More Than Our Work
A joke: Two grandmothers are at the playground with their grandchildren. One asks the other “How old are your grandchildren?” The second grandmother replies, “Well, the lawyer is six and the doctor is four.”
Ha ha ha.
Good jokes are often funny because they poke fun at a certain truth; great jokes are funny when that truth is an uncomfortable one. This joke works so well because the premise that a four year old and a six year old would already have their career paths laid out for them is so ridiculous—and yet for many of us, so real. Our cultural preoccupation with work begins in childhood, when we are asked at very young ages what we want to be when we grow up. And when we do grow up, the first thing we ask, and are asked, when meeting new people is: “What do you do?” In both explicit and subtle ways, we are taught that our work is what defines us.
Work can be wonderful. It can be creative and exciting, it can be a source of purpose and fulfillment. Work can bring prestige and pride. Work can bring good things into the world. But when we come to over-identify with our work, well, that path leads to suffering. In a Harvard Business Review article entitled “What Happens When Your Career Becomes Your Whole Identity,” psychologist Janna Koretz writes about the phenomenon of career enmeshment—a blurring of the boundaries between self and work so extreme that it can lead to mental health breakdowns and existential crises.
How might we embrace all that is positive about work while avoiding the pitfall of career enmeshment? Enter Shabbat.
This week’s parashah is one of the many times the Torah instructs us in the mitzvah of Shabbat observance. In each case, the Torah uses some variation of this language:
שֵׁ֣שֶׁת יָמִים֮ תֵּעָשֶׂ֣ה מְלָאכָה֒.וּבַיּ֣וֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִ֗י…. כׇּל־מְלָאכָ֖ה לֹ֣א תַעֲשׂ֑וּ
Six days a week you shall do melakha. And on the seventh day, you shall not do any melakha.
Melakha is often translated as work, but its deeper meaning eludes the English language. Jewish educator Rachel Anisfeld notes that the word melakha contains the word malakh, meaning angel. This would suggest that when the Torah tells us not to perform melakha on Shabbat, it is also instructing us not to be like angels. This sounds counterintuitive. Wouldn’t we want to be more like angels on Shabbat, transcending the worries of the world and resting in the presence of the divine?
No, she teaches—because our tradition understands angels as having a singularity of purpose, one mission and one mission only (see this midrash on Parashat Vayera). Angels are uni-dimensional. But human beings are not built this way. We have more than one aspect to our identity, more than one way to express who we are. When we are told not to perform any melakha on Shabbat, the Torah is reminding us that there is more to our identities than our work. Shabbat is the time to be different from the angels, to release ourselves from melakha and to invest in the other dimensions of who we are: friend, parent, community member, spiritual seeker.
There is much work to do in this world, and each of us has a unique contribution to make. But if this becomes the totality of our existence, we will have lost part of our humanity. On Shabbat, when we disengage from melakha, we create space for all the facets of our identity, embracing the fullness of the human experience and bringing deeper meaning into our lives.
Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Shuli Passow