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BEING GOD'S PARTNER
September 17-18 1997
Rabbi Jeffrey K. Salkin
Senior Rabbi
Community Synagogue
Port Washington, New York
I have often wondered where this idea came from - this notion of spirituality in the workplace and what it can mean to us. For me the intellectual and spiritual journey was born on the day, almost nine years ago, when we moved from Doylestown, Pennsylvania to Long Island. The boss of the moving crew was a delightful, crusty gentleman, a dead ringer for Willie Nelson. I had never met anyone so enthusiastic about his or her work, and I asked him the source of that enthusiasm.
"Well, you see, I'm a religious man," he
answered, "and my work is part of my religious mission."
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"Well, it's like this. Moving is hard for most people. It's a very vulnerable time
for them. People are nervous about going to a new community, and about having strangers
pack their most precious possessions. So, I think God wants me to treat my customers with
love and to make them feel that I care about their things and their life. God wants me to
help make their changes go smoothly. If I can be happy about it, maybe they can be,
too."
I forgot his name long ago. But, like so many anonymous people, he was a messenger of God.
He was the first lay person I ever met who believed that God wanted him to do his job in a
certain way, and that his work was part of his way of being religious in the world.
It is not surprising that this gentleman was a pious Christian. As a rabbi, I began to
confront the truth - that Christians have thought more than Jews about work and
spirituality. Christians are very comfortable speaking about "vocation;" Jews,
much less so. The seminal work on the sociological relationship between religion and work
is Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism. But, as far as I
could tell, no Jew had ever engaged in a dialogue with culture in a way that replicated
Weber. I am indebted, therefore, to those Christian writers and thinkers who have paved
the way for me to discover the spiritual nature of work.
In particular, I am indebted to the Christian author, Frederick Buechner, who wrote in Wishful
Thinking: A Theological ABC:
"...The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need
most to do and (b) the world most needs to have done. If you really get a kick out of your
work, you've presumably met requirement (a), but if your work is writing TV deodorant
commercials, the chances are you've missed requirement (b). On the other hand, if your
work is being a doctor in a leper colony, you have probably met (b), but if most of the
time you're bored and depressed by it, the chances are you haven't only bypassed (a) but
probably aren't helping your patients much either....The piece God calls you to is the
place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.
We need, many of us, to find that place where God calls us...that place where our deep
gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.
We Americans work very hard. So hard, that we often put work at the emotional and
spiritual center of our lives. Professionals work an average of 52 hours a week;
college-educated workers in their 20s and 30s work even more. Manufacturing employees in
the United States work 320 more hours - the equivalent of two months- more than
their counterparts in Germany and France. On National Public Radio, it was recently
reported that in the last decade we have added 17 days to the work year.
Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin at the podium at the University
of St. Thomas, while responders Susan Mundale and
Dr. Michael Naughton listen attentively.
The author John Updike said: "We may live well, but that cannot ease the suspicion that we do no longer live nobly." We want to live nobly. And to live nobly is to know that there is more to life than just working and getting and spending and consuming. We yearn for something deeper and higher. We long, many of us, for that great intangible that religion can and should and traditionally does offer.
I hear it on the ball field from other parents. I hear about it in my study. I meet many people who are spiritually burnt-out from their work. I meet many who are disillusioned with their professions. We're working harder, but spiritually and emotionally, we're getting less out of it. You don't have to be a radical to note that there are some major glitches in the capitalist system we have created. We sense that we have become spiritually damaged by the pernicious cycle of working/wanting/having as ends in themselves.And once we start asking those questions about life, they become religious questions. Years ago, Vaclav Havel, the former playwright and president of the Czech Republic, wrote these words from prison: "The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less." Every question about ultimate meaning is a religious question. To paraphrase the modem Jewish theologian, Franz Rosenzweig, "Religion has to be smuggled into life." It also has to be smuggled into our work. That is the hidden religious revolution of the next century: finding the way - or RE-finding the ways - that religion and everyday life can speak to each other - without becoming something called "fanatical" or "fundamentalist" (which is how many Americans describe anyone who takes theology seriously).
