Show Transcripts

SW11: Working to Live or Living to Work

Hello, I’m Irwin Kula and welcome to “Simple Wisdom.”  For the past 20 years, I’ve had the amazing opportunity of traveling around this country bringing the wisdom of an ancient tradition to the challenges of daily living to help people make more meaningful and creative lives. Today we’re going to talk about an area in life at which we spend more time than at any other area in our adult life. Social scientists say that we spend 65% of our time in this area—it’s the area of work.  Work involves so much of who we are.  It’s not surprising that the bookstores are filled with books on the meaning of work and there are countless forums on the meaning of work.  Well, today we’re going to talk about how work is central to our dignity.  We’re going to talk about the two problems that are central to our work.  One is boredom. Sometimes we get into jobs that just become tedious.  They no longer express who we are.  They get too small for our spirit.  The second is the problem of the balance between work and the rest of our lives—and that is particularly challenging when our work is actually great.  Then we’re going to talk about re-magining work – reconnecting our livelihood to our life, reconnecting our work life to the other parts of our life.  And, of course, I’m going to offer some practices.  Let’s start by asking: What do you do?

Speaker 1:  I’m a lawyer.

Speaker 2:  I’m a social worker.

Speaker 3:  I’m a retired building inspector.

Speaker 4:  I’m a retired college professor.

Speaker 5:  I teach and counsel. 

Isn’t it fascinating?  I ask: What do you do? — and even the people who are retired tell me about their profession.  There are thousands of things that we do in a day.  There are many things that are important to us.  But when I ask and when we’re asked: What do you do? — immediately we know what that means.  We talk about the work that we do for compensation and that makes sense.  I have no criticism of this.  Actually, what it indicates is something that goes back a long time — that work, our capacity to produce and contribute in the world, is one of the central aspects of our dignity.  A lot of people know that the fourth of the Ten Commandments is the commandment on the Sabbath.  Most people do know the part of the commandment that says, “Observe the Sabbath.”  But there is a first part of that commandment:. “Six days you shall work” and then, the commandment continues, “On the seventh you shall rest.”[1]  Which means actually, from the biblical authors’ perspective, that to work was as serious a commandment as the Sabbath.  They went hand in hand.  They were connected. And we will talk more about that in a little bit.  

But for a moment think about your earliest memories of work and how important it was – try to remember your first job.  I remember I mowed the lawn of the people who lived across the street from us and it was so perfect.  I used a lawn mower on our lawn, but I did that lawn a million times better than I did our own lawn.  I went to every corner.  I made it perfect because somehow this job -- this work -- was going to reflect on me.  I was building their world in a certain sense.  And as good as the work was -- it was great to get paid for the first time.  I ran home and I think I only got $5, but it seemed like an extraordinary amount of money.  We want to be productive.  And also we want to get paid – it is an aspect of our dignity.  If you watch toddlers who toddle around the house, inevitably while you are setting the table they want to help.  It’s when they get to be teenagers that they don’t want to help anymore.  But toddlers want to help.  And they always want to do something that’s bigger -- more than they’re capable of.  That’s the beautiful thing about our spirit and our drive to be  productive.  So you say, “Okay, you can put the napkins on the table.”  They are three or four years old -- they just wanted to put on the napkins – and then they ask, “Can I put on the glasses?”  This drive to be productive is so central to who we are.  It’s central to our dignity and that’s why people who are unemployed go through higher levels of depression.  Similarly, people who are under-employed or over-employed, when their work doesn’t match their spirit, actually get depressed.  Cynicism and despair begin to be part of their being.   

So to match up our work with our life is one of the central projects of our life.  And that’s exactly why when I ask: “What do you do?” people proudly say the job that they get paid for even if they’re retired.  They’ve always done that.  It’s central to their identity.  The fact is when it comes to work there are real challenges that we face no matter what we do.  The first challenge of work is that when work is as good as it is for many of us, it’s very easy for work and the rest of our lives to get out of balance.  I’ll tell you my story.  Over the past 14 years until about a year ago, when I was given a sabbatical, I traveled somewhere from 70 to 100 nights a year, maybe 200 days out-of-town a year.  What happened about nine months ago was I kind of burned out.  I realized that my whole life had become my work.  By the way, nothing was bad.  It was specifically because my job was great that it could get out of hand.   

