Rabbi Glatstein is calling shuls to. It is a quiet version of the courage he is asking for.
That is what the Kavanah Pouch is for. A magnetic seal that closes when you sit down and opens when you leave. You are still reachable in a true emergency — the phone is with you — but you have given yourself an actual boundary between the outside world and Shemoneh Esrei. Not an app. Not an intention. A physical fact.
Rabbi Glatstein is asking for leadership. Sometimes leadership looks like a rabbi standing at the bimah and drawing a line. And sometimes it looks like one person, in the second row, quietly deciding that his own phone, for the next forty minutes, is going to sit sealed on his lap.
Watch the full clip above — Rabbi Glatstein's tone is sharper than any summary can convey, and it is worth hearing directly.
A note on the video above: it was not created for or by Kavanah Pouch. The people who appear in it and the account or channel that originally published it are not affiliated with this website and do not endorse it. We shared it because we found the message worth pausing over — the connection to Kavanah Pouch drawn above is our own reflection, not theirs.