Smuggling religion into our work will provide us with a sense of fulfillment. Smuggling religion into our work will help shatter our egocentricity. Smuggling religion into our work will teach us to move beyond ambition and success, to stop worshipping at the false altars of career and prestige. As part of that process, we will learn that the original meaning of "career" is "that which you carry." We will learn what meanings we, as Jews, carry into the world.
So, what spiritual meaning can we bring into our work? And how can that spiritual meaning shape who we are and what we strive to become-and touch the inner places that determine our character?
I define spirituality as those moments when we feel that our reality and God's reality intersect. As a Jew, I find the sources of that spirituality in the texts and the traditions that I have inherited from my ancestors, and that I want to pass on to my descendants. And as I speak to this multi-cultural/multi-religious audience, I would urge you to hear my words as a universal prodding to each of you - to find those hidden texts in your lives, the sacred scrolls that each of you has inherited.
There are 3 ways in which we find spirituality in our work, and in our every day lives.
1. To find spirituality your work, do what God does. Imitation of God.
In one of the final scenes in the film, "Manhattan", Ike, the Woody Allen character, challenges his friend Yale to be more self-critical about the ethics of his personal life.
Yale resists the challenge. "You are so self-righteous!" he screams. "We're just people. We're just human beings. You think you're God!"
Ike shrugs his shoulders and says, "I gotta model myself after someone."
As lofty, impossible and arrogant as it may sound, that is the beginning of the Jew's spiritual mission: Imitating God.
Imitating God is common to both Jewish and Christian theological vocabularies. When Christianity speaks of the imitation of God (imitatio dei), it means imitating Christ because he is God incarnate. Christians emulate Jesus's thoughts, desires, intentions, virtues. They are also inspired by the saints because such persons were particularly expert at Christ-imitation and, therefore, at God-imitation.
But Jews speak of the imitation of GOD.
Here we learn from the wisdom of the Talmud. The Talmud says that just as God clothed Adam and Eve when they were naked, we must supply clothes for the naked. Just as God visited Abraham when he was healing from his circumcision, we should visit the sick. Just as God buried Moses, we must bury the dead. Just as God comforted Isaac after the death of his mother Sarah, we should comfort mourners.
Consider the notion of healing as God's work.
The modem Jewish theologian, Abraham Joshua Heschel, said, "Medicine is prayer in the form of a deed...The body is a sanctuary, the doctor is a priest...The act of healing is the highest form of the imitation of God."
As far back as the Middle Ages, medicine was the Jewish ticket into the wider world. It served as the best way for Jews to interact with gentile culture. In fact, an astonishingly large number of rabbis in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance were physicians. Not surprisingly, medical insights were often mingled with their more erudite discussions of Jewish law and practice. In the 12th century in Spain, for instance, Judah Ha Levi wrote: "Not upon my power of healing I rely/Only for Thine healing do I watch." In the 17th century in Ferrara, Italy, Rabbi Jacob Zahalon echoed one of the more sublime themes of Yom Kippur when he wrote: "Thou art the physician, not me. I am but clay in the Potter's hand, in the hand of the Creator of all things, and as the instrument through which You cure Your creatures."
In his biography of Maimonides, the great medieval philosopher, commentator and physician, Heschel noted that the great thinker spent his last years almost entirely engrossed in medicine. "This is Maimonides' last metamorphosis," Heschel wrote. "From metaphysics to medicine, from contemplation to practice, from speculation to the imitation of God. God is not only the object of knowledge; He is the example one is to follow."
I thought about Maimonides as I spoke with a young man in my congregation who wanted to become a plastic surgeon. He settled on this goal after working in an emergency room and seeing accident and burn victims who had been disfigured.
"I don't want to be a cosmetic plastic surgeon," he said. "I'm not interested in people's vanity. I want to help people who have real problems."
"There are many reasons people want to become doctors," I told him. "Some like the title or the status or the prestige. Some like the money. But the best reason I know is to be God's helper and aid those who are the victims of random misfortune in the world."
So medicine is God-imitation. And so is the garment business-making clothing for people like God made clothing for Adam and Eve. And so is the funeral business - burying the dead like God buried Moses on Mount Nebo. And so is creativity itself - imitating the God Who creates every day.
