Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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Here at the end of the year, I wanted to share one of my favorite episodes of the show that isn't about politics. It's about something that certainly I could do a better job of, which is rest. This is with the writer Judith Shulowitz. It's about the practice of Sabbath. We talked back in 2023, but it's one of those shows that has rung in my head far longer.
From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. This episode for me today has its roots way back. And so I'm going to take a moment in setting it up. When I was in college, a rabbi I knew, he gave me Abraham Joshua Heschel's book, The Sabbath. And I love that book. I've probably read it a dozen times since. And the reason it's mattered to me so much for so long is not just about the idea of the Sabbath. It's a critique of the way many of us, certainly me, live. A critique of the way our world has been designed. Heschel's argument is that the modern world is obsessed with questions of space. We spend our days trying to master the spaces in which we live, building in them, acquiring from them, traversing them. And what we spend to do that is the time that we have to live. He writes, quote, most of us seem to labor for the sake of things of space. As a result, we suffer from a deeply rooted dread of time and stand aghast when compelled to look into its face.
That line has always felt true to me. It's always felt true about me. But I mostly ignored its trueness. There's stuff to do every day. Maybe what's changed recently is that I've gotten older. Maybe it's that I've had children or I'm seeing my own parents age. But I've had more trouble ignoring that trueness. I don't think the speed at which I live, at which I move through time, at which I see the people around me living and moving through time is a speed that any of us really want. I don't think the habits that I've cultivated here are really good ones. So I've become interested in what this old practice has to say about how I live and how we live today. Heschel has this line, six days a week, we seek to dominate the world. On the seventh day, we try to dominate the self. It's amazing how much harder that is to do. But I can't shake the question of what if I did actually spend a full seventh of my life, which is what the Sabbath is supposed to be, living at a different speed. Who would I be if I knew more than how to work and not work?
Who would I be if I knew actually how to rest? A metaphor we often use now for rest is recharging. I need to recharge. Like we're iPhones that need to be plugged in overnight so we can work again in the morning. And here too, Heschel has a critique of this. He knew it. He talked about it. He writes, man is not a beast of burden and the Sabbath is not for the purpose of enhancing the efficiency of his work. Oof. When I was young, I went to an Orthodox Hebrew school for a couple of years and I had friends who truly kept Shabbat. I enjoyed going to their homes, but I didn't understand why they were giving up so much, all of these should nots, the refusal to use a car or to turn off a light or to fire up a video game. There was so much renunciation. And I still don't quite think those practices are right for me, but all I could see then was what was being pushed away.
And now I've become a lot more interested in what was being created, what was worth creating. In her beautiful book, The Sabbath World, Judith Shulowitz looks very squarely at that question, what the Sabbath has tried to create and how that has worked throughout time, throughout cultures, throughout different religions, right? There's a Jewish Sabbath, Jewish Shabbat, but obviously it's a Christian practice. Now there are secular versions of the practice and many more. And she looks at how difficult, how antagonistic, how idealistic that act of creation is in the world in which we live. And what struck me reading her is how fundamentally counter-cultural the practice now is, how radical something so ancient now feels to me, and in a way, how urgent it feels. I mentioned in my end-of-the-year AMA that my big resolution for this year is to actually build some kind of consistent Sabbath practice.
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