EPISODE 2: Weaving the World to Come
Show Notes
You can find more info about Tzedek Lab here.
The list of 39 melachot can be found here.
Olam haBah is often translated as “the world to come” and is used in reference to the afterlife. In this context, I’m using it to describe “the world as it could be” which includes dignity, equity, and liberation.
The idea that each person is a letter in the Torah is rooted in Megaleh Amukot (Va'etchanan 186:1).
I learned about the concept of “ratzon” from my teacher, colleague, and friend David Jaffe, Founder and Executive Director of Kirva.
Rabbi Tarfon’s quote comes from Pirkei Avot 2:16.
One source for Rabbi Simcha Bunim’s teaching is Tales of The Hasidim Later Masters by Martin Buber.
The Mary Oliver line comes from her poem, entitled “The Summer Day”.
This quote has been misattributed to Courtney Carver. It is instead referenced by Carver in her book, Gentle: Rest More, Stress Less and Live the Life You Actually You Want. The quotation itself comes from Psychologist Nicola Jane Hobbs who teaches, “Instead of asking, 'Have I worked hard enough to deserve rest?' ask, 'Have I rested enough to do my most loving, meaningful work?'"”
The practice in this episode was inspired by a practice that I learned from Rabbi David Jaffe, Founder of Kirva, and it is one that I’ve enjoyed practicing with each Cohort of “Dismantling Racism from the Inside Out” that I have the privilege of co-facilitating for People of Colour, alongside Yehudah Webster. The next cohort begins in Fall 2026 and you can find more info here.
This episode is brought to you by the Institute for Jewish Spirituality. Rest to Return exists because we believe slowing down is a spiritual act. IJS believes that too. For over two decades, IJS has been helping people go deeper, through Jewish mindfulness meditation, contemplative prayer, sacred text study, and embodied practice. Their offerings range from online courses and silent retreats to immersive cohort programs for seekers of all experience levels, clergy, and spiritual leaders who are ready to live and lead from a more grounded place. Kohenet Keshira haLev Fife is part of IJS’s core faculty, and the wisdom you'll hear in this series is very much in that spirit. If this podcast is stirring something in you, IJS is a place to go further. Explore their programs, and more ways to learn and practice with Keshira, at jewishspirituality.org, including:
View the latest offerings from IJS in our program catalog
Join Keshira on retreat this August: Returning Anew
Learn more about Keshira's latest class at IJS on Mindful Speech as a Spiritual Practice
Learn more about Shevet, IJS's community for younger adults (20s-30s)
IJS has several online free practices with Keshira and our other faculty including our live Daily Sit, our weekly Shevet Sit for younger adults (under 40), and monthly Affinity Sits for Jews of Color, LGBTQ+, and individuals with disabilities. Click here for more information.
Join our mailing list to be notified about our upcoming fall courses, including Keshira's Earth, Moon, Mindfulness year-long class.
Settled back into his room, my dad was a bit frail…but he could still kiss us and us that he loved us!
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From the moment I first learned about Tzedek Lab, I had been eager to join, to be part of this “hearth for the Jewish Left”. It’s a national, multiracial network of Jewish practitioners and allies, who are building a network in service of dismantling antisemitism, racism and white supremacy.
Given that they only occasionally welcome new members, I was thrilled to have been accepted and I was delighted by the possibility of a virtual network gathering; 5 days of learning, connecting, and deepening into the work of sitting at the intersection of spirituality and social justice.
The opening was epic - so many people who I admired, so much excitement about what was coming. The session ended and with highlighter in hand, I intended to form the perfect schedule.
As I gathered snacks and supplies at my desk in preparation for the next day, my phone rang: my dad, who had been in Alzheimer’s care, had some sort of episode and wasn’t doing so well. The nurses put him in an ambulance and I rushed over to meet him at the hospital - I was barely in the room when it became clear that my week had different plans for me.
Over those next few days, incredible network weaving and inspiration came across the ethers in various sessions and breakouts…all while I sat with my beloved dad, coaxing him to eat and advocating with the hospital to have him transferred back to the memory care unit that had come to be his home.
On Monday afternoon, everything was finally in order and we settled him back into his room.
I got home just in time for the closing session. Having missed the entire gathering, I was curious to receive the summary of what had transpired while I was tending to my dad. What I experienced was nothing short of astonishing.
As each group came forward with their summaries and jam boards, a new awareness arose in me: by joining this network, I’m part of a web. Sometimes, my job is to be a weaver. And sometimes my job is to provide care for my family, or myself, and to trust that others are doing the weaving.
That day, I learned by leaning in and leaning out, that we can strengthen relationships, tightening the knots that hold the web together.
It was a revelation and a relief.
Welcome to Rest to Return, a podcast for a restless world. I’m Kohenet Keshira haLev Fife and I’m your host. This series is rooted in Shabbat, an ancient Jewish practice that teaches us how to belong to time. Here, rest is a sacred rhythm woven into who we are.
We continue by gathering around a single question: What is my sacred purpose?