2. To find spirituality in your work, learn to stand in the presence of God.
In his classic code of Jewish law, the Shulchan Arukh, the sixteenth century Rabbi Joseph Caro takes as his motto the words from the Psalms: "I have set God before me at all times." Every action, therefore, becomes an opportunity for devotion - indeed, for the refinement of individual character and communal culture.
I speak now of the crying need for ethics in every day life.
Two things happened to me recently that reminds me of this hunger in the world.
A woman called me and asked my advice. She is selling her home, and a Jewish family came to look at it and will most likely buy it. They have asked about synagogues in the area. But what haunts this woman, who is an old friend of ours, is that the neighborhood is not at all Jewish - certainly not anymore. What should I tell the prospective buyers? What is my responsibility?
A man came to see me. He is a baker, and he is upset that a former worker and protege of his has opened a bakery around the corner from him, taking former customers. How could he do this to me? He cries. Why should I bother being good anymore?
My answer to the first woman drew on the Biblical tradition. I reminded her that it is illegal in Jewish ethics to put a stumbling block before the blind - to knowingly deceive anyone. My answer to the baker also drew on that tradition - that what his former colleague had done was hasagat gevul, unfair encroachment on his trade. And why should he be good? Because, sometimes we must work for no reward in this world. Sometimes the reward for virtue is virtue itself.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel once taught a class to rabbinical students at the Jewish Theological Seminary about a subject that most of them had probably never considered: Business ethics in Jewish law.
Heschel told them, "You have become skilled at spotting blood in an egg. When there is blood in an egg, it becomes unkosher and unsuitable for eating. I hope you will be just as able to spot blood in money as well."
Thinking of the ethical implications in our work teaches us that even if what we do is not very spiritual, how we do it can be. And you don't have to be Ben and Jerry's to do it. There are many companies and corporations that are involved in ethical striving. Growth in the hiring of vice-presidents in charge of ethical audits.
It means being self-critical. It means rejecting the vulgar idea that "Hey, it's a jungle out there." It means living in a moral community. It means, in Biblical terms, leaving a corner of the field for the poor - letting the poor share in your profits. It means not putting stumbling blocks before the blind, and not deceiving others. It means that cigarette advertising is not kosher. Neither are ads that put forth the image that only thin women are glamorous. While anorexia is clearly a disease, it is a disease with a serious social component to it - and that is the fact that we live in a society that believes that only thin is in.
I speak as a Jew who believes that this faith has something very important to teach the world-as I believe that all faiths have something precious to add to the religious conversation of the centuries.
Word Perfect story: We need Jews who look at what they do in their work as representing the Jewish people in the world.
3. To find spirituality in your work, wage a daily war against idolatry and break the false gods.
Workaholism and careerism.
Ask people: "How many of you here are or have been workaholics? How many of you are alcoholics? How many of you are drug addicts? How many of you are addicted to shopping or sex?"
A glimpse of the audience at the University of St. Thomas.
As Diane Fassel wrote in Working Ourselves to Death, "Work is God for the compulsive worker, and nothing gets in the way of this God." Work becomes an end in itself, a way to escape from family, from the inner life, from the world.
How do we break the false gods of career?
* First, remember the most profound revolution in religious thinking that Judaism gave the world. It's called the Sabbath. The Sabbath is the ultimate statement that the world does not own us.
Our culture has lost the notion of sacred time. Now, we have Filofax. And in that journey of the spirit, we have become Sabbath-phobic. That phobia is built into the very premises of Western civilization.
The Roman philosopher, Seneca, complained that "to spend every seventh day without doing anything means to lose a seventh part of one's life." This is the classic criticism of the Sabbath: It is inefficient. It is useless time. And this, which is "useless" and "non-productive"- especially people - frightens us.
Jump with me across the centuries from the ancient pagan criticisms of the Sabbath to the generation of my great-grandparents, who came as immigrants to America. Poor and stressed, they lived tenuous existences. Many Jews of that generation were tailors and wagon masters and shoemakers and barkeepers and middle-men-and they longed for the blessed rest of the Sabbath.
