Letting the Light In // 10/21 

Episode description: 

What would life look like if we oriented our week not around work—but rest? 

In a world where the pace of life never seems to slow, we need rhythms of rest now more than ever. In this episode, we explore our personal and societal need for rest, restoration, and delight—and how the light of Sabbath rest might be the missing ingredient we’ve all been longing for.

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Transcript:

Shalom is a Hebrew word meaning peace, harmony, wholeness, completeness, prosperity, welfare and tranquility and can be used idiomatically to mean both hello and goodbye.

Laura: This is Shelter in Place, a podcast about embracing the journey in a world forever changed. Coming to you from Oakland California, I’m Laura Joyce Davis. 

When we talk about the early days of the pandemic, we often talk about the world shutting down, and for many people, it did—but for some of us, it was just ramping up.

Nikki: My life was moving with such frenetic intensity that I barely had time to stop and think about what it meant that we were in a pandemic.

Laura: This is Nikki, one of our Kasama Collective trainees. Nikki moved to Philadelphia in 2016 to get her MFA in creative writing. She has a lot of extended family in the area, so she visited Philly a lot as a kid. The city was already familiar when she moved there, but even so it’s taken a long time to find a place that feels like home. 

Nikki: I had two weeks to find a new place to live. I was moving so fast and I was working so hard to make something happen, but it felt like everything was spinning out of control. 

A few months before the pandemic I’d moved into a community house and it was fine, but the people I was living with weren’t close friends. And then in March when everything shut down, it was like everyone suddenly realized that this wasn’t who we wanted to be sticking this out with.

Laura: Most of Nikki’s roommates moved out or left town. The ones who stayed had a falling out with each other, so the house became a tense, lonely place to be. Nikki found herself avoiding being there, and even went to stay with her sister for a couple of weeks. But her sister lived forty minutes away, and the only place for Nikki to stay there was on the living room couch, so eventually she came back. One of her roommates had moved out and the other had no plans to stay. Nikki’s landlord promised to extend the lease because of the pandemic, but then changed his mind and told her she had to move out too. 

Nikki: I had two weeks to find a new place to live. I had already been feeling pretty isolated in that house, but trying to find roommates in a pandemic when no one wants to meet in person was incredibly stressful. I was looking at apartments and being interviewed for other community houses, and I was working so hard to make something happen. I’d go to these interviews and smile and try to seem like I could be someone they wanted to live with, but underneath it all, I was really depressed. It felt like everything was spinning out of control, and no one was really in it with me. 

I remember there was a week where I just couldn’t get out of bed. I felt like all of the joy had been sucked out of me, and I was exhausted. I knew I should reach out to someone, but I couldn’t even make myself do that. Most of my friends in the city were going through their own struggles, and didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to support me.

I finally did end up calling my mom and sobbing over the phone. She comforted me, but I knew I had to figure things out, even if I just wanted someone else to take care of me.

Laura: A couple of weeks later, Nikki heard about another community house from an acquaintance she’d met once at a party. It turned out to be right around the corner from the place she was living at the time. But other than that acquaintance, everyone living there was total strangers. 

Nikki: It was completely overwhelming, to suddenly be in such close quarters with people I had just met. I wasn’t in a great place emotionally, and even the thought of getting to know these new people felt exhausting.

Laura: But she quickly realized that she’d stepped into a community that was unlike any she’d ever known. Her housemates spent time together, not just as roommates, but as friends. 

Nikki: Finding this group of people who were so inviting and warm felt unreal to me. It was as if I was stepping out of this separate, lonely, existence where I had to work so hard to take care of myself, and stepping into this restful, restorative community that valued me not for what I could do, but for who I am. 

Laura: And then one Friday evening when Nikki was on her way out the door, she walked into the living room and was struck by a feeling that was both intensely familiar and completely new.

Nikki: When I stepped into the room, I actually jumped a little! It startled me. It was this palpable sense of calm, like time had stopped and the world had pushed pause. 

There were white candles on the table. The spread on the table was beautiful: soft, warm light, the smell of challah, a bottle of red wine. I was outside of myself but at the same time also more present than I’d ever been. 

Laura: Nikki knew what she was seeing, because she knew that her housemate Jake was Jewish. He’d even invited her to join him in practicing Shabbat a few days before she moved in, but she had been too busy to text him back. 

