Unplugging – Jewish style

As you read this I’ll just be returning from a brief vacation to somewhere sunny. I tend to work really hard, tire myself out, and then need a few days of lounging around in the sun to recover. It occurs to me this time that perhaps this isn’t the best way of living life.

Are you like this? Do you tire yourself out with family responsibilities, work, social obligations, until you simply can’t continue and that’s when you take a break or a holiday?

I was thinking about something similar at the last Rabbis Without Borders retreat I attended. The very term “retreat” makes it seem like our normal lives are something from which we must flee. Surely the point of the gathering was to strengthen and enhance what we do in our regular working lives. Just like the point of a vacation should be to enhance one’s life, not escape from it. The truth is, it’s all just… life. We get one life to live — work, home, vacation, rest, play, struggle, sleep. It’s all real life and it’s all happening right now.

So this time I’m going to bring a little bit of my beach vacation back with me. I hope to bring the sun, for this has been a brutal winter, but that’s not what I’m talking about. One of the things I love about travel is the sense of being unreachable. I love the moment I get on a plane, turn off my phone, and know that no one can find me for the next several hours. While I can’t bring back the pina coladas or ocean sounds, I can bring back the experience of letting myself unplug, literally and figuratively.

We have a Jewish mechanism for this. It’s called Shabbat. The wisdom of Shabbat is taking time to rest each week. It’s a way of preventing burnout; there is a regular time to rejuvenate built right into the schedule. Many secular Jews mark Shabbat in some way, but most of us don’t completely unplug.

The Hebrew Bible reminds us to rest… that after the earth’s creation a day of rest was called for, there is a sabbatical year (shmita) to allow for rest, and there are rules about letting workers rest. Our tradition generally understands that productivity can only happen if rest can also happen. We know this, but we live in such a fast-paced culture, so very driven and obsessed by/with busy-ness, that it can be easy to forget. We need to rest; we need to unplug. Our smartphones and computers have made our working lives vastly more productive, but they have also blurred the boundaries between our working lives and our personal lives. Our times to rest are interrupted and sometimes eclipsed by email notifications and urgent calls/messages.

I’d be lying if I said I was going to completely unplug from all media and technology every Shabbat for a whole Shabbat. I know that I wouldn’t like that — I enjoy speaking with friends, I use my phone to make plans, I love a good movie on a sleepy Sunday afternoon. I do intend to unplug a little more frequently and for a little longer than is my usual practice. I also have put my phone on silent mode as the default, shut off all notifications, and schedule in times to check email. But wait! There’s more!

I am hoping you will join me for a challenge. This comes to me from my fitness trainer (Oonagh Duncan, google her!), but I’m stealing it for us and repurposing it Jewish-style: try to avoid using your phone for one hour a day, one day a week, and one week a year. Think of it as your own Shabbat/Shmita (sabbatical).

The hour a day could be the hour before bed (shown to improve sleep) or first thing in the morning (one of the indicators of cellphone addiction is whether you reach for it upon waking). The day a week could be  Shabbat or the “shabbat” of your choosing (a Wednesday weekly hiatus, perhaps). The week a year could very well be when you go on vacation. I think an amazing week to try would be around the Jewish high holidays, as we focus on introspection and goal-setting.

Could you do it? To me it’s still aspirational. But I am committing to an hour a day, a day a week, and a week a year with no work emails, social media, or news.

If you are committing to the challenge, drop me a line. I’ll send you a funky and fun gift in the mail! It’s a “cellphone sleeping bag” from the Jewish organization Reboot. They host a national day of unplugging every year and sent me these cute little bits of swag when we ran the challenge last year. The sleeping bag is a great reminder to put away that phone and makes it less tempting to reach for it. It’s also a great reminder of why we do it: we should live our lives in such a way that we don’t need a retreat or a vacation to escape our reality. Our reality should have the elements of rest and retreat built right in.

This is the beach where I was. I shall channel beach-me. I shall unplug. Join me!  

Unplugging – Jewish style

As you read this I’ll just be returning from a brief vacation to somewhere sunny. I tend to work really hard, tire myself out, and then need a few days of lounging around in the sun to recover. It occurs to me this time that perhaps this isn’t the best way of living life.

Are you like this? Do you tire yourself out with family responsibilities, work, social obligations, until you simply can’t continue and that’s when you take a break or a holiday?

I was thinking about something similar at the last Rabbis Without Borders retreat I attended. The very term “retreat” makes it seem like our normal lives are something from which we must flee. Surely the point of the gathering was to strengthen and enhance what we do in our regular working lives. Just like the point of a vacation should be to enhance one’s life, not escape from it. The truth is, it’s all just… life. We get one life to live — work, home, vacation, rest, play, struggle, sleep. It’s all real life and it’s all happening right now.

