“I think people in tech who are creating new rituals really need to be in deep conversation with religious people like me,” Steinlauf said in an interview, adding that it’s all too rare to see a Silicon Valley entrepreneur learning from ancient religions. “I’ve seen people reinventing the wheel, and as a rabbi I kind of laugh sometimes. People say, ‘Let’s take Tuesday—and basically make it Shabbat.’ It’s just funny. Why are you trying to do that when there are already synagogues and churches and all kinds of things that exist for that?”

In the next breath, the rabbi added: “But I understand it, of course. People are alienated from these structures.” For a person who’s walked away from institutionalized religion, it may be psychologically easier to join the National Day of Unplugging than to observe the Sabbath, the original 24-hour digital detox.

On the other hand, turning to new rituals as stand-ins for ancient ones raises the tricky issue of legitimacy. Part of why an ancient ritual seems legitimate or authentic to many of us is because it is, well, ancient. Its validity is sourced from its perceived unchangingness—“My great-great-grandparents did this the exact same way!”—and the way it binds us to a larger community of people, both dead and alive. Absent that antiquity, what makes a new ritual feel authentic?

“In earlier generations, the more we could objectify religion as something that lives outside of you, the more authentic it was,” Steinlauf said. “Now, if you’re really going to speak Millennial, ritual has to be fundamentally subjective in the sense that it has to be intensely personally meaningful and relevant. As soon as it speaks to my truth, that’s authenticity—that’s how we define authenticity now.” If the bespoke and the legitimate used to be inversely proportional, today they are directly proportional.

Although this may be a reality of the 21st century, there are several downsides to it. For one, ancient rituals are technologies that have been debugged, fine-tuned, and time-tested over millennia. They evolved to respond to human needs, and in their crystallized form, they contain deep insights into those needs. By jettisoning the rituals, we also jettison the wisdom they house. “One of the great critiques of modern Millennial spirituality is that the sense of lineage is being utterly destroyed in this radical democratization of spiritual life that we’re seeing,” Steinlauf said. “You lose something very precious when you obliterate lineage.”

To the rabbi, there’s an even graver risk that comes with separating ritual from religion. “When it’s ensconced in religious life,” he said, “ritual doesn’t just serve to validate your experience or to help you through a difficult moment.” It also situates your experience within a larger framework of moral imperatives, and makes demands of you, including that you be of service to others. “Someone may say, ‘I’m just helping somebody who had a bad day at work to process and move on.’ Well, okay, that could be effective—but to what extent are you actually helping the ultimate job of all ritual life, which is to give you the message that it’s not all about you? Rituals that are designed as one-offs for individuals are divorced from that—and that’s very dangerous.”