In Praise of Idleness
Thoughts on BeShalah 2019
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Parashat
BeShalah begins our national story of movement. It tells
about Am Yisrael’s first steps of freedom after their stagnancy in Egypt
for more than two centuries. And then, just as the muscles of the nation’s men
and women had begun to loosen in the desert, God instructed them to return to
that uncomfortable feeling of idleness:
“See,
for God has given you the Shabbat…Sit each of you where he is, let no one go
out from his place on the seventh day.” (Shemot 16:29)
Although He would
later (at Ma’amad Har Sinai) provide a clear rationale for this day of
rest – to recall His creation of the world and His hand in leading us out of
Egypt – God’s message at this point was quite simple: just stop moving.
But absent the theological component of Shabbat, what did a day of inactivity
mean to Am Yisrael at that point?
In The Art of
Stillness, Pico Iyer wrote about how many of the very people who work to
speed up the world are also the most sensitive to the virtue of slowing down.
He was impressed by the way that workers at Google’s headquarters spend a fifth
of their “working hours” on trampolines and in treehouses – “free of work.” He
marveled at the fact that many in Silicon Valley observe an “Internet Sabbath”
every week, during which they turn off most of their devices on the weekend.
And Iyer was fascinated by the mandatory meditation room in every building on
the General Mills campus in Minneapolis.[1]
But if our growth
is driven by movement, as we know, then what is the role of idleness? What’s
the point of slowing down the minds of the world’s greatest innovators?
Idleness provides
the grounding and structure within which our movement can prosper. “Movement makes richest sense when set with a
frame of stillness,” Iyer wrote.[2]
It provides the space for us to focus on positioning our activities in the
appropriate direction.
Consider, for example,
Yaakov’s reaction when he awoke from his fateful dream at Bet El:
Yaakov
woke up from his sleep and said: “Surely God is present in this place and I did
not know!” (Bereshit 28:16)
Yaakov was shocked
that he had overlooked that place of great sanctity. How had that happened? The
moments leading up to that dream provide a hint:
And
Yaakov departed Be’er Sheva and went toward Haran. He encountered
the place and slept there because the sun had set; he took from
the stones of the place and arranged around his head, and he lay down
in that place. (28:10-11)
Notice the
excessive activity! The Torah was perhaps teaching that Yaakov’s incessant
movement at that time had overwhelmed him to the extent of distraction. By
stopping all activity and submitting to the idleness sleep, however, his focus
was restored.
Researchers at the
University of Southern California found that a particular style of neural
processing is suppressed when we pay direct attention to things, emerging only
when the brain switches to “default mode.”[3]
In other words, some our most unique thoughts and ideas are discovered in a
state of “daydreaming.” An “unplugged” mind flourishes in ways that the
connected one cannot. Idleness benefits our mental endeavors as much as it does
our physical.
Shortly after Am
Yisrael began their journey in the wilderness, God called their attention
to the importance of periodic inactivity. By conspicuously leaving out the
theological significance of Shabbat as He instructed them to cease all activity
on that day, God was teaching them – and us – about the intrinsic values and
virtues of idleness.
[1] Pico Iyer, The Art Of
Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere (New York, NY, 2014), pg. 42-4.
[2] Ibid., pg. 15.
[3] Mary Helen Immordino-Yang,
Joanna A. Christodoulou and Vanessa Singh, “Rest is not Idleness: Implications
of the Brain’s Default Mode for Human Development and Education,” Perspectives
on Psychological Science 7, no. 4, pg. 352-64.