My Virtual Shabbos — This One’s for Oliver Sacks

By Sharona Coutts, Co-Founder of SpareChair

This past Saturday, my phone lit up with a Facetime call from my sister, half a world away from the palm trees and freeways of Los Angeles, where I now live. She was calling from Sydney, Australia, with a question: Did I get her email with tips on what to buy (and what not to) in preparation for the arrival of my first baby?

The answer surprised her. I hadn’t read her note, because I was observing my own version of Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest.

Now, obviously, since I was in a car, and since I answered the phone, this is not your strict interpretation of the rules that religious Jews observe between sunsets on Friday and Saturday. Those rules prevent countless things, and mandate others, all in the hopes of encouraging people to avoid work.

It’s why elevators run continuously — stopping at every level — in many buildings in Israel. According to tradition, pressing a button is equivalent to sparking fire, which is considered related to work — and since work is the opposite of rest, it cannot be done on Shabbos.

The rules similarly prohibit driving, then there’s rule that severed my connection to Shabbat, and to organized religion — the prohibition on swimming on Saturday. Growing up in Sydney (which is basically like LA, without freeways or palm trees), the single thing I loved to do best was to swim. But if you swim, my rabbi told me, you might drip water onto the grass. And carrying water is work. Thus, swimming is verboten on the Shabbos.

I was out.

So how is it that now, as an adult, I’ve returned to a personal version of Shabbat?

It came about through my ongoing quest to balance work and life while working from home, and was crystalized by the recent passing of the wonderful Oliver Sacks.

In his final weeks, Sacks wrote of the importance of the Shabbos to him when he was young. He reflected on how his memory kept returning to that time, and how he had come to understand how important it had been to take time away from work, to carve out space for friends and family. Like millions of others, I was deeply moved by that piece, which turned out to be the last he wrote before he died last weekend.

I’d been experimenting with my own virtual Shabbos for a few weeks, but that news inspired me to write this post, in the hopes that it might be of some use to others who are looking for a practical way to do the things Sacks talked about, while acknowledging that modern life makes it virtually impossible to abandon our phones, even for a few hours.

It’s now trite to observe that our phones make our personal and professional communications constantly available through the same device, and that the always-on mentality can be hard to shake. The higher you get in the corporate foodchain, the greater the expectation of infinite availability.

And for those of us who work from home, the difficulty in separating work time and free time is even greater, since the physical reality of the weekend can be identical to the work week — hanging out in your apartment. It can be hard to signal to yourself that you are taking a mental and physical rest from work, and to demarcate the weekend from the week.

My idea is that adopting a Shabbat philosophy can go a long way toward solving this problem.

Mostly, I do this by deliberately pretending that my phone is just that — a phone, not a mini computer.

I don’t read emails during the day on Saturday, and I’m trying to avoid Facebook and other social media. I try to block out the kinds of communications that come up during the week, like Slack messages. Instead of reading the paper on my phone, we get the New York Times and, now, the Los Angeles Times, delivered. There’s a real pleasure in unfolding those broadsheets, and thumbing through the magazines.

But I don’t want to be like the rabbi who forbids fun in the name of mandatory relaxation, turning what should be rest into a form of punishment.

So, I do use the phone as a GPS system (LA wouldn’t be very restful if I were forever trapped in freeway purgatory, to borrow an analogy from another religious tradition). I also chose not to go entirely screen-free, at least not yet. I’ll watch a movie or binge on some good TV (recent recommendations include Bloodlines and Peaky Blinders.) The aim is to achieve a mental break from the buzz of the week, not to miss out on things I enjoy that also help me unwind.

So far, I’ve found that my mini-Shabbos is having a huge effect. I feel rested in a way that I didn’t used to after the weekend. I also find that I’m more likely to hear the voices of friends and family, since I’m “allowed” to call or text but not to email.

It’s also helping me to look at, and really see, my new city. And isn’t it exquisite. Los Angeles possesses the kind of embarrassing beauty of a precocious girl. There’s something overwhelming about the colors of this place — the deep cobalt of noon and the burnt apricot of dusk. And the beaches are wild and epic. They make the beaches of Miami look like a giant Jacuzzi — Jacuzzis are fun, but not magnificent. You can fall in love with the beaches of Los Angeles.

The next step is to experiment with putting on out-of-office notifications on my emails, which I’m feeling a little reticent about doing. I’m trying to figure out a palatable way to tell people that I’m not ogling my email for that precious 24-hour period, but if they want to reach me, they can just give me a call. Somehow I still haven’t burst through the stigma that we’ve developed as a culture of admitting that we need, and want, a rest. But my virtual Shabbos has brought me a precious step closer.