Remember the Sabbath...[a different world]

Ezra Klein, Sabbath and the Art of Rest, NYTimes, December 3, 2022. From the introduction:

Do we know how to truly rest? Who would we be if we did?

I’ve been wrestling with these questions since I read Abraham Joshua Heschel’s stunning book “The Sabbath” in college. The ancient Jewish ritual of the Sabbath reserves a full day per week for rest. As it’s commonly practiced, that means about 25 hours every week of no work, very little technology and plenty of in-person gathering.

But the Sabbath is a much more radical approach to rest than a simple respite from work and technology. Implicit in the practice of the Sabbath is a stinging critique of the speed at which we live our lives, the ways we choose to spend our time and how we think about the idea of rest itself. That, at least, is a central argument of Judith Shulevitz’s wonderful book, “The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time.”

Shulevitz is a longtime culture critic and currently a contributing writer for The Atlantic. Her book isn’t just about the Sabbath itself, it’s about the world the Sabbath tries to create: one with an entirely different conception of time, morality, rest and community. It’s the kind of world that is wholly different from our own, and one whose wisdom is urgently needed.

It is about engaging a different range of behavioral modes, ways the brain has of engaging us with the world. I suspect it engages the brain’s so-called default mode network, which is more dream-like, less driven, more social, more conducive to synching with others.

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Addendum: Judith Shulevitz observes:

You are supposed to let your mind wander. We’ll gather, have a moment of just letting go. Not all the time, some of the time. But these are the positive things that the frame gives a special gloss to the way it does a work of art and says, this space here, it’s meaning. Make sense of it.

That's definitely the default mode network.