A palace in time

Abraham Joshua Heschel was born in Warsaw in 1907, into a long line of Hasidic rabbis. He left Poland weeks before the German invasion in 1939 and reached the United States in 1940. His mother and the sisters who stayed behind were killed in the Holocaust.

In America he became one of the best-known Jewish thinkers of the century, and in 1965 he marched beside Martin Luther King Jr. from Selma. In 1951 he published a short book, The Sabbath. Most religions, he wrote, build holy places. Judaism builds holy time. The Sabbath is a sanctuary made of hours instead of stone: "a palace in time".

For six days, Heschel wrote, we wrestle with the world of things: making them, getting them, fixing them. On the seventh we stop trying to master the world, and simply live in it.

Overwork usually comes with a rule nobody chose: rest is a reward, earned once everything is done. But it is never all done. There is always one more email, one more chore. So the rest never comes, or comes so broken up by "just quickly checking" that it doesn't count.

A palace in time turns the rule around. The rest is scheduled first, with a wall around it. Inside the wall, there's nothing to finish.

Research on recovery from work points the same way. People who mentally switch off from work in their free time, rather than just stopping physically, tend to report more energy and less exhaustion. The switching off is the part that matters, and that is exactly what a boundary protects.

Marcus is worn out and decides to try a palace in time on Saturday morning, 8 to noon. His plan: a slow breakfast, then a run, then "use the quiet to finally sort out my inbox, so I can actually relax afterwards". He says he will start the real rest next weekend, once things calm down at work.