Nikki: It was like I’d stumbled not into a scene but a feeling—of love and quiet and security . . . the word that comes to mind is one I almost never use; the scene I’d stepped into felt holy. It felt like I was finally home.

Laura: Jake was raised in a shomer Shabbos household, which means that his family practiced Shabbat according to Halacha (hä-lə-ˈḵä), or Jewish Law. We asked Jake to describe in his own words what this means.

Jake: Shabbat is a collective journey of consciousness towards joy, peace, freedom, appreciation, and rest

as Jews that we take it from Friday night at sundown through the end of Saturday night, when three stars come out in the sky. 

There is a felt sensation that I have normally, sometimes it comes earlier. Where I just feel completely at ease and at peace. And I know that there's this whole busy world that awaits on, on the other side, really in a few hours, but I'm in this world and I'm not in that world yet. 

Laura: Growing up, Jake’s family took Shabbat seriously; they didn’t turn lights on or off, drive their car, or do chores. But the sabbath wasn’t just about refraining from work. It was also a day for inviting guests into their home, eating good food, and walking to the synagogue together. Those rituals and rhythms gave Jake a blueprint not just for his spirituality, but for his life.

Jake: There's so much doing in my life and in our world too. I think I feel comfortable speaking to this as a collective issue. There's so much doing all the time in our by our culture, I mean, North American, United States on the east coast, there's so much value placed on work and movement and doing and productivity, productivity and life hacks and this and that. 

And it feels profoundly counter-cultural and nourishing to actively say, actually, I'm on a different set of values here. I'm on a different track.

I am not prioritizing doing, but I'm prioritizing being. And once I tap into that frame shift, a little bit of that attitude cannot help but seep through into the rest of my week, especially the first few days.

Laura: Nikki isn’t Jewish—she grew up attending an Assemblies of God church—but it had been a long time since she was a part of that faith community.

Nikki: As a child, I loved going to church. There was this incredible community. It was this collective catharsis around loud and expressive singing. And I did encounter God there.

But there was always this part of the service that left me feeling anxious, when the pastor’s voice would escalate in prayer suggesting that someone in the room wasn’t right with God. Our pianist would begin to play, and I could feel my chest tighten. I wondered, is it me? Am I the unrighteous person in the room?

I didn’t have friends from other spiritual backgrounds and so I didn’t have anything to compare that experience to until I went to college. I stopped going to church, because I realized it was a complicated place for me, one where I sometimes felt God’s presence, and then other times I felt these conflicting emotions and underlying guilt, like I’d done something wrong. By then I was also starting to question some of the things I’d been taught there. Their silence on the LGBTQ community in particular was something that I never understood or supported. Having friends who were queer really opened my whole world and suddenly it just wasn't okay anymore. 

Laura: Even though Nikki’s feelings about her church experience are complicated, she doesn’t dismiss it. It was a place that she loved going, a place where God was real to her—but ultimately it was also a place that alienated her from that sense of presence that drew her in.

When Nikki walked into that candlelit room and saw Jake practicing Shabbat, it was immediately attractive to her, not just because it was beautiful, but because it felt like something she hadn’t known she’d been missing. She had been working so hard to take care of herself, trying to regain control even as the world was shutting down, and here was this moment where she could let go of all of that and just be. It’s a feeling that Jake values too.

Jake: I've always been a person who's drawn to those moments of being, of pure appreciation of the moment, and Shabbat creates that space.

Shabbat practice doesn't immediately grant these experiences, of pure presence or joy or rest or any of the things we're talking about, but it makes space for that. 

Laura: The idea of Shabbat—a day of rest—is one that I can get behind wholeheartedly in theory, but I’m not very good at practicing it. I grew up in the church like Nikki, so my family’s Sabbath happened on Sundays. There were certain rituals that we protected—going to church, having lunch together as a family, sometimes hosting guests in our home—but if I’m honest, those days were really never about rest; they were about finishing homework, doing chores, or squeezing in a little more time with friends. My dad is a physician, so it wasn’t unusual for him to get a page right in the middle of church and have to rush off to do an emergency surgery. 

When I met my husband Nate, all of my ideas about Sunday were put to the test. His family practice of Sabbath was closer to Jake’s: they didn’t go to the store, didn’t do work around the house, and they had popcorn for dinner so Nate’s mom could get a break from cooking. It was a day for church, rest, and service, like visiting a nearby nursing home. Often his dad would take a nap.

