ESSAY: Rest Is Not Secondary (Parashat Behar-Bekhukotai)

We say we love rest.  But do we?  Why does everything else seem to take priority over rest in our lives then?  This week, I’d like to take a hard look at our relationship to rest, both our usual societal way of viewing it and the different more nourishing perspective the Torah offers us.  

Primacy of Rest In Torah

The parsha begins with shmitah, the law of leaving the land to rest every seventh year. Veshavtah ha’aretz shabbat lashem.  The land shall rest a shabbat for God (Leviticus 25:2).  The parsha introduces this law by saying it was taught on Mount Siinai.  Rashi asks the famous question – mah inyan smitah etzel har sinai.  What’s shmitah got to do with Mount Sinai? 

Maybe it’s because shimitah is a symbol of the core message of Sinai, the core message of the Torah – rest.    Rest is the essence.  Indeed, note that the command to keep shabbat is one of the middle ones of the 10 commandments, implying that this idea of sacred rest is at the heart of the Torah’s teaching.  

First Practice: The Resting Place At Your Core

Rest is at the core.  Pausing here to feel into the resting place that is at your core, too, in your middle, the central animating place that is always at peace. Recognizing all of the doing and working energy swirling all around that core, feeling into it as a wild windy storm or as many arms reaching out, honoring that doing energy, seeing how important it is, and at the same time, not getting caught up in it, not losing yourself to its pull. All that work is important, but peripheral, secondary to that little tiny point of rest in the middle, your essence.  Becoming aware of that shabbat point of stillness at the heart of you and resting there for a moment.

Our Struggle With Rest

Resting this way is not always easy for us and the Torah includes here such difficulty, too, imagining us objecting to the shmitah  (and yovel, jubilee) year by saying – mah nokhal?  What will we eat if we rest and don’t work the land (Leviticus 25:20)?  We resist rest, are scared of it, feel uncomfortable and guilty and ambivalent about it. We yearn for it, but we also can’t quite unwind enough to taste it, are tied to our schedules and to do lists and expectations around getting things done.  No! I can’t rest!  There’s too much to do!  It all feels so urgent and important.  

Our culture values work and productivity, not rest.  We carry around this deep seated unconscious belief that our primary value comes from our work product, that we need to justify our existence through our accomplishments.  Rest feels immoral and indulgent to us. There is a sense that resting will not get us anywhere, will not get us the approval and recognition and success and security and sense of self worth we crave.  The whole point is to be productive, and rest is not productive.   What good is it?

That’s the opposing force we are reckoning with here.  It’s much stronger,  more subtle and deeply embedded than we usually acknowledge.  We claim to love rest.  But do we?  We sure don’t live like we do.  

Rest for the Sake of Work?

It’s not that rest is never allowed in our culture, of course.  It is still occasionally allowed or even encouraged, but notice for what purpose – solely for the purpose of future productivity.   I am resting to recharge my batteries, we say, so that I can get up and do more work tomorrow. Or I am letting the land lie fallow for this sabbatical year in order to increase its fertility in future years.   All of that only reinforces the primacy of labor as the ultimate value.  In this schema, rest serves labor and the whole point is the labor.  

Rest Is The Point

But that’s not what the Torah is calling us to with these shabbatot.  The Torah says shabbat lashem.  A shabbat for God.  Rashi explains– leshem Hashem, for the sake of God (Rashi on Leviticus 25:2).  For the sake of God.  Whatever else that means, it certainly does not mean for the sake of work. It does not mean rest your land and your body so that in the future you can be more productive.  “For the sake of God” takes the rest completely out of this utilitarian scale into another plane, the divine plane.  Rest is not there to serve labor, but on the contrary, the whole point is the rest.   

The whole point is the rest.  As we say in Friday night prayers, Shabbat is tachlit ma’aseh shamayim ve’aretz.  Shabbat is the purpose of the creation of heaven and earth.  The whole world was created for the sake of shabbat.  Rest is the goal, not the means to something else.  My yoga instructor said something similar recently, that originally the whole point of all the body movements of yoga was to come into stillness at the end.  The goal was the stillness, the rest.  That’s what Shabbat is, the point of it all.  

Can you feel how mind blowing a shift that is?  It’s like taking what was background in a picture and making it the foreground.  Now rest comes into view as the main event.  I thought the point was productivity and it turns out to be rest.  

