Nicola and I went to dinner with a couple of our friends a few days ago. On their wall they have one of those popular prints taken from papers like the Illustrated London News from the mid 19th Century. The print shows a 19th century gentleman dressed in country gear walking along a rural lane through a wooded area, with a wooded hill gently sloping to his right. No houses, not even a horse and carriage to impede his country walk. The caption of the picture is Kilburn High Road looking towards Hampstead. It doesn’t look much like that any more.
I’m sure that many of us have prints of towns and cities or the past, perhaps the areas in which we live as they appeared a couple of hundred ago. When you look at them they all share something in common – the skyline is dominated by the churches and cathedrals, if London, then the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral and the many other Wren churches that punctuate the cityscape of London.
Now if you picture a city it is never the churches , the houses of God so to speak that define the skyline – rather it is the houses of mammon, the office building skyscrapers which give shape to our cities – for London, the BT Tower, Canary Wharf, Tower 42 and the Shard. Only strict planning requirements have saved St Paul’s the ignominy of being completely obscured from view.
When the prophet Balaam looked out from the summit of Peor in our Torah Portion over the plains of Moab to see the children of Israel encamped he said mah tovu ohalecha yaacov, mishkanotecha yisrael – how beautiful are your tents of Jacob, your dwelling places O Israel – both in the plural. What would he say if he were to stand on the Terrace at Alexandra Palace and look out over London?
Would he be able to declare that what he sees is a thing of beauty? He would see the places where we work dominating his view. And what he would see would quite accurately reflect the balance of the lives of those of us of working age. People in London work on average very long hours compared to elsewhere in Europe and even compared to anywhere else in the country – an average of 9.5 hours a day with an average working week in the city of 54 hours. If you are the head of one of these companies then things are even more of a strain. Fully half of the heads of British companies say that they never make it home during the week in time to see their school age children. A similar survey carried out in France found only ¼ of company bosses saying their never made it home to see their children, and of Spanish bosses only 12% did not make it home in time to see their children during the week.
We human beings have definite meaning to our lives according to teachings of Judaism. Our purpose is to try to imitate God. As it says in the Midrash Sifre (49) – Just as God is gracious and compassionate, we must be gracious compassionate, just as God is beneficent and loving, so must we be beneficent and loving.” But God is also in our understanding creative and hard working. As Bachya Ibn Pakuda wrote in eleventh century Spain – “The active participation of Man in the creation of his wealth is a sign of his spiritual greatness. In this respect he imitates God.” (q in Jeffrey Salkin “Being God’s Partner”)
But we are not God and nor can we be God – rather God is our role model. Herein perhaps lies the problem. God has all eternity to achieve what he purposes. God can be in an infinite number of places at one time. God can be expected to know everything and to take responsibility for everything. God has no body and thus does not need to worry about his health – and at least in Judaism – has no children to try and get home in time to see. Indeed God does not even have a home to return to and can remain at his post all the time.
Consider the working habits of many of what we consider are the high achievers in our society we can see that their drivenness encourages them to work as if imitating all of these in-human aspects of God. Perhaps the one piece of God’s make up that they do not try to imitate is that God always, without fail, takes a day off every week – the Shabbat! The end result of working like this is not terribly praiseworthy – as they say no – one ever said on their death bed “I wish I had spent more time at the office.”
To make life worthwhile we have to try to achieve balance in our lives – validating our existence not only through our work but just as much through our relationships, our home life, our leisure and study. It is not difficult to find where Judaism fits into the latter four of these. Our relationships are influenced by Judaism’s values of love, respect for the other, commitment and care. Our home life includes Jewish rituals to sanctify the home and the concept that the home is a mikdash me’at – a small sanctuary where we can join our family to live the best of our lives. Our leisure is established by our duty to rest on the Shabbat and study is a fundamental Jewish duty in order to make our Judaism meaningful at all and certainly to make it grow beyond childhood conceptions. But since we do spend so much time at work, does Judaism leave us there? Is God with us at work as He is in our relationships, our home life, our leisure and our study?
Surely our answer must be based on the assertion that Judaism is not a hobby to be squeezed into spare moments at weekends but rather that it is a life orienting set of values and teachings with something to help give eternal value to everything that we do. Rabbi Dow Marmur in an article in Manna magazine pointed out that Jews are not commanded to be spiritual – rather they are required to do something positive in this world with their spirit and body together – that is to bring the world to a point of holiness. We are God’s hands to achieve the mission of Judaism in this world.
As Meir Tamari notes, out of the 613 commandments that our sages identified in the Torah well over 100 are connected with our economic life – our life at work – only 20 or so are connected, for example, with keeping kosher, often seen by some as the gold standard of Judaism. These economic mitzvot are expressed in terms that might seem to be archaic – like leaving the corners of your field for the poor and the stranger to glean. But all are transferable to the current work situation with a little imagination and effort. How for example might one bring holiness into the workplace in the way we employ and work with staff?
The Torah tells us just to pay our hired hands on time (Lev 19) and when we free a slave, to send them off with enough to sustain them for a while “And when you send him out free from you, you shall not let him go away empty, give him some of your flock and the produce of your threshing floor and winepress” (Deut 15:14) in recognition of how he has been a partner in God’s blessing to you of wealth. It takes a small leap of imagination to recognise that holiness at work, bringing Judaism and God into your workplace asks you through the principles based on these texts, to recognise the whole lives of those who work for you even for a day – not to use them as an expendable commodity. Then, for those who have worked for you for some years and have then been part of your ability to provide for your family, when that relationship comes to an end, through redundancy or whatever means, to give them a portion of what they have helped you to create in order to set them on their way with recognition of their value – text message sackings are not Godly.
In the Midrash on the Book of Numbers which we have been reading these past weeks an interpretation is offered of the priestly blessing- May God bless you and keep you (BmR 11:5). What is the difference between being blessed and being kept or guarded by God? The answer offered is this – May God bless you with wealth and possessions. May God keep you – from being taken over by this wealth and these possessions and the desire for them. Our work is part of ourselves and our value as Jews, it can take us over if we let it and drive us far from God, or we can bring God to it and make the days that we labour and do all of our work the time when our Judaism is most with us. May we all be blessed and kept in God’s hands.
