Keep Holy the Sabbath

"Why are we so stressed out?” was the question that framed an invitation for law students to reflect on better ways to manage time as professionals. As we munched on pizza, my Jewish colleague shared insights from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s sense of time, and the meaning of keeping Sabbath. 

To start, the one who wants to enter into the Sabbath “must first lay down the profanity of clattering commerce, of being yoked to toil.” I started to squirm in my seat, feeling convicted by my own incapacity to fully designate any block of time as sacred, as set aside for something other than the low hum of a rhythm of work or some kind of “productivity.” 

I’m armored with excuses: if I don’t keep up on the weekends—with email or papers to grade—come Monday I’ll drown in work and become even more anxious and stressed during the week, and so less able to be attentive to the needs of others. 

But is that really true? In fact, I spend a lot of my work time trying to help students avoid these same pitfalls as they prepare to step into professional life. 

Each autumn, our campus ministry team brings a group of graduate students out to a beautiful spot in the Blue Ridge Mountains for a one day “Rest, Recharge and Renew” retreat. In the wake of the pandemic, we’ve learned not to overpack the schedules of any of our programs, but to leave as much time as possible for people to simply connect and truly rest. My favorite moment of this retreat each year is the evening free time, when everyone tends to gather in circles, laughing with abandon while playing the simplest card games like Uno, or chatting around the fireplace to roast marshmallows. 

One of the small group sharing topics centers around the image of “the yes inside the no.” Recognition of limits on our time and energy and the process of setting healthy boundaries is nothing to feel “guilty” about—but instead an opportunity to savor how a healthy “no” is actually a “yes” to deeper values. On the flip side, tendencies toward the unreflective “yes” that leads to exhausting overcommitment may actually result in a deeper “no” to the capacity to meet other commitments.

For the students, the retreat has the desired effect. Some share that they haven’t slept so deeply in a long time. Others reflect on how much new energy they found to face difficult tasks or questions in their lives.

At other times during the year—in the midst of stressful final exams, for example—our campus ministry office offers study breaks that aim to create a mini-oasis of rest and play, offering bowls of hot chili, a table with Legos and coloring books, and open ears for whoever would like to talk. It’s just a brief pause, but here again, you can sense the calm that pervades with an effort to rest and play. 

Jesus is quoting a classic midrash when he says, “Physician, heal thyself” (Lk. 4:23). Indeed! Why can’t I seem to take my own medicine? How does my own schedule get packed to the avalanche point? 

Recently, after a long day of meetings, I was literally running to the metro station, dinner box in hand, to shove in a few spoonfuls before traveling across town for an event on the other campus of my university. Halfway to the station, I suddenly stopped on the sidewalk. 

Do you know how ridiculous you look? I said to myself. If you are so tired, how essential is it, really, your presence at this next event?

Then, I talked back to myself. (Really, I’m OK. We all have these internal dialogues, right?) Well, I said I would be there.

Okay, but what is blocking you from admitting to yourself, and others, that you can’t run around like this anymore? 

At least in that instance, some better or braver angel helped me turn around, find a calm spot to eat my dinner box in peace, write an email to apologize for my absence, and go home. 

“Six days a week we seek to dominate the world, on the seventh day we try to dominate the self,” wrote Rabbi Heschel in his classic book, The Sabbath.

What is the real impact of my inability to stop and rest for a significant block of uninterrupted time? When I have the courage to be brutally honest with myself, I realize that it produces a kind of draggy exhaustion, which probably interferes even more with the capacity to serve others during the work week. 

Even that line of thought reflected an overly instrumental relationship with time! As Heschel again cautions: “The Sabbath is not for the sake of the weekdays; the weekdays are for the sake of the Sabbath. It is not an interlude but the climax of living.”

“Six days a week we wrestle with the world, wringing profit from the earth; on the Sabbath we especially care for the seed of eternity planted in the soul.”

As my Jewish colleague shared memories of how observance of Shabbat provided a consistent space to nurture the most important relationships in his life, I was flooded with a kind of envy (hopefully holy, or holy-ish) for that shared agreement and capacity of the whole family unit—whole community!—to stop to rest. 

But wait: there it is, swimming up to the surface from my memory: “Family Night.” In the 1970s and 1980s, my family participated in a few renditions of the “Family Weekend Experience,” which grew out of the Marriage Encounter movement. Together with about twenty other families, we went into the depths of our parish basement, built a little cottage out of folding tables, blankets and pillows, and sat on the floor to reflect together on practices to strengthen our relationships and our family communication dynamics. 

One of the suggested practices for follow-up was modeled perhaps in part on Sabbath observance, and in part on the Latter-day Saints community practice of setting aside Monday nights as family night. 

The three components are still seared into my brain: 1) Some kind of fun activity together—in my house often a purposefully less competitive board game or questions for sharing; 2) A moment to “reach out” to someone who was ill or in need, with a card, note or gift;

and the evening concluded with 3) “Surprise dessert,” concocted or chosen by a rotating point person, sometimes generating home-made creativity, but often as simple as an ice cream roll from the nearby deli.

As a family with three school-age kids, we managed to maintain this practice for several years. This is in part indicative of how at the time our schedules were less packed with extra-curricular activities than typical schedules today. But I think it is mostly a tribute to my parents’ conviction that it was worth it to make the Herculean effort to slow the pace of our individual and family schedules in order to prioritize a sacred time to be together as a family.

Looking back, many years later, what remains from that time spent together in such a deliberate way, is a sense that we were indeed caring for “the seed of eternity” planted in our souls, and in the soul of our family life.

Perhaps it is there that I can again find the courage to prune the bramble of over-commitment that gets in the way of meaningful and regenerative rest. Turning toward loving care for that “seed of eternity,”