Parashat Behar I: In Praise of Rest

A recent article in the New Yorker reported on the use of stimulant drugs like Aderall for the “off-label” use of “neuro-enhancement.” People take these drugs so they can increase productive wakeful time and accomplish more tasks at a high level of brain function without the need of sleep.

The Torah has a different attitude toward non-productive time. As we see in the first of this week’s two parshiyyot, Behar, even the land must have its rest, every seventh year, the year of shmitah, as well as every 50th year, the year of yovel. The idea is similar to that of the weekly Sabbath day. For six years or days, we are commanded to be active and productive in the world, but on the seventh year or day, we are commanded to cease.

These Sabbaths remind us that it is God who created the world, not us; we are mere sojourners here, living on borrowed land and borrowed time. The lesson is of our own smallness and insignificance. The Torah says people will worry: “But what will we eat if we don’t work the land?” (See Lev 25:20). We have similar worries: “If we stop doing what we’re doing, even for a short time, everything will fall apart. The kids won’t grow up right. The business will collapse.” The truth is, and this comes with some relief, we’re not as essential as we think we are. The earth turns without us, the ground produces fruit (albeit not as efficiently) without our tilling, and even our kids will grow up fine without our constant supervision.

These Sabbaths point to our smallness, but they also point to our greatness. And here is the surprise. The Torah teaches that our greatness as humans lies not solely, perhaps not even primarily, in what we create and produce in this world, but rather in our sacred moments of non-productivity. It is the seventh day, the day God rested, which He proclaimed holy. Both the shmitah and the Sabbath day are called Shabbat Lashem, “A Sabbath for God.” It is in part through non-productivity, through just being, that we come closest to God, closest to that spark inside of us which is of God, and therefore eternal. Perhaps this is why the rabbis say Shabbat gives us a little taste of eternity; it is mey’eyn olam haba.

The race to increase productivity with drugs or other means is a race against time, against the limits of our mortal lives. The Torah’s Sabbaths suggest an alternative response to mortality, an attempt to connect to the Eternal One through sacred moments of rest from our creative endeavors.


An Additional Thought on this Subject by the Sefat Emet:

With reference to the yovel year, the Torah says, “Each of you shall return to his holding” (Lev 25:13). The Sefat Emet, a 20th century Hasidic master, reads these words as referring not to each Jew’s return to his original land holding, but to his return to his divine origins. On Shabbat, we have the opportunity to return to our original source. By not working for our food, on both the Sabbath day and the Sabbath year, we live like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden before their sin. After all, working for food only came about as a result of sin, so that in a way what we are doing when we rest from work on these Sabbaths is returning to that original state of close connection to and dependence on God.