The Point Is You

Because it’s you that matters in the end of the day, not what you produce.  It’s you that matters.  You are enough just sitting here resting. That’s where God is, God is in the peace of mind of sitting here with yourself and being enough, knowing that is enough.  God is in the intrinsic valuing of this moment, of yourself, without any agenda, without something else you’re trying to get to or accomplish or produce, just being here. 

I used to teach in high school and I could feel the pervasive academic mentality of getting things done and covering material, and every once in a while I would look up at the students in front of me and think – the point is these human beings.  They are the point.  Everything else is a means to their growth, to their flourishing as humans.  The point is you. The point is you. That’s what it means to say that a human is made in the image of God.  A human has intrinsic value, is never a means to some other end, never a productivity tool.  Rest is how we learn that, how we remember that, how we inhabit that in our bones, this notion of our intrinsic divine value.  Here I am, sitting and doing nothing, at rest, and yet I still have value.  In fact, it is here that I discover my value. 

Can you feel the call to this purer form of rest?  It keeps tugging and inviting us into something unknown, something beyond this utilitarian world, it keeps asking us to let go of another layer of effort and control and earning and evaluation, to relax and trust a little more, to go further into the deep. Another layer and another layer.  We are never so completely at rest that we do not have more to let go of.

For The Sake of God

Shabbat lashem.  For the sake of God.  I rest for the sake of God.  I know how to work for the sake of God, but now God is inviting me into something new, something much harder – to rest for the sake of God.  Because it is here that I serve God most completely.  It is here that I come to know God most completely, unbound by my conditioned assumptions about work and earning and practicality.  It is here that I return to the simplest purest essence that is God in me.  I am not hoping to achieve anything through this rest, not hoping to get anywhere, to accomplish anything.  There is nothing in the world that matters right now other than this rest, nothing that demands my attention, that is more important, more valuable, more urgent, though the world tells me otherwise.  This is what matters, I am what matters, intrinsically, without any fancy footwork, just as I am. 

Second Practice: Returning To Our Resting Place

Do we even know how to rest?  See how hard it is for me to let go of talking and doing.  So many words.  I keep thinking if I clarify it more, it will help.  But no.  It is actually very simple.   It is at the core of who we are, a still silent point inside us that is always at rest.  So once again, I invite you to practice – tetting all the thoughts and worries and words swirl around you as you come to rest in that shabbat place inside, where God dwells, where you meet God and yourself and you remember who you are.  Letting your body unwind and unclench as you do this.  Your body is like the land.  It, too, needs a sabbatical.  Letting it rest for a moment.  Not arguing with any thoughts or worries or plans that come up in you – being restful with them – fading them out as if you are turning down the radio.  They’re still there but they have lost their volume, their urgency.  Letting your breath take you to that place, maybe adding the word “shabbat” to your breath and following it to the shabbat inside.  Whispering “shabbat,” breathing that in and out, feeling it take you down into calm, to a place beyond words or plans or worries, down to the depths of the sea, to the still rock that lies at the bottom.  Resting there for a moment.  

Rest Is A Positive Force

For this you were born, to rest in this way.  We think of rest as an absence of something, a lack of doing, but it is actually a presence, a positive energy we bring into the world, a force that changes the world, that calms it, that smooths it, that heals it, that offers some co-regulation to a very dysregulated system.  They say you have to be productive and active to contribute to the world, but rest, too, perhaps rest most of all, can be a gentle soothing offering to a parched universe.

Work From a Place of Rest

And at the same time, we don’t stay holed up in our resting place forever.  We are called back into the six work days, back into the world with all its needs and demands, but we are invited to return with a different energy, to walk through even the busiest, noisiest, most overwhelming and stressful of streets still carrying an awareness of that shabbat point inside, to work and speak and act and do, yes, but to do those things from that place of rest, to stay connected to that divine stillness inside even as we move about in the world, to remember, even as we work, the truth of our inherent value beyond the work. 

The Secret of Redemption

This is how we redeem ourselves and this is how we redeem the world.  Shabbat is considered a taste of the world to come. And some commentaries see in the first line of our parsha about shmita also a hint of the world to come, sod yemot olam, the secret of the end of time (see especially Nachmanides on Leviticus 25:2).  Maybe this is the secret of redemption, the secret that draws that time closer to us. It is the secret of rest, a well kept secret in our world.   The secret of rest.

Photo by magda-ehlers at Pexels