mails nagging us at all
hours. The phone buzzing, ping-
ing, blinking and ringing every-
where—in the car, on the plane,
at the table. Office stress. Mar-
ket stress. Commuting stress.
We hit our sales goal, we raise
the goal. We get one promotion, we aim for the next.
There are errands to run, commitments to keep, family
and friends who need us. There’s housework, home-
work and bookkeeping. And to top it off, 24/7 cover-
age of an increasingly uncivil, violent world whose
politics are often coarse and divisive. It’s no wonder
stress-induced irritable bowel syndrome, heart dis-
ease, obesity, diabetes, headaches, depression and
anxiety are tearing many of us apart... As Abraham
Joshua Heschel put it in his famous book The Sabbath,
“It is as if the forces we had conquered have conquered
us.” He wrote those words in 1951. Life was stressful
then, and it’s hard to argue it is any less so now.
Heschel attributed much of the stress we feel to
the inordinate amount of time we spend immersed
in the muck of our own material struggles and the
world’s problems, versus how precious little time
we spend nourishing our inner, spiritual lives. Even
those of us who find our careers to be enormously
fulfilling can become victims of a cruel syndrome
wherein the more time we give over to work and our
many other responsibilities, the more our spiritual
lives atrophy. Take it from a rabbi (me) whose vo-
cation is to dwell and enlighten in the realm of the
spirit and yet, like many in the clergy, spends most of
his time on meetings, memos, budgets, fundraising
(and more fundraising), committees (and more com-THE SABBATH
ANTIDOTE
Even if you aren’t religious, taking a day off
every week to completely unwind can bring
emotional and spiritual rejuvenation