Before we had kids, this wasn’t hard to duplicate. We’d go to church, maybe have lunch with friends, and then spend the afternoon reading books on the back porch or going for a run. It was a day where we gave ourselves permission to relax and just do the stuff we liked. 

But once we had kids, Sundays became one of the least restful days of the week. We never seemed to get the infant and toddler nap schedules in sync, so our only break from constant requests would be the hour or so when we’d trade off exercising. We’d often get to Sunday night feeling more exhausted than when we started. 

Even now, when our kids are finally at an age where they don’t constantly need us, Sunday is a day where the pressures of the week loom large. There are groceries to buy, bills to pay, laundry to do, meals to plan and prep, doctor and dentist appointments to schedule, kid birthday parties to attend, school dropoffs and pickups to coordinate, parent-teacher conferences to put on the calendar, permission slips to fill out. On the rare occasion that we actually manage to stay on top of all of that, there’s an endless list of house projects and yard work and friends or family we haven’t managed to call in weeks. I feel behind before the week has even started. 

I want to take a sabbath—I would love nothing more than to take a day of rest—but I rarely feel like I can. 

Over the years, this became a point of tension between Nate and me, which made Sunday feel even less restful. He’d nag me about being on my computer or running errands, and I would retort, “You know this stuff isn’t going to get done on its own, right?”

But when I hear Jake talk about Shabbat, I’m reminded of why it’s a day worth fighting for. Because it’s not just about resting one day a week. It’s about the way that the rest of the week—the rest of our lives—changes because of it.

Jake: So it’s said that, in Jewish tradition, that the first three days of the week, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday are lit up or illuminated by the previous Shabbat. and the next three days, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday are illuminated by the coming Shabbat. So there's not a single day of the week that isn't in some capacity illuminated by Shabbat, nourished by Shabbat.

Laura: I’ve heard this concept before from the church I attend now, that the Sabbath is the day that sets the tone for the rest of the week. And to be fair, we have tried to practice it. 

Years ago we made Saturday our bill-paying day, the day when we attempt to get the house back in order after a frenzied week. But it was also a day of helping reluctant kids with homework, of negotiating sibling fights, of multi-tasking and never finishing what we started. During the last year and a half, those challenges intensified without the relief of friends and neighbors to break up the day.

We didn’t dispute our need for the light of a true sabbath in our week, but we were still in the dark about how to get there. 

Jake: It's been very challenging to have a consistent Shabbat practice. And one thing that I've realized over the course of the pandemic is the extent to which Shabbat is this kind of collective experience of consciousness that's created in community, which is not always the same kind of relationship I've had at other points to it throughout my life. When I was living in New Mexico, I took a lot of pleasure and joy from a pretty solitary Shabbat practice in the high desert and, really beautiful landscape and had this much more solitary sort of Shabbat experience, which I appreciated. During the pandemic, it hasn't felt that way. It's felt much more like an involuntary loss of that community and that collective experience of Shabbat.

Laura: Like me, Nikki recognizes her own need for Shabbat, that moment in the week when she can stop and let the light in to illuminate the rest of the week. She’s loved being invited into Jake’s weekly practice of Shabbat, and it’s slowly become the way she’s found her way back to the parts she loved about her childhood faith. But she’s still figuring out how to incorporate those sabbath rhythms into her life in a way that achieves the Shabbat Shalom she’s after.

Nikki: Saturday mornings tend to be the best day for me to talk to my mom, who works a night-shift Saturday through Wednesday night. This gives me only a small window of time to talk to her, yet Jewish tradition understands honoring one’s parents to be a mitzvah, or sacred commandment. Instead of introducing firm boundaries around a Shabbat practice, I’ve taken a more flexible approach--and this has meant including telephone conversations with my mom. Embracing Shabbat in this way has made me more mindful of how I’m using technology and participating in the frenetic energy of our contemporary world.

Last week, one of Jake’s friends invited us over for Shabbat dinner, but I had to stay up late working. Before he left, we paused and took a moment to light candles and set an intention for the evening, even though we wouldn’t be spending it together. Taking a breath and a moment to reflect, I was able to let go of some of the week’s stress. Even though I was working, I felt content. 

