Bereshit: Finishing the work by stopping

Torah interpretations through the Bridge6 leadership model

Parashat Bereshit · Genesis 1:1-2:3

This Shabbat the yearly cycle of Torah reading starts again from the beginning, with Parashat Bereshit. Near the end of the creation story there is a detail that jumps out at me from a leadership perspective. The Torah says that the work was finished on the seventh day, the day on which nothing was made. This is interesting because we usually think of a task as finished when the last piece of work is done and here it’s finished by stopping.

In Bereshit, stopping is described as three separate acts. God ceased, blessed the day, and set it apart. Most leaders manage the first, sometimes. Work and leadership are often unending and there is no pause built into them.

At the end of each day of creation there is a review. “And it was good,” ki tov, marks the end of the day and confirms that the work is going well so far. This is also a leadership practice: the regular review of work in progress.

On the second day, the separation of the waters, the Torah does not say “it was good.” Rashi explains that the work with the water was not finished until the third day and something that is not finished cannot yet be called good. On the third day “it was good” appears twice, once for finishing the waters and once for that day’s own work. The approval only comes when the work it depends on is done.

At the end of the sixth day God looks at everything that was made and calls it very good, tov me’od. This is a different kind of assessment from the daily reviews because it’s about the whole. It’s also worth noticing that the word is very good. The Torah doesn’t call it perfect.

Looking back at the six days, the regular reviews and the missing approval on day two are a lesson for leaders. Reviewing during the work is necessary. A team that only assesses at the end has no way of noticing that day two isn’t finished and finds out when problems are most expensive to fix.

For God, the work was finished and then came the rest. For people it works the other way around. The Ten Commandments give six days for work and make the seventh day a Shabbat (Exodus 20:9-10). Shabbat arrives every seventh day whether the work is done or not. The stop is fixed in the calendar and nobody has to ask permission for it.

I have seen both sides of this with people I managed. One colleague didn’t know how to build stops and rest into their work. They were a perfectionist and that was always their enemy. It was hard for them to call anything finished so there was never a natural point for the work to stop. They could not be managed out of this mentality and over time it cost them their health and their ability to do the job.

Another person I managed was incredibly rigid about their working hours. They clocked in and out, took scheduled lunch breaks, and defended their time ferociously. Because they were so inflexible, they were meticulous about planning their time and used their energy judiciously. They never burned out and what got done in their working time had to be good enough. In a sense they had built the seventh day into their week. Their stop was fixed and because it was fixed, the work inside it had to be judged complete. The first person never had that moment of judgment because the work never stopped.

This raises a question about how organizations handle rest. If rest is built into the way an organization works, it is part of the process of finishing work. If rest depends on permission from a manager, it is a different kind of rest from the one in Bereshit. Many organizations say that rest is important but their culture and practice make it a matter of permission from higher up. In the Bridge6 model, this is a question of Structure, meaning how an organization is designed and how it behaves as a result. A stop that is built into the design holds under pressure. A stop that depends on permission tends to disappear when things get busy.

The Torah treats rest and cessation as necessary. Rest is part of how the work gets done. In Bridge6, this belongs to what I call Regeneration: how a person, a team, or a whole organization brings new things into being, keeps them going, and lets go of what has run its course. A fixed stop is a sign that a system takes finishing and reviewing its work seriously.

Cessation completes the work and makes assessment of it possible. What will change in a team when the stop is built into the week rather than granted by a manager?

Leadership lessons from Bereshit
1. Cessation completes work. Rest is the act that finishes the task. Nothing is really done until the work stops.
2. Reviewing as you go is a different skill from reviewing at the end and a team needs both. Teams that only review at the end find problems when they are most expensive to fix.
3. Incomplete work should not be approved. Holding back the approval on day two was deliberate. A premature approval damages everything that follows.
4. Rest that is conditional isn’t really rest. When rest is fixed, it becomes part of the organizational structure. If it depends on workload, it’s just an intention.
5. If a system hasn’t designed rest into it, rest will disappear as soon as the system is under pressure.
6. When the stop is fixed in advance, whether a team actually keeps it tells you something. A team that keeps it when things are busy is renewing itself. A team that always has a good reason to skip it is not.
7. In Parashat Tzav, the Torah describes a fire on the altar that must never go out, the esh tamid (Leviticus 6:5-6). It stays lit because a priest adds wood to it every morning. Perpetual doesn’t mean self-sustaining. It means someone shows up and tends it. A fixed stop works the same way. It holds because it’s kept week after week, including the weeks when it would be easier to skip.