You know there was no workaholism until the earlier 20^th century—we don’t even have the word until the early 20^th century.  A subsistence laborer who works from sunrise to sunset to eke out a living is not a workaholic. You can only be a workaholic—work can only get out of control--when you do not have to work to get what you need.  You already have what you need, but you choose to work.  It is actually when work is so good that you become intoxicated with it because it feeds that part of who you are that seeks to produce and accomplish and build and create.  The bible tells two creation stories in Genesis, chapter 1 and in Genesis, chapter 2.   These are often referred to as Adam 1 and Adam 2.  Adam 1 and Adam 2 capture this tension between our work life and our other life.  Adam 1 is told to master and rule over the world—to preserve and take care of the world.[2]  That’s the part of us that wants to work.  That’s the part of us that wants to accomplish. That’s the part of us that wants to produce.  That’s the part of us that wants to innovate and achieve and create.  It’s such a deep part of us that the bible itself made it the first creation story.  What people don’t know is that in chapter 2 there is another creation story, what is called Adam 2.  Adam 2 is not told to work.  Adam 2 is told to be, to rest, to be in relationship, to be reflective.[3]  These two stories reflect two parts of us—the doing part and the being part, the achieving part and the stepping back and letting go part.  And it’s very hard to keep those two things in balance.  

By the way, we’re not the first generation to have that problem, though it’s at a harder level.  The story is told about Moses[4] after he takes the people of Israel out of Egypt – he takes care of them, teaching and judging legal cases from morning until late into the night.  Finally, Jethro, his father-in-law, comes to him and says: “What are you doing, Moses?”  In contemporary language, Jethro is saying, “You’re  going to burn out”—although the text says: “You’re not doing the people any service and you’re not doing yourself any service.”  Why was Moses doing this?  I’d like to think it wasn’t only self- importance, though that’s a part of why all of us overwork—why it gets out of balance.  But it was more.  It was actually that the work was important work.  When our work is important, when we’re  lawyers bringing justice, when we’re social workers helping people through their problems, when we’re doctors trying to heal people, when we’re building inspectors making sure that buildings will be safe—the work is actually great—that’s exactly when it can get out of balance.  

There’s another story about Moses – this one a bit racy -- that indicates how far out of balance it can get when your work is really meaningful.  Moses decides he needs some help finally, so he asks God for some help here and God commissions 70 people to help Moses.  The 70 people go out and two of them, one named Eldad and the other Meydad, begin to prophesy -- after all they’ve just been commissioned by God to help Moses.   At that moment, the rabbis teach that Moses’s wife Tzipporah was walking by and began to weep uncontrollably and fall to the ground.  Tzipporah had two friends with her and they asked: “What’s the matter?”  Tzipporah said: “I know from my own experience—this is terrible—I feel bad and sad for the wives of Eldad and Meydad—they’re never going to make love again.”[5]  That’s the rabbis interpreting what it means to have work become out of control.  By the way, one of the reasons they understood this is that in Talmudic times the rabbis who kind of formed Judaism were required to work a real job.  Being a rabbi was not enough of a job!   I often say that religion got sick when rabbis and ministers and priests began to work only in religion.  They actually begin to get distant from real life.  That’s how central work is to our dignity.  So recovering the balance between work and life is a central challenge.  

The second challenge is boredom.  Sometimes you get into a job and you rise, and sometimes you rise to a position that’s actually not the position for you.  It doesn’t maximize your talents.  We call that Murphy’s Law.  But sometimes you are in a job that just is a dead end job.  It doesn’t work for you anymore.  And then you have a real choice.  You either have to change your mind or change your work. You either have to re-imagine your work or you have to change your work and both are possible—far more possible than we are led to believe—especially the form of the re-imagining of work. In fact, let’s talk about re-imagining work to address this question of balance and boredom.  

I want to suggest that the crisis that we often feel in work is actually not a crisis of work.  It’s a crisis of the Sabbath.  I don’t mean the Sabbath which says you have to stay home and not do anything.  I mean the Sabbath in the larger, metaphorical sense.  For most of Western history work was always associated with the Sabbath, but here is what I mean by that.  The work that God metaphorically rests from is work that is profoundly creative.  It builds a world and building a world is such dynamic work that actually you have to take a rest.  Jewish wisdom teaches that the work that one ought not do on the Sabbath is specifically the creative work that goes into building the world.  What we have to do with our jobs is reconnect our work to the great project of creation, of building, upgrading and enhancing this world, and it’s very possible.  Here are some of the stories of people I have met who have connected their work more deeply to creation to give their work profoundly more meaning.   

