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Jacob Staub: Is my Shabbat practice going to synagogue? Is my Shabbat practice gardening? Is my Shabbat practice taking my toddlers to the zoo, or learning to play the guitar? Things that I want to do that I don't have time to do during the rush of the week. Many of the things I just described are not Shabbat activities in a traditional way, but if we are going to create a rest that is different than the rest of the week in communities where not everybody is walking, and not riding, and not everybody is going to synagogue then these are ways to develop a practice.

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Deborah Waxman: I'm Rabbi Deborah Waxman, and I'm so happy to welcome you to Hashivenu, a podcast about Jewish teachings on resilience.  Hashivenu means "return us." The "us" is the Jewish people, asking to be renewed.  Seeking renewal, cultivating resilience—these are central concerns in Jewish thought and Jewish practice.  Focusing on resilience is one way to think about how the Jewish people and the Jewish civilization we've created have survived for thousands of years.  Again and again throughout history, Jews have experienced catastrophe—I'm talking about living through shattering challenges that destroyed our communities, that made us rethink our relationship to God, our relationship to other Jews, our relationship to other peoples and the world around us.  And, again and again, we have transcended these catastrophes, we have breathed new life into the Jewish people and the Jewish civilization, we have found pathways to repair.  From trauma, we have had to heal.  We have done so by finding ways to cultivate resilience, both individually and collectively. This podcast explores different resilience practices in Jewish teaching and Jewish living. 


In this episode, I'm delighted to talk with Rabbi Jacob Staub, my teacher and my friend, about one of the deepest and best known of Jewish practices: Shabbat, the Sabbath. Jacob is a rabbi and a professor of Jewish philosophy and spirituality at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. He's written wildly on many topics, including a beautiful extended chapter on the Jewish Sabbath in, *A Guide to Jewish Practice*, which is published by the RRC Press. You can find a link to that chapter in the notes to this podcast and we'll draw on it in our conversation today. Jacob, thank you so much for being here.

JS: I'm delighted, thank you.

DW: In Hebrew, the Jewish Sabbath is called Shabbat. It's an ancient practice. We read about it in the Hebrew Bible, the Torah. The Book of Genesis begins with God creating the world in six days and then resting on the seventh, and from that we get the concept of a day of rest. Can you talk about Shabbat in general and how you think it helps to cultivate resilience? 

JS: Sure. I think that the end of the first chapter of Genesis where it says that God rested and was refreshed, renewed, re-souled, *vayinafash*, is key not only to understanding what the Shabbat is, but to understanding the Jewish view of reality. Basically, we understand that the world is so constructed that we work for six days and then we rest on the seventh day. How do we know to do this? Because at least, mythically, God rests on the seventh day. It is embedded in reality that the best way to work is to also rest. This has major implications for the concept and the approach to resiliency, and we just can't keep going, can't keep going without renewing and re-souling and refreshing. There are many anthropologists who think that this approach, this biblical approach involved the invention of the seven-day week. The seven-day week does not correspond to anything in nature, not to the lunar month or to the solar year. It is an assertion that we need to sanctify time by marking different periods, holy periods, less holy periods.

And in the *kedushah*, in the holiness of Shabbat and in imitating God and living a godly life, we stop, we are renewed, we are refreshed, we do not do what we do for the first six days of the week.

DW: Yeah, absolutely. One of my favorite *midrashim*, one of my favorite Rabbinic interpretations of Shabbat is that it's not six days of creation then Shabbat, but in fact that creation was completed *through* the resting, that we are most effective in our working not only by stopping but that it contributes, and it renews, and it furthers the work. For someone who's a workaholic, which I definitely have those propensities, I always have to coach myself that it is in the ceasing, in the resting, I actually then have the energy and the vision to go back to the important work that I want to get done.

JS: I completely agree. The word *menuchah*, rest, Sabbath rest doesn't in the Jewish tradition actually mean "rest" in the sense of napping or doing nothing. The *menuchah*, the rest on Shabbat is the process of renewing. So it involves maybe a review of the week, maybe some quiet time, maybe a walk in the park or gardening. Anything that reconnects us with our source and with our ultimate goals and purposes. It's a rest of returning to our basics and our source, and that is what propels us at *havdalah* at the end of Shabbat back into the week.

DW: So you earlier talked about re-souling from that verb, *vayinafash*, *nefesh* soul. Can you talk about what you think about when you say re-souling? 

