Happy Thanksgiving! Don’t worry (if you were): I’m not writing this email on Thanksgiving; I’m spending time with my family. That’s the beauty of the “schedule send” function that is now so common in email services. But this topic of creating space away from work relates to the remarks I delivered this past Shabbat that I wanted to share with you this week
I am a workaholic. There I said it. To continue some of the themes I talked about on Kol Nidre this past Yom Kippur, I derive meaning from what I put forth into the world, and one of the primary spaces that this shows up is in my work, here at Society Hill Synagogue. The more I work, I sometimes imagine, the more worthwhile my presence here on earth. Work leads to results, results lead to recognition, recognition leads to validation, validation leads to worthiness. It’s a straightforward equation.
Only, we know it doesn’t quite work like that.
Judaism knows it doesn’t quite work like that. From the dawn of creation, there is a recognition in Jewish tradition, that the universe—both in the global sense of the cosmos, and in the individual sense of the universes of our lives—is incomplete, the work, so to speak, is incomplete, without rest: Shabbat, repose, reflection.
Vayechal Elohim bayom hashevi’i melachto asher asah. “On the seventh day, God finished the work that God had been doing” (Genesis 2:2). The work wasn’t finished until the seventh day. The picture was incomplete without rest.
In life, we need contrast. A song needs downbeats. A (I imagine) painting needs light and shade. An action movie needs moments of calm to break up the turbulence.
The universe needs differentiation. One midrash, one tradition for the creation of the world in Judaism is that at first, all was just God, all was oneness, sameness, into infinity. In order for the universe to be created, God had to effect tzimtzum, withdrawal, breathing in, in order to create space for the Other. Differentiation, contrast was needed, in order to effect creation.
So, too, with the rhythms of our own lives. A perpetual cycle of work, without breaking it up with periods of refraining, doesn’t allow us to experience the fruits of our labors. Not only in the literal sense of not having time to spend some of the resources we’ve generated, but also in the more profound sense of not creating space and demarcation to recognize what we’ve done, what contributions we’ve made, and where work stops and the rest of life begins.
Judaism recognizes the importance of sacred demarcation. Kedushah, holiness, after all, means, essentially, to demarcate; to set apart; to create a recognition that time is not undifferentiated, people are not undifferentiated, life is not undifferentiated. While all (some strains of Jewish tradition say) is a manifestation of the Divine, that Divinity is refracted in so many different ways, so many different moments, so many different periods of life, so many different embodiments. We carry out this principle by marking, by consecrating, by recognizing as holy, Shabbat, so that we recognize our life is not one endless slog of work, but a deeply interconnected series of sacred moments. Work, repose. Breathing in, Breathing out.
In Jewish tradition this is manifest not only in a temporal sense, but in a terrestrial sense, in a material sense. Right now we are in the year of Shemita. Shemita means sacred release, and it refers to the Biblical injunction that we work the land for six years, and in the seventh year, we let it lie fallow, let it produce what it’s going to produce, let its wild instincts take hold. As scholar Nahum Sarna observed, “continuous cultivation of arable land leads to serious depletion of its nutrients.”
So with the land and so with us. Periods of refraining, of rest and repose, in a physical and a spiritual sense are an important part—essential parts—of the complete cycle of existence.
Perhaps nothing embodies this more than the stated rationale for the existence of Shemita, of the sabbatical year, of the recognition of the need for release of the land. Li haaretz, God says. “The land is Mine,” Ki Gerim v’toshavim atem imadi. “You”—the people— “are but sojourners and tenants with Me” (Leviticus 25:23). Sojourners and tenants on this earth, and in this life.
Our time is sacred. It is so important that we recognize the rhythm inherent in the universe, according to Jewish tradition. The rhythm of creation and repose, work and rest, the differentiation, not the homogeneity, of time; of the days of our lives.
Baruch atah Adonai, Blessed are you Adonai, we say as we bless the wine, Mekadesh, Who makes holy, Who demarcates in a sacred way, HaShabbat, rest, exhaling, lying fallow, just be-ing.
These are the words I invite myself to hear when my instinct to work eclipses my instinct to be. When it’s time for the restlessness of my soul to give way to the restfulness of existence. When the presence of the cycle of time is ready to envelop us with love. And with that we say Shabbat Shalom, may we experience Shabbat, in peace.
Happy Thanksgiving, Shabbat Shalom, and Hag Hanukkah Sameah (Happy Hanukkah),