Laura: Practicing Shabbat hasn’t just made Nikki more mindful of her own need for rest. It’s made her realize that we all need rhythms of restoration.

Nikki: Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about our care for the earth and all of its creatures, how Christians believe that God created that earth as something good, but churches like the one I grew up in just don’t seem to think about how their communities can take care of the planet. 

There’s an organization I found recently called the Green Sabbath Project, and their vision of a Sabbath feels a lot like Jake’s. They contemplate what a day without driving, shopping, and building would look like and believe that a day of collective rest would benefit not just humanity but also our Earth. On their website they have this:

“Nothing may be the best thing you can do. One day every week. Do nothing. Take a weekly day of rest. Make it a real sabbath for you. For Earth.” 

Jake has been taking classes from a Jewish organization called ALEPH, which stands for Alliance for Jewish Renewal. ALEPH aims to be socially progressive and earth-aware and in one of his classes, Jake read a speech by Wendell Berry called “Health is Membership.” Berry is an American poet, environmental activist, and farmer who describes rest and food and ecological health as the basic principles of our art and science of healing.  He believes that the community—not the individual—is the smallest unit of health. This an idea that comes up in Judaism, too, in the concept of Shmitta, which applies Shabbat to our relationship with land and society. 

Jake: Now Shmitta refers to the sabbatical  year, or the seventh year , in a cycle when the land is allowed to go fallow and rest, and basically the entire community rests in this way. now was this actually practice during what periods, these are all, all questions we could discuss. but we talk a lot in our classes about , what would the ecological implications of that, actually be if we were to practice that as a community, as a globe, as the Jewish people, as whatever kind of collective level you want to think about.

 think about the permaculture techniques you would really need to be employing and the care you would need to have for the land and thinking in terms of cycles and not just a quarterly cycles of profit, like corporations tend to think in.

{transitional music}

Laura: The concept of Shmitta, that seventh year of sabbath rest for the land, is a significant one for me. The year before we got married, Nate and I encountered the passage of scripture that Jake is referring to, in the book of Leviticus, and we were so struck by it that we decided to reorder our lives around it from that point forward. We got married in 2003, and 7 years later we quit our jobs—our version of working the fields—and spent a year in the Philippines. It was a year that changed us forever, that I wrote about way back in season one in episode 30, the sabbatical year. That experience transformed our worldview so significantly that we spent the years since then planning for the next one, this time in Mexico. If not for the pandemic, that’s where we would have been in 2020, stepping off the treadmill of American work culture and taking our year of Shabbat.

But hearing Jake talk about that practice now, I’m struck with a new realization, that sabbath isn’t just about rest. We don’t know what the ancient Israelites did while they weren’t working their fields, or if they ever even implemented the practice. But the purpose of that year was to intentionally step away from all of the work that defines us, the things we do that make us feel like we’re contributing something important. 

That year in Manila wasn’t an easy one. It was one of the hardest years of our lives. We were volunteering with sex trafficking survivors, I was writing a novel on a Fulbright scholarship, and we were rebuilding a marriage that had been crumbling for years. It wasn’t a year of rest, but it was a year of restoration. 

Stepping away from all of the distractions and accomplishments of our daily lives forced us to just be. Some of the most powerful moments were the ones where we washed dishes with the women we were working with, or walked arm and arm with them down the street. No one cared what we had accomplished or how much money we made in our previous lives. We were enough simply because we were there, being present in those relationships, learning how little all of the accomplishments and busyness of the old life mattered. 

Even though we didn’t get to do another sabbatical year in Mexico, the idea of a sabbath year has guided us. It’s pushed us to take a step back from the frenzy of life and ask how we can reorder our lives not around work, but rest.

Encountering Shabbat has been transformative for Nikki too, both spiritually and relationally. As she’s grown to love Shabbat, she’s also found another restoration that she hadn’t expected. 

Nikki: When I was first getting to know Jake, I immediately liked him and wanted to get to know him. He was kind and calm and just really generous. I knew we were friends when I accidentally introduced a pantry moth infestation into our shared cabinet and he just laughed when his 5lb bag of pandemic beans had baby moth worms living in them. 

Laura: Over the months they became great friends. Nikki became part of Jake’s community. Five years after moving to Philadelphia, she finally felt at home. And then one day, everything changed.

