Summer, Shabbat

Editorial

The summer, however apparently tardy in its arrival, provides a desperately needed respite from many of our routines. With the kids out of school, visitors coming, outdoor pursuits like camping and hiking topping our to-do lists, taking a few hours or days or maybe even weeks away from the office, summer is, if we’re lucky, a season out of time from our regular hectic lives. How nice it would be to preserve some of these moments of relaxation and relive them later in the year, in the way the more ambitious among us are canning the fruits of the season to enjoy the tastes of summer even in the dark mornings of December.

The idea of a time apart, a time out of time, is not an exclusively Jewish idea, but it is a concept that Jews, as much as anyone, have nurtured and defended. Shabbat, the Sabbath, is, in our year-round routine, something of a summertime at the end of the “winter” of the week. We are renewed, rested and then girded for the new season of toil to come.

Abraham Joshua Heschel’s economical treatise, The Sabbath, is not just a thoughtful reflection on the meaning of time and the spiritual dimension of slowing or stopping the worldly routine; it is a slim but intensely insightful discourse on Judaism itself. Shabbat is inherent to the heart of what Judaism means and how we practise it.

There is a human need for idleness, more pronounced in some of us than in others. Of course, the rabbis have said that Shabbat is not a time of idleness, but of reflection and attention to God. Other religions have sabbaths, but Shabbat has been – and, in some circles, remains – a time of such complete withdrawal from the week that it has few direct comparisons in the modern world. How has this affected the Jewish people? One might think that a people who took one-seventh of their working lives off from productive activity might fall behind their peers. And yet, over millennia of dispersion, if some of the other traditions and rituals have been cast aside or neglected in the name of expedience, a day deliberately set aside for relaxation with family, rejuvenation and religious reflection, may have had the consequence of preventing, as we say in the vernacular, “burnout.”

While it is perhaps too much of a stretch to suggest that other civilizations contemporary to our ancient Israelite ancestors disappeared as much because of burnout as massive historical factors like crumbling empires or subjugation, the evidence is clear: people need “down time” and the Sabbath is a great way to enforce it. This is the thesis of the Jewish think-tank Reboot, which is promoting a new “Sabbath Manifesto.” Their 10 core principles will look very familiar to even the most vaguely affiliated Jew: Avoid technology. Connect with loved ones. Nurture your health. Get outside. Avoid commerce. Light candles. Drink wine. Eat bread. Find silence. Give back.

In last Sunday’s New York Times, writer Tim Kreider made a similar case, from a secular and very contemporary perspective, skewering “the busy trap.” Ask an average person how they are these days, writes Kreider, and the answer is likely to be “Busy!” “So busy.” “Crazy busy.” He takes a slap shot at such people, noting that the main complainers bring it on themselves. (Or, should we say, ourselves?)

“Notice it isn’t generally people pulling back-to-back shifts in the ICU or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs who tell you how busy they are; what those people are is not busy but tired. Exhausted. Dead on their feet,” he writes. “It’s almost always people whose lamented busyness is purely self-imposed: work and obligations they’ve taken on voluntarily, classes and activities they’ve ‘encouraged’ their kids to participate in.... Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.”

And yet, ironically, Kreider suggests this is exactly what we are attempting to hide from ourselves and others by making ourselves so busy. Finding meaning and importance in our lives can require us to sometimes do less with our time – in order to find out for ourselves that which really does matter.

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