Fallow TIME Mother of three, Nechama Hadari enjoys the Jewish Sabbath with her family by letting it be

8 The Green Parent

Igrew up in the sort of household where time was accounted for more assiduously than money. The, “So what did you do today?” that greets so many children when they get home from school was a loaded question in my family at least. It meant “What did you learn?”; “What did you achieve?”, in just the same way that “Who did you play with at playtime?” was a code for the anxious “You do have friends, don’t you? You do have the right sort of friends?” When I wasn’t in school, I was practising the piano, practising the violin, doing ballet summer school, learning to type, writing poems, doing calligraphy, reading books – all very rewarding activities, and ones which I enjoyed (some of them enrich my life still) but I was left with little sense of who I might be when I wasn’t doing quite so much. Many years later, I became Jewish and discovered a concept I had never really come across before – the concept of the Sabbath: fallow time.

Taking time out We all know that intensive farming sooner or later destroys the land it uses because it is precisely that – too intensive. And we all pay lip service to the knowledge that the over-intensity of modern life with its excessive

demands destroys the delicate balance that enables our bodies and lives to hang together in health. But how many of us actually take time out? We may relax, certainly, but how many of our forms of “relaxation” are actually regenerating? We go away for the weekend. But that requires hours of travel with all the stress that that entails. We go to the gym, or to the swimming pool, but those are noisy, brightly-lit places. We talk to friends on the phone, or via e-mail but did you ever stop to notice how much more energy it takes to talk to someone you can’t see (and whose body language you can’t read) than it does to be with someone in “real time”? When was the last time you hugged someone over the internet? Or shared an accepting silence over the telephone?

The Sabbath Our family does the Sabbath. (The Yiddish is “making the sabbath” – which I like – it respects the fact that each Sabbath is something “homemade”, something different from the one before and the one after. Our family’s Sabbath is different from yours, because we are different (just like my banana cake is different from my mother’s, even though we use the same recipe). So I’d like to share some ideas with you – some will resonate, some won’t. That’s OK. I can’t get

offended, they’re not my ideas. Like the best ideas they’re very old. So, to make a Sabbath, first put away the car, the bicycle, the travelcard. The weekend has two days; whenever you decide to observe your Sabbath, it’s the other day that becomes the one for visiting friends and relations. The Sabbath is about where you are, not where you want to be. It’s about who you’re with, not who you think you might like to be with. Next, switch off the television, the computer and the telephone. The television because there is nothing more sure to shut down conversation than having a television on in the room – nothing better designed to ensure that your children won’t spend time with you than giving them the option of spending it in the fantasy-world of TV. The computer because it makes everything seem terribly urgent – you just have to check your e-mail NOW,
“The over-intensity of modern life destroys the delicate balance that enables our bodies and lives to hang together in health.”

look up this piece of information NOW. On a Sabbath, nothing is urgent – you have (until it ends) all the time in the world. The telephone (yes, it’s the hardest) has to go, not only because it too takes your focus away from where you are and who you are actually with, but because (and this is the very thing that makes it the most difficult to drop) we are addicted to the notion that that emergency telephone call is just about to come through, and we are the only people that could possibly deal with that call. For 24 hours a week, it’s good to remind ourselves that actually, the world can continue perfectly well without our participation. Yes, our friends and our extended family need us, but 999 times out of 1,000, they don’t need to speak to us RIGHT NOW. In our eight years of being Sabbath-observant, all the times the telephone has rung and we have ignored it, worrying all the time that

“Take rest,” wrote Ovid some two thousand years ago. “A field that has rested yields a bountiful crop.”

it might be some emergency situation, it has turned out, at the end of the day, only to have been telesales, or a wrong number. For quite a few weeks, your friends and family will be annoyed at you setting bounds on the times they can call. But then, my mother-in-law is still quite annoyed at being asked not to call during the children’s bath-, story- and bed-time. As a family, we love our friends, grandparents, aunts and uncles. But we’re only able to be there for them because we’re here for each other first. If our family is going to survive, there has to be time when it’s quite clear it’s “just family”. Finally, put away the wallet, purse and credit cards. The Jewish Sabbath

is meant to recall two things – first the creation of the universe, which is why it’s a good time just to sit back and be close to nature. We don’t do gardening, even though it’s a great, earthy activity which as a family we enjoy, because it’s a day to appreciate what is, rather than to try to improve it and create something “new”. And secondly, it recalls the Jewish people’s liberation from slavery in Egypt. That means it’s a day when we don’t focus on where we are in the economic scale of society. We’re not meant to be worrying about what we can or cannot afford to buy. We’re not meant to be judging ourselves or others by the standards of economic or social success. Of course,>

The Green Parent 9