a Sabbath day each of those weeks, it amounts to
seven and a half weeks of vacation from the madness.
Simple math that will change your life.
Muslim, Christian, Jew, Buddhist, Baha’i, human-
ist, secularist—we can each create our own sort of
Sabbath. We can each live a seventh of our life with
less stress and more splendor. You really can spend
the day in your pajamas. Unplug. Share a delicious
meal with people you love. Walk, breathe, stretch,
garden, play and remove what obscures the beauty
of life. Stop grinding, threshing and spinning. Kindle
no fires. Let your away message read: “Today is my
Sabbath. I am transcending the muck of the world—
nurturing my spirit. Stress me out tomorrow instead.”
someTimes, even A rabbi needs reminding of
what’s really important. The recent round of wild-
fires in Southern California did the trick. A special
police bulletin informed us that our neighborhood
would be the next to evacuate if the fires continued
moving eastward. We had time to pack two suitcases.
In one we put supplies for our dogs. The other we
packed full of family pictures and home DVDs. When
the heat is on, it’s people, pets and pictures that mat-
ter most. If you think about it, it doesn’t take long to
figure out that pictures, despite having no real ma-
terial value, are so priceless because they represent
moments in time with the people we love.
There’s the one of my dad with his sparkling blue
eyes, wide smile, baggy pants and a cowboy hat, eat-
ing a slice of grapefruit at a roadside stand. It reminds
me to find joy in the simplest of things. There’s an-
other of my mom, hovering over an enormous pot
of soup with a spoon the size of a paddle. It carries
me back to how warm she kept us all on those cold
Minnesota nights. A photo showing my son’s freckled
face bobbing in the ocean, and my daughter’s corn-
rowed, beaded hair puts me on vacation with them
again in Mexico, feeling free and calm. The honey-
moon beach shot of my wife reminds me how long
and beautiful our journey has been. There is a sacred-
ness to time that errands, meetings, memos, Insta-
gram likes and all the money for all the things in all
the world will never give us.
The Sabbath is an ancient answer, a wise and pow-
erful antidote to the necessary indignities, cravings
and predations of our frenetic lives during which we
are so terribly busy yet feel so terribly empty some-
times. Seize your own Sabbath to relish the most sa-
cred, finite and beautiful of all blessings—time. •Steve Leder is the author of More Beautiful Than
Before: How Suffering Transforms Us and is the senior
rabbi of Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles.Photos of family, friends and cherished moments are enduring reminders of what is most important
and what we should prioritize in our overly complicated lives.