Scrawled out on a notepad on my desk there is a note which says, “everybody comes to meetings more tired than they used to.”
It was an observation made by Rabbi David Teutsch in the context of a conversation that Society Hill Synagogue President Carmen Hayman and I had with him, in preparation for a retreat with the synagogue Board of Directors about how to better structure our volunteer leadership and its activities.
Rabbi Teutsch, for those who don’t know, is the former President of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and a widely known author and organizational consultant, who has given counsel to hundreds of synagogues on how best to organize themselves.
For him, the comment — everybody comes to meetings more tired than they used to — was, I think, made in passing; context to inform how best to structure a meeting: you do the meaty stuff first before you start losing people.
For me, it was something far more profound. Everybody comes to meetings more tired than they used to.
If that’s not a punch in the gut—an indictment of the toll society has begun to take on us—I don’t know what is.
Rabbi Teutsch has been doing this work for decades. Long before Zoom meetings; before iPhones and even Blackberries (remember those?). In fact he often references his memory of synagogue newsletters being produced through smudgy mimeograph machines. That reference is before my time, but I take his point: in a previous era, not so long ago, people seemed to have more energy at your run-of-the-mill evening synagogue committee meeting.
This d’var torah is not meant as a jeremiad against technology. Do you remember the pre-GPS experience of driving to some residence out in the suburbs? Some handwritten directions scrawled out on a piece of paper, which you then had to mentally reverse on your way back in the dark? Let’s see on the way here I turned right off off 23 North, so now I’m turning left onto 23 South? But wait, I can’t turn left here…
And that’s a mundane example of the benefits that technology has brought, to say nothing of vaccines and important medical developments.
Still, “everybody comes to meetings more tired than they used to.” There’s something there. I’ve often used the analogy with respect to technology of the boiling frog. Everybody know this one? Someone somewhere made the point that if you try to put a frog in boiling water, of course it will jump out immediately. But if you put a frog in warm water and heat it up until it boils, the frog never jumps out.
If you had told someone in the 1970s, hey in 50 years, you’re going to be carrying around a phone, and people are going to be able to reach you, anytime, day or night, through written and oral communication, and expectations are going to increase about how fast you respond, would you have taken that deal?
How about this: you are going to hear, through multiple channels of communication, all of the trauma that is taking place in the world. All the war, all the political instability, all of the shameful act. A couple centuries ago — I’ll go back a little further now — one could argue that there wasn’t necessarily any less suffering in the world—perhaps there was even more. There was war, there was plague, natural disasters. But we weren’t inundated with news of all of it, notification after notification, streaming into our palm at all hours of the day, carrying all of that on our shoulders and in our heart.
One can argue about the pros and cons of this. Knowing about the world’s disasters allows us to collectively respond, provided we have the political will. But on an individual, psychological level, it is taking its toll.
Everybody comes to meetings more tired than they used to.
So what do we do? We’re not putting the genie back in the bottle. Technology isn’t going anywhere, and we’re not sure we’d want to if it could.
I don’t want to be fatalistic about the capacity to regulate technology’s excesses. This isn’t to say there couldn’t be some regulation to limit the addictive qualities of social media or other fixes addressing the technologies directly. But there are the components of this having to do with what’s outside of us, and what’s within us.
Judaism, of course, has a very clear and direct answer to what to do with our perpetual exhaustion. We’re living it: Shabbat. A foretaste of the world to come.
Sometimes, when I’m exhausted, I fantasize about retirement. I know, I know, I was only installed about two weeks ago, and now I’m already moving on to retirement? Judaism cautions against this all-or-nothing approach. Either burning the candle at both ends, or just being completely done.
Judaism says there is a way to bring the experience of perpetual peace into our lives here and now; not just waiting for the world to come, and one of the ways it offers is Shabbat; menuhah, the weekly experience of rest and repose.
Heschel points out that the Torah does not say “on the sixth day God finished God’s work, and on the seventh day god rested.” It says,
[God] ceased on the seventh day from doing any of the work.
Vayahel elohim b’yom hashivi’i m’lahto asher asah
וַיְכַ֤ל אֱלֹהִים֙ בַּיּ֣וֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִ֔י מְלַאכְתּ֖וֹ אֲשֶׁ֣ר עָשָׂ֑ה
On the seventh day God finished the work that had been undertaken. Heschel wrote “there was an act of creation on the seventh day. Just as heaven and earth were created in six days, menuha was created on the Sabbath.” Rest, or more accurately, “tranquility, serenity, peace, and repose.” Life is incomplete without it. And not pushed off towards the end of life, but interwoven within it. Life is incomplete without working repose, peace into its very fabric.
I’m as guilty as anyone of pushing it off. Sometimes I attribute that to having a two year old and a near-five year old—how does anyone have time to slow down when you’re working and parenting young kids?
But, everybody comes to meetings more tired than they used to.
It hasn’t always been this way.
Sometimes we have our own psychological reasons for running on empty. I’ve been reflecting this week that my dad’s sudden death at the age of 35 imprinted on me the unconscious understanding that that’s about how many years I’ve needed to pace myself for in this life. At 40, I’m already into the overtime period. Any moment now I’m going to get my breather; until then it’s pedal to the metal.
But that’s not how it works. We’re all trying to build long, sustainable, healthy lives—in which mehucha is not reserved for the afterlife, invoked as it is in אֵל מָלֵא רַחֲמִים (el maleh rahaim), the plea that the souls of the departed receive מנוחה נכונה (menuhah nehona), proper tranquility, but present in the here and now, experienced now. There’s an urgency to this.
Rabbi Dayle Friedman, who works to support and accompany people with dementia, teaches that this work has something profound to teach us. “As we learn from those we accompany that the human being is more than intellect, more than memory, even more than cognition,” she writes, “we learn that we are, too. We learn to value ourselves for our very essence.”
It’s hard to do that when we’re so exhausted. How can we build structures into our lives that teach us to value ourselves for our very essence? How can we pace ourselves, be compassionate with ourselves, so that we’re not always dragging from one task to another?
Bill Clinton once told a post presidency audience that in his long political career, most of the mistakes he made — and there were some big ones — he made when he was too tired.
Everybody comes to meetings more tired than they used to.
Than they used to. It means we used to be able to do this with more verve, with more spirit, with more energy. We used to allow ourselves more respite, more rejuvenation, more tastes of the peace of the world to come in the here and now.
Let’s try to do so again.
Shabbat Shalom.
