The summer I was thirteen, I went on a canoeing trip with my Girl Scout camp. It was my last year there; I was leaving a difficult middle school experience and hopeful but unsure about a new high school. I am, by nature, a busy person, but on that trip I went into overdrive. I tried to be helpful and productive in every possible moment. I looked for the heaviest bags to carry; for trash left behind when we broke camp; I raised my hand to filter and fill water pots, deflate and seal waterbags. If there was a task to be done, I wanted to do it. 

My counselors noticed. One afternoon, after we’d pulled our canoes up on the bank of a small island and were preparing to make camp, they pulled me aside and said, “Vera, we’ve talked to your meal group and you are not allowed to do anything at dinner tonight – don’t cook, don’t clean, don’t put stuff away. You’re not doing anything wrong – you’re doing too much. You need to take a break.” 

This felt very strange and quite uncomfortable to me. For the rest of the afternoon, I fretted. Would the others think I was being lazy? Had I really been working that much harder than everyone else? Should I do more than usual this afternoon to make sure I deserved a break later? And, buried under all of that: Would they still like me if I wasn’t being useful? 

I ate dinner that night slowly, feeling shy. When it was done, I hovered uncertainly as my group started cleaning. One of my counselors saw me circling the cleanup and shooed me away. “Go take a walk,” she said. “Sit somewhere and enjoy the sunset.” Feeling a little foolish, I wandered over a rise, out of sight of our camp. I sat down on a small ledge. The earth was soft; the scent of pine was all around me; I had a clear view down to the river. I remember feeling my nervous heartbeat – should I stay? should I go back and help? – slow down as, gradually, my body relaxed into the experience of rest. 

I had internalized the North American norm of resisting rest. I still mostly live with that norm. My recent learning with the Institute of Jewish Spirituality has only just begun to pull a few tendrils free.

“Rest is for the weak!” “I’ll sleep when I’m dead!” “I can’t rest – I wouldn’t know what to do with myself.” “If I stopped, nothing would get done.”

How often have you heard, or said, one of these phrases? 

Now: think of a time when you felt well-rested. How does rest taste to your body? Do you feel better when you’re well-rested? Do you make better decisions?

We behave and sometimes we speak as if necessary, delicious rest were not our birthright as humans made and living in the image of the Divine. As if taking the rest our bodies and souls need is a failure, and as if those who rest, lack worth. Where do we learn to so devalue rest? 

Tricia Hersey is the “Nap Bishop.” Her ministry is making sacred spaces for communal napping, and she’s seen reorientation towards rest change herself and the people she serves. Hersey writes that, “America was built on the backs of Black and Indigenous people who labored without rest for centuries as the country built its economic power… Rest is resistance because it is a counternarrative to the script of capitalism and white supremacy for all people.”[1]

On that island, out of sight of the rest of my scout troop, I didn’t have rent to make or grades to achieve. There was no reason for me to drive myself into the ground. Yet there I was. I had received enough of American culture’s message about self-worth equaling productivity to fear that if I stopped contributing labor, if I stopped getting things done, I might not be valued by my peers or by myself.

Parker Palmer writes of “shadows” in leadership: particular negative perspectives that show up when we are in positions of responsibility. One of these “shadows” is “functional atheism.” Functional atheism, Palmer says, “is the unconscious, unexamined conviction that if anything decent is going to happen here, we are the ones who must make it happen – a conviction held even by people who talk a good game about God.”[2] In other words, if we stop to rest, the whole world might come crashing down. Something vital might not get done. Tricia Hersey puts it this way: “Much of our resistance to rest, sleep, and slowing down is an ego problem. You believe you can and must do it all.”[3]

To rest is to accept that we can’t do it all. To rest is to believe that the work, just like the problem, is bigger than we are, and Someone has our back.

We may resist rest because of a deep, justified sense of crisis. The world is on fire. How can we pause when there is so much to do? Yet rest supports our capacity to offer aid, to push back against abuse and violence, to resist.

Singing teaches us rest. When a group of people sing together – the same note, or the same melody – each can breathe at need, knowing the whole group has that melody or that note. We can rest and re-enter when we’re ready.  

