Rabbi Charles P. Sherman
Alex Coplon Bar Mitzvah
Shabbat Noach
November 1, 2003
How Best To Rest
The early chapters of our Bible set out a series of firsts for the human race. Gradually the world as we know it took shape. Therefore, when we get to Noah it is fair to ask what is so special about him? What did he contribute to humanity to merit the praise "and Noah found favor in the eyes of God"?
Rabbinic tradition picks up a hint from the meaning of the name Noah, which means "comfort" or "rest." Students of American history remember that in Puritan New England a very common name given to children was "Comfort." We find the names of people like Comfort Adams, Comfort Winthrop, and Comfort Smith. In the King James version of the Bible, the book the Puritans knew and loved so much, Comfort is the English translation of Noah.
So why was Noah called Comfort? According to the Midrash, it is because Noah was the inventor of the plow. Noah perfected the world’s first labor-saving device. He was maker of history’s first machine, and since machines were supposed to make human life more comfortable, the man who invented the machine was called "Comfort."
But Rabbi Simcha A. Zissel of Kelm offers a more psychological suggestion. He suggests that in an age of innovation and hard work, Noah knew the secret of being able to rest. If so, Noah is the teacher our age may need the most, because too many of us struggle with the inability to rest. Not only do many of us have two-career families, but some among us work at more than one job. Every study of families shows that the amount of time parents spend with their children has been shrinking drastically since 1960.
A few decades ago books were being published that proclaimed that the major imminent social problem would be management of leisure time. Well, it did not happen. People today are working harder and longer hours than ever before. The average American worker has added almost 200 hours to a year’s work since 1973. The U.S. has the longest work hours of any industrialized nation, 350 more hours than the average European each year. Half the Americans surveyed by a Harris Poll reported that they were not taking a week of vacation over the summer.
But even more perplexing is the fact that when we do have some leisure time, so many of us cannot use it for the purpose of rest. We hurry, hustle, run to fill our leisure time with other activities. What are the factors which prevent us from resting?
One would be an addiction to wanting more and more things. Though there are many people who struggle at several jobs just to survive, there are also many of us who could get along well with one job less, with fewer hours of overtime, if it were not for the things we feel we have to buy or to give to others. Almost all the great religions agree that to be happy you have to kick the addiction to things, to craving more and more possessions.
At least 2,000 years ago, Rabbi Ben Zoma in the Talmud put it this way: "Who is rich? Those who are happy with what they have." Controlling the addiction to things is a good first step in acquiring the ability to rest.
Another source of our inability to rest is our compulsion to achieve, to create, to be successful. Pablo Picasso once declared that painters were happier people than writers. Why? Good painters need natural light, daylight, to work. Artificial light distorts the colors of things and is a hurdle for painters. So painters do not feel guilty not working at night. But at least in theory writers can work all the time, so they always feel guilty when they are not writing.
Nowadays when there is a stock market open in some time zone around the world 24 hours a day, where customers are awake somewhere, people feel the pressure to work all the time. Look how many people have to work, or choose to work, on holidays. Some holidays which used to be days off are now times for the biggest sales, and with a cell phone and pager, many people are on call wherever they are 24 hours each day.
So you can see why Shabbat is so much more precious than ever before. The Sabbath creates a space where the phone does not have to ring, a time when we do not have to achieve, but can just be and enjoy. Shabbat does even more. It restores to us an important sense of our value as people. Too often we become totally identified with our work, with the product we invent, produce or sell; that is why so many retirees experience depression. When we stop working, we lose our sense of self-worth. And if your individual dignity is totally tied to your work, no wonder you resist retirement. Shabbat reminds us of our importance just as human beings, separate from what we do.
Do you remember a television series called "Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman"? There was one episode when Lois and Clark are planning their marriage. Clark confesses that he felt highly jealous when Lois had fallen in love with him as Superman and did even not pay attention to him when he was Clark Kent. Lois protested that he was, after all, the same person. But Clark says: No, Lois, Superman is just what I do – Clark Kent is who I am.
Too many of us spend the week straining to be superman or superwoman. One study shows that mothers with school-age children average more then five car trips a day. Some parents give first-graders day schedulers to keep up with piano, French, Soccer and tae kwon do lessons. Some of us take work home because we’ve spent our workday at conferences, in meetings with committees or answering email, with no concentrated time to think. It is important to have a day when we can rest from that need to achieve so much and to realize that our family and our friends and our God really love us for what we are, not just for what we do. Thanks to Shabbat, we can shift our perspective and free ourselves of the need to achieve. When that happens, we gain the ability to rest.
There are people for whom the inability to rest is even more serious however. These people have trouble sleeping at night; their minds race, they worry about the next day and what they have to do, they go over the conflicts and the troubles of the previous day.
Few of us think of insomnia as a religious problem. We consider it something to be treated with over-the-counter remedies or more serious prescriptions drugs, tranquilizers. Those things may have their place; but, for many of us the inability to sleep stems from a misunderstanding of a religious nature. Deep down, we have taken on a responsibility which really belongs to God. We are afraid that if we go to sleep and are not watching out for the world, the world will cease to exist. If we are not worrying about our family or our business, they will stop existing.
This may seem foolish, but who said that all of our feelings are logical. I suggest an experiment the next time you have trouble sleeping. Instead of reaching for the Sominex, relax your body in the dark and remind yourself that it is God’s job to look after the world while you are sleeping. The world will not disappear without your supervision. You can take a few hours off from worrying and still find everything in order when you come back to it. God is really very reliable about this. One of the meanings of religious faith is the confidence that God will not fail; the universe will still be there when we awake tomorrow.
That is what the traditional prayer before sleeping is all about. Before we recite the Sh’ma Yisrael, that verse we learned as a small child, perhaps the very first Hebrew words we learned – Hear O Israel, Adonai is our God, Adonai is one – before we recite those words, we concentrate on the Sheckiuah, God’s presence being with us and we recite the verse from Psalms – "nto Your hands I place my spirit, You redeem me, O God of truth." With the assurance that we do not have to play God, keeping the world in existence at all times, it becomes possible to rest.
Dear Friends, in a world which seems to grow more and more tense and stressful, I pray that we will learn the secret that was Noah’s. May we be comforted with the wisdom our tradition provides us – the ability to rest. Amen
I am grateful to Rabbi Shamai Kanter whose work inspired this message.
