There was a long time where I responded to people asking me how I was doing with the phrase, “busy!” I absolutely hated it. It was so boring. And yet, it was the truest way to describe my experience of daily life for a long time. I found myself starting to enumerate deadlines and projects, life events and travel, until I somehow managed to fall asleep while I was talking.
Within all of the busyness and running around and moving quickly, life often felt like it was passing me by in an unsatisfying blur of activity and short-lived accomplishments. My days start to feel dried-out. I started to live for the weekends and vacations. The work and people that I cared so much about often felt lost in the day-to-day flurry of getting things done. Omad Safi calls this “the disease of being busy.” At the end of the day, that is how it tends to leave us: in dis-ease.
This week’s parsha offers an antidote to the alienation of busyness: Shabbat
2 Six days work may be done, but on the seventh day you shall have sanctity, a day of complete rest to the Lord; whoever performs work thereon [on this day] shall be put to death.
3 You shall not kindle fire in any of your dwelling places on the Sabbath day"
(Chapter 35)
Sacred Pause
This instruction on Shabbat is dropped into the text exactly at this precarious moment between the sin of the Golden Calf and the creation of the Mishkan. It is the pausing point that turns the Israelites’ anxious energy into creative, heart-swelling, devotion to what is true. In between the fires of idol worship and the fires of creating a sanctuary there is a silence that requires the Israelites to be with what is. To take a break. To kindle no fires.
Shabbat is one of Judaism’s most powerful, countercultural, radically mindful inventions. Shabbat says rest is sacred. Shabbat says stop doing and just be. Even when it comes to building a holy sanctuary for the divine, God says that the best gift, the most important sacrifice, is not any place, object or action. Rather, it is time itself. It is being ourselves, now, as we are, without doing or making or creating anything extra.
What gets in our way of finding our way to those moments of sacred pause? Whether or not we observe the formal Sabbath, why do we resist taking breaks from busyness, even when we all agree that the breaks help to sustain us?
Scott Dannemiller, in a recent article for the Huffington Post, argues that it is because we are afraid of facing ourselves and the rawness of who we are. He writes: “I am created in the image and likeness of God, yet somehow that isn’t good enough for me. So I fill my Facebook feed and my calendar with self-important busyness to avoid just being.”
It is not just ourselves we are afraid of seeing in the void of unstructured time – it is the void itself. It is the nature of reality. It is a sense of emptiness, and perhaps God itself. It feels terrifying and unknown. Of course, the irony is that in my experience, actually looking into that void and experiencing the emptiness leads to a reconnection so rich and powerful, it does feel like coming close to the Divine.
Darlene Cohen in her book, The One Who is Not Busy, agrees that the fear of emptiness keeps us busy. She also adds another dimension. She argues that we stay busy for the adrenaline rush and the short bursts of excitement that the drama brings us. “The client loved it! The deadline is met! Yes, we are alive! We know it now!” She continues, “most importantly, the intensity distracts us from the slowly dawning suspicion that our life means nothing, that all our efforts have not brought us any closer to happiness” (Cohen 96).
It is not busyness per se that is the problem. I’m assuming life will always be busy The problem is when work becomes mindless, or frenetic, or an escape mechanism from life. In the Torah, the fact that we receive the strange commandment to observe Shabbat right in the middle of the building process for the Mishkan is a way to force us to take a breath and a rest and remember why we work in the first place. It helps us find ourselves and God and remember that we are precious and loved, regardless of what we do or produce.
Shabbat of everyday life
Shabbat also gives us the taste of spaciousness so that when we return to work, we know how to do so mindfully. Unlike the utterly mindless creation of the golden calf in last week’s parsha, every movement and micro-movement in the creation of the Mishkan is done with attention, care, and – most movingly to me – heart
In Vayakhel, the word “heart” is mentioned fourteen times. “Every man whose heart uplifted him came…” (35:21), “every generous hearted person brought bracelets… ” (35:22), “every wise-hearted woman spun with her hands…” (35:25), “and He put in his heart the ability to teach ”(35:34), “then all the wise hearted people of the performers of the work made the Mishkan…(36:8), and more. These people – all the Israelites in one way or another – are working hard, but they are working wholeheartedly. They are deeply invested. They are putting love into every gift, every act of spinning, weaving, constructing, measuring, and finalizing. This is the essence of working mindfully.
What would it mean if we all worked this way? If we all moved this way through the world, paying attention to everything we were doing with all of our heart? Even when it was difficult? Even when it was happening quickly?
Darlene Cohen calls this “simultaneous inclusion.” She says that when we give the gift of our attention to everything we are doing, whether sending email, saying hello to someone in an elevator, paying our bills, or eating our dinner, we touch the spacious nature in every activity. We open up to our life. We find the peaceful nature of Shabbat wherever we are.
Emptiness to Fullness
The response to bringing our whole heart back into our work, supported and enhanced by periods of rest and stillness, pours life back into everyday life that can feel empty and hollow. It can transform “busyness” to “fullness.”
This is illustrated in the last few paragraphs of Pekudei:
34. And the cloud covered the Tent of Meeting, and the glory of the One filled the Mishkan.
Just as God’s kavod, God’s glory, fills the new Mishkan, making it complete or whole, our lives are made whole through the connection of our heart and our work.
The Institute for Jewish Spirituality’s mission is to develop and teach Jewish spiritual practices so that individuals and communities may experience greater awareness, purpose, and interconnection.
Learn more at jewishspirituality.org
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