But many impoverished workers who emigrated to America left the idea of the Sabbath back home. Upon landing here, they encountered two ideologies that agreed on the importance of work: Socialism, which exalted the worker; and capitalism which venerated hard work. In their new world, the Sabbath was incongruous with the all-consuming work ethos.
The Depression reinforced the modem American obsession with work. Not to work was financially disastrous and psychologically traumatic. (It still is. Therapists note that for men, unemployment is often linked with sexual impotence.)
As anti-Semitism waned after World War Two, corporate barriers began to fall and Jews entered professions previously closed to them. Sabbath observance drastically declined since to celebrate a day of liberation from profession or career, after such a long fight to get that career, was almost unthinkable.
Yet, I believe that the Sabbath must be reclaimed. It must be reclaimed because of that spiritual ache of which the late social critic, Christopher Lasch, wrote, when referring to the life styles of young professionals: "Their distinctive manner of living embodies the restless ambition, the nagging dissatisfaction with things as they are, that are fostered by a consumer economy. Their careers require them to spend much of their time on the road and to accept transfers as the price of advancement...Leisure, for them, closely resembles work, since much of it consists of strenuous and for the most part solitary exercise. Even shopping, their ruling passion, takes on the character of a grueling ordeal: 'Shop till you drop."
*Second, don't sacrifice your family for your career. The American journey up the ladder to success has devalued the traditional role of the parent as nurturer and teacher, while emphasizing almost exclusively the role of provider.
In a Yiddish song, "Mayn Yingele" ("My Little One") a father sings to his sleeping child:
I have a son, a little son, A boy completely fine.
When I see him it seems to me that all of the world is mine.
But seldom, seldom do I see my child awake and bright;
I only see him when he sleeps; I'm only home at night.
It's early when I leave for work; When I return it's late.
Unknown to me is my own flesh, Unknown is my child's face.
When I come home so wearily in the darkness after day,
My pale wife exclaims to me: "You should have seen our child play."
I stand beside his little bed, I look and try to hear.
In his dream he moves his lips: "Why isn't Papa here?"
That song was written in 1897. Papa and Mama are no longer in the sweatshops. The anguish has moved to the suburbs. It is still there and it is very real.
Rabbi Salkin signing one of his books
following his presentation.
*Third, it means not judging yourself by what you do, but by the meaning that you bring to it.
The story of the woman who worked in a woman's undergarment store. When I did her funeral, her co-workers came up to eulogize her. One by one they talked about how compassionate and sensitive she was to mastectomy patients who came into her store.
We can never know what it is in our work, and in our daily existences, that will be remembered and that will be holy. It has nothing to do with our job titles - it has everything to do with the faith and the vision and me love that we bring to it.
"How can you tend to the sick and the dying," an interviewer asked, "knowing that you will not be successful with everyone?"
"We are not here to be successful." she answered.
"We are here to be faithful."
Finally, To find spirituality in your work, know that what you do survives you.
When we read Shakespeare or see one of his plays performed, we glimpse his place in
mortality. Hearing Mozart music means that he has, in one sense, conquered death.
So, too, does the designer of the classic Mustang, the doctor who saves lives, the lawyer
who helps a defendant, a secretary who creates an efficient filing system, an architect
who designs and builds a building: All are immortal. Their work survives them.
My friend owns a bookstore, and he told me, "Every time I
recommend a book to a child, and that book had been recommended to me by Mrs.
Cohen, my fourth grade teacher, that's Mrs. Cohen's immortality. That's her Kaddish."
And every time I teach, I feel the presence of the teachers who have shaped me - the
presence of the departed teachers as well-our teachers in heaven whom to this day have
shaped me.
You have no idea how powerful your work really is. You have no idea the half-live of your
words and of your teaching and of your reaming.
Your work is more important than you have ever known. The workmen
who built the great cathedral at Notre Dame signed the stones. We all want to leave
something behind...even if we will not see it.
I close with the following Hasidic parable.
While walking in a neighboring village late at night, a Hasidic rebbe met a man who was
also walking alone. For a while, the two walked in silence. Finally, the rebbe turned to
the man and asked, "So, who do you work for?"
"I work for the village," the man answered. "I'm the night watchman."
