Smug()lin
Religion
Into Wor
JEFFREY SALKIN SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
ILLUSTRATIONS BY ROBERT ALAN SOULE
58
bile walking in a neighboring
village late at night, a Cha-
sidic rebbe met a man who
also was walking alone. For a
while, the two walked in si-
lence. Finally, the rebbe turned to the
man and asked, "So, who do you work
for?"
"I work for the village," the man an-
swered. "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?' "
Many people ask themselves the same
question. They work very hard. They
know their job titles. They know their job
descriptions. They know who their boss
is. But they want to know for Whom they
really work.
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 em-
ployees in the United States
work 320 more hours — the
equivalent of two months —
than do their counterparts
in Germany and France.
And yet, we suspect there
is more to life than just
working and accumulating
goods and wealth We yearn
for something deeper that
will make meaning of our
fragile existences. From 9-
to-5, we work hard. From 5-
to-9, we are with our
families or our hobbies or
our friends or our various
entertainments. And on
Saturdays, we (or, at least,
some of us) are with our
God, briefly and fleetingly.
It's one of the reasons that
we wonder why all the dis-
parate pieces of our selves
somehow just don't fit to-
gether.
In the 1950s and 1960s,
the average American
asked such questions as,
"Will I be successful and
make a good living?" "Will
I raise happy, healthy, suc-
cessful children?" By the
1970s, Americans had
turned more introspective
and were asking, "How can
I find self-fulfillment?"
"What does personal success really
mean?" "What is worth sacrificing for?"
"How can I grow?"
These are religious questions because
every question about ultimate meaning
is a religious question. But to paraphrase
the Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig,
"Religion has to be smuggled into life." It
also has to be smuggled into our work.
Hearing the voice of religion in our work
will provide fulfillment instead of the
"lives of quiet desperation" to which Hen-
ry David Thoreau referred. It will orient
us toward meaningful work and help
shatter our egocentricity. It will teach us
to simultaneously serve others, transcend
ourselves, and, hopefully, encounter the
very presence of God.
Letting spirituality and faith speak to
us in our work will teach us to move be-
yond ambition and success, to stop wor-
shipping at the false altars of career and
prestige. As part of that process, we will
learn that the original meaning of "ca-
reer" is "that which you carry." We will
learn what meanings we, as Jews, carry
into the world.
What's The
Spirituality
of Work?
In the Garden of Eden, God gave Adam
a single task: "Till the garden and guard
it."
Spiritually, Adam's task satisfied him
because he knew God wanted him to do
it. The Garden of Eden, which was a col-
laborative effort between God and Adam,
is a metaphor for all life and for the en-
tire world — and for the world of work.
Because Eve told Adam to eat from the
Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, she
was punished with the pain of childbirth.
Adam's punishment was that his labors
would be henceforth difficult, a curse that
was not necessarily labor since he already
had worked in the Garden. Instead, he
would have to do sweaty, tiring, frus-
trating toil to bring forth bread from a
sometimes uncooperative earth.
In essence, that is the Jewish spiri-
tuality of work: Work, which would not
be easy, would be how humanity could
make the world more holy and complete
the work that God had started.
A simple perusal of Jewish holy texts
reveals that, over the centuries, Jewish
scholars spent more time interpreting
the meaning of non-work (e.g., Shabbat)
than the meaning of work itself. When
they did look at work, they mostly cen-
tered on ethical issues related to such
professions as medicine or on the intri-
cacies of labor law.
As Marshall J. Berger, a senior fellow
at the Heritage Foundation in Wash-
ington, D.C., has suggested traditional