Has it been a year already since I was here last?  It must have been… I come in every fall for my annual check-up and exam.  I do not look forward to this.  All the sitting around and waiting that seems to go on forever.  And you have to bare your soul – and just about everything else!  There’s all those embarrassing questions and the poking and prodding – I feel like I’m being judged.  And when you get to be a certain age, it can be very scary: They’re likely to find something and you’re terrified you’ve been given a death sentence!  All I want to do is get out of here in one piece, and not have to come back until next year.  But more often than not, they tell me to come back – they want to see me for this, or they want me to check out that… And all of this isn’t cheap.  You wouldn’t think that coming in once a year would cost so much!  And if all that wasn’t bad enough, they make me wear one of these ridiculous things – which I always end up putting on the wrong way!

How long have I been waiting for him?  It must be a half-hour already.  I really can’t stand when he does this to me… I hate him!

Oh! Hi, Doc!  How are you?  So nice to see you again.  Oh, that’s alright.  I don’t mind waiting…

Me?  Ah, not so good.  There’s a bunch of things that I wanted to run by you.

First off, I’m just tired all of the time.  I’m physically beat.  My whole body aches.  I’m putting in long days.  Sometimes I find I’m even bringing work home over the weekend.  You know how it is out there these days.  I’m lucky I’ve got a job.  My wrists hurt from pounding the keyboard and my eyes are weary from staring at the computer screen, and my elbow is killing me from holding the phone to my ear all day.

My diet is terrible.  I’m wolfing down too much fast food, and I’m scarfing down way too much candy and coffee to keep me going during the day – and then I end up not being able to “go” at all – if you get my meaning.

And  all the pressure is taking an emotional toll on me, Doc.  I’m stressed out.  I’ve got trouble sleeping at night.  I’m sure my blood pressure is way too high.  I’m worried about money: Can I pay the mortgage, and afford that Bar Mitzvah, and what about college?  And then there’ll be the wedding; and what’s  going to become of me when I retire?  My house needs a new roof – and I’m the last one on my block who hasn’t put up a McMansion.  My kids are pestering me every day for something – a new pair of $150 sneakers, the new video game, for the latest I-Phone, a more expensive Prada bag.  It’s driving me ragged just trying to keep up with the Joneses – and I don’t even know the Joneses!

And my family – I can confide in you, right, Doc?  Things aren’t so good at home.  My wife and I are fighting more than we’ve ever done.  She’s working, and when she gets home, she’s got to carpool the kids, and make dinner and do laundry.  She thinks I’m not helping out enough, but I don’t get home till late.  There are days when I’m on the train in the morning before the kids are up, and by the time I get home, they’re already in bed.  I used to look forward to vacation so we could spend some quality time together – but I don’t want to have to wait six months to be with my kids, and besides, who can afford a vacation anymore?

And there’s one more thing, Doc.  I don’t know if you’re the one to help me on this – maybe I should see a psychologist, or talk to my Rabbi – but there’s a real emptiness in my life.  Something’s missing.  When I was younger, I knew exactly what I wanted: To be successful.  Make a lot of money.  Buy a nice house in a great neighborhood.  Drive a fancy car.  Belong to a Country Club.  Go on a cruise in the winter.  Most of those things I’ve got – and to tell you the truth, they don’t mean all that much to me anymore.  A good friend of mine died suddenly this past year, and that really shook me up.   I keep thinking about that old song: “Is that all there is?”  Is this what they call that “Mid-Life Crisis”?  Wondering if I’m on the right track, or if I’ve wasted the first half of my life… Wondering if my time here has been put to good use… Wondering how I’ll be remembered when I’m gone.  I know a lot of guys go through this exact same thing.  And I know that a sports car or an affair is not the answer.  But I don’t know what is!  You gotta help me, Doc.  I’ve seen commercials on TV for pills for everything else – there’s got to be a drug that can cure this.  Please – give me a prescription!

       

First off, let me assure you that you’re not crazy, and you’re not alone.  I hear the same story at least once a week.  Maybe it’s the tough times, or maybe it’s just a normal stage of life that everyone goes through.   You’re ahead of the game, because at least you have the courage to talk about it and to seek out help.  Many people keep it all bottled up inside, and they end up with an ulcer, or a stroke, or a heart attack.

Second, I’m sorry to tell you that there’s no quick fix.  There’s a pill for everything else – but not for this.  If there was, I’d buy as much stock in the company as I could – I’d end up a very rich man.  But they’ll find the Fountain of Youth before they come out with a pill to cure all that ails you.