They walked in silence again. Finally, the night watchman asked the rebbe, "And who
do you work for?"
The rebbe answered, "I'm not always sure. But this I will tell you. Name your present
salary and I will double it. All you have to do is walk with me and ask me, from time to
time, 'Who do you work for?"'
Who do you work for? Many of you already work for God.
Response to Rabbi Salkin
Susan Mundale
President, Mundale Communications
Minneapolis, MN
There is a lot of discussion about spirituality and work going on these days, and it takes many forms. Is some ways, this subject is a vessel into which we each pour our desires and need for finding meaning in our work.
I was intrigued by a notice I received of, The Third Annual International Conference on Spirituality in Business to be held this November in Pueno Vallarta, Mexico. Here are just a few of the topics: READ TOPICS. This may give you a sense of all the meanings that can be attached to the topic spirituality and work.
These discussions can tend toward the abstract and philosophical, which have their place. But in the end, I think what really matters is how we as individuals think about our daily work and how we behave as we go about it. So I thank you for talking to us as individuals and for holding our feet to the fire of what we're about as we go about our work and our business.
I also want to thank you for bringing to our attention the scriptural underpinnings for the link between spirituality and work as you describe it. The scriptures you cite in your book teach us that we are in partnership with God as cocreators-indivdually and also collectively in our businesses, our schools, our communities, and our religious congregations. The Garden of Eden as a collaborative effort between God and Adam, for example, and the covenant God made with the Israelites on their journey out of Egypt toward their home. I'm grateful that our two traditions share these scriptures, because they provide such a good foundation for conversations such as we are having this evening. These scriptures can guide us, as Frederick Buecbaer said, "in finding the place where our deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet."
Now I want to respond to your description of how people in various professions imitate God: Supplying clothes for the naked, healing flee sick, burying the dead, comforting mourners. You challenged me to wonder how the work I do can imitate God-an idea that at first seemed presumptuous and even frightening to me.
My work is communications. What I do, and what the people who work with me do is to put our clients' thoughts and ideas into words and visual images so Hey can be communicated to others. We don't heal, we don't clothe, we don't feed the hungry or care for the dying. Sometimes what we do feels vary abstract, and the feeling of deep gladness isn't one I am aware of having on a regular basis.
I have thought that my best contribution whatever immortality that might come out of my work-will be in the way I treat my clients and the people who work for and with me, and also in giving young people a chance to grow in the business and make a living at it.
But wait. This is about communication. We who are Christians believe that the purpose of the birth of Jesus was communication--God's communication with the world. The Gospel of John says, "And the word became flesh and lived among us."
To realize that the work my co-workers and I do every day is so directly an imitation of God's communication is a sobering thought. How do we handle that responsibility?
Our mission is clear communication so we have a passion
for accurate language, for correct grammar and punctuation so meanings can be clearly
understood. At one level, to the extent that we communicate clearly, to the extent that we
keep our commitment to accurate language that doesn't obfuscate meaning, to the extent
that we choose the right words and the right visual images and pay attention to grammar
and punctuation are all ways in which we imitate God.
Susan Mundale (center)responding
to a question from the audience
while Rabbi Sulkin and Dr. Naughton
listen pensively.
Michael Naughton passed on to me a paper written by Ray MacKenzie, a colleague of his at St. Thomas who teaches business communication. Mr. MacKenzie begins with the question of whether or not advertising ought to strive to be truthful or if it's OK to sell dreams as almost all ads now seem to do. This is a novel question, mainly because the concepts of truth and falsity are not discussed very often in the business world. "Truth is relative," "my truth may not be your truth," "let the buyer beware"- these are all common phrases in 20th century Life.
But listen, as Mr. MacKenzie did, to the words of St. Augustine on this subject: We
know inwardly a truth that comes from God, and the words we speak or write are a sign of
this inward truth. "Accordingly, the word that sounds outwardly is the sign of the
word that gives light inwardly. . . for our word is so made in some way into an articulate
soured in (now I'm paraphrasing) the same way as the Word of God was made flesh."
Suddenly I'm aware of the sacramental nature of language, and of my responsibility for
truth as well as accuracy.