Group singing models communal intertwining and care. It resists the functional atheism and the “rugged” or toxic individualism of American culture. Psychologist and mindfulness/meditation trainer Tara Brach writes that our unprecedented, exaggerated belief in a separate self causes what she calls “severed belonging…in our society.”[4] 

When we don’t believe we belong, and desperately avoid trusting our community web, we drive ourselves into the ground. We burn out. Our mental and physical and spiritual health suffers. Hersey calls it “Grind Culture,” the belief that we cannot and must not stop, that it is shameful and lazy to rest. Grind culture is the world in which we all swim. 

But there is another way. Like Avraham, clutching the knife, we can hear the voice of the angel, saying, “Hey! Beloved! This thing you are doing is wrong! Stop!”  

Avraham had no communal web catching him. The Akeidah hardly shows him and Sarah kibbitzing with the neighbors. Avraham, alone, tries to assess what the moment, and God, demand of him. He drives himself hard. He doesn’t consult with Sarah. He doesn’t take any time to think over God’s monstrous command. Avraham wakes up early after what I cannot believe was a restful night. I imagine him dismounting after the three days’ ride to Mt. Moriyah. I imagine how Avraham pushed himself on that hike, heartbeats loud in his ears, terrified that if he rested, took time to think, he wouldn’t go through with it.

And then he – and we – learn that God never wanted him to go through with it. 

Judaism’s oldest traditions are the first of our angelic voices calling out “Stop!” Judaism’s core texts and practices value rest!

• Right there in the beginning of the Torah, Creation, we meet Shabbat: God rests, so as we strive to emulate God, we rest too. Torah also gives us the sh’mita year and the Yoveil, sabbatical years and Jubilee years.
• Yom Kippur is described as Shabbat shabbatot hi lachem! a Shabbat of Shabbats! (and – bonus! – Rosh HaShanah this year was also Shabbat – Yom Kippur will be second Shabbat for these High Holy Days!) However refreshing and joyful we may or may not find Yom Kippur, and I understand that your mileage may vary, on that day we absolutely rest from all our doing and making.

Rest is valued in Judaism for its own sake: Shabbat is not the fuel in the tank for the rest of the week, but the regular culmination of the rhythm of our days. We don’t rest in order to do or make or produce. We rest because we are beloved human beings who need and deserve rest simply by being alive.  According to Midrash B’reishit Rabbah[5]

וּמַה נִּבְרָא בוֹ לְאַחַר שֶׁשָּׁבַת, שַׁאֲנָן, וְנַחַת, שַׁלְוָה, וְהַשְׁקֵט

The world was not complete until God’s first Shabbat rest allowed God to create the missing quality of “tranquility, satisfaction, calm, and quiet” in the universe.

Kohenet Keshira haLev Fife of the Institute for Jewish Spirituality teaches in her podcast “Rest to Return” that Jewish time prioritizes rest in a way that runs against the grain of American grind culture. On grind culture time, a day begins in the morning, with a quick meal, perhaps some coffee, then right to work. Our Jewish day begins in the evening, with a more expansive, perhaps communal mealtime followed by rest and dreaming. [6]

This flow is also how our Jewish year begins! We start with Rosh HaShanah, gathered in celebration with our community and our loved ones, tasting apples and honey and feasting our ears on the healing sounds of the shofar.  

Next comes Yom Kippur. Twenty-five hours of complete rest, as a community. We give ourselves entirely over, even our bodies, on Yom Kippur to dreaming of a world in which healing from inflicting harm and suffering harm is not just possible, but the norm.

Beyond a countercultural schedule – how else is rest resistance? 

Rest interrupts “burnout as usual.” Tricia Hersey again: “Rest must interrupt. Like hope, rest is disruptive, it allows space for us to envision new possibilities.”[7]  

Rest is also our vision space. Our Jewish stories of Ya’akov and Yoseif demonstrate the power of dreams to change reality, and many other Jewish texts take up this theme.

• Talmud Bavli B’rachot 55a says that we need to pray for the mercy of good dreams, because God giving us a good dream is like God rescuing us. B’rachot takes dreams very seriously: it details rituals and prayers for dealing with bad dreams and good dreams.
• Dreams can bring us fortitude, clarity, and healing. Beth El member Linda Yael Schiller writes, in her book Ancestral Dreaming, about their power to connect us with ancestral strength as well as trauma, stop cycles of harm, and recognize inherited blessings.[8]

Today, “dreamer” is often a pejorative, used as a synonym for “naïve.” But the Book of Jeremiah explicitly links dreams and prophecy, saying: “The prophet who has a dream – let him tell that dream.”[9] And our Talmud more famously calls dreams “one sixtieth of prophecy.”[10] Without dreams, we are trapped in the worst of what is, unable to imagine our way to anything better.

