Experimenting with the Sabbath
“Remember to observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days a week are set apart for your daily duties and regular work, but the seventh day is a day of rest dedicated to the LORD your God. On that day no one in your household may do any kind of work. This includes you, your sons and daughters, your male and female servants, your livestock, and any foreigners living among you. For in six days the LORD made the heavens, the earth, the sea, and everything in them; then he rested on the seventh day. That is why the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and set it apart as holy.
— Exodus 20:8-11 (The Daily Walk Bible)
On his podcast, Ezra Klein interviewed journalist Judith Shulevitz about the Jewish Sabbath, which involves spending from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday on rest and community. Though Jewish himself, Klein was more interested in the Sabbath as an antidote to his busy life as a journalist and parent than in its religious purpose.
Of course, everyone’s familiar with the concept of the Sabbath—people have practiced it for thousands of years, and we have the weekend as a structure for our calendars. Yet I was struck by how this description in Abraham Joshua Heschel’s book The Sabbath captures how counter-cultural the practice is in modern times.
“[T]he Sabbath as a day of rest, as a day of abstaining from toil, is not for the purpose of recovering one’s lost strength and becoming fit for the forthcoming labor. The Sabbath is a day for the sake of life. Man is not a beast of burden, and the Sabbath is not for the purpose of enhancing the efficiency of his work.”
That line resonated with me because even though I’m good about avoiding appointments on the weekend, I still create a weekend to-do list like on weekdays, and it is usually filled with items that are basically “enhancing the efficiency” of my work.
I often read books, but they’re related to work. I run errands or fix things around the house, but those tasks land on the weekend because of the unconscious beliefs “I don’t have time during the week” and “I need to get this out of the way before I go back to work.” I usually treat the weekend as rest for work, which really makes them part of work rather than a respite.
That’s what made me interested in experimenting with the Sabbath. As Heschel writes,” Six days a week we seek to dominate the world, on the seventh day we try to dominate the self.”
The easiest thing I (re)learned during my Sabbath experiments was just how much the phone is a problem. Keeping my phone on the charger for most of the day delivered more than 80% of the restful mindset I was hoping to achieve. This isn’t groundbreaking—anyone who’s thought about the addictiveness of our devices knows this—but it became undeniable when I deliberately created a space that prioritized rest over productivity and distraction.
However, the larger insight came in preparing for taking a Sabbath. Since the goal was to achieve a sense of spacious rest, I had to ask myself on Friday, “What will it take to feel ready to rest?”
That question wasn’t just about the tactics of getting things done or looking ahead to Monday to ensure that I was all set. Instead, it forced me to confront my fundamental approach to work.
For example, when I feel compelled to be productive on the weekend, it’s usually because I feel anxious or unprepared for what’s going to happen the next week. Similarly, feeling like my calendar is in disarray because I have projects happening simultaneously creates an emotional state that’s unconducive to rest. And when I’ve exceeded a reasonable number of live projects, no amount of preparation on Friday could give comfort about the things left undone.
Experimenting with a Sabbath practice was a reminder that there’s no way to adequately achieve the spacious rest that most of us want on the weekend without addressing those larger questions about how we approach work.