JS: In my mind and in my experience, if I am like you, working day and night on something for a long, long... For many days in a row, I lose track of the larger picture. I'm either mired in the details or mired in the goal of getting something done. And even if I'm not working, if I'm on vacation and I need to get to all of the sites that we want see or to accomplish -- when I'm mired in accomplishing stuff, I forget what the original reason for doing it is. And when I talk about re-souling, it's getting back in touch with that aspect of my reality and my existence that is connected to some larger, more meaningful whole. If I am devoted to the repair of the world, if I am devoted to acts of loving kindness, I can remember that. And in remembering it, it's like I'm recharging, recharging the soul. That's what I mean by re-souling.

DW: Jacob, can you share a story of one of your Shabbat experiences? Something that has really nourished you? 

JS: One of the great moments of my parenting career has been waking up on Saturday morning, on Shabbat morning, and the excitement -- sometimes the resistance, but the different atmosphere of what it's like to take an 11, eight and five-year-old to synagogue, to have a different breakfast. Maybe we're having French toast based on the challah from a night before. And then to have my eldest daughter sitting while I'm leading a service, it brings me back to walking in New York City when I was a kid with my father. I never walked with my father except on Saturday morning as we walked to the synagogue. So that the traveling with my children and then the eating with my children, and sitting on Friday night really not only gave me *nahas*, pleasure, but also tied me to hundreds of generations of people who had done it before me.

Another such example is how singing, singing a Shabbat song really takes me out of my body, out of this moment and into some kind of ethereal pleasurable realm of equanimity. So, sometimes it has been really traditional and complicated Hebrew hymns in which as I'm describing the rising of the sun, I feel like I am one with the universe. But also singing "Bim Bam, Shabbat Shalom" over and over again with kids or with adults in a relaxed way in which we all know and aspire, at least most of the kids, aspire to entering into another time and space continuum -- [that] often makes me tear up, well up. It's a way of connecting not only familially but with friends. I know that people who have not been raised in Shabbat households sometimes feel awkward for people to sit around and sing. Even if we don't have great voices, even if we don't have notes but singing, Shabbat singing from the heart in whatever voice we have is a way of joining together and offering up our good will and wishes.

DW: It strikes me that you're talking both about vertical community, like the ancestors who preceded us and your children, and also horizontal community, the voices joined together in real time, and it feels like that's part of the Shabbat practice. I remember my sister-in-law who is a Jew by choice, I had that honor of sitting in on her *beit din*. And one of the Rabbis asked, "What happens for you? Why are you lighting Shabbat candles?" In truth, I think this Rabbi wanted an answer "because I feel commanded". I was so moved by my sister-in-law's answer. She said, "When I light the Shabbat candles, I know that I'm engaging in an activity that my mother-in-law is doing and -- my *bubbie* was still alive-- that my grandmother is doing. And I know that Jewish women have done this generations back and I really like joining myself into that line of tradition." And she would do that activity with her real community at that point, my brother and now their two sons gathered around her. And I was very, very moved by how powerfully she could answer that question.

DW: So our listeners can find a lot of different sources about traditional Jewish observance of the Shabbat and the laws and the practices. And I don't want to go so much into that. We can, in the program notes, point to some resource. Your chapter in 'A Guide to Jewish Practice' does a wonderful job of both reviewing traditional practices, and then also more contemporary practices. In our 24/7 world that is so shaped by technology, what are some practices that you might want to offer up? What are some things to take on? And what are some things maybe to step away from that you might suggest in terms of observing a Sabbath that leads toward renewal and re-souling? 

JS: I think the first thing in thinking about this question is to acknowledge how formidable a challenge it might seem to be. Taking an hour off may be difficult, but to actually change what we do for an entire 24 or 25 hours seems impossible. And I think we need to acknowledge that unless I am a part of a community where everyone is together observing, it is very hard to do. So, I recommend that people begin with a Friday night meal, with lighting the Shabbat candles, maybe connecting to parents or grandparents or previous generations who did that. And drinking a glass of wine, breaking bread with some friends, or at the synagogue when there are communal meals, just stopping whatever it is we were running around doing before that, and easing into a moment where we can think about what it means to not be anxious, not be thinking about the next thing we are going to do.

Now traditionally this has involved... It's usually the woman cooking for several days or Thursday night or something getting everything ready. But sometimes these days, the best thing to do is to go out to friends, to a restaurant or to a cafe to have the Shabbat practice. If I can at 7:00 or 7:30 sit, eat, and relax with people whom I like or love for two or three hours, that I think is a practice to practice, to work on for a long time. I then think that it is difficult to move, "Okay, what do I do when I wake up in the morning? And how do I do the whole Saturday or something?" I have found the next easy marker to be Havdalah, the end of Shabbat. So if I celebrate the end of Shabbat in some way, either with other people, with a candle and wine, and a little bit of song, or alone, I know that this is the end of the sacred period. And over the course of months, probably years, one fills in what it is that is sacred. Is my Shabbat practice going to synagogue? Is my Shabbat practice gardening? Is my Shabbat practice taking my toddlers to the zoo? Is my Shabbat practice studying a text or learning to play the guitar? Things that I want to do that I don't have time to do during the rush of the week.

