CBI Blogs

Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of your God יהוה: you shall not do any work—you, your son or daughter, your male or female slave, or your cattle, or the stranger who is within your settlements (Exod. 20:9-10).

Six years you may sow your field and six years you may prune your vineyard and gather in the yield. But in the seventh year the land shall have a sabbath of complete rest, a sabbath of יהוה (Lev. 25:3-4).

The idea of a sabbatical year is one of the longest-standing concepts of the agrarian world. Those who work the land have long known that planting the same crop year after year has a negative effect on the soil. It depletes the nutrients that it provides to the crops, and over-use of the land leads eventually to poor quality harvests. A more modern method of helping the land rejuvenate is crop rotation, but giving the land a sabbatical year is practiced to this day in Israel and other parts of the world.

The idea of a day of rest also comes from Torah and serves a similar purpose for the human body. If we work seven days a week it does not take long for us to be overtired, irritable, prone to sickness, over-stressed, and generally out of sorts. For most of the Jewish world that day to rest is Saturday, but for the clergy of CBI that day is Monday.

Sometimes, like the land, the mind and body need an extended rest. As such, the scholarly world has come up with the concept of a sabbatical for professionals as well, especially professionals who have a tendency to allow their work to creep into their Shabbats and Mondays. In that vein, the board has graciously offered a well-deserved albeit brief sabbatical to Rabbi Levy. Her time to rejuvenate will be only three months instead of a full year, and she and I have discussed a variety of things she hopes to accomplish so that when she returns in late January/early February she will be revitalized for the coming year with yet another new clergy partner.

While she is away, Sarah Avner and I will be taking care of all of her clergy responsibilities, and some of our lay Torah teachers will be helping me take care of Saturday morning Torah study. She will also not be responding to emails. I have encouraged her to remove the email apps from her phone and iPad, and any email to her will receive a bounce-back message, guiding the emailer to reach out to Sarah or me.

So please, feel free to reach out to me or to Sarah Avner directly over the coming months. Together we can help safeguard Rabbi Levy from the tendency we all have to check on work when we are away. We are here for you and we promise to catch her up upon her return.