So thank you for opening that avenue of thought and insight. I can't say I'm more
comfortable because of it. I know we never fully realize this imitation of God and will
always fall short-many times a day, probably-but I'm certainly paying closer attention to
the messages we deliver and the ways in which we shape and deliver them.
I would like to end this response with a question about two aspects of spirituality and
work that you touched on briefly a few minutes ago.
As I talk with people about their own spirituality and how it is or isn't played out in
the work they do, I hear two themes, and both are related to the nitty-gritty, day-to- day
aspects of their jobs.
One recurring theme is about values: How can I remain true to my values in a work
situation where I'm not the one to decide what I do, where I see things happening that I
may not agree with, where my department often looks and acts like a dysfunctional family,
where I don't feel my company or organization values what I do. So this first theme is
about the clash between personal and organizational values.
The other theme is related to relationships with other people: co-workers, customers,
clients, employees, supervisors, the boss, and usually they are troublesome. I hear
questions such as these: What am I going to do about the co-worker who drives me up the
wall? What can I do about my feelings when my boss takes all the credit after the rest of
us have done all the work? What can I do to get along better with my employees? Do a
better job of delegating? Or even, What causes my need to control everything, my fear of
delegating?
I see these questions as an invitation to look within, for the individual to ask
"What in me needs to be healed so that I can do a better job of imitating God?"
It's not easy for many people to see negative or even abusive work situations as an
opportunity for personal and spiritual growth. And sometimes these questions can take
people into the darkness of their souls, where there can be monsters waiting. So I would
like to ask you what, as a rabbi, you offer to people struggling with these real-life
issues in the world of work.
Response to Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin
Michael J. Naughton
Director
Center for Catholic Social Thought, University of St. Thomas
St. Paul, MN
In response to Rabbi SaLkin's talk I will explore two points: First, I will expand on his insightful comments on imitating God. Second, I will reflect on a word Rabbi Salkin uses "smuggle" for it can be both helpful as well as misleading depending upon how we understand it.
1. First point: Made in the Image of God, we are called to imitate God. Rabbi Salkin brings out the rich and profound insights of what this means through the use of Talmud and various commentators in the Jewish tradition. As stated in his talk, "'God is not only the object of knowledge; He is the example one is to follow' n (quoting Abraham Joshua Heschel).
One example of how we are to follow or imitate God is that God works and God rests. It is this rhythm of God's working and resting that we are struck with a profound reality: what we rest IN tells us what we work FOR. Let me explain.
Thomas Aquinas, the name sake of this university, explains that there are two forms of rest: 1) The rest from motion: when one stops working he or she rests from the work done; and 2) the rest in the fulfillment of one's activities. It is this second sense of rest that we see in the book of Genesis when God looks back on His work at the end of the day and says "it is good." This act of looking back is a form of rest expressing an act of celebration that what has been made has order and is good. God's creative action reveals itself in our human experience. For whom would celebrate and find rest in a world that is disordered, chaotic, and meaningless? As Josef Pieper in his most insightful book Leisure the Basis of Culture explained "Those who do not consider reality as fundamentally 'good' and 'in the right order' are not able to truly celebrate, no more than they are able to" truly find rest.
What we find here in the rhythmic interchange between work and rest is that our celebrations are forms of rest which tell us what we affirm to be good. If we then are called to imitate God and say at the end of our workday "It is good," we must find rest in that which tells us what is good. We cannot adequately affirm our work as good unless we participate in the celebration of that goodness. In the Jewish and Christian traditions, our main celebration is worship. For to rest is to worship, and to worship is to affirm that which is most worthy, that which is most good. And while the Sabbath means to rest from labor (Aquinas first sense) it more profoundly means to rest in God (second sense). For as Augustine puts it "our hearts are restless until they rest in you oh God" precisely because God is the source of all goodness.
To rest in God, then, is not to escape reality, but rather to penetrate it ever more clearly. Worship on the Sabbath is not a diversion from the world of work, "rather it is the arrival at a vantage point from which we can see more deeply into the reality of the world.n' This is why the deepest form of resting in is the celebration and worship of God, the Creator of all that is good. It is the deepest form of rest since it is the deepest form of affirming the goodness of creation that impels us to ask at the end of our workday "Is my work good?"