Nikki: One afternoon last October, when Jake and I were hanging out in our neighborhood park, he told me he had feelings for me. I immediately rejected him and told him that I wasn’t interested.

Laura: To understand this moment, we have to go back further—a lot further—to a few years ago when Nikki was living in another part of the city, living with some other housemates who’d become friends. One of her housemates was a coworker at the coffee shop where she was working at the time, and since their rooms were across the hall from each other, they’d often chat in the hallway each night as they were heading to bed. Sometimes they’d stand there for hours talking, and they became great friends. They talked  about traveling the world together, and though they never spoke about it, Nikki realized that she’d fallen in love with him and was certain he was in love with her too. She assumed that it was just a matter of time before they’d talk about their feelings for each other. 

One weekend Nikki’s housemate went out of town for a wedding, and she decided that when he got back, she’d finally tell him how she felt. But the week he got back he told her he’d met someone at the wedding who lived just a few hours away, and she was coming to visit. That night Nikki was in her room when she heard a woman’s voice in the hall, and then the door to his room closed behind them.

From that point on, Nikki started finding reasons not to be home, or coming home late whenever her housemate’s girlfriend visited. It wasn’t until that relationship ended that Nikki’s housemate asked her out for coffee and admitted that he had had feelings for Nikki—but he hadn’t wanted to act on them because he didn’t want to date someone he was living with. 

Nikki: I was devastated. He’d known that I was in love with him the whole time he was dating this other woman, but he pretended like nothing had changed between us. When we finally did talk about our feelings, he acted like maybe something could finally happen between us, but never acted on it, and eventually he moved out and we lost touch. A year later he came into the same coffee shop where he’d told me he had feelings for me that he’d never acted on. Strangely enough, I had started working there as a barista, and of course he saw me, but he stood there looking down or away—as if he had never known me.

Laura: When Jake told Nikki he had feelings for her, all of the pain and loss of that other friendship came rushing back. 

Nikki: I had been so hurt in previous relationships—and in that one in particular—and I’d built up these barriers so I wouldn’t get hurt again. I was so afraid to open myself up and trust anyone.

Laura: Jake was disappointed when Nikki rejected him, but it didn’t change their friendship.

Nikki: Jake was different. He didn’t give up on me even though he was disappointed, and even though I was terrified of losing his friendship if we dated, I also knew that I did have feelings for him. We agreed to meet the next day at a nearby pond, where turtles like to sun-bathe and there are these flat, smooth rocks next to the water. It felt like our own secret spot.

I asked Jake what he was looking for in a relationship. Just by asking this question, I had finally admitted that I did have feelings for him.

He then suggested something I could have never anticipated: That we both journal intentionally about our commitments to ourselves along with our relationship visions. I thought this was such a beautiful concept and it made me like Jake even more. There was a strange period of two weeks or more where we were living together as housemates and reflecting on this but not discussing it with one another. 

Laura: As she journaled, Nikki realized that what she wanted in a relationship was what she’d seen in Jake: someone who was more interested in living intentionally and bringing restoration to the people and places around him than racking up accomplishments or trying to impress other people. She realized that what she experienced with Jake was the same feeling she’d had when she stumbled into that candlelit room on a Friday night, the sense that she could stop all of the striving and hurrying, and just be herself. 

Nikki: When we did sit down and have that conversation, I felt more connected to myself than I had in a long time. Discussing our relationship visions made me realize how our shared love for spirituality is really what drew us together. I experienced the same kavanah—or intention—in how Jake and I started our relationship as I encountered in the Jewish ritual of Shabbat. 

Laura: I asked Nikki if she was going to convert to Judaism, if she would continue practicing Shabbat even if Jake weren’t in her life. And she said she would, that it’s become that central for her. It’s reordered her priorities not just for the hours of Shabbat, but for the rest of her life. 

Nikki: My circle of friends who are spiritual is small, and even when we do discuss spirituality, it is often through the lens of nature or more mainstream ideas of self-care, like taking a bubble bath or sitting in a park. 

Telling others that I am most likely booked on a Friday night—to rest—feels so countercultural to the ways I imagine everyone else is spending their Friday night.

That being said, no one I have ever spoken to about this Shabbat practice has ever said that I’m weird, and I wonder if it’s because we could all make room for more rest in our lives. 

