Sermon: Rest

Written by Rabbi Josh Levy — 1 August 2020

One of the most interesting and important books on work to be written in the last few years is a book called Rest, written by business consultant Alex Soojung-Kim Pang.

Pang’s thesis – to precis a 250 page book in a couple of paragraphs – is twofold.

Firstly, that we have come to think about work and rest in the wrong way – we now understand them as opposites, in tension, taking away from one another, when in fact they should be seen as partners.  Our current culture of work is not only bad for our wellbeing, but, he argues, it also makes us less productive.  It substitutes an appearance of busy-ness for effectiveness, for creativity and focus.  So, we need to reconceptualise work and leisure.

The second idea of the book is that we also need to think differently about rest.  That Rest is not simply ‘not working’.  Rather rest is a skill.
It requires contemplation and intentionality – what he calls ‘deliberate rest’.  As Pang has put it: Rest is not “a negative space defined by absence of work but much more than that. The counterintuitive discovery is that many of the most restorative kinds of rest are actually active”.  Rest is not the same as crashing in front of the television but asks that we change our routines, privilege recovery, exercise, and engage in what he calls ‘deep play’.   Those who manage this kind of rest, Pang shows, often report that they – perhaps counterintuitively – experience fewer time pressures in their lives, are more productive on fewer hours.

What Pang presents makes a lot of sense, even if it also feels easier said than done.   Indeed, not only does it make sense, but much of what he writes also taps into older wisdom – including that found in our tradition.

The idea that we must see work and rest not as opposites, as competing goods, but as partners, mutually supportive goods – is one that resonates very strongly in Jewish text, in which both work and rest are seen as fundamental, as sacred ideals.  Full, balanced, lives require both.

Think only of one of the key phrases that Eddie read for us this morning – “sheshet yamim taavod v’asitah kol m’lachtecha, v’yom hashvi’i Shabbat l’Adonai elohecha, lo ta’aseh chol malachah” – “Six days shall you labour and do all your work; and the seventh day is a Shabbat for God, you shall not do any work”.  Most often it is translated ‘but the seventh day’ as if they are ideas in tension.  However, that oppositionality is projected into the text by the translation.  These are not opposing, but complementary concepts – both the work and the rest are part of the mitzvah.

As Abraham Joshua Heschel put it in his wonderful little monograph ‘The Sabbath’: “The duty to work for six days is just as much a part of God’s covenant… as the duty to abstain from work on the seventh day”.  “The Sabbath as a day of abstaining from work” Heschel writes, “is not a depreciation but an affirmation of labour, a divine exaltation of its dignity”.

This reflects an attitude to work and to rest which sees both as divine activities – God both worked in the Creation of the world and ceased work in order to rest.  So the ideal is to find the correct balance of both – of which the offering of our tradition is the concept of Shabbat.

It is worth acknowledging how remarkable this observation was for its time.  To ancient Greek and Roman writers, in an echo of how many see work today, Shabbat rest was seen as evidence of the indolence of the Jewish people.  Juvenal described Jews as “Passing each seventh day in idleness and refusing to attend to any duty of life” – presenting exactly the same opposition of work – good, and rest – bad, which Pang rejects.

The second half of Pang’s thesis also resonates strongly in our tradition.  Eddie has spoken beautifully about the two aspects of Shabbat – positive acts of remembering – Zachor et yom hashabbat – as represented by the fourth commandment in Exodus and the negative, ‘thou shalt not’ keeping which the rabbis identified with the same commandment in his portion shamor et yom hashabbat.

This duality applies also, specifically, to Rest.
In his codification of the mitzvot, the biblical commandments, Maimonides presents resting and cessation from work as two different commandments – one positive one negative.  We are commanded not to work, and also we are commanded to rest.  That is, Resting is not just refraining from work but a positive, deliberate, action of restoration.

We learn this most clearly from the divine model of creation.  God’s resting.

In our Amidah we sang the words of v’shamru – a passage from Exodus which concludes, ki sheshet yamim, asah Adonai, et hashamayim, v’et ha’aretz – For in six days the creator made heaven and earth – u’vayom ha-shvi’I shavat and on the seventh day God ceased, vayinafash – and God rested.  Two separate verbs, two separate sense concepts.

And the verb vayinafash carries many of the ideals of deliberate, restorative rest that Pang speaks about being so central – the root is the same as for the word nefesh – meaning breath, life, soul – vayinafash means to breath again, to reinvigorate, to be restored, re-souled.  That is the divine model of Shabbat rest.  It is not just not working, but a thoughtful act of restoration.

Again, it is worth reflecting for a moment on the radical nature of this resting God idea.  This was a particular challenge for some ancient observers of Jewish tradition.  In his poem about travels in the fifth century CE, the poet Rutilius Claudius Namatianus wrote of the Jews of the empire: “Every seventh day condemned to lazy sloth, a feeble image of its wearied god!”  Jewish rest was a sign of weakness, not only of them, but of their god – a god that got tired enough to need a break?  Of course, that is the wrong way to think about divine rest – rather, God’s rest in our text is a model for us to emulate – the recognition of a human need for, and a privileging of, restoration – built into the very fabric of the universe.  Rest as a divine example; and thus also as an act of imitatio dei – of imitation of divine holiness.

So Pang’s two ideas both resonate strongly in our tradition too.  A good life, a productive life, requires rest.  We cannot think about rest as stealing from our work time but rather as honouring it; as Heschel puts it, ‘a divine exaltation of its dignity’.

And secondly that rest is not the same as cessation of working. This is one of the great – and sometimes most overlooked – insights of our tradition when it speaks about Shabbat.  We have to deliberately, intentionally create renewal and restoration.  It is a problems if we focus only on the prohibition of work, which in itself is not the re-souling we need.

And never has that re-souling been more important than now – when we have seen the boundaries between work and home, between labour and leisure blurred even more – when our family, professional and religious lives are all situated in the same chair, on the same screen; and when many of us have to rethink how we make the summer a different kind of restorative experience.

To ensure productivity in our work lives, in our personal lives and in our religious lives now more than ever requires us to be intentional about privileging space and restoration, embracing the divine model of rest.

To quote the Amidah for Shabbat that we read earlier in our service: eloheinu v’elohei avoteinu r’tzeh na vimnuchateinu – Our God and God of our ancestors, may our rest (as well as our work) be pleasing to You.