Summertime

As the sun sets every Friday evening and we light our Shabbat candles, we respond yes to a world that invites us to stop, to pause from our day-to-day hustle. To be sure, this invitation is to pause, not to collapse from burnout. To mark this time is to intentionally carve out Shabbat not only because it is a mitzvah, but because it is soul-nourishing. We do not work ourselves to exhaustion and only then take a rest; rather, we see that the kind of rest it gifts us is built into the very architecture of the week from the very beginning.

Summer asks us to practice that same discipline on a larger scale.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote about this in his reflections on Shabbat in The Sabbath:

The meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space. Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time. It is a day on which we are called upon to share in what is eternal in time, to turn from the results of creation to the mystery of creation; from the world of creation to the creation of the world…Six days a week we wrestle with the world, wringing profit from the earth; the Sabbath we especially care for the seed of eternity planted in the soul.

Summer, with its longer evenings and looser schedules, gives us several weeks to try the same thing. The lesson here is not about doing less; it is about noticing that Judaism has always treated rest as something worth building on purpose. The Israelites sojourning in the Midbar, whom we will read about all summer in Torah, did not arrive anywhere for 40 years. And yet that time was not wasted. It was formative, and some of the most important growth of the Israelites happens in the stretches that, from the outside, look like nothing significant is happening.

A favourite poem of mine (see full text below) by Jewish poet Marge Piercy is called "The Art of Blessing the Day," which moves through a series of ordinary summer blessings: for rain after drought, for a ripe peach, for the first tomato of the season. What Piercy is inviting the reader to do is to pay attention, even amid the slowness of a summer day, and to watch a tomato grow on a vine. For the poet, reciting brachot (blessings) is not meant to be by rote but rather a discipline to help us drop into the experience…to linger in every moment.

This might be the deeper work of a summer pause. Our lives do not stop during these hot months, but we are encouraged to slow down just a bit, to recognize the long, lazy evenings unfolding before us, the cycle of fruits and vegetables growing and ripening in their own time. Judaism has never ask ed us to wait for the holidays to find the sacred. Rather, it asks us to bring our full attention to whatever is in front of us and call it blessed.

So let us use these next few months to savour the tastes of summer, to rest and relax, and to recharge. May we all be blessed with the time to bless each and every day that unfolds before us.

The Art of Blessing the Day by Marge Piercy

This is the blessing for rain after drought:

Come down, wash the air so it shimmers,

a perfumed shawl of lavender chiffon.

Let the parched leaves suckle and swell.

Enter my skin; wash me for the little

chrysalis of sleep rocked in your plashing.

In the morning the world is peeled to shining.

This is the blessing for sun after long rain:

Now everything shakes itself free and rises.

The trees are bright as pushcart ices.

Every last lily opens its satin thighs.

The bees dance and roll in pollen

and the cardinal at the top of the pine

sings at full throttle, fountaining.

This is the blessing for a ripe peach:

This is luck made round. Frost can nip

the blossom, kill the bee. It can drop,

a hard green useless nut. Brown fungus,

the burrowing worm that coils in rot can

blemish it and wind crush it on the ground.

Yet this peach fills my mouth with juicy sun.

This is the blessing for the first garden tomato:

Those green boxes of tasteless acid the store

sells in January, those red things with the savor

of wet chalk, they mock your fragrant name.

How fat and sweet you are weighing down my palm,

warm as the flank of a cow in the sun.

You are the savor of summer in a thin red skin.

This is the blessing for a political victory:

Although I shall not forget that things

work in increments and epicycles and sometime

leaps that half the time fall back down,

let's not relinquish dancing while the music

fits into our hips and bounces our heels.

We must never forget, pleasure is real as pain.

The blessing for the return of a favorite cat,

the blessing for love returned, for friends'

return, for money received unexpected,

the blessing for the rising of the bread,

the sun, the oppressed. I am not sentimental

about old men mumbling the Hebrew by rote

with no more feeling than one says gesundheit.

But the discipline of blessings is to taste

each moment, the bitter, the sour, the sweet

and the salty, and be glad for what does not

hurt. The art is in compressing attention

to each little and big blossom of the tree

of life, to let the tongue sing each fruit,

its savor, its aroma and its use.

Attention is love, what we must give

children, mothers, fathers, pets,

our friends, the news, the woes of others.

What we want to change we curse and then

pick up a tool. Bless whatever you can

with eyes and hands and tongue. If you

can't bless it, get ready to make it new.