Shabbat and Your Personal Spiritual Curriculum

I’m just feeling my way into this blog and I have learned something: make it shorter. I have a lot that I want to share with you and that leads me to write long. But that doesn’t suit the blog format, so from now on, these posts will be shorter.

Now where were we? Oh yes, we were discussing that each of us has a spiritual curriculum we are working through in our lives. The person who is always impatient, the one who has no real familiarity with the truth, the lustful person, the miser, the overly humble person …, these people – also known as “you and me” – are not just built like that, take it or leave it, nor is it accurate to say that their character is “flawed.” Every inner trait that someone trips over time and again is announcing itself as having a place on that person’s personal spiritual curriculum.

If you accept that life comes with that sort of curriculum, and you are honest and perceptive about your own, then it is possible to transform those traits so you no longer trip over the behaviours you have repeatedly stumbled over. But if you don’t accept that you have that kind of curriculum and you choose not to work on it, then you will just keep facing the same tests in life, over and over and over again.

The impatient person will forever be facing long lineups. The liar will face endless ridicule. The arrogant person will wonder why they have no friends.

Shabbat provides a remarkably effective weekly laboratory for working on our personal spiritual curriculum. Shabbat is disruptive. It interrupts the ordinary patterns and rhythms of our lives. The work I am doing needs to stop. The plans I am developing go on hold. All the engagements of the six days of the productive week break off. At a precise moment in the week, I’m challenged to put it all down. Even before I hit the roadblock fixed by the setting of the sun on Friday evening, I’m already running into inner resistance and challenges that reflect nothing other than my personal spiritual curriculum.

Growing up, “Shabbat” was a Saturday no different from any other day of the week except that I didn’t go to school. Then, when my wife and I felt the need to explore more Jewish practice and started to keep something of a Shabbat, we were very loose about the moment when we would light candles and mark the beginning of a different kind of day in the week. We were both busy with our work and wanted Shabbat to be a time of rest and relaxation, and so we would both continue working until we had reached a point of satisfaction with what we had accomplished, enough that we could close the file and put away the phone and strike the match that welcomed Shabbat into our home.

Over time, the realization slowly dawned that what we were doing was 100% backwards. We were giving ourselves the authority to declare when Shabbat began and we were basing that decision on our work lives. In fact, Shabbat is timed to begin according to the movement of the earth around the sun and its spinning on its axis. When I begin Shabbat according to these cosmic cycles, I am aligning my little self with the great universe in which I find myself. In that context, my work life needs to submit to these larger cycles through which my life is moving.

As soon as I talk about submitting, your spiritual curriculum shows up. I don’t want to regiment my weekends. If Shabbat is a day of rest, doesn’t it make sense to finish my work so my mind will be clear and I can rest more easily? When Shabbat comes in at 4 pm as it does in the winter, there is still so much time to do what I want to get done. You will have your own story to tell in this context.

In my book, The Shabbat Effect, I focus on eight inner traits that a Shabbat practice helps develop. Joy, trust, peace, rest, and more are enhanced when you build a Shabbat into your weekly schedule – not automatically, but because Shabbat gives you a superb opportunity to focus on and cultivate those traits, if you choose to do so.

You can only give yourself the gift of that opportunity when you establish a boundary that separates the ordinary weekdays from Shabbat. A particular time, certain markers (like lighting candles) and other practices are meant to draw that solid line. And shutting off your phone is a primary one. That’s where we will pick up next week.