So this time I’m going to bring a little bit of my beach vacation back with me. I hope to bring the sun, for this has been a brutal winter, but that’s not what I’m talking about. One of the things I love about travel is the sense of being unreachable. I love the moment I get on a plane, turn off my phone, and know that no one can find me for the next several hours. While I can’t bring back the pina coladas or ocean sounds, I can bring back the experience of letting myself unplug, literally and figuratively.

We have a Jewish mechanism for this. It’s called Shabbat. The wisdom of Shabbat is taking time to rest each week. It’s a way of preventing burnout; there is a regular time to rejuvenate built right into the schedule. Many secular Jews mark Shabbat in some way, but most of us don’t completely unplug.

The Hebrew Bible reminds us to rest… that after the earth’s creation a day of rest was called for, there is a sabbatical year (shmita) to allow for rest, and there are rules about letting workers rest. Our tradition generally understands that productivity can only happen if rest can also happen. We know this, but we live in such a fast-paced culture, so very driven and obsessed by/with busy-ness, that it can be easy to forget. We need to rest; we need to unplug. Our smartphones and computers have made our working lives vastly more productive, but they have also blurred the boundaries between our working lives and our personal lives. Our times to rest are interrupted and sometimes eclipsed by email notifications and urgent calls/messages.

I’d be lying if I said I was going to completely unplug from all media and technology every Shabbat for a whole Shabbat. I know that I wouldn’t like that — I enjoy speaking with friends, I use my phone to make plans, I love a good movie on a sleepy Sunday afternoon. I do intend to unplug a little more frequently and for a little longer than is my usual practice. I also have put my phone on silent mode as the default, shut off all notifications, and schedule in times to check email. But wait! There’s more!

I am hoping you will join me for a challenge. This comes to me from my fitness trainer (Oonagh Duncan, google her!), but I’m stealing it for us and repurposing it Jewish-style: try to avoid using your phone for one hour a day, one day a week, and one week a year. Think of it as your own Shabbat/Shmita (sabbatical).

The hour a day could be the hour before bed (shown to improve sleep) or first thing in the morning (one of the indicators of cellphone addiction is whether you reach for it upon waking). The day a week could be  Shabbat or the “shabbat” of your choosing (a Wednesday weekly hiatus, perhaps). The week a year could very well be when you go on vacation. I think an amazing week to try would be around the Jewish high holidays, as we focus on introspection and goal-setting.

Could you do it? To me it’s still aspirational. But I am committing to an hour a day, a day a week, and a week a year with no work emails, social media, or news.

If you are committing to the challenge, drop me a line. I’ll send you a funky and fun gift in the mail! It’s a “cellphone sleeping bag” from the Jewish organization Reboot. They host a national day of unplugging every year and sent me these cute little bits of swag when we ran the challenge last year. The sleeping bag is a great reminder to put away that phone and makes it less tempting to reach for it. It’s also a great reminder of why we do it: we should live our lives in such a way that we don’t need a retreat or a vacation to escape our reality. Our reality should have the elements of rest and retreat built right in.

This is the beach where I was. I shall channel beach-me. I shall unplug. Join me!  

Beyond Thoughts and Prayers

I write this on the day that news broke of a horrendous terrorist attack, murdering dozens of worshippers at two Christchurch Mosques. You know the story, and have all processed this in your way. That morning, on my way to an appointment, I saw a simple bouquet of flowers placed at the closed door of a Mosque. I was touched that someone had the thoughtfulness to create that simple, loving gesture of support.

It’s never going to be something I can comprehend; taking the lives of others because of fear and hate will never make sense to me. I’m sure you feel the same way. The senseless loss of life, and destruction of families and communities, is mind-boggling and heart-wrenching. We are reading and hearing, and will continue to read and hear, stories of these people. It’s important that we do that; these were real people with real lives and they deserved to be remembered as humans and not numbers in a climbing death-toll. But I want to use this space to talk about some of these issues in a broader frame. This isn’t to detract from the sadness and loss, it’s to help ensure these attacks stop so there needn’t be more sadness and loss.

I think the time is here for some brave conversations. It’s easy and uncontroversial to say that our thoughts are with the victims and their families. It’s harder to say what is true in our hearts but, as Secular Humanistic Jews, that’s our way of being: we say what we believe and we believe what we say. We know these attackers were fuelled by anti-immigrant sentiment. It is dangerous and it is widespread, both abroad and here at home.

I am deeply concerned about political leaders who fan the flames of white supremacy by scapegoating and targeting immigrants and refugees. I am also angry at our leaders who can’t find it in themselves to denounce white supremacists. None of us is responsible for what happened in Christchurch, but each of us is responsible for holding our leaders to account and letting them know that xenophobia and hate have no place here. I urge you to consider that voting for someone who speaks alongside known white supremacists sends the message that this, all of this, is ok. It’s so far from ok.

