Walk down the streets of many major cities right now—New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, Jerusalem or Melbourne—and you’ll see throngs of people unusually engaged with their smartphones. They’re not texting, tweeting or snapping. Instead, they’re playing Pokémon GO, the hit Augmented Reality game. Players can catch virtual monsters, collect them and battle each other while wandering the actual streets of their hometowns. Using the smartphone’s GPS coordinates and camera, Pokémon can be “seen” on the screen, seemingly living wild on the streets. Multiple players can come together in physical locations to do battle within the game.

In traditional Chassidic thought, there is another wild beast that must be caught and trained. The evil inclination is compared to a wild animal—a powerful, untamed and untapped source of primal energy. Only when it is caught, harnessed and trained can it be transformed from a wild ox to a tamed creature that can plow fields and in its own way, build a better world.

Perhaps then, there is a Jewish message behind all this madness.

Despite all the media hype about Poké-Zombies invading public spaces—oblivious to the world as they interact through the intermediary of the app—and accounts of people using the game to steal phones from erstwhile virtual adventurers, we can learn a lesson for our own lives.

The Mitteler Rebbe, Rabbi Dovber of Lubavitch, once said to one of his Chassidim: “When two people speak to each other about the service of G‑d and they study together, there are two G‑dly souls against one animal soul.” We can come together (interestingly, some local Chabad institutions have been designated as “Pokéstops” in the game), find a fellow adventurer and work on taming that wild animal, training it and joining in unity to build a better world.