Just ‘being’ on Shabbos requires some ‘doing’ beforehand

SIMON SHEER

A couple of years ago, I travelled to India with an itinerary consisting of a single bullet point: anywhere but Goa. Naturally, I spent the next two weeks on various hammocks dotted around Goa’s beaches and backpackers.

I thought I might have more control over my destiny in the more familiar climes of Joburg’s north eastern suburbs, but I was very quickly disabused of my naivety. Consequently, I present entries from the one and only Shabbos Project piece I was determined to avoid writing – that irresistible cliché, “Diary of a day without my smartphone”.

There’s no avoiding it. The absence of my scratched, two-year-old matte black iPhone 7 was overwhelming, colouring every Shabbos moment.

There I was at shul on Shabbos morning, just after Mussaf, sitting with an Artscroll Chumash cracked open to the appropriate parsha. In the right corner, a scholar was carefully working through a knotty section of Talmud. On the left, a young rabbi gave a shiur on the finer points of halacha. Through the window, I spotted a mountain range of confectionery, piles of waffles and pancakes and cinnamon bulkas. And my overriding thought was, “I wonder what @Updog420_ is tweeting about right now.”

And, when my gracious hosts unveiled Friday night’s pièce de résistance, decadent creamy (or at least Orley Whippy) handmade peanut butter ice cream, I was so preoccupied with a strategy to preserve the frozen dessert’s structural integrity for a Havdalah Instagram photograph, I barely tasted the icy goodness in my bowl.

I suspected it would take a week of Shabboses before the experience of just taking things as they came became normal again. For someone tasked with writing about his Shabbos, this raised an obvious problem. How was I to describe my Shabbos if I was too distracted by imagining that it wasn’t Shabbos to notice what was going on?

Or so I thought. After lunch, I walked home in the hope of lazing under a tree with a paperback. I thought I was departing from the tumult – the site of hollering children and inexhaustible bowls of herring and kichel and clamorous zemirot (songs) – towards a shady idyll.

In fact, released from the structured chaos of a shomrei Shabbos (observant) home, I found not peace, but agitation. Here was an electric gate that needed closing and opening and closing. The silence was disturbed by the drone of talk radio, and down the road, a pothole demanded a kvetching Facebook post.

I had undertaken to remember the Sabbath day, and keep it at least a little holier than usual. Now, the effort was starting to give me a headache. Yet at my hosts’ house, it had been so easy, I barely noticed I’d been doing it.

Had I stopped to think about the idea of “keeping Shabbos”, it would have seemed weirdly narrow. Shabbos was just a thing that was happening. Earlier, I perceived my Saturday social media musings as evidence of absent-mindedness. Now, I saw that it had been a hyperfocus on the possibility inherent in each moment.

This year’s Shabbos Project, under the tagline “Stop doing. Start being.”, sounded paradoxically so simple, but also unattainable. Just halt everything all of a sudden for half the weekend. I hadn’t realised, until I experienced it, that the stopping wasn’t about simply turning off, it wasn’t cessation. Rather than entering a state of passivity, “keeping” Shabbos involves constructing the conditions in which the world comes to you differently.

Through the week’s stringent preparation, we achieve a state in which we are focused on the here and now, on what’s right in front of our eyes. Focusing on that which, without a framework for understanding, is the hardest thing in the world to see.

For me, the overriding lesson of Shabbos was that we can perceive another world, but first, we have to make it. That, and the even more shocking revelation that it’s possible to make a satisfying parev ice cream.

• Simon Sheer is a writer and editor based in Johannesburg.