10 | SEPTEMBER 8 • 2022 

opinion 

‘Quiet Quitting,’ The Sudden Trend 
in Work, Sounds Sort Of … Jewish? 
I 

hadn’t heard of “quiet 
quitting” until about 10 
minutes ago. Since then 
every major news outlet has 
done a story on this purported 
trend, defined as a movement 
among office 
workers to draw 
firmer work-life 
boundaries by 
doing less work. 
It means closing 
your laptop at 
5 p.m. when 
your cubicle-
mate is staying late to finish a 
project. It means turning off 
notifications on your phone 
so you can’t check your work 
emails after hours. It can mean 
doing the bare minimum and 
still hanging onto your job.
On a grander scale, it means 
cooling your hottest ambitions 
in favor of a saner work-life 
balance.
Of course, to a certain kind 
of devotee of the attention 
economy, this sounds like 
nothing less than slacking 
off. “Quiet quitting isn’t just 
about quitting on a job, it’s a 
step toward quitting on life,” 
huffed Arianna Huffington, 
in a LinkedIn post. The Fox 
News host Tomi Lahren said 
it’s just a euphemism for 
being “LAZY” (she added an 
expletive).
I don’t have a dog in this 
fight, since I am not a “quiet 
quitter.” (I am more a “person 
without any hobbies or little 
kids, who if he closes his 
laptop at 5 p.m. doesn’t know 
what to do with himself.”) 
But I understand the impulse. 

Technology and corporate 
culture conspire to blur the 
lines between work and 
office. The demise of unions 
has shifted the workplace 
power balance to employers. 
For those who could work 
at home, the pandemic 
obliterated the boundaries 
between on and off hours.
“Quitting” is a terrible way 
to describe what is really doing 
your job, no more and no less. 
It only feels like “quitting” to 
a culture that demands that 
you sacrifice private time to 
your employer or career. This 
peculiarly American “ethic” 
shows up, for instance, in 
vacations: Americans get on 
average 10 fewer vacation 
days a year than Europeans 
because, unlike the European 
Union, the United States does 
not federally mandate paid 
vacation or holidays.
Just reading a New York 
Times article about how eight 
of the 10 largest private U.S. 
employers are using tracking 
software to monitor their 
employees made me feel guilty 
and anxious — even though I 
was reading the article as part 
of my job.
If quiet quitting were 
actually slacking, it would run 
afoul of Jewish law. “Jewish 
employees are obligated to 
work at full capacity during 
their work hours and not 
to ‘steal time’ from their 
employers,” writes Rabbi Jill 
Jacobs in a responsa — legal 
opinion — called “Work, 
Workers and the Jewish 
Owner,” written for the 

Conservative movement in 
2008. And yet this warning 
aside, Jewish law is much 
more concerned with 
employers who take advantage 
of employees rather than the 
other way around.
Jacobs — now the executive 
director of T’ruah, the 
rabbinic human rights group 
— describes nine principles of 
workplace justice in the Torah, 
and nearly all are addressed to 
the employer. These include 
treating workers with “dignity 
and respect” and paying them 
a living wage and on time.
“The ideal worker-employer 
relationship should be one 
of trusted partnership,” she 
writes, “in which each party 
looks out for the well-being 
of the other, and in which 
the two parties consider 
themselves to be working 
together for the perfection of 
the Divine world.”
This is not exactly what we 
now know as the “Protestant 
work ethic.” The rabbis of 
the Talmud did not tie hard 
work and economic success 

to divine salvation. No doubt, 
they understand that people 
need to and should work for a 
living. “In traditional sources, 
work is often regarded as 
necessary, and certainly better 
than idleness (which can 
lead to sin),” according to a 
helpful article from My Jewish 
Learning.
And yet, because the 
study of Torah is considered 
the ideal use of one’s time 
(assuming you are a man, 
anyway), the rabbis were 
clearly wary of occupations 
and ambitions that demanded 
too much of a worker. In 
Pirkei Avot, the collection 
of ethical sayings from the 
Mishnah, Rabbi Meir says, 
“Minimize business and 
engage in Torah.” The rabbis, 
My Jewish Learning explains, 
“were clearly worried that 
excessive pursuit of material 
well-being would distract from 
higher pursuits.”
The artist Jenny Odell’s 2019 
manifesto about quitting the 
“attention economy,” “How 
to Do Nothing,” similarly 

HEIDE BENSER/GETTY IMAGES

PURELY COMMENTARY

Andrew 
Silow-Carroll 
JTA.org