About three years ago at 5:00am in Washington, D.C., I get into a taxicab.  It’s cold and raining and I’m miserable and I hate being there and I can’t believe I’m up so early and I don’t like to get up when it’s dark.  The taxicab driver has a big smile on his face.  He’s genuinely happy at 5:00 and he has this computer in the front of his taxi.  And I see he’s putting in stuff.  “What are you doing?” I ask.  He responds, “ I have all my regular passengers in here—well, here is my next passenger.”  He brings up the passenger’s name—the kind of coffee the passenger likes, that this passenger happens to always need to go to the bank, that he always needs extra time so he gets picked up 15 minutes early.  So I say to him: “What do you do—you keep a list of your passengers like this?”  He says: “Yes, you see for people to go from here to there is always more complicated than you imagine.  I take people from here to there.”  Well, the first thing I thought of was a Jewish wisdom tradition about the ba’al agalah, the wagon driver.  The wagon driver is always the messianic character—he’s always Elijah because the wagon driver takes you from here to there, which is just a metaphor for from this world to a better world.  Here’s a person who was able to re-imagine his work and so at 5:00 am in the cold and the rain he smiled and his passengers’ lives were enhanced.   

Let me tell you a story about a mover.  My wife and I moved from St. Louis to New York about 15 years ago.  There is a lot of tension when you move.  You pack up your stuff, you don’t know what’s coming, and there’s plenty of anxiety.  Well, this mover began talking to me.  For about 20 minutes, he engaged me in a conversation about all the opportunities that were coming when I moved to New York, how he and his crew prided themselves on always being on time getting across the country and never breaking anything.  I realized that the tension was dissipating from my body as I talked to this guy.  And I said to him: “Thank you very much, you know what you’re doing.”  He said: “Yes, in fact, I understand perfectly that one of the tension filled times in people’s lives is when they move, so what I try to do is not only pack their stuff, but pack up their hearts.”  This is a mover!   

Or the conductor on the Upper West Side subway line #1 in New York City, who tells jokes at each stop.  You want to take that subway.  It’s such an amazing subway, though the subway is not the greatest place to be, especially in the summer.  But you get into the subway and if you catch the right line at a little after eight in the morning, he’s telling jokes about every stop and he has new jokes every day.  I once talked to him and asked him what was his story?  He said two things to me that were fascinating.  The first was that “I know it’s difficult for people to be in the subway, especially at rush hour, and I am trying to brighten their day.”  That’s a conductor!  He is not just conducting the train, he is conducting/creating an entire environment for people.  Then he said to me: “What I really want to be is a comic.  I’m hoping that someone will hear me.”  This is a person with a profound understanding that you can always be doing what you want to do most from whatever position you are in and, in fact, whatever you’re doing may well be a metaphor for something bigger than you can do.  This is exactly why every single leader in the bible is either a shepherd or a farmer—there is something about these jobs that anticipates the leading and nurturing of people.  Whatever we’re doing is a hint for something bigger.  

The last story is about a toll booth collector.  I’m going through a toll booth and this guy is also a comic and does the same exact thing—the toll booth collector and the conductor actually happened within a year of each other.  People can transform their work in ways that express more deeply who they are and more profoundly affect other people and it doesn’t make a difference what you do.  If you’re an administrator and you think administering is a little job dealing with small details, here is a story about how a little job can make a difference.  It’s a story about an old man who is walking along the beach and he sees starfish that are drying out in the sun.  Feeling for them, he picks them up one by one and gently throws them back into the water.  This young guy comes running by and looks at him and says: “What are you doing?”  “Well,” he says, “starfish dry out and die in the sun and so what I’m doing is I’m taking them and throwing them back.”  The young man began to laugh and said:  “What are you doing!  There are hundreds and hundreds of starfish on the shore and there are thousands and thousands of beaches—what difference can you possibly be making?”  And he ran off. And the old man looked at him thoughtfully as he was running away and then continued on.  He leaned down, picked another starfish up, looked at the starfish and gently threw it into the sea and said: “Made a difference to that one!”  You don’t know what phone call you’re going to pick up that will make a difference.  You don’t know which small acts actually transform worlds.  None of us do.  So actually we can transform our work by re-imagining it.  

The connection to the Sabbath does also allow us to step back from our work, and when we step back from our work we can do two critically important things.  The first is we can develop other areas of our lives—our relationships, hobbies, intellect, volunteering—and very often when we develop other areas of our lives, here’s the funny thing that happens.  We recover our initial joy—the initial reasons we even went into our own work.  I remember when I entered the rabbinate it was really about teaching. Believe me, the last few years since becoming president of a non-profit organization weren’t about teaching.  I had to recover why I went into the rabbinate.  Then there are the lawyers who went into law  because they really wanted to bring justice to the world and then, day in and day out, found they had to make the compromises we all make in our work, so that the pursuit of justice became disconnected from the practice of law.  What stepping back does is allow us to ask who we are again in our work.  Doctors who went into the “practice” of medicine (the word evokes a sacred task) because they really wanted to heal, but you know HMOs and insurance, and it’s so easy to forget what it was about. Activists who went in to change the world and then it became about being in the right place with the right people—and you forget that you went in to change the world.  So if we could reconnect our Sabbath to our work and our work to the Sabbath, we might be able to recover the joy and idealism that we started out with in our work. 