We do not deserve to be trapped in world that is on fire, or awash in fear and bigotry. We do not deserve to be trapped in a system where our bodies, and the rest they need, are treated as sites of shame rather than sanctity. We do not deserve to believe that each of us is on our own and that nobody else will help.

We need to dream up better than this, and to tell each other those dreams so we can make them real. And so we have to rest.

I believe that both rest and resistance occur in the context of communal care. In successful community organizing, as we’ve seen recently in Minneapolis and right here in MA, mutual aid creates a thick web in which both needs and resources are shared effectively. If I can’t accompany an immigrant at their check-in, I might know someone else who can. If someone tells you about a family too scared to go get groceries, maybe you can help with that. When government systems are inadequate and cruel, communal care catches us.

We are not going it alone like Avraham. We are here in our temple community and in a host of other communal circles. Right here and now, as we pray together in our High Holy Day services, we are intertwining our voices, our words, our thoughts, becoming, in the words of Ketem Paz, “a holy, bound rope … Just as in a rope the threads are twisted, intertwined and bound one with the other until they become one strand, so too we must be twisted together, bound and intertwined one with the other until we merit the promise of the prophet that God will draw us out of exile with ropes of love.”[11]

Being part of community, one strand twisted with others, lets us rest and meet vital needs. This holy rope draws us out of chaos and oppression and helps us return to the best us that we can be. We can trust more fully, act more humbly and more compassionately. We can take some beats, take some breaths, take some time with hard decisions – or just rest.

Just as the world was not complete without Shabbat, our lives are not complete without rest.  

On Rosh HaShanah we say “Hayom harat olam” – today, in this holy, celebratory, resting time, we conceive of our world. I invite you to begin this New Year by covenanting with rest and with the sacred space of your own dreaming. Say to yourself, “I am worthy of rest.” Try it with me! “I choose rest!” 

Then I invite you to choose a kabbalah, one small, regular, attainable practice. What is one thing you can do each week to bring more rest into your life? What’s something that will open up space for your dreams and your visions?  

And finally, as we begin this New Year, I invite us to ask ourselves as a community: Amid all our wonderful doing, how can we more deeply value and prioritize rest? How can we support each other in resting?

The late, great Dolly Parton z”l said to the 2009 graduating class of the University of Tennessee, “If I had but one wish for you, it would be for you to dream more.”[12] And today I add, “and for you to rest more.” May we rest more, and more deeply, together, in this New Year. May we dream and may we build a better world of our dreaming.

And if you need a reminder – I do! – sing yourself this song.

Lay it down, let it go, feel the earth movin’ slow,

Lay it down, let it go, feel your heart beat you know[13]

I’m looking forward to hearing your dreams. L’shanah tovah.

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[1] Hersey, Tricia Rest Is Resistance. Little, Brown Spark, an imprint of Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Gorup, Inc. New York: 2022. Page 33

[2] Palmer, Parker J. “Leading from Within,” Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation. Copyright 2000 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Page 7

[3] Hersey p. 18

[4] Brach, Tara Awakening From the Trance of Unworthiness (from the Spring 2001 issue of Inquiring Mind – vol. 17, number 2)

[5] Midrash B’reishit Rabbah 10:9

[6] Fife, Kohenet Keshira haLev Rest to Return podcast Judaism Unbound: 2026 https://open.spotify.com/album/3Uho4hUp08CJQKUTWY7HtD?si=ETN5ZuurRJSP6XhJq-Vnfw Episode 3, “Rhythm of Rest”

[7] Hersey p. 60

[8] Schiller, Linda Yael Ancestral Dreaming: Heal Generational Wounds Through Dreamwork. Llewellyn, Woodbury, MN: 2025

[9] Jeremiah 23:28

[10] Talmud Bavli B’rachot 57b

[11] Ibn Lavi, Rabbi Shimon, Rabbi Sam Feinsmith transl. Ketem Paz

[12] Parton, Dolly, commencement address at the University of Tennessee, 2009, transcript accessed on github.

[13] Fife, Kohenet Keshira haLev, “Lay it Down, Let it Go” 2026 https://youtu.be/zsl5EMmoHzg?si=s5RiUNos4dcl272P