I always talk about scheduling in rest time into my week, or gym time. This is like that a little bit. "Okay, this is a day when I really love to write poetry or something, but I never have time, and it really is meaningful to me." This can be a Shabbat practice. And I should say that many of the things I just described are not Shabbat activities in a traditional way, but if we are going to create a *menuchah*, a rest that is different than the rest of the week in communities where not everybody is walking and not riding, and not everybody is going to synagogue, and I don't have such a community, then these are ways to develop a practice.

DW: It's interesting, because at the beginning when you were speaking, I was thinking about, "Oh, Shabbat," -- I sometimes think about Shabbat as a time to be rather than do, especially the entering into it, that shift from the frantic everyday activities into a different kind of space, and then it really is about stopping. And I agree with you that I think about the day of Shabbat, the long day stretching out, that I try to approach it as an expansive space and how am I going to fill it? And sometimes that is about doing. And I love your focus on doing those things that don't necessarily make it into the rest of the week, or that you engage in them on Shabbat in a really qualitatively different way with a sense of -- with an open heart. You were talking about doing, and I find refraining is also a really important part of Shabbat for me, and that there are two things that I try really hard not to do. One is, I try to do no business. Sometimes I might have the computer on because I'm writing, but I try really hard not to go over to the Quicken. But I try really hard to be off of email for the entirety of Shabbat, and that's so unlike the rest of my week. It's hard, and it's also very, very liberating.

JS: It is, and it's transformative of time, of a sense of time. It may be the best contemporary practice we have for changing the nature of Sabbath time from weekday time, because when I check my email on Saturday night or Sunday morning, I have no idea what happened first, and I completely lost track of things that I am tracking all the time. It's a liberation after the liberation. "Oh, look, I do not have to be at attention at all times. I can direct my gaze in a different direction."

DW: I think that's exactly what I just heard someone talk about: how there's an app that can reflect on how much we use our phones. And the person who was talking about it reported on her own statistics, and she was stunned to see that she was checking email something like 20 times an hour. Usually around 5 o'clock on Shabbat afternoon I have to think, "Oh, I wonder what's in my email?" But I've built up enough capacity that I can say, "All right, I wonder, but I'm not going to check." And that's so unlike, "Oh, I'm waiting in line for 30 seconds, I'm going to check the email." It's just a really different way of moving through the world. I so appreciate that I have some kind of pathway that allows me, as you said, to practice that.

JS: Yes, yes, yes. And doing something positive in place. If I'm sitting around singing with a couple of friends, I'm much less tempted to engage in regular weekday activities. "Tempted" --there's nothing wrong with engaging in weekday activities on the weekday, but a really rich Shabbat experience is when you're not even refraining. This is way down the line when you are habituated into a different kind of day and set of activities.

DW: As we wind down, I think I want to raise up that there's some activities that we engage in, and they're one-offs. And they might be deeply renewing. I had the great opportunity to go see the musical, Hamilton, last weekend. I can't tell you how much it re-souled me and it ensouled me. It was just thrilling, and it's a once in a lifetime experience. And Shabbat is really qualitatively different, and it's an invitation each and every week to do this. It really can be a practice that helps us to build up capacity and orient us toward the most important things, I think.

JS: The difference between a single event and Shabbat practice is exactly the regularity. Singing or saying the same words, chanting or reciting a blessing, then calls up things that I experienced saying those words another time, or humming a tune. I want to go back to my original point about the Jewish idea of reality being six and one. Six and one. Six days we work, and on the seventh day we stop so that the next six days we can work. That is a mode of living that isn't about doing and not doing. I mean, it's also about doing and not doing. But it's about knowing that I can count on a world in which I can lean back in my easy chair, in which I can have a relaxed meal, in which I can, as I'm inclined to, meditate or sit in silence, or just reflect. I know it's coming, I know it's coming. And that in itself ensouls me during the previous week. Traditional Jewish practice has us counting down from Shabbat to Shabbat. So on Wednesday we're right in the middle; on Tuesday and Monday and Sunday, we're still coming off the previous Shabbat; and on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday we're preparing for the next one, that Shabbat. We live from one Shabbat to another. If we can live a life like that, it's a different kind of life.

DW: A little taste of the world to come.

JS: Right, exactly.

DW: Right. Well, thank you so much.

JS: Thank you, and may we all continue to enjoy much Shabbat rest and much productive work.

DW: Amen. So be it.

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