Here’s a joke that captures what I have been talking about.  Actually, I heard this as I was preparing for this show.  So a guy falls overboard, and the captain yells out, “Hey, we can’t see you, what’s your position?”  And he yells back,  “I’m a banker in a big bank.  What’s your position?”  The reason we need Sabbaths -- and I don’t care when your Sabbath is and what preacher you use for your Sabbath — the reason we need Sabbaths is to recover who we most deeply are, which then allows us to re-imagine our work.  The word for work in Hebrew is avodah which is also the word for prayer or for divine service.  Imagine if our work could actually be like a prayer.  Imagine if we could make our work worthy of being sung about like a prayer.  Imagine if our work could be genuine service, and for all of us it can be -- it’s a question of our imagination.  It’s a question of our will.  

Now there are a number of practices that I think can help us move in this direction besides just the Sabbath, which by the way could make our week not 24-7, but 24-6.   There are also practices that are even less extensive than that.  The first is you can have mini-Sabbaths all the time.  Here are two or three mini-Sabbaths that I use — one that I just instituted and it’s a practice that’s amazing.  I’ve been doing it for about two months.  Every hour at work I take one minute off — it’s hard to do.  That’s about eight minutes a day , 40 minutes a week, times a lifetime!  It’s one minute in which I just step back, so I’m not completely swallowed up by my work.  A second mini-Sabbath is I never answer the phone on the first ring.  I let three rings go by.  You know how sometimes the phone can be ringing off the hook all day and you just keep picking up the phone.  You never take a breath and you begin to get tense when that phone rings again.  I use the phone as a time to refresh – three rings — three deep breaths –okay, then I’m ready to speak to whomever it is I have to speak.  I use coffee breaks and lunches.  Lunch may be a meeting, but what about going to lunch?  What about the trip to lunch?  It’s defined, set-aside moments in our very, very productive life that we can carve out.  

The second practice is a kind of blessing or affirmation and I learned this from an ophthalmologist on the East coast.  I once gave a speech about work and spirituality and this guy said to me: “I’m not a religious person at all” -- a lot of times that’s what people say to rabbis — “I’m not religious,” and then they proceed to tell me an amazingly religious story.  “I’m not religious, but for two weeks every single year I charter a plane and a bunch my ophthalmologist friends and I go to the former Soviet Union and we do clinic work because you know the former Soviet Union has some of the very worst eye care.”   I was blown away.  This is a guy who told me he wasn’t religious.  I said, “Wow, now I understand a blessing in the Jewish tradition that I never understood before: ‘Praised are You God Who makes the blind see.’ ”  I tell him this and the guy begins to cry.  He says, “Can you tell me what that blessing is?”   I write down the blessing and then he says something amazing to me: “Can I say this blessing in my day-to-day work, too?”  To this day, three years later, he says the blessing every morning.  It’s on a post-it.  Which means he has an affirmation before his work — he has a blessing before his work — to remind him what his work is really about.  There is not one person in the room who can’t develop some kind of affirmation for his/her work.  At the very simplest: “May my work today be a blessing.”  

The last practice is very easy to do.  All of us get reviewed at some point in our jobs.  Either we review ourselves or we are reviewed by supervisors or boards.  Have we been efficient?  Have we brought in clients?  Have we been productive?  Have we increased the bottom line of the company?  But there are three additional questions we have to ask.  The first is: Has my work brought me joy?  If not, why not, and how can my work bring me more joy?  The second is: Has my work contributed to the good and how can I make my work create more good?   And the third is: Has my work been creative?  Has it maximized the contributions I can make to this world?  You ask these three questions each quarter, half year or even yearly and your work will change. 

So these are the practices.  You do these practices -- and you have to do them—you know how practices are, you have to practice them, not talk about them.  You do these practices and some of the central challenges of work will begin to become clear.  I guarantee you that you will not be as bored at work because you will begin to re-imagine your work.  I guarantee you that the balance between work and life will begin to re-emerge as a genuine balance.  You’ll be Adam 1 and Adam 2.  You won’t be bored, you’ll understand the true dignity of work and you will contribute to creating this world.  In that way, you’ll understand what the real definition of work is.  Good work is when your deep gladness meets what the world needs most.  That’s “Simple Wisdom.”  Thank you very much.  I’m Irwin Kula, and I look forward to seeing you again.