Sermons and Divrei Torah
A Sabbatical A Week
by Rabbi Elyse Goldstein
(Sermon - Rosh Hashanah 5764)
I remember the great New York black out of 1965. I remember exactly where I was- on the living room couch of our apartment in Queens, New York, listening to the battery operated radio. As a kid, the black out was more scary than impressive. But as an adult, when the great black out of August 19, 2003 came, I was actually not only ready, but ready to be inspired. Because we had prepared for Y2K, we had flashlights, water, batteries, candles. We barbequed our dinner like everyone else did. And then... night fell. There wasn't much to do. We put the kids to bed, and went outside. We sat and talked. Then we got our binoculars and star gazed. What a black sky there was, no ambient noise, no ambient light. Our neighbors joined us. We picked out the constellations. We could see Mars with the naked eye. Then we sat in silence and enjoyed the night. It's amazing the energy an absence of energy can give you.
It was an eerie strangeness, that silence. But an eerie beauty, too. A sort of peace descended on us and our neighborhood. People went outside, started walking, not to go shopping- just to take a walk. There was a kind of shared understanding that nothing much could be done, and a shared expectation that since nothing could be done, we might as well enjoy doing nothing.
The black out gave us back the evening. No T.V. No lessons, no after school extracurriculars, no laundry. I'll tell you the truth. A part of me wished the lights wouldn't go on again for a long, long time, because it was such a lovely respite from from the ordinary daily routine of my life. It was exotic and different. It was, in a way, a sanctuary in time, imposed upon me by an outside source, a quietude not of my own choosing but incredibly valuable all the same. It was, in a word... Shabbat.
From January to June, I was privileged to experience Shabbat for an entire semester, as my family took sabbatical away from Toronto. Of course the word sabbatical comes from Shabbat, and the world Shabbat in the Hebrew comes from the root l'shbot- to rest. Most rabbis, when they receive their sabbatical, go to live in Israel, study in a yeshiva, and teach. Since I teach all the time, and since I have lived in Israel already twice, we decided on a "radical" sabbatical that would take us the long way to Israel, through Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia, China, Thailand Greece and Italy. All along the way we had extraordinary adventures, but I'm not going to share them with you today- sorry. I hope you will join me on October 26th at 8 p.m. at Kolel to hear my stories. I'll tell you then about tzedakah in Thailand, Shabbat with the aboriginals in Australia, and the last indigenous ethnic Chinese Jew in Kaifeng. But for today, I'd like to share three large life lessons we learned on this six month Shabbat.
First, I think we learned to, as twelve steps programs put it, "let go and let God." Buses were late, plane schedules were changed, museums were closed, and we would have really gotten on each other's nerves if we didn't learn to lower our expectations of things and raise our expectations of each other. "Deal with it" became our mantra. "You can deal with it" became our prayer. We learned how petty our lives can get when we concentrate on the petty.
Second, we learned not to cling to things. We each had a backpack and we had taken a few suitcases, though by the end of the trip we only had one left. I think we learned how little we really need, as opposed to how much we really want. We noted this especially in Thailand and China, where the urge to buy everything because it was so inexpensive was overwhelming. But then we would look at the monks, only allowed to carry what they can fit in one sackcloth pouch over their shoulder, and we remembered that, literally, "you can't take it with you." We tried to live the hiker's creed: Take only photos, leave only footprints. We began to realize that the more we own, the more it owns us.
So then we understood that the only thing we really had with us on our sabbatical, the most precious of all things we brought with us, was time. For the first time in our lives, all we had was time. And this third lesson was the hardest to learn, and, if we are not careful, it will probably be the first we'll "unlearn" now that we are back and in the "real world."
In the beginning, it was extraordinarily hard to stop the wheels from turning, both in my head and physically. Nearly impossible get our bodies to rest and relax. We are used to taking vacations where we do something. We are used to coming home from vacation needing a vacation. I felt a tremendous need to plan the next outing, to know where we were staying next, to organize something. Because what would we do if we weren't doing somethng?
Now I understand why Shabbat is so hard for us. Perhaps that is why so few liberal Jews actually observe any form of Shabbat. If you don't "have to" like Orthodox Jews do, why would you? If we are not doing, if we are just being, then the silence, the ability to go inward and seek who we really are, the opening of our hearts that is possible is so real it's almost painful. We run away from solitude. We fill our time to the point of exploding. We are, I fear, afraid of meeting ourselves in so quiet a space with no distractions. We are, I fear, terrified that if we allow ourselves the emptiness needed to deeply explore, we will find ourselves empty.
Liberal Jews protest that there are just too many rules and regs for keeping Shabbat. I don't think that is really the problem. Because the point is not whether or not you've turned off the lights in your fridge- the point is whether or not you can turn the lights off in your head for 24 hours. The point is to not to be afraid of the dark, but rather, like the blackout, to use the dark to inspire. Sometimes I think we use the seemingly endless list of Shabbat "thou shalt nots" as a screen behind which we hide, because having Shabbat in our lives would mean we have to stop being so busy. Now we are always complaining about how busy we are-thats the mantra of my generation- but here's an opportunity to not be busy for 24 hours. That makes us anxious, I think.
Stopping means we get to let in, to open to the inner dialogue of the meaning of our lives, to find spirituality in the moments of time not spent on mountaintops but in backyards and front stoops. But stopping also means we have to listen to our kids babble, find things to talk to our partners about beside making shopping lists and renovation plans, take a walk with our parents and get to know them as people. Much easier to watch a movie or go to the mall.
Now I'll tell you a personal truth. Shabbat is hard only because it ends. As the havdala candle is extinguished, so is our freedom. So is the quiet. The lights come back on, and the airplanes seem suddenly overhead again, and then there's the traffic, and the radio blares its banality, and the newscasters are still talking about each other's dress. Coming back to ordinary life is almost excruciating. The truth is that Shabbat is sometimes painful, because it is a taste of true freedom that leaves us wanting more, yet knowing we can't have more. We can't really fully let down because we know we have to start up all over again and our backs go up and the stress level rises and by Saturday afternoon we are already making mental lists of what we have to do when Shabbat is over. Now we have to stare down the coming week, and we know we will have no time yet again.
That fantastic feeling of having all the time in the world. Who wants to feel that if you know you have to give it up? To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven. ..." yeah, don't bet on it! A time for every purpose under heaven? How about a time to work out? A time to buy school supplies before the Monday of Labour Day weekend? A time to chat over coffee with a friend?
What happened to our time? Folk singer Charlie King sings a song with the refrain, "what ever happened to the eight hour day? When did they take it away? No- when did we give it away?" Labour unions fought for a livable work day, and we- lets admit it, most of us are white collar, middle class workers-we still work 70 hour weeks. We judge our worth by our workplace productivity. We know in our hearts that this is the only life we get, and work is only one part of it. Yet it defines us. We feel small if we work for a small place. We feel devalued when a customer devalues us. We feel unimportant if we estimate that we do "unimportant" work. In Proverbs 31, in the poem Eishet Chayil The Woman of Valour, we read: Tama ki tov sachra"- she perceives that her work is good." Where do we get that inner strength to perceive that our work is good? Whe do we get to stand back and examine the painting of the lives we've be creating?
On the one day a week in which our human worth is realized, is actualized, with no price tag. On the day we get to take a Sabbatical of the soul. To my family, it feels like we are one of only a rare few non-Orthodox family celebrating this day of spiritual time. My kids have non-Orthodox compatriots that they can do Shabbos with. Once a year, on Pesach, lots of us admit that once we were slaves, now we are free. But why do we miss the opportunity every week? Every Friday night, when I make kiddush, I say "zacher l'tziyat mitzrayim"- this is a reminder of the exodus from Egypt. Once a week I am free of the computer, free of the telephone, free from work, and its hold on my self definition and self esteem and self worth. Free time is what makes me a free person. I'm not worried about whether or not you drive on Shabbat, though to be free of the car once a week is a gift. And I'm not asking whether you go to the synagogue on Saturday, though to be with community once a week is a gift, too. I'm asking: from what will you build a sanctuary of the soul?
This is what we learned in the beautiful golden sanctaury-temples of the East: unlike other religions that focus on sacred space, in Judaism the idea of holiness is rooted in sacred time. In Judaism, it is the amorphous idea of time, rather than the concrete reality of space, that is holy. There are fixed times for prayer, but no fixed places. In the Bible, in Exodus 20, God tells Moses, "In every place where I cause My name to be mentioned I will come to you and bless you". Abraham Joshua Heschel writes, "The Bible is more concerned with time than with space. It sees the world in the dimension of time. It pays more attention to generations, to events, than to countries, to things; it is more concerned with history than with geography." Even the building of the Mishkan was interrupted by a reminder to keep the Sabbath. Again, Heschel suggests, "The Sabbath itself is the sanctuary which we build, a sanctuary in time." One day a week we stop building the edifice of our lives, and instead, we concentrate on building the essence of our lives.
But Ismar Schorch writes, "To rest is to acknowledge our limitations. One day out of seven we cease to exercise our power to tinker and transform." Or as my son Carmi noted, "One day a week we just don't patchke." We aren't really prepared to do that, I fear: prepared to stop patchkying. We aren't really prepared to move from the results of creation to the mystery of creation. Prepared to admit we are not the masters of everything we see. Prepared to take a sabbatical from using the toys of modern technology. Prepared for a weekly "earth-day" ; a "No Shopping Day" now being promoted to counter the rampant consumerism and commercialization of our lives. A no work day.
Lawrence Kushner writes, "Work is to Shabbat like hometz is to Pesach." Just as we try our hardest to remove hametz from our homes, any last crumbs are disposed of by a legal formula (in Aramaic, Kol Hamira). So too, suggests Kushner, all work (whether completed or not) is declared "done!"
I know that many, if not most, of your workplaces cannot or will not offer you a sabbatical in your lifetime. I know that many, if not most of us cannot take our children out of school for six months and home school them around the world. But I also know that many, if not most of the adults sitting here today, and even some of the kids, are overworked, overstressed, overprogrammed., overwrought, and overspent. We're putting in longer hours on the job now than we did in the 1950s, despite promises of a coming age of leisure before the year 2000. On average, we work nearly nine full weeks (350 hours) LONGER per year than our peers in Western Europe do. Overwork threatens our health. It leads to fatigue, accidents and injuries. It reduces time for exercise and encourages consumption of calorie-laden fast foods. Overwork threatens our marriages, families and relationships as we find less time for each other, less time to care for our children and elders, less time to just hang out. We have less time to know our neighbors, to supervise our young people, and to volunteer, to be informed, active citizens. But most of all, overworking leaves us little time for ourselves, for self-development, or for spiritual growth. Can you believe the Girl Scouts recently introduced a "Stress Free" merit badge for today's harried young girls?
Douglas Rushkoff , in his book Nothing Sacred, writes, "Today, we are to be available to business associates-through our mediating technologies-at any hour, day or night. We live in an age where on-line marketers measure human attention in quantities called "eyeball hours." Any moment spent thinking instead of spending, or laughing instead of working, is an opportunity missed. And the more time we sacrifice to production and consumption, the less any alternative seems available to us. In such an environment, Sabbath becomes a way of combatting the contraction of personal and community time and space...Sabbath is a way to reclaim your time and celebrate that you are special, even sacred, just the way you are."
So while most of us will not get a six month sabbatical, I know every person sitting here is capable of a sabbatical once a week: if we believe that we deserve to rest, and need to rest, and if we believe the world will go on just fine without us, thank you very much, from Friday night to Saturday night. If we are able to say say "done" -at least for awhile-and only then can Shabbat serve as a sanctuary in time, because ordinary time will no longer operate. We'll stop planing, preparing, investing, fixing, manipulating for some future goal because we'll be totally in the moment. We'll be living only in the present. Not solving problems that doen't yet exist, not worrying over issues that will eventually work themselves out. By the end of our sabbatical, I and my family finally learned how to live in the present. But it took us being millions of miles away from our "regular" life to learn how. And coming back was exceptionally tough, facing our ordinary, mundane lives, trapped once again in that world of lists, e-mails about viagra and mortgages, school tuitions, taking care and taking on and taking part in.
That is why today, when Rosh Hashanah which falls on Shabbat, is doubly distinctive. We celebrate Shabbat first, by leaving out certain parts of the service, like Avinu Malkenu and the blowing of the shofar. I know that upsets people. I know that people wait all year to hear those two things, and would honestly prefer that we just chuck the tradition and do them anyway. But we don't, to drive home the point that the absence of the shofar is even more startling than the sound of the shofar. The not having can be more forceful than the having. In other words, as Zalman Schacter-Shalomi has suggested, the silence of the shofar may be more shattering then it's noise. To miss the blast of the shofar is a kind of wake up call to the need for the stillness of Shabbat .
If there is one gift I could have brought each of you back, as a souvenir from my sabbatical, it would be the gift of time. But Judaism is holding out that gift to you. Because, as the Yiddish saying goes, "To die, you can always find the time." This year, lets find the time to live. Shanna Tova.
Shana Tova
Sermons and Divrei Torah
Additional Resources
Elul: Period of Preparation
Yamim Noraim: Days of Awe
Rosh Hashanah: Introduction
Shofar Symbolism
The Custom of Tashlich
Yom Kippur: Introduction
G'mar Chatima Tova...