But don’t give up hope.  There is something that can help you.  It’s not a pill, but a course of therapy that’s going to require some changes in your lifestyle.  If you’re serious about this, and if you are willing to give it a try, I’m pretty sure you will begin to see some positive changes in your life in practically no time at all.  The people who’ve stuck with it, swear by it.  They’ll tell you that it’s one of the best things they’ve ever done – that they can’t imagine living without it.

I’ve got to tell you that this therapy is not some new discovery; it’s been around for 3,000 years.  And yet it may be the answer to the very problems that so many people today are plagued with!  It’s very simple, and yet it’s very sage.  I’ll write you a prescription.  It’s called “Shabbes.”

There’s three parts to it.

Here’s the first part: It’s Friday Night, at Home.  There are a number of elements, so let me go through them, one by one.

Friday, just before sunset, you light candles in the house.  This is a sign that something special, something out of the ordinary is about to begin.  Candles at a dinner table are often sign of love, and Shabbes candles remind us of all our love relationships – with our parents, with our spouse, and with our children.  The flame teaches us to fill the home with light and warmth – especially on this day, but every day of the week, too.

It’s important that the family gather together for a leisurely, substantial meal.  We sit, we talk, we eat.  No TV on in the background; no frozen food nuked in the microwave.  The Torah doesn’t require Matzo Ball soup, Gefilte Fish, Chicken, or Cholent; those choices come out of Jewish culture, not Jewish law.  But Thanksgiving wouldn’t be the same with Pizza instead of Turkey, and a special Shabbes menu helps to set the mood and define the occasion.

The meal starts with Kiddush recited over wine and Motzi over the Hallah.  Wine teaches us an important lesson about moderation: A little is very good, too much is very bad.  What goes for wine, applies to every other aspect of our lives: If we overdo things, they become cursed.  And that goes for work, too.  Shabbes is a time to remember that lesson, and to savor our many blessings as we vow not to misuse them, or take them for granted.

The blessing over the bread: HA MOTZI LEHEM MIN HA-ARETZ is technically false.  God does not “bring forth bread from the earth.”  All that God brings forth is wheat.  The braided Hallah is shaped like a stalk of wheat.  And it comes to teach us that Bread, like life, is a partnership.  God provides the natural resources, but it’s left to us to harvest, thresh, winnow, grind, knead and bake the loaves.  Thinking that we are independent and self-sufficient, that we need no One else to help us is a main source of much of modern man’s troubles.

Just as the Hagada provides a script for the Passover Seder Meal and Program, the Siddur provides a similar guide for Shabbes.  The husband toasts his wife to the words from the Book of Proverbs (A Woman of Valor – Eshet Hayil); many wives return the favor with the words of Psalm I (“Blessed is the Man…).  And parents place their hands on the head of each child and offer them blessings.  These moments are the Jewish equivalent of a Hallmark Card.  We use someone else’s poetic words to say what is hard for so many people to say: “I love you.”  It’s no coincidence that Jewish tradition suggests that Friday night is an especially appropriate time for physical intimacy between husband and wife (or, as any kid who went to Yeshiva knows “It’s a double mitzvah on Shabbes.”)

Suburban life is so harried and hectic – there are so many activities to do and so many places to go that families are often like the proverbial ships that pass in the night.  We’d go a long way towards healing ourselves and bringing our family together if we could make a sacred rule: Friday night, as the work week and the school week end, is Family night.  It’s our chance to be together, and to catch up, and get to know what we’ve been doing and what we’ve been thinking and feeling.

Friday night dinner is also the perfect time to invite guests to join us.  Some people have even created Havurot – small groups of families that get together once a week, or once a month, in rotating homes, to share Shabbes, with the adults talking and the kids playing.

Let me move on to the second part of the Shabbes Cure: Saturday Morning in Shul.  We Jews have a theological trinity: God, Torah, and the People Israel.  And each of these are found in the Shabbat service.

It’s certainly true that you can pray anywhere, or anytime.  But it’s especially helpful when there’s a set time and place to gather together, with others.  If prayer to God is like a rocket ship to the Moon, the more people who gather – the greater the energy and the higher we reach.  The prayers in the Siddur and the Cantor’s singing can make the experience so much more successful than we could ever do on our own.

Spirituality is an “in” term these days, and it’s on a lot of people’s agendas.  Surveys indicate that many are searching for “spirituality”, even while they have ambivalent feelings about “religion”.  Judaism has always taught that the two are intertwined.  The way to discover God, and the path to bringing God into our lives is through our rituals and mitzvot.

