Submitted by Rachel Glazer
Emma Goldberg (New York, NY):
For my first Shabbat back at home, I committed myself to a full 25-hour halachic observance. Laptop shut down, cell phone turned off, wallet shoved somewhere deep in the recesses of my dresser. Twenty-four hours later I found myself on the couch, eyes glued to the clock, anxiously counting down the minutes until I could power up my computer and delve back into my normal life.
It wasn’t the absence of Facebook or text messages that I minded so much. It was the lack of creation. I had been working on a short story all week and lines of prose kept leaping into my head, winding their way to my fingertips and impatiently pulsing towards fresh notebook pages. I had spent the previous Thursday beginning that dreaded college essay, and Saturday at noon my latest lead sentence demanded to know why it wasn’t being recorded in a “brainstorm” document. Shabbat felt stifling in its absence of action, a difficult time for the doers of the world.
In a lot of ways, Bronfman was my five-week Shabbat. We took buses, turned on lights, and spent money on falafel, so halachically speaking, not really. But it was a five-week break from reality, when we had no obligations other than to question, share, and disagree. The Torah as water analogy that we discussed feels relevant; our learning made the ink bleed on my mental to-do list, made responsibilities like summer required reading and college applications feel irrelevant.
Shabbat is, as Abraham Joshua Heschel put it, our chance to “turn from the world of creation to the creation of the world.” Bronfman was a time to turn from to-do to to-deliberate, from act on this to analyze that. That is a lot more difficult to do at home without peers surrounding me who are eager to discuss prayer, spirituality, and egalitarianism.
Pirkei Avot teaches that learning is most important in that it inspires action. As I start to unpack and settle in at home, I feel ready to shift from discussion to doing, to begin planning my Ma’aseh project as a start. But I’ve also learned that study and action can and should co-exist. I don’t want to leave behind my ability to close my eyes, crumple up my sticky note lists, and slip into an existential question. In the past five weeks I’ve learned how much I can learn by putting away my pens and paper and rooting around in the filing cabinets of my mind. So next Shabbat once again I’ll be taking on the challenge of attempting to find meaning in the powering down of my laptop and the creation of a new world.
