Burnout

Written by Rabbi Elliott Karstadt — 15 February 2025

An article from The Guardian a couple of years ago told the story of Amy Gandon, who had been working as a senior civil servant when the Covid Pandemic hit in early 2020, and found herself putting in fourteen-hour days as part of the government’s Covid response, assuming that it was normal to feel exhausted all the time. She is quoted as saying: ‘When you’re working in an emergency situation, lots of feelings that might prefigure burnout – constant adrenaline, racing thoughts, racing heartbeat a lot of the time, feeling I couldn’t switch off at night – are indistinguishable from what I thought I should be feeling in that context. I thought that was part of being professional and responsible. I do care a lot, I want to work hard.’ According to the article: ‘It was only after a panic attack so severe she thought she was dying that Amy realised something was wrong. Ironically, she says, her doctor went off sick with burnout shortly after signing her off work.’

Millennials (those whose teenage years or adulthood began at around the beginning of the millennium) have never known a workplace that does not include a smart phone, which means a constant sense of always being on and always being available to others. Having your email on your phone means that you never really know when you can switch off. It is never possible to not get that email or that text, or to instantly see that piece of news.

This Shabbat, we reach the point in the Torah in which Moses reaches the point of burnout. As Rabbi Nicola read for us, Moses’ father in law Yitro says to him: Navol tibol – ‘you will surely wear yourself out’. On Monday at our Annual Meeting of Congregants, I spoke about this in the context of language and how the people spoke to each other. Today I want to focus on what it means to be worn out, to be burnt out. To have become detached from the core purpose of what you do.

A number of medieval commentators point to the parallel with a verse from the book of Isaiah that describes the hosts of heaven withering ‘like a leaf withering on the vine’ (Is 34:4). We get the image of drying out, shrivelling, and losing vitality.

And in the Book of Deuteronomy, there is another parallel in which God tells the people that in all their time wondering in the wilderness, simlot’cha lo valtah me’alecha – their clothes did not wear out. In all the forty years of wandering – and Rashi tells us that this was because ‘the clouds of Divine Glory used to rub the dirt off their clothes and bleach them so that they looked like new white articles, and also, their children, as they grew, their clothes grew with them, just like the shell of a snail which grows with it’. If only that were true of our children today!

Yitro goes on to say: Gam atah, gam ha’am hazeh – ‘and for you, and for this people’. Yitro tells Moses that this is not just putting a strain on him, but on the people around him, and those he is trying to serve. We could understand gam atah as ‘both you and this people’ with ‘you’ referring to Moses himself. But many commentators argue that the ‘you’ is actually God speaking to Moses’ brother, Aaron, and his friend, Hur. Both Aaron and Hur are being affected by Moses’ burnout.

Finally, so are the people of Israel as a whole. Moses thinks he is doing this for them. He may even think that he is sacrificing his own mental and physical health for their wellbeing. But Yitro sees that the people need a healthy and well-rested Moses in order for him to serve them as best he can. It puts more strain on the people to have a Moses who is burnt out.

Consider where we are in Moses’ story. Like Amy Gandon who I quoted at the beginning, Moses has been leading the Israelites through an emergency situation. I would imagine he has not slept very much since the moment that God first came to him and charged him with the responsibility of going to Pharaoh and demanding the release of the Israelites from slavery.

It is no accident, perhaps, that Yitro having confronted Moses about burnout and overworking himself in one chapter, within the same parashah we get the Ten Commandments, and central to the Ten Commandments is the commandment for Shabbat, which we sang just now as part of our service.

Some may have heard me teach before about the explanation given for Shabbat by the Israeli philosopher David Hazony. Hazony points out that the Shabbat command is different from most other mitzvot in terms of the justification that is given for why we must observe it, which is very particular to the version in Yitro.

Usually, we are told to do things because I am the Eternal your God or because I the Eternal brought you out of Egypt. And this latter reason is the one that is given for resting on Shabbat when we get the repetition of the Ten Commandments in the Book of Deuteronomy. But here, when the Israelites have just left Egypt, and when Moses has just had his first experience of burnout, a very different justification is given. The people should rest because God rested. They should observe Shabbat in imitatio Dei, in the imitation of God. God rested on the seventh day after creation – so the Israelites should rest every seven days.

Hazony points out that this leads to a further question in the chain of justification for this commandment: why did God rest on the seventh day? Surely God did not need to rest, God is God, all-powerful. As we recite in our liturgy, God doesn’t sleep but rouses the sleepers! God doesn’t need rest. And yet God does rest. God downs tools and says: I could go on forever, but this is enough. And Hazony argues that this emphasis on God resting on Shabbat is in order to distinguish God from what God had created.

If God had created the world in six days and then the story immediately continued with all the events that would follow, a theology that might follow from that would be that God was to be identified with creation. This is what theologians call pantheism – the idea that God is identical with the cosmos; that God is present in everything. Now, those who are conversant with the history of Jewish philosophy might point out that there are some notable pantheists among Jewish philosophers, not least among them the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who argued that God was everything. But the authors and redactors of the Torah are trying to make an argument against pantheism. They want to present a God that is above creation, and separate from creation.

The historian of philosophy, Julius Guttmann, argues that the theology of the Hebrew Bible wants to resist mysticism, and the idea that the aim is to have union with God – finding our place within creation and thereby harmonising with the Divine. Rather, we have to recognise God as something separate from us, with whom we can enter into relationship and dialogue. We have to approach God as something separate from nature because (unlike nature) God is not something we can control. We can (if we want to) dominate nature and harness it for our needs. That is not something we can do to the divine. But enough theology for the moment.

The point is: God rested in order that God would not be thought of as identical with God’s work. And, according to Hazony, the reason that we should emulate God in resting on the seventh day, is that we also need to be reminded that we are not identical with our creations. As human beings, we are of infinite worth, regardless of what we produce, and regardless of what we achieve. We do not need to be working 24/7 on order to be considered worthy of love. And if, in some way, we feel we fall short in our professional lives or in our business lives, even in community life, that does not mean that we have failed as human beings. If we get burnt out, it does not mean that we are not worthy of love and compassion.  But this can also act as a reminder that we do not need to work ourselves into the ground in order to be considered worthy human beings.

Like Moses, like Amy with whose story I began, we are simply following the pattern of what it means to be human. People reach that point of burnout because they care, because they don’t want to let other people down. But we should learn from the words of Yitro: what you are doing is not right. You will wear yourself out. It’s not good for you, or for anyone else.

By the way, the fact that I am saying this does not mean that I myself am very good at hearing this teaching! It is a constant struggle to hear the voice of Yitro. It is much easier, even more comfortable, to hear the voice that says: keep going, don’t accept the help, it’s all on you.

This Shabbat, as we celebrate leadership in our community, let us strive to hear the voice of Yitro. Let us recognise when we are taking on too much and let us avoid burnout. Let us make the rest of Shabbat part of our lives – whatever that means for us in practice. And let us distinguish between ourselves and the works of our hands, so that we recognise the inherent worth both of other human beings and, crucially, ourselves.

Shabbat Shalom.