Laura: It took working on this episode to make me realize the root of my reluctance to rest. For me, taking a Sabbath isn’t just about rest. It’s about having what I need to face another week.

The rabbis of the Talmud recorded hundreds of discussions about the particulars of how Shabbat should be practiced, and one of them involves what to do if an animal is in pain and its pain can only be relieved by violating Shabbat. Do you help it out, or let it suffer? The answer is the former. You see echoes of this kind of thinking in the Christian tradition, too, in the gospel of Mark, when Jesus heals people on the Sabbath and invites judgement from religious leaders. Sabbath isn’t just about rest. It’s about being restored—or in Jake’s words, illuminated! 

This is not to say that I find all of those household or life chores to be restorative. I find them every bit as exhausting as they sound. But if I’m ever going to truly rest and be restored on a weekly basis, then something fundamental in my life needs to change. I think the real challenge about taking a Sabbath isn’t just that we need to stop what we’re doing for 24 hours. It’s that taking a true sabbath means changing the rest of your week leading up to it. 

This past week, Nate and I finally had a conversation about Sabbath that got us somewhere helpful. Hearing Jake and Nikki talk about Shabbat, it’s clear that it’s not just about what does or doesn’t happen on that day of rest. It’s 3-step process of preparation, purpose, and protection.

Preparation was the part we sometimes did: getting all of those annoying chores done on Saturday. 

But the purpose—of all having the vision of our sabbath as the focal point of the week, the day that would illuminate all of the rest—wasn’t there. If we prized our sabbath as the most important day of the week, the one we desperately needed to we could be restored, then it would be a day worth making sacrifices for. It would mean sometimes saying no to things on Saturday so we could ensure the necessary preparation for Sunday.

This is no small challenge, and I’m still not sure if we can do it. The Bay Area is a culture of activity, of doers, which as an entrepreneur, I’ve felt grateful to come home to. But Jake’s reminder of how necessary sabbath is to our collective health—and the ideas of preparation, purpose, and protection to get us there—feels like a ray of light. 

Nikki: In his book The Sabbath, it’s Meaning for Modern Man Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel writes that the Sabbath is “a day for the sake of life.” Rest is not a means toward an end to increase our productivity. I agree with Rabbi Heschel; I don’t think swimming in a sea of stimulations to escape out of our exhausted lives is the end that is meant for us. What new meanings might emerge if we began centering rest as the life-giving pinnacle of existence it is meant to be?

Laura: Aristotle said that character is formed by repeated actions. If we never rest, we become restless. If we are always consuming, we become consumers. 

In 1950, only 5% of grocery stores were open on Sundays, versus today you’d be hard-pressed to find a grocery store that isn’t. In 1950, about 3/4 of Americans were members of a church, synagogue, or mosque. Today that number is less than half. If we take those numbers as proxies for Sabbath consciousness, does that mean we’re trading keeping the lights on for shoppers, for letting the light into our souls?

Jack Cheng, in his essay “Door Close,” raises crucial questions about how smartphones are affecting us, but this section applies to these larger issues of consumerism and rest:

“Another consequence of an increasingly on-demand world is that we have virtually eliminated waiting . . . but often the most important changes in our lives spring out of such moments of repose, from having the time to reflect on a path we falsely believed we had desired, and abandoning it in favor of something with a fuzzier outcome . . . . Meaning is borne out of uncertainty; it is the realization of an end or a goal we were not aware existed. Sometimes we climb to the top of the trees and discover that we’re there not for the fruits, but for the view.”

Laura: In my day to day life, especially during the week when I’m juggling more hours of work than are humanly possible to accomplish, and trying to be a good mom to my kids, and trying to be a good friend or family member or wife, I don’t need any convincing that I need a day of rest. The effects of not getting enough rest—of my lack of sabbath—are obvious: I’m fitting too much into my days so I’m not sleeping as much or as well at night. Sleep deprivation reduces empathy, unsurprisingly, and so I rush through my days slurping coffee and struggling to feel sympathetic when my 4-year-old sobs because she can’t understand why she needs to wear proper shoes to school. Driving my kids to school is like seeing my stress personified: angry drivers lay on their horns and run red lights. We’re all in such a hurry, late to get where we’re going, living in a constant state of frenzy. 