We already know that the dynamics that led to this attack on Mosques are the same dynamics that led to the attacks in a Pittsburgh synagogue last fall. For all the tension between Jews and Muslims, we face a very real common enemy now: the growing movements of white supremacists who enjoy proximity to people in power, who are emboldened by fake news and hate online, and who have access to weapons that should not exist. This is all my own opinion and, as always, you are welcome to disagree. But I’m beyond tears now; I’m angry. I think a lot of you feel the same way. We need to be loud that this can’t keep happening. We deserve a much kinder, loving world.

Writing, working, wishing while the world is on fire

Some of you may know that I take classes at a creative writing studio. I am not artistic in most ways: I can’t sing or play a musical instrument, I can’t paint or draw, I can’t sculpt or craft. But I do like to write. For a really long time I avoided creative writing because I was doing so much writing for work or school or necessity. The very last thing I wanted to do after spending all day working on my doctoral dissertation was sit down in front of yet another blank page.

Two years ago I decided to find my way back to writing creatively and it has been lovely. I’m not a great writer or anything but I love the dedicated and special time it gives me to sit quietly, to look inwardly, and to create something. Even if what I create is silly or not particularly evocative, it’s so nice to simply be engaged in creativity.

Currently I’m taking a class meant for people who work in helping professions or do social justice work. It’s called “writing while the world is on fire.” Whoa, right? The world is on fire? Sometimes it feels that way.

If, like me, you simply can’t face turning on/reading the news sometimes. If you are overwhelmed by big struggles like climate change, political divisiveness, poverty, and whatever else it is that keeps you up at night, it can feel really hard to enjoy the beautiful moments in every day life.

This writing class is about making time/space to find that enjoyment. It feels like the world is on fire and so it can be easy to give up and say “why bother?” To our work, our dreams, and/or our creative passions. But it is precisely because it feels like the world is on fire that the world needs us at our best. We can’t be at our best if we don’t make time to process the things that are hard, and to celebrate the things that are good.

I hope this message feels like an invitation to make a little space for your own creativity, in whatever form it takes for you. What do you need to fill your cup; to recharge so you can keep writing, working, wishing for a better future, even when the world is on fire?

The Torah, the Ten Commandments and Us

This week’s Torah portion is such a juicy one and has so many great resonances. This is probably a familiar story: Moses ascends the mountain and while he’s gone, the people build a Golden Calf. Moses comes down with the Ten Commandments and is so angry that he smashes the tablets.

There are lots of interpretations for what the Golden Calf might symbolize. For many today, we see it as money or stuff — the true idolatry of our day is that we as a society worship things. The goldenness of the calf fits nicely with that drash/interpretation. The Golden Calf is, of course, symbolic of any form of idolatry for, as we see when we get the decalogue, the first commandment is all about having only one God.

Years ago when I studied in Israel as part of my rabbinic training, I attended a great class at the non-denominational Pardes Institute for Jewish Studies. In the week of Ki Tissa, this biblical portion, the instructor posted a question I had never thought of: how did this group of Israelites wandering around the desert have the gold to make the calf? She suggested we look earlier in the Exodus narrative. Sure enough, just before the Israelites are leaving Egypt and about to cross the Red Sea, they ask their Egyptian neighbours for stuff to take on their journey

So, according to the story (and, yes, I believe this is a story, not history), the Egyptians helped the Israelites with items of value, including gold, and the Israelites used all that to build a golden calf instead of building a better life.

What’s the lesson? Well, firstly, we are told many times in the bible to “love the stranger, for you (we) were strangers in the land of Egypt.” It’s worth remembering that the Egyptian folks in the story weren’t uniformly bad — they tried to help us out, even after the plagues! And that the Israelites in the story weren’t uniformly good — they mess up too.

I loved thinking of the golden calf in these terms because it’s a reminder that we as humans have the potential to build amazing things, particularly when we share and cooperate, and yet so much of what we do with our resources amounts to nothing but garbage.

Whatever you have been given and are carrying with you, my hope is that you use it towards good. The golden calf provided false hope for a desperate people. Our job is to avoid succumbing to such false hope, to meet our own desperation or fear or despair or yearning with bravery and courage, and to build something more beautiful.

Finally, a fun activity to do with Sunday school kids is to come up with a new Ten Commandments – what are the ten rules everyone should live by? There are some in the original we might keep (like honouring your parents; that’s a good one). There are some we might discard. We might prefer to see new stuff in there, like protect the earth and its creatures, show respect and kindness, have dance parties regularly, or always say yes to cake. What are your ten?