Rest As Resistance
And the Radicalness of Shabbat
I always have a big pile of books on the nightstand next to my bed. I tend to be reading multiple books at once, and a few issues of The New Yorker, usually dipping into and out of different things based on my mood, available time to read, and what’s on my mind before I get into bed. Sometimes I get hooked and I really focus on just one book - I read Patricia Lockwood’s “No One Is Talking About This” in two nights, I read Richard Powers’ “The Overstory” uninterrupted over several weeks – but usually, and especially with non-fiction, I toggle between a few titles. Sometimes I’m not aware that I’m doing research into a topic until I realize that I am reading books that are thematically related.
At some point over the past year I was reading Jenny Odell’s book “Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock” while I was also re-reading Abraham Joshua Heschel’s “The Sabbath”. (Heschel was a prominent, influential rabbi who was closely allied with Martin Luther King Jr. in the Civil Rights Movement.)
Odell is exploring time – our experience of it, the underlying assumptions of how we organize, quantify and qualify time (think: labor, capitalism, productivity), the difference between constructed time and “natural” time, among other concerns – with an eye towards the climate crisis. She pulls together so many fascinating threads of investigation, so many ideas and sources and insights, that by the end of the book I found myself yearning passionately to reconfigure my – and the world’s – relationship to time in order to reclaim our humanity and save the planet.
When I first picked up Heschel again, I wasn’t thinking so much about time. My memory of the book, or rather my remembered impression, of Heschel’s “The Sabbath” was that it was a book about Jewish spirituality. Coming back to the text decades later, possessed of considerably more life experience, it was as if I was encountering it anew; I was awe-struck and amazed at Heschel’s conception of time and its centrality to Jewish philosophy and practice. “Jewish ritual,” he writes, “may be characterized as the art of significant forms in time, as architecture of time.” Furthermore, “the Sabbaths are our great cathedrals.”
The last time I read Heschel’s book my attention was on the “Jewish ritual” part. On this reading my attention was focused on the “architecture of time” part, on Heschel’s nuanced, carefully considered distinctions between the realms of space and time:
“The danger begins when in gaining power in the realm of space we forfeit all aspirations in the realm of time. There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord. Life goes wrong when the control of space, the acquisition of things of space, becomes our sole concern.”
It's a remarkable insight and, in a way, a surprising reminder that so many of the problems of modernity are the same human problems we’ve encountered for thousands of years, only in new forms. Revisiting Heschel while reading Odell reminded me that not only there are ancient but extant ideas and practices to address the problems of modernity, but that many of these insights and answers existed in my own tradition.
About a year ago I heard an interview on NPR with Sarah Hurwitz, author of the book “Here All Along: Finding Meaning, Spirituality, And A Deeper Connection To Life–In Judaism (After Finally Choosing To Look There)”. From 2009 – 2017 Hurwitz was head speechwriter for First Lady Michelle Obama and as a senior speechwriter for President Barack Obama. Looking to fill time after a tough romantic breakup she signed up for an “Intro to Judaism” class at the JCC.
“Here All Along” recounts Hurwitz’s discovery process, and as I read it I kept nodding my head in agreement or recognition. As you might imagine, she’s a talented writer, and it is an enjoyable read. Her experience very much aligned with mine, and while I didn’t agree with everything she wrote, of course, it was affirming to read her story and see my experience reflected there.
For most of my adult life I found the idea of observing the Sabbath onerous and infuriating, just another set of inscrutable and complicated rules telling you what you can’t do from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, imposed by a god I don’t believe in. Then life happened. And death happened. And the Internet and social media and capitalism and authoritarianism and hustle culture and bills, bills, bills and jobs and more jobs and more bullshit and isolation and sadness and all the time pressure and stress and so many assholes and …. well, you get the idea.
I started going to shul every week to say kaddish for my mom because I didn’t know what to do with my grief and my loss and my life, I needed time to sit with it all, time for myself, time to listen, time to be in conversation with something bigger, deeper, more profound, more meaningful than the quotidian, everyday concerns of daily busy-ness and distraction. And the more frequently I went, the more I looked forward to it, the more I wanted Shabbat to arrive and the longer I wanted to stay in it. The more I started to do Shabbat, the more I realized that the rules were there to help, not to hinder, because it is just so hard to turn everything off, to not work, to not be distracted, to just be: to be with yourself, be with your family, be in community, without any expectations or motives or need to be productive.
This past Memorial Day weekend I attended a barbecue in a friend’s backyard and one of the guests asked me if I’d read Trisha Hersey’s manifesto Rest is Resistance, where she explores the idea that “Rest is a form of resistance because it pushes back and disrupts white supremacy and capitalism.”
I hadn’t read the book, though I remembered reading about Hersey and her Nap Ministry in “Saving Time”, so I went out and bought it; I was interested to see where Hersey’s project and practices intersected with my own experience of developing a Shabbat practice, as my own act of self-care and resistance against capitalism, productivity, digital distraction and materialism.
Then, in June, in one of those strange surreal synchronicity moments, Louisiana’s Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signed into law a bill requiring that the Ten Commandments be displayed in all public classrooms. Which is so insane for so many reasons. And then the memes started going around with pictures of the Two Tablets with Hebrew on them and so, of course, I had to go back and look at the Ten Commandments!
It turns out that the Ten Commandments are recounted twice in the Torah - first in Exodus, then again in Deuteronomy. (It’s actually a little more complicated than that, and then there’s the whole problem of translation from the Hebrew. But stick with me here.)
The first time the Ten Commandments is recounted it says to remember the Sabbath because that was the day God rested from the work of creation. But the second time it is recounted, it says to keep the Sabbath because, “you shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and that the L-rd your G‑d took you out from there with a strong hand and with an outstretched arm; therefore, the L-rd, your G‑d, commanded you to observe the Sabbath day.”
Even if you don’t hold by the whole God part (and I have very mixed feelings about that) it is still pretty wild because, basically, that second version of the commandment is saying that keeping the Sabbath is about rest as resistance against slavery and liberation from oppression! Here all along ….
Like Hurwitz, Hersey is an enjoyable, conversational writer, her ideas and stories are compelling. I found myself wondering what Hersey, or Odell for that matter, would think about the Jewish sabbath - its relationship to time and productivity, its origins, its practice as a mode of resistance. I found myself thinking about how the centrality of Sabbath observance to Jewish communal life (and the diversity of ways it is observed) might serve as a model for instantiating community, renewal, spirituality and self-care into modern life for all people.
It doesn’t have to be about religion or God or anything like that if that makes you uncomfortable; it can be whatever it looks like for you and your community. But what would it look like to really center rest in our lives as a communal practice – even just one day a week - to prioritize connection and care, compassion, circumspection and reflection?
Rest is about creating time for us to free our minds and dream of new possibilities and imagine alternatives. What would the world look like if we, as a society, gave ourselves permission to rest, and dream, and envision a better, more just, more compassionate society? There are so many forces at work trying to limit, confine and constrain our imaginations, our sense of the possible, our sense of hope. How do we reclaim our time (and space and energy) to change our lives, our selves and our world?