Precisely in affirming God's creation as good through the Sabbath, through worship, through prayer, we are able to participate in God's ongoing work of creation. But it is precisely here that we encounter a profound crisis of our culture--a crisis of rest or leisure. We are in crisis in terms of what we rest in. We have sought to rest from our work by either resting in or escaping to various forms of entertainment and excursions, or we see our rest or our non-work life as merely a way to juice ourselves up for more productive and efficient work. Once we divorce our rest or leisure from that affirmation that the world is really good, really created, and merely see our rest or leisure as our own individual utilization of the world, our celebrations will lose their restfulness and quickly become either extremely decadent as in the case of some forms of Mardi Gras and St. Patrick's Day or they will become pervasively materialistic as in the case some weddings and Christmas. Josef Pieper warned us 50 years ago that "Unless we substitute true [rest or] leisure for our hectic amusements we will destroy our culture--and ourselves. If we can no longer celebrate goodness that provides us rest in that which has made everything Good, then the question of whether our "work is good" becomes dubious if asked at all.
God's rhythmic activity of work and rest tells us this: if we fail to get rest or leisure right, it is unlikely that we will get work right. Worship and work are related periods of time in human life. Their relationship represents moments in our self--realization of whom we are as people of faith. In our worship, we are formed by God's goodness, in turn, we are to become God's presence in the work we do, and are able to see whether our work at the end of each day is truly good.
Q. In light of this
expansion of Rabbi SaLkin's talk, my first question is a practical one. How do you as a
Rabbi help members of your congregation to bring worship and work in closer connection,
especially since they share the saline Hebrew word avod:ah. I ask this question because in
the Christian and in particularly Catholic church, clergy have been criticized for failing
to help the laity to better understand their role in the professional and corporate world.
(It is interesting to note that word Liturgy in classical Greek like worship means a work
undertaken on behalf of the people.)
2. Second point, Smuggling Religion into the Workplace: While the word "smuggle"
may sound rather devious and manipulative, it helps us to appreciate the dangers of
translating our religious and spiritual lives into for many a rather secular workplace.
Living in a secularized world, people of faith must prudently examine the specific and
concrete workplace they find themselves in and not be reckless in what it means to bring
our religious and spiritual lives into the workplace.
It should be noted, however, that Rabbi Salkin does not say we are to Smuggle God into the
workplace. And it is here that we ought to be cautious about the word smuggle. The word
"smuggle" here can perpetuate a somewhat false vision of the world and prevent
us from seeing a very important reality: we do not catty God into the workplace because
God is already there. A spirituality of work is not an attempt to impose an artificial
reality onto a neutral or so called secular economic organization, but rather it is to
help us understand in a deeper and more meaningful way what work really is: a partnership,
as Rabbi Salkin puts it, or a collaboration with God which forms not only objects of the
world, but also our very selves. In imitating God we can avoid the false images of
ourselves and become God's image of justice and love in the work we do. A spirituality of
work then is not an imposition on the workplace but rather a revelation of whom we should
be in our work.
For example, when Mother Teresa went to the slums of Calcutta, she did not see herself as
bringing God to Calcutta but rather she encountered Christ in the sufferings of the poor.
She saw God in the poor. Her spirituality of work allowed her to see God where most don't.
And by the way she did think that God was only in the poor. A journalist in his attempt to
recognize Mother Teresa's special qualities dismissed her relevance to the world as too
holy, too saintly, too extraordinary for ordinary folk by stating, "Oh Mother Teresa
you are so holy, how can any of us be like you?" Her response to the journalist
prevents the implicit irrelevance of her life to the modern world: "I have been
called to be holy as a nun; you have been called to be holy as a journalist; be holy as a
journalist and I will be holy as a nun. Holiness is not relegated to the privilege few,
but a universal call for all people to participate in God's creative and redemptive
love--a love that does not discolor or distort the world, but which seeks to see its
deepest meaning. (Dorothy Day had similar responses to such questions.)
My second question to Rabbi Salkin is whether I characterized his use of
"smuggle" correctly.