Most specifically, Jews are called to perform great and loving deeds on the one hand while, on the other, they are summoned to trust, rest, and wait. Jews are called to do and to be, urged to achievement and surrender, enjoined to strive and to cease. 

Perhaps Kohelet was teaching this skill when he observed that for everything there is a season: "A time for seeking and a time for losing, a time for keeping and a time for discarding, a time for ripping and a time for sewing, a time for silence and a time for speaking" (Ecclesiastes 3:6-7).

How in fact do you give all your effort to a great task, like saving planet earth from looming, environmental disaster, while also taking time off to dream, stare at the stars, listen to the birds, talk with a friend? Not easy. The model for such a life is, of course, inscribed in the first chapter of the first book of the Hebrew Bible. The Great Doer, the One who called all Creation into existence in six short days, takes a seventh day simply to do nothing.

But a God who takes a day off?  How is this possible? Does not the Psalmist observe that God neither slumbers nor sleeps? But there it is, iterated in the 10 commandments: "For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth and sea, and all that is in them, and He rested on the seventh day..." The art of living with contradictory commitments is, we might say, divine.

I hear 1st century sage, Rabbi Tarfon, grappling with this challenge in his famous formulation:  "The day is short, the work is great, the workers are lazy.... You are not obligated to finish the work, neither are you free to give it up."

At Yale you and I are taught that much is expected of us, that our generation cries out for solutions to vast problems, imminent dangers, staggering challenges. You juggle a bundle of demanding classes, rich extra-curricular commitments, as well as endless social and cultural claims. A semester condenses so much into 13 short weeks that most undergrads are sleep-deprived by midterms, utterly exhausted before break. The art of balancing the race with rest, of making real time for true chilling, is not, shall we say, pervasive in Yale culture.

In stopping there is the risk that you may never reenter the fray. And in full throttle striving there is the risk that you may crash. The long term striver, I believe, is a person who knows how to stop, and how, once stopped, to begin again. There is an art to this and Judaism knows much about it. I am planning to keep my eye on that art as this new race, called Spring Semester, lurches from the starting line.

– Jim Ponet