Ritualistic rest: Revitalizing rather than repressive

ur ever-increasing, modern-day dependency on electronic connectivity makes it easier and easier to make the case for Shabbat observance.

“Six days a week, I’m never without this little piece of plastic, chips and wires that miraculously connect me to the rest of the world and that I hope makes me more efficient, but clearly consumes a lot of my time and attention,” wrote Joe Lieberman, who meticulously observed a traditional Shabbat throughout his long tenure in the United States Senate.

The busier and more distracted we become, the more we need and appreciate a physical, spiritual and emotional break. As a day of rules and restrictions, however, Shabbat does not seem to be the optimal way to accomplish this break. Its laws, which the Talmud derives from the commandment in this week’s parshah to desist on Shabbat

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Infidelity. Blackmail. Murder mysteries. Kidnapping. Clandestine artificial insemination. These families have experienced it all. Their DNA plots sound more like blockbuster thrillers, but behind that are the emotional firsthand accounts of people who’ve had to pick up the pieces of their lives and start all over again.

What type of relationship do you owe a relative stranger you had never met before the DNA test? What happens to the close family you no longer share a bloodline with?

These were the questions I needed answered and the families who let me listen in on their most intimate DNA moments truly provided them.

I learned more about what the family I’ve had all my life means to me after developing relationships with my newly-discovered family.

Now that the dust has settled, my dad summarizes what this gut-wrenching DNA experience has meant to him:

“It’s now just a matter of fact,” he said. “It’s not good. It’s not bad. It just is.” JN

Samuel Burke is a three-time Emmy-awardwinning television news correspondent, Arizona State University graduate and Phoenix native. He now lives in London and is the host of the new podcast “Suddenly Family.” from the activities required for building the Mishkan, are among the most numerous and detailed in the whole of halacha (Jewish law). How does following this catalog of restrictive rules fit with the feeling of freedom that we require for rest and repose?

OTo understand the positive and uniquely constructive effect of the Shabbat restrictions, it is useful to consider several angles. It is easier to see how the Shabbat requirements imposed a much-needed physical rest in prior generations when for a larger portion of the population work equaled labor.

A beautiful example is the Jewish stevedores of Thessaloniki, Greece, who, with other types of Jewish port workers, were so essential to the functioning of its busy international seaport that it had the unique distinction of being closed on Shabbat. Norwegian Journalist Alexander Kielland reportedly found himself as a passenger on a boat that arrived at the port on a Saturday and wrote about how dissatisfied his fellow passengers were with the Jews and their Sabbath since they had to wait until the next morning before the boat could be docked and unloaded.

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 12 could function properly. Synagogues, federations and philanthropic agencies of every stripe, as well as activist groups, have had to lay off employees and learn how to operate in a completely different fashion. But they have fared far better than many first supposed.

But along with acknowledging this achievement, we must also note two other elements of pandemic Jewish life.

The first is that while the modes of communication — and even to some extent, observance — have changed, it has been business as usual with respect to some of the worst aspects of Jewish life.

The fracturing of the Jewish world into warring tribes along denominational and political lines has, if anything, grown far worse in quarantine than it was when we were still gathering together.

Part of that may be credited to a deeply divisive election in which Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews largely found themselves on different sides. The same is true with reactions to the Black Lives Matter movement, in addition to the rise of critical race theory and the oppressive “cancel culture” that goes with it.

The restrictions on movement and in meeting people have increased our isolation from those with different opinions about the issues, as well as how Jews should

When the big, burly, Jewish stevedores and porters finally expertly unloaded the boat with their bare hands, Kielland observed with great interest. He could not square the circle of how these ostensibly brutish, unsophisticated and unrefined men who spend their days as physical laborers could forgo their Saturday income for religious reasons.

Still in Thessaloniki when the next Shabbat came around, he began to understand the transformative power of Shabbat when he made it a point to walk through the Jewish neighborhood where he could scarcely recognize the same men who were now dressed in Shabbat finery, surrounded by their families, and exuding peacefulness and serenity. He wrote that he then grasped how the mighty Romans fell but the Jews live on. And in an era like our own when even blue-collar employees often do more office and administrative work than physical labor, it is the restrictions of Shabbat that make its weekly rest effective. Without the limitations on phones, messaging and email that its laws provide, breaking free of the pressure of checking up on or responding to the communications from our weekday work would be all but impossible.

Senator Lieberman made this point while highlighting the irony of restrictions creating rest. “If there were no Sabbath law to keep me from sending and receiving email all day as I normally do,” he wrote, “do you think I would be able to resist the temptation on the Sabbath? Not a chance. Laws have this way of setting us free.”

The self-imposed limitations through which we attempt to regulate our work-life balance can never create the uncompromising freedom that our divinely imposed Shabbat delivers every week. There is no better time to move forward by coming back to the secret of our continuity and our beautiful national treasure. JN react to them. Sadly, the pandemic has replicated the social-media cocoons in which too many of us cut ourselves off from anyone who might contradict our pre-existing beliefs and prejudices. When faced with people who voted differently or have varying approaches to the pandemic, more often than not we have treated fellow Jews with contempt. In this respect, the problems the pandemic has posed have exposed our communal weaknesses and shown just how far we have fallen short of our ideals and the needs of the moment.

Yet the pandemic has also proved that Jews of every sort, affiliated as well as unaffiliated, are more than ever before longing for meaning in their lives. Rabbis I have contacted all say the same thing about how people are looking to institutions not just for help in hard times, but for a reason to have faith in spite of the despair that this shattered world has often engendered. If there is any reason to have faith in a time of crisis, it’s not just the light at the end of the tunnel provided by vaccines. It is the knowledge that Jews, individually and collectively, need what our religion and the treasures of our heritage have to offer.

The solace, as well as the resources, that those who are suffering in isolation require are to be found in the everyday genius of Jewish faith and practice. That’s also true of the services and opportunities for activism and charitable work that the organized Jewish world offers to those who are willing to reach out and participate. The consolation that we can take from what has otherwise been an unprecedented trauma is that those who have availed themselves of what Judaism has to offer have generally found what they needed.

The challenge going forward is not merely to survive but to redouble our efforts to bring help, both material and spiritual, to a community in need of both. We can only hope and pray that a year from now when we are again preparing to celebrate Purim, social distancing will be but a distant memory, and the only masks we wear will be those with costumes. As we anticipate that time, keep two key pandemic lessons in mind: seek out those with whom we differ to relearn how to speak to each other in a civil fashion; and remember that faith and Jewish peoplehood have the answers to most of the problems our torn communities are facing. JN