Holy boredom

On a recent Shabbat Zoom call, which also happened to be the day before my birthday, my father criticized me for my lack of appreciation of boredom.

“That’s always been a thing with you,” he said. “You can’t stand being bored even for a minute. You gotta learn to relax and go with the flow.” He wiggled his fingers beside his ears in a gesture that I could only guess represented “the flow.”

“What, become a hippie?” I replied, archly.

“This is ’60s wisdom for all time, my dear,” he continued humorously, but in all sincerity. “It will help you.”

It’s true that I have never done well with boredom. I get restless, and soon I start making up stories to fill the space. (I’m a writer, after all.) Boredom is an itchy feeling and I am only just learning to resist the urge to scratch. Boredom, fundamentally, asks us to look head on into the face of death, and I have only recently become ready to do so in what I mostly sincerely call the magic of my 40s.

I think there is also a significant Jewish element to this fear of boredom: historically, we have mostly been moving. From Mizrahim to al-Andalus to the Pale, being thrown from one crisis to another in very short succession, we couldn’t learn to trust boredom. Quiet times were usually the calm before the storm. Over millennia, this vigilance could come to mean that our sense of trauma became so keenly aware that we have trouble appreciating moments of rest.

This is, divinely intentional or not, what Shabbat is for. On Shabbat, we take a break from our worldly cares, even in otherwise dire situations, and we rest. It is an enforced rest to be sure, and as a result it has its moments of boredom, but I think this is by design. We probably would not allow ourselves the time to recuperate if it wasn’t coming from a higher power. It would be too easy to ignore the need for rest, now as much as then in our contemporary workaday culture that rewards superhuman effort at the price of mental health and peace.

I have often felt bored on Shabbat, a day of walks and reading the parsha and eating leftovers and not writing, but that is the key genius of the holiday. Shabbat requires rest even when one does find it boring. We recharge in boredom, we relax in boredom. We take a break in boredom, and we need that boredom to more fully engage with the problems of our lives and the difficulties of our lives and the joys of our lives the rest of the week. It’s part of the revolutionary nature of Shabbat to be a little bored sometimes. We could call it holy boredom. A space out of which the divine can spring, or where, after much searching, it can be found. Or made, in partnership with our G-d.

The contemporary world has sped up its pace far more than is good for most of us. We see record rates of burnout in the labor force, and practices like quiet quitting, which try to preserve the individual within their employment without fully engaging in the process of work. We see exhaustion on all fronts, including relationships, from friends to dating to family, whose participants don’t or can’t take the kind of time and care that is needed to tend to an intimate connection.

The revolutionary capacity of a bit of boredom could serve as a balm to these social ills if we could learn to sit with the boredom Shabbat allows (and as Jewish meditation also allows, on a more daily basis). If we could do that, we would see a renewed capacity for care and engagement and wonder in the world. It might take a bit of pain to get there, to develop the muscles of boredom and sitting with what is, but it would be well worth it. As a society, we need to learn this lesson, myself included: slowing down to the point of, the engagement with, boredom. In Jewish tradition we have it built right in with the Shabbat, and with the longstanding practice of Jewish mindfulness, with roots in the Hasidic world onward until today.

This Shabbat, let’s be bored.