We don’t claim ours is the only road to God; we do believe that it is the authentic Jewish way to spirituality.  And in our world, which is so focused on the material and on the physical, it is critical that we set aside a time and place to search for something which is deeper, which is higher, which is greater than the mundane or the ordinary.

Prayer is not merely asking God for what we want.  It is also about reflecting on whether what we want is what we truly need.

Prayer is about making a Heshbon HaNefesh – an accounting of our soul.  We open the Siddur and find a mirror on the page that forces us to look at ourselves, and to judge whether or not we like, and respect what we see.

Prayer is looking over the past week, and deciding whether we’re pleased with what we’ve done; and if we’re not, prayer helps us to figure out how to make amends and how to find a new route.

Prayer is the time for counting our blessings and for appreciating all the things we have.

Prayer is the way that we look at God’s world in awe and in wonder, and come to see our own place in it.

       

Professor Louis Finkelstein famously said: “When I pray, I talk to God; when I study, God talks to me.”  Reading the Torah is the Jewish way of listening to the word of God.

Hearing words of Torah is very important, because we live in a culture in which there are many other sets of values that are being conveyed in the marketplace of ideas.  This nation was first inhabited by a religious sect, the Pilgrims, and to this day, many Americans think of the US as a Christian country.  So that’s one set of values that aren’t ours.  The founders of our government were secular Humanists, who took their values from the European enlightenment.  There’s another set of values that aren’t Jewish.  And in recent decades, popular culture give us a crass and often mean-spirited set of ideas and practices, that are foreign.

It’s only by immersing ourselves in Torah that we come to understand Jewish values.  If you were a serious student, you might learn the Humash, Tanakh, Midrash, Talmud, Halakhah, Kabbalah and Jewish Philosophy.  But without enrolling in Rabbinical School, you could still learn the Jewish approach to life by attending Shabbat services.  At the center of the Saturday morning liturgy is the Reading of the Torah.  Each week we hear a portion of the Five Books of Moses read (until at the end of the year, we have completed the entire scroll).  And following the Kriyah, Rabbis take one idea from the reading and apply its Teachings to contemporary life.  It is here, each week, that you learn to think, and to act like a Jew.  The Torah becomes the lens through which we see the world, and then change that world.

Finally, it is in Shul that Jews find their people – or at least those of their people who identify and live as Jews.  It’s here that Jews gather to find like-minded co-religionists with whom to interact, and work together.  It’s here that Jews find those to care for – and those who will care for them.

The synagogue is not just for old men who come to remember the world of their youth.  The synagogue is not just for young children who need to fulfill their Jr. Congregation requirements.  The synagogue is not just a place where Kaddish can be said for the dead.  The synagogue should be a place where families gather together to talk to God, and to hear God talk to them.

       

Let me now come to the third part of my prescription: Shabbat is a Day of Stopping.  That’s what the word “Shabbat actually means: “To Stop.”  It’s the day we stop our normal regular activities so that we can introduce something new, something special.

I could tell you to make Friday night into Family night, or to make Saturday morning into Shul day, but unless you stop the mundane, there’s not much chance that you’ll even have time for Shabbat, or if you do, the sacred won’t be able to overcome the ordinary: So here’s what you need to try to do:

To the best of your ability stop work on Shabbat.  That means not going to work, if you can manage it, it means no housework, it means no homework.  It means no cooking.  It means not even picking up a pen.  It means not shopping or spending money.  It means trying to liberate ourselves from the technology that we have become addicted to, and which threatens to enslave us.  Our lives today are run by our phones, our blackberries, or our computer screens.  People don’t talk to one another – they text or tweeter.  It’s rare that you look into someone’s eyes anymore – all eyes are on the keyboard.  You don’t shake anyone’s hand – your thumbs are too busy banging out a response to the latest message.

Many people think of Shabbes prohibitions as too restrictive, as too confining: “You can’t do this, you can’t do that!”  The truth is, Shabbat traditions are liberating.  They free us, for 24 hours a week, from the world playing havoc with our heads.  It’s not: “You can’t use the phone…”  Rather, it’s: “You don’t have to.”  One day a week, there’s better, more important things for you to do.  You can rest, you can relax, you can take a long walk, you can read, you can sing, you can play a game, you can have a real conversation with someone you really care about.

Here, take this prescription.  The best part is that it won’t even cost you anything – You’re covered.

Take my word for it.  This Shabbes thing really works.  It’s the best cure I’ve ever seen.

Give me a call after you’ve tried this for a week or two, so we can see how you’re doing.

Have a Good Shabbes!

       

Oh – by the way… You’ve got that gown thing on backwards…