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oughly once a year, our senior staff conducts a round of meetings evaluating the magazine and setting goals for the coming period. About two and a half years ago, during one such round of meetings, an editor got very agitated. So agitated that I remember it still.

“How can you run an article that mentions people posting things online?” he asked. “We should be telling people to avoid these things! We should be that voice of moral clarity!”

I thought about that comment for a long time afterward. There were so many assumptions and so many questions layered beneath it. Is it our job to tell people what to do or not to do? Do people look to their weekly Shabbos reading for religious instruction? Should a magazine set the spiritual bar for the community? Should it merely reflect readers’ standards, or urge them to aim higher?

I don’t think of this magazine as a replacement for a rav or derech. I hope readers don’t either. I think and hope that it can serve as a forum for productive conversations, a prompt to rethink our longstanding and not-so-healthy assumptions, a supportive environment offering resources for life’s challenges, a place for enrichment and inspiration and enjoyment. And always, as a guaranteed good read. (That’s important, too.)

But one thing I am pretty sure about — if you come to preach, you’re guaranteed to fail. There’s nothing like a preachy tone to shut out readers and brand you as irrelevant.

That’s why we were very cautious when Aliza Feder originally pitched the Tech Talk column, which is winding down in this issue. As a rule, we’re wary of publishing material that can be seen as preaching, and this seems to be a topic that readers are especially sensitive about. But the way the material was built — real voices of real people thinking out loud about their tech usage — seemed like a good formula. It’s conversation, not pontification.

The voices were also valuable: Aliza Feder, the narrator of the series, is a teacher of high school students, and if anyone knows how to avoid preaching, it’s teachers who successfully reach teens. And the participants are the furthest thing from all-knowing: In every segment, they were seeking and struggling and vulnerable. They felt very relatable.

To test the waters, we sent out samples of the column to different people and asked if they’d want to see it running as a series in the magazine. One respondent wasn’t interested in touching the topic at all — “Doesn’t do anything for me, sorry,” he wrote. The subtext: People just don’t want to hear this.

Another respondent, who spends most of her time “plugged in,” pushed us to run it. “I don’t think it’s preachy at all,” she told us. “A lot of this resonated with me and this would be something I would read and encourage others to read. If we’re being real, this is a huge problem. It’s crazy how we’re not even discussing inappropriate material consumption anymore, it’s come to a point that overconsumption of appropriate material is the issue. This is not extreme at all. This is everyone.”

Office staff who saw the material seemed excited and open to it. All good signs. So we mapped out the series, worked on the text, built the design — and waited to hear from you.

Just last week, in the context of a different letter sent to Family First, a woman mentioned that she had deleted some of her apps after reading the series. We’ve gotten letters from other readers who are rethinking their own tech use.

To us, the main achievement is that the conversation is happening. Our role isn’t to determine spiritual standards or tell our readers what they should or shouldn’t do. It’s to lay out the issues in a thoughtful, nuanced way, and invite you to join a discussion that reevaluates, rethinks, and reframes the contours of our inner landscapes. (Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 722)