The Joy of Missing Out

JOMO!

To this day, when Friday evening comes, and the time to light Shabbat candles approaches, I am challenged. So much is incomplete, so much more to do. But through the years I have learned that my baggage can’t make the crossing from the mundane world to the holy. Once I take it with me, the holy vanishes.

At that precise moment on Friday evening, my aspiration for the holy compels me to leave behind all the projects, responsibilities, cares and woes that have occupied me the previous six days of the week, and I step into a consecrated space.

Stepping over the line from the six days of doing to the seventh day of rest is often not an easy thing to do. We all tend to be deeply engaged and committed to the things that are on our plate, and we are firmly bound to those activities.

Maybe you are attached to what you have been working on because you are eager to see the fruits of that project. That’s desire.

Maybe the emotional bonds are from anxiety or even fear that something will go wrong with the thing you have been caring for. That’s worry.

Maybe your identity is so tied up in our worldly activities that it is scary to think of living without that familiar sense of self. That’s ego.

Maybe you are so used to being engaged with your worldly activities that a day without them just doesn’t appeal. That’s habit.

Maybe you are just dying to find out who won, or how it ended, or what someone said or did. That’s the thoroughly modern attachment of FOMO – fear of missing out.

When I was speaking to a group in Florida last month about FOMO and how things like that keep people glued to their phones when they would do themselves a big favour if they put them down for one day, a woman asked, “What about JOMO?”

I didn’t know what that was, so I asked her, and she replied, “The JOY of missing out.” She had a point. There is a kind of joy in detaching from the stuff that ordinarily fills our moments and our minds. We tend to get so wrapped up in what we do that we are almost enslaved to it. It may not be easy to say, “Let it go, come what may,” but if we empower ourselves to do just that, it can come to us as a liberation.

I am grateful to have tools that help me loosen the grip and set my burdens down on Friday evening, to free me up to welcome something different and more soulful into my space.

One tool that helps me is the ritual structures of Shabbat. Concerning the fact that Shabbat begins precisely 18 minutes before sunset, I wrote:

This concern for exact timing reflects a broader principle that shows up throughout Shabbat observance, which is that a structure with boundaries is extremely helpful, and, for most of us, essential, if we hope to achieve a spiritual day of rest. A web of precise lines we are meant to heed and not cross establishes the boundaries that distinguish and separate the holy from the mundane and thus serve to establish and protect the sanctity of the seventh day.

In Jerusalem, and even in Far Rockaway, NY, where I studied with my Mussar teachers, Rabbi and Rebbetzin Perr, and elsewhere as well, at the exact moment when Shabbat arrives, a loud siren sounds throughout the community.

Not a moment before, not a moment after. This is the moment.

Were it not for this precision, I know that the momentum I develop over the six days when I am doing the things I am attached to and identify with would keep me going well into Friday evening and likely beyond. There is always more to be done and a clear and loud announcement that I have come to a precise border helps me set down my incomplete burdens so that, unencumbered, I can cross over.

Truth is, the fact that there is a precise boundary, even one publicized as prominently as the start time of Shabbat, is no guarantee that we will be able to defy our attachments and put aside our labours even if that is our commitment. That marker is external to us, and while it is very helpful as we grapple with the internal dynamics that would have us checking the phone and continuing our efforts endlessly, it does not deal with those dynamics directly.

For that, we need Mussar. The Mussar teachers through the centuries have recognized that trust [bitachon] is one inner quality that is on everyone’s spiritual curriculum. I’ve joked that you don’t see any self-help guru offering workshops on how to worry. That’s because we are all already really good at worrying. But we are challenged to trust.

We tend to live as if we are fully in charge of our lives and all that happens within them, and we cling to control as if our life depended on it. But it is not true. What is true is that we are fully in control of very little that happens in our life.

Since Shabbat deprives us of the possibility of taking action to shape our world and its components, we are forced to live in a world in which it is explicit that we are not in charge. That quality of bitachon is the lever that pries open our hand so the weekday burdens can be set aside on Shabbat.

In the chapter on trust in The Shabbat Effect, I mention the story of the manna that fell from heaven to feed the Israelites in the desert. The Mussar teachers have seen this as the archetypal test of trust “because that God-given food could only be collected daily. If kept overnight, it rotted. Every day, the people had to put their trust in God that they would be fed. But on Friday, they needed to trust even more, because they were promised that they would be given an additional portion in order to be freed from the labor of collecting on the seventh day itself.”

Then I wrote that our test is even greater:

“If they went out to gather on Shabbat, they found that there was nothing to be had. We, on the other hand, could easily keep working, keep sending emails, go to the bank, go shopping to catch that item before it sold out, or before the sale ends, because in the society in which we live, Saturday is just another day.”

And the conclusion: “It takes a deliberately and purposefully chosen act of trust for us to be able to lay it all down.”

If you have read the chapter on the middah of bitachon in the book, I explore four explanations of what it means to trust God. I’d love to hear which of them lights up most for you, and maybe even why you think it does.