Vampire Weekend's Surprising Jewish Stories
6 min read
By regularly postponing our manic ascent up an assumed ladder of success, we come to see life from a broader, richer perspective.
With the pace of technology and its demand for our attention increasing month to month, comes the challenge of occasionally leaving it behind. I’ve found some solutions in my observance of Shabbat, a time when using technology – including cell phones, computers, and televisions – is off-limits.
I was recently involved in a creativity symposium in San Francisco. Among the speakers was a former senior editor at a well-known technology publication. I had a chance to speak with him about the idea of stepping back from technology, and how the rituals of Shabbat echoed a very important, if often missing, dimension of technology: our ability to shut it off. He observed that Shabbat seemed to point not to some ancient and irrelevant past, but to a decidedly postmodern view of our integration with technology.
Shabbat brings with it an opportunity to step away and better see life, not as a series of compartmentalized actions, but as a unified whole.
Any good composer or painter knows that as important as it is to be immersed in the sound of the symphony he or she is working on, or to be engrossed in the images he or she is setting down on canvas, it is equally important to step away from one’s creative work and to observe with clarity and renewed objectivity just what it is that has been created. Shabbat brings with it an opportunity to step away and better see life, not as a series of compartmentalized actions, but as a unified whole.
Here are a few ways the tenants of Shabbat can help you in your life.
It’s an axiom of physics that two things cannot occupy the same space. And just as this applies to things, it also applies to ideas. To be at our creative best we need to make an empty space through the cessation of our creative endeavors. Only by stopping our constant output can new inspirations take hold.
As we learn to breathe more slowly in the practice of meditation, adopting the rhythms of Shabbat-time into our lives has the same beneficial tendency. To many people the world feels chaotic, out of control. Too often it seems, we are guided by demands and situations, rather than by our own volition. Shabbat is the bedrock in time that cannot be moved aside for anything other than life-threatening situations.
When I got my first recording contract in 1986, I decided I would work to protect my most valuable resource. It wasn’t artistic control over what songs to record, or the power to decide what my record jackets would look like —my most valuable resource was my time.
I made it known that I would not perform on Shabbat no matter what the reason. It wasn’t as if my convictions weren’t tested. There were slots on The Tonight Show that I turned down, opportunities to be the opening act for top artists like Sting that I waived away — all because these prospects, while good for my career, would have violated my observance of Shabbat, and as a consequence my understanding of time as something precious, something that belonged to me (and later, to my family) alone.
Shabbat is time away from iPhones and computers and errands and shopping and every conceivable distraction. We humans hunger to be heard, to be seen, and to be known, but we suffer from a paucity of attention-giving and attention-getting. Just as it’s impossible to make music without an instrument, it is impossible to create thriving relationships without making space and time for them to flourish.
As children we couldn’t help but be burdened by our unfulfilled desires. We wanted the things we wanted — immediately. Waiting for any length of time just wouldn’t do. Our immature minds were not yet sophisticated enough to realize that staving off a momentary pleasure for a longer-term gain would, in the end, bring us far more pleasure. Shabbat is about honing our sense of gratitude.
In insisting — in the way that only God can — that I observe the Sabbath, God is evincing a quality that is inexplicable even in human beings: The quality of will, the feelings of desire. And who can adequately explain that which we ourselves, let alone anyone else, desire? So, is it wrong then, for me to feel and to act upon the desires of a God who creates the world anew each day, who has put into motion an inexpressibly complex web of events that led me to marry my soul mate, to father my four children, and to place me in such close proximity to the warmth of unconditional love and the potential for endless creativity?
If God asks me to desist from working on Friday nights, am I not also being instructed that there are higher things to focus on, more important aspirations than fame or the acquisition of wealth and power? In desiring that I keep the Sabbath, I have come to believe that God is showing me, lovingly, and with Infinite wisdom, that time is everything. Time, like water to a fish; time, like air to a man —it is what we exist in. Time is where our lives play out.
It was a desire on my part to embrace even a modicum of that sanctity which compelled me to make the decision to not work on the Jewish Sabbath.
By desiring that I observe Shabbat, God is telling me that I must be cognizant of time and place it in the realm of sanctity. Only through sensitivity to the idea that time itself is sacred is it possible for me to bring sanctity to my life and the lives of others. In the end, it was a desire on my part to embrace even a modicum of that sanctity which compelled me to make the decision to not work on the Jewish Sabbath.
Most of us work to make a living and strive to achieve the things we desire, but we also need to feel as if we’ve come home again, come back to some midpoint. By regularly postponing our manic ascent up an assumed ladder of success, we come to see life from a broader, richer perspective.
By first finding, and then being brave enough to use the “off switch,” we gain the sweet, and all too rare sense, of having finally arrived at our destination.
