To Everything, There Is a Season, or, Why You Don’t *Have* to Look for a Job Right Now
By: Rabbi Nikki Deblosi, She Her
Tags: Judaism, Rosh Hashanah, Career Change, Fulfillment, Values

“Now is a time to refrain from embracing,” the young musician affirmed. There followed a gorgeous, acoustic-guitar-accompanied, pure-voiced rendition of The Byrds’ classic song Turn, Turn, Turn. Fitting, for our video conference celebration of both Shabbat and the Jewish new year.

We’re in the middle of the Days of Awe, the Yamim Noraim, the ten days framed by Rosh Hashanah, the day on which our fate for the upcoming year is written, and Yom Kippur, the day on which that fate is sealed. It’s a time of transition, of taking account, of seeking and granting forgiveness and repair.

But it doesn’t lead to a period of being settled. Instead, these High Holy Days flow almost immediately into the holiday of Sukkot, a harvest festival that emphasizes resilience and persistence in the context of our mortality and ephemerality. We build temporary structures, mandated to be partially open to the elements, with roofs that allow us to see the stars above, and make those our permanent homes. We deck them out with furniture, we feast there, we welcome guests.

During Sukkot, the only holiday on which we are mandated to be joyful, we hear the words of Kohelet, Ecclesiastes, the words that inspired Pete Seeger’s classic lyrics:

A season is set for everything, a time for every experience under heaven:

A time for being born and a time for dying,

A time for planting and a time for uprooting the planted;

A time for slaying and a time for healing,

A time for tearing down and a time for building up;

A time for weeping and a time for laughing,

A time for wailing and a time for dancing;

A time for throwing stones and a time for gathering stones,

A time for embracing and a time for shunning embraces;

A time for seeking and a time for losing,

A time for keeping and a time for discarding;

A time for ripping and a time for sewing,

A time for silence and a time for speaking;

A time for loving and a time for hating;

A time for war and a time for peace. (Kohelet 3:1–8)

During quarantine, at least for me as a parent with two school-aged children at home 24/7, time plods along monotonously, or accordions awkwardly forward as anxiety fills the brain with “How long is this going to last?” There is hardly “a time to every purpose under Heaven,” as the Byrds translate the Biblical text, when it seems that all we do is laundry, dishes, meal prep, remote learning troubleshooting, breaking up sibling quarrels, