I took TWO naps on Shabbat

It seems to me that the world we live in is designed to exhaust us. The pace of life is so ferocious, and no matter which lane you are moving in, it takes an enormous amount of effort to keep up. And while we struggle to master all that is coming our way in that one area we are focused on, in every other lane, we are falling behind.

I was in Cleveland for Shavuot, which coincided with Shabbat this year, and an older man with whom I shared the Shabbat dinner table told a tale of his woes. He was still practicing as a dentist. But he was suffering, and it was painful to hear how difficult it was for him to master all the new technologies, not only in his care for his patients but in all the administration he was now having to do by computer. Although he loved what he did and was good at it, he was about to throw up his hands and retire.

That’s where he was focused. But other people at the table were engrossed with political events that explode in our faces in such rapid succession, and environmental initiatives that are attacking preservation of habitat and setting back the timetable for the inevitable move to sustainable energy, and wars nobody voted for, and the rapidly spiraling cost of living, and the proliferation and mainstreaming of antisemitism, and division over Israel, and…. I am sure you are living in the same conversations as I am.

As I sat at that table, I struggled. All the issues are real and important and how great it is that people care and are passionately engaged. But we had just lit candles, sanctified the day with kiddush, and welcomed the Sabbath bride. I wanted to park all those issues at the door. It was not my table and not my place to direct the conversation, but silently to myself, I drifted away from the conversation because I was reaching to savour the taste of the world to come that Shabbat offers.

No doubt the needs of the moment are pressing, but it seems to me that giving 6/7ths of my life to the struggle to build a better world is quite enough. I know exactly what would happen if I gave all my days to the affairs (crises?) of the world and I allowed Shabbat to be just another day of worry, complaint and pursuit. The world would be no better off, and all I would succeed in doing is exhausting myself.

I’m underlining my need for rest on Shabbat, not because I am exhausted, and not even to help me avoid becoming exhausted which would bring along with it the depression and despair that inevitably accompany such depletion, but because Shabbat offers an opportunity to realign myself with the deeper truths of cosmic reality that are pummeled and buried under the welter of assaults everyday life throws my way.

It is true that I am a small creature on a planet circling its sun, and when I light Shabbat candles at the designated moment, the small light of those candles brings me in line with the light of the sun, the position of the earth in relation to it that creates the season, and the rotation of the earth on its axis that delivers up evening. Six days a week of electric lights, mental agitation and frantic busyness obscure this truth. Once a week, I realign.

That realignment reminds me of the truth of my place in Creation. Finite, mortal, small – vital, aware and capable.

The great Mussar teacher, the Alter of Slabodka, tells us that what got created on the six days of creation were the elements of the universe, but only when the seventh day came into being did the full set of days take on their purpose and meaning (their form, their tzurah). And pointing to how much pleasure a person gets when they finish some project or inquiry they have been long working to complete, he says Shabbat offers a much greater pleasure, though of the same type:

How much pleasure and delight there is in finishing the complete form of the entire creation. A person is united with this pleasure through rest on the Sabbath day which has in it the completion of the form of the creation. Even sleep on Shabbat brings a person to this pleasure. And although sleep is one sixtieth of death (Berachot 57b), and “the beginning of one’s fall is sleep” (Genesis Rabbah 17), and there is something to confess before sleep like one confesses before death, and they say: “Enlighten my eyes lest I sleep in death,” (Psalm 13:3),but on Shabbat there is a virtue in sleep, because a person unites through the rest of sleep with the complete pleasure of the form of creation and one elevates and rises to a higher level.*

And so, come Sunday, I re-enter the world of struggle and battle, not just refreshed and renewed, but – much more importantly – realigned with that higher level in me and with the world through the rest and pleasure I gave to myself on Shabbat. Rest on any day is good for body and mind. Rest on Shabbat is also good for the soul, and so I have no guilt about having taken TWO naps this past Shabbat. Now, when I rejoin the world as a person who has reconnected to living in tune with the soul within, I can expect that everything I do will be more worthwhile for being informed and infused with that higher wisdom. That’s the Shabbat effect.

I would love to hear if any of this resonates with your own experience, whether of exhaustion or renewal?

* Ohr HaTzafun, “The Rest of Shabbat”, Part 2, page 120.