Summer Floods and Shabbat
By Susie Snyder
I’m sitting in my slightly dingy basement flat, looking out of an underground window. All I can see is the rain pouring down in sheets from a dismally grey blanket of cloud. Not an unusual occurrence this summer.
 The temptation to abandon my computer and retreat under my duvet is almost overwhelming. In fact, when I think about how much I’ve got to do in the next two weeks, it is overwhelming...
... much better now. There’s nothing like a good sleep. I’m off to the South of France in two weeks, where I all I intend to do is lie in a comatose state and occasionally enjoy some wine, cheese and ‘canard à la’ something or other – as and when I can drag myself off the sun bed and stagger to the kitchen. Before then however lies a seeming Everest of work. I’ve got funerals and pastoral visits, sermons and services, meetings, tours for Betty Layward and Hackney U3A, building and decorating to sort, presentations to write and loads of itsy bitsy admin to do. Oh, and I nearly forget a friend’s wedding in a town that’s currently a flood zone.
I know I’m not the only one though. Many of us juggle work and childcare, visiting relatives, community activities, trying to cram in a run around the park or the gym, shopping, cooking, eating ‘five a day’, DIY, catching up with friends and the latest Harry Potter. Sometimes, there’s barely a moment to breathe. The more we do, the more we seem to try and cram in. There’s never any time to stop. Working hours are getting longer and longer and everything else gets squidged into the dwindling time left over. It’s hardly surprising that more people than ever now suffer from stress and insomnia: the NHS spends £20 million a year alone on sleeping pills.
Well, the recent floods have brought me up short. I was watching the TV reports of Tewkesbury and was struck by two things. The first was that everyone was forced to stop. Life couldn’t go on at the ‘normal’, manic pace. People were just milling about – or rather, paddling about. They were going slow, waiting for water levels to fall, waiting for water supplies to be restored, waiting for emergency services to rescue them. People of all ages, shapes and sizes were just floating around together in their thigh high waders or rubber dinghies. The second thing I noticed was that there was such a sense of community. Everyone was rallying around to help their neighbours and friends. One particularly impressive guy went on a mission impossible to rescue an elderly couple from a house on the river front, an area the emergency services hadn’t even managed to get to yet. Older people in one submerged residential home said that the last time they’d experienced such neighbourly solidarity was during the war.
So, do we have to have a natural disaster or war to make us slow down, think and be more community minded? I hope not. But I do think – oh, I can feel a serious truism coming on – that stopping and finding time for the important things in life are related. Mmm. Why is it that truisms always seem to go in one ear and out of the other though? I was reading a book recently which warned me that busyness is actually a form of laziness. Busyness, it said, ‘is doing the easy thing instead of the hard thing. It is filling our time with our own actions instead of paying attention to God’s actions.’ Whether you have a faith or not, I reckon the point still basically stands. We fill our lives up with all sorts of things because sometimes stopping can be uncomfortable: it’s easier to keep sprinting on the treadmill than to step off it and think about where we’re actually at in life. Sometimes, we keep going because we’ve bought into the ‘The busier I am, the more successful, happy, wealthy, cool and enviable I must be.’ Being busy gives us self-worth.
This is where I think those of you who are Jewish have something vital to teach us. While most of us have become slacker and slacker about protecting a ‘holy’ day, you’ve always recognised the importance of taking regular, weekly Sabbath time. From Friday evening to Saturday evening, absolutely everything stops – it’s Shabbat – not an ounce of work is done and not one chore. Families simply eat and spend ‘quality time’ together. You do it, not just so there’s time for explicitly ‘religious’ things, but also because stopping and resting, relaxing and reflecting helps us to bask in simply being alive. Sabbath time helps us to have fun, focus on the people around us and prevents us from getting too caught up in things that don’t ultimately matter. I love the way one Christian writer puts it. He says that it’s vital to breathe in ‘the fragrance of Shabbat’. It’s almost as if Sabbath rest is something we can catch, something which will pervade and transform our lives if only we stop to breathe it in.
So, gutted though I was that The Spence has been shut for a week and Petit Coin was taking a summer break– where on earth do I get my coffee and cake fix now? – I’m actually really glad too. Stoke Newington is one of the only places I know where shops haven’t yet succumbed to opening 365 days a year and where resting is valued enough that cash registers are occasionally switched off. Perhaps we’re doing all right here without a flood. Phew.
Quotations are from two different books – wasn’t sure how to list them/reference them in an article like this.
Eugene Petersen, Subversive Spirituality
David Ford, The Shape of Living. |
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