This is an invitation to return. Sacred time starts now.
While the world is not binary, it is often helpful to consider things in contrast; in this case, we can deepen our understanding of “rest” in relationship to “work”. In the modern moment, “work” has all sorts of connotations including being hard, taking effort and energy, being extractive, and generally being connected to wages or money.
Melacha, the Jewish conception of “work” is derived from the set of tasks required for building the mishkan. This understanding long predates capitalism; to the contrary, melacha, is understood as purposeful, creative action that shapes the world through human intention. Melacha names the power that we have to transform raw materials into meaning, structure, and form.
It was through industrialisation and capitalism that we have come to reframe what it means to work. No longer focused on purpose, meaning, intention, or world building, the ideology of our day demands all energy be converted into output, generating profit for some, on the backs of those expending the effort. Because this way of understanding productivity became the cultural norm in the west, many of us have also adopted the erroneous belief that our very value lies in our ability to generate profit. We’ve come to prize productivity at the cost of our own well-being, and we’ve gotten confused into thinking that anything that keeps us busy is righteous. As a result, it can be tempting to subjugate ourselves to productivity.
Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with being productive and certainly not with creating; in fact, it might be among the most holy of pursuits, if the work that we’re doing is sacred work.
Sacred work could be understood as the work that brings more love, more care, more connection into our world; in short, it’s the work of maintaining and continuing to weave the web that connects us all. And, most importantly, it’s the work that we do collectively. Not necessarily together at the same time, or even in the same place, but the work that we undertake - each of us holding a piece - that elevates the connectedness that inherently exists between us.
In Jewish terms, we might call this work “weaving olam haBah” - creating the world to come - a world that not only includes and cherishes each of us but also a world that is fitting for the Divine. In doing this work, we strengthen our interconnection, living into the world that we deserve and desire.
Our individual roles within this sacred puzzle are what each of us might call our life's work, or our Cosmic assignment, or even just “what we're here to do”. This is not the kind of work that can be finished in a day, or a week, or even a year. It's the sacred work we’re compelled to give our lives to.
There is a teaching that every Jewish person is a letter in the Torah, that the Torah would not be complete if even one letter were missing. What follows is that each of us, created in the Divine image, must attend to our own sacred work, so that together we can write the whole story. Part of our work is to discern the shape of our letter, to not only know the letter but to embody its contours, to emanate its sound, to deepen in connection with our neighboring letters.
When we rest, when we slow ourselves down, we’re more able to feel and think clearly. We’re able to reconnect with our individual sacred purpose or, in Jewish terms, our ratzon; that which could be understood as our deepest internal motivation. This ratzon is part of our core identity and it’s imbued with Divinity, sourced in holiness and in service of holiness.
From there, we are better able to distinguish between the tasks of our collective sacred work and that which is busy work, intended to keep us small. The spaciousness that we feel when we rest is the embodied antidote to the smallness that ensues when we lose track of our sacred purpose.
With conscious awareness and effort to stay clear and connected to our ratzon, we are then able to find our role in the sacred collective work to which our sacred purpose contributes. For example, if your ratzon - the thing that you really want - the thing that motivates your choices, is to live in a world where all people are treated with dignity, you might choose work - paid or volunteer - which reflects that value. For example, one person might translate that value into a career which brings dignity to patients as a nurse. Another might volunteer with an organisation that seeks to dignify the arrival of new immigrants.
When we come together, we weave a web of connection through the relationships we form. Arguably, this weaving is the work of our lifetime. And the more we show up, the more we put into the web - energy, care, resources - the stronger it becomes. The stronger the web is, the more we can trust that it will hold us all, and that it will sustain the collective work when we rest.
In the same way that plants are heliotropic, always growing toward the sun, we, as humans, are theotropic, always growing toward connection with the Divine. When we engage in sacred work, we are transforming our yearning into action; this might help us to feel ourselves growing in sacred connection, as we enact Divine agency. We might even feel ourselves to be the very embodiment of the Divine.
We also know that none of us can do this work alone.
Rabbi Tarfon, in Pirkei Avot, famously teaches:
לֹא עָלֶיךָ הַמְּלָאכָה לִגְמֹר, וְלֹא אַתָּה בֶן חוֹרִין לִבָּטֵל מִמֶּנָּה
“We are not obligated to complete the work but neither are we free to desist from it.” We often take this to mean that we don’t have to run ourselves into the ground trying to finish our sacred work, even in our lifetime, but that we also can’t give up.
However, this doesn’t mean that we can’t pause. In fact, there is wisdom in taking a beat and returning to the work refreshed. In that time away, whether an hour or a day or longer, we make space for recovery, regeneration and inspiration.
Another way to understand this teaching is that we aren’t obligated to do the work all by ourselves, that we must weave Olam haBah in collaboration…and that we’re also not free to abandon the task and just leave it to everyone else.
The corollary of this is that we’re also not free to do all of the work and to crowd others out. Every one of us has a sacred purpose to live out and each of us is needed to advance our sacred work. As our own ratzon drives us toward purpose, we must always remember that we’re not in it alone.
If we combine the work that’s motivated by our individual sacred purposes, we comprise the collective work of our time. It’s beautiful to imagine a future where antiquated systems fall away and what’s left is a strong, vibrant web. One that we can continue to create and strengthen with every choice we make about how we rest and relate.
There is something deeply empowering about the idea that each of us has a vital role to play in bringing our agency, our talents and skills and gifts to the collective project of repairing our world. And, at the same time, there is something deeply humbling in the constant awareness that we are but o ne small piece of such a large and complex puzzle.
This calls to mind Reb Simcha Bunim who, each morning, would take two slips of paper and tuck one into each of his pockets. In one pocket, a note that read “Bishvili nivra ha'olam - the world was created for me." And in the other: “Anochi afar v'efer - I am dust and ashes."
Our souls are eternal AND our individual energy and strength are finite. Only when interwoven into community, only placed in a chain of generations, can we balance the awareness of our own preciousness while embracing our smallness.
I remember once, while living in Australia, I was quite unwell, so much so that I wondered whether I’d ever be strong enough to get on a plane again. I took myself to the beach late one night and, under a midnight sky full of stars, I thought about who was on the other side of that great expanse of water.
Something happened as I stood there at the water’s edge: I realised how small I am in relation to the cosmos. I felt how miniscule I really am; from the moon, I might even seem to be as small as a grain of sand. Somehow, instead of feeling despairing, I realised that if I’m that small, that it would be easy for the Divine one to deliver me to that far shore. That I had to strengthen myself and do my part but that it wasn’t all on me, and that I’m worthy of the care that it would take to get there.
Our smallness is not the same as not mattering. Our existence, that we're alive, that we came into being at all, is a mark of our preciousness, that we were loved so much that we came to be here. So, in the words of Reb Mary Oliver, “what is it that you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
Often people ask me, “how can we rest in a time like this? When our world feels like it’s upside down and there is so much work to be done?” The awareness that our lives are precious is the opening through which we discern: what is ours to do, what is ours to support, and what is someone else’s entirely?
Our work and our rest are both imperative to sustaining, for while what we do is important, we are but one small piece of the action. Being humbled by this awareness can also bring a sense of relief from the pressure to “do it all” and, in turn, often makes us more able to hold our own unique piece.
In her book, Gentle: Rest More, Stress Less and Live the Life You Actually You Want Courtney Carver asks “have I rested enough to do my most loving, meaningful work?”
Loving, meaningful work is the kind of work that is fulfilling to us while also benefitting ourselves and the world. In this conception, we don’t rest when we’re finished, we rest first, in order to move from love.
Ancient Israelites moved from love. They were committed to building and carrying the mishkan, to creating a place where the Divine could dwell. In those times, they rested - not because they wanted to take a break from this holy work but because they wanted to emulate their Creator, embedding a rhythm of work and rest into their lives and into their beings.
Today’s world may seem different but, ultimately, our collective work is the same: to create the kind of world that’s befitting for Sacred presence.
And more than providing a directive to cease, Shabbat provides an opportunity to rest in a way that helps us to remember ourselves and to reconnect with our ratzon, and to get in touch with our part in this collective project. Each and every week, we get to return to ourselves, to check in, to make choices about how we’ll be in the week ahead.
Moving in this rhythm keeps us rooted in our sacred purpose and deepens the commitment we’ve made as sacred weavers of Olam haBah.
For today’s practice, I invite you to take a piece of blank paper and something to write with. Feel free to pause now and grab what you need. We’ll take three minutes here to journal, mind map, or draw in response to the question:
What is your ratzon, the thing that you want above all else?
You might begin by responding to the question: what do I want?
Once you’ve answered, you might ask yourself again, “but what do I really want?”, repeating the question again and again as you peel back the layers toward your sacred purpose.
Along the way, you might pay particular attention to your body, heart, and mind as indicators of alignment with sacred purpose, noticing that you feel lit up or enlivened as you get close.
As we bring this practice to a close, you might choose to set an intention - big or small - for how you’ll reconnect or realign with your ratzon in the week ahead, in the context of our collective sacred work.
You might identify where you fit within the various relational webs that you’re a part of, as a way to consider where you can collaborate, support, or share the load.
You’re living your life in real time, in constellation with others - it’s safe to put sacred work at the center and to let it guide the way.
There is so much to be done and the world needs our contributions.
So, rest well, dear listener. And join us next week when we explore how to know when it’s time to work and when it’s time to rest?
Gratitude to Lippman Kanfer Foundation for Living Torah for making Rest to Return possible. Rest to Return is a production of the Institute for the Next Jewish Future and part of the family of podcasts of Judaism Unbound. Hosted by Keshira haLev Fife, directed by Joey Taylor, produced at Monastery Studios, sound engineering by Justin Watson, original music by Keshira haLev Fife, arrangements by Ric Hordinski and art by Katie Kaestner.