I can’t help wondering if some of our collective challenges—the bitter divisions in politics and values, the biting tone of much public discourse, our chronic tendency toward consumerism—stem at least in part from our societal reluctance to not just distract ourselves with entertainment, but to truly rest.

When the Great Reset happened early in COVID, Nate and I told ourselves we weren’t going to go back to the old way of living, where we had something going on every night of the week and Sundays were just another day of activity. And we haven’t gone back to that. But we also haven’t quite managed to cultivate the kinds of weekly sabbath rhythms that we know we desperately need. And Nikki says she still struggles with this too. 

Nikki: Jake and I have now been together for a year, but I still don’t practice Shabbat every Friday night. Sometimes Fridays are the only time I can hang out with one of my friends or see an event I don’t want to miss. I haven't managed to be completely off my phone for 24 hours either. 

I have become more conscious of everything because of my Shabbat practice. I recently looked back at the commitments I made to myself when I first started dating Jake and I realized that all six of them have come true. I’ve discovered firsthand the joy of purposeful living.

Laura: The joy of purposeful living found through practices of rest. Easy to say, but much harder to do. As Nikki and I worked on this episode together, we realized that for both of us, a key part of sabbath was restoration. 

Jake: I'm thinking about not just Shabbat as the day of Shabbat, but about Shabazz consciousness as individuals and as a community and as a globe that I kind of am a true believer in thinking that as humanity being able to relate towards being and not just doing is really part of the paradigm shift.

I'm speaking, using some of the language of Reb Zalman who's one of my dad's teachers and some of my teachers' teachers in the Aleph program, but a paradigm shift of global consciousness that I really think that is vital for humanity's future, to be able to connect with that being mode of consciousness and not just doing.

Laura: We’re still in process as a family with this paradigm shift. We’re still figuring out what it means to practice our sabbath. 

Nikki encountered Shabbat for the first time when she was feeling particularly broken, when she was longing for a truth that was deeper than her circumstances. And maybe that’s the reason we need sabbath rest most, because all of us have been hurt and broken. We all long for wholeness and restoration. We need Shabbat Shalom because that sense of holiness that Nikki felt brings us back to the core of who we are: human beings with the innate potential to reflect the divine. 

On my worst days, this idea feels impossible. But when I’m able to pause long enough to remember my need for rest and restoration, that illumination Jake talked about feels possible. I remember that at my best, I can reflect light and even joy to those around me. That’s what sabbath can do for us. It’s the truest, most essential form of rest.

It’s hard for me to take a sabbath, that this will probably always be a practice that I struggle to prioritize, and maybe this is precisely why I need it. I think it’s a worthy struggle, because it forces me slow down, to stop doing and just be. 

If you’re still not convinced you need a sabbath, or it feels impossible to even try, then I want to invite you to try it just once, maybe even this week. Take a day of rest. SabbathManifesto.org has a great list of principles that are inspired by Jewish tradition, but beneficial to all of us. I’ll include that link in the show notes for today.

I want to close today with a blessing that Jake says often, that’s become important for Nikki, and for me too: “May the Lord bless you with Sabbath Peace, may the Lord bless you with Sabbath Joy, may the Lord bless you with Sabbath Holiness.” 

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Support Credits:

As always, if you listen to the very end of the episode, you’ll hear Shelter in Place outtakes, our little easter egg to thank you for sticking around. 

End Credits:

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The Shelter in Place music was created by Chase Horsman at Reaktor Productions. Additional music and sound effects for this episode come from Storyblocks. Nikki Schaffer was our lead writer and did voiceover for this episode, Nathan Wizard was our assistant producer, and Zahra C. was our assistant audio editor. Nate Davis is our creative director, Sarah Edgell is our design director, and our amazing season 3 Kasama Collective trainees are Bethany Hawkins, Hannah Fowler, Meridian Watters, Nathan Wizard, Nikki Schaffer, and Zahra C. 

Until next time, this is Shelter in Place. I’m Laura Joyce Davis. And now if you’re still listening, here’s a little outtake.

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OUTTAKE:

Jake: well, if you want me to be warm and fuzzy, I guess, you know, being around you feels like a kind of Shabbat, a lot of the time. So the sense of, puts me into that mode of consciousness being. So of course, I'm not sure I understand the question though. 

You answered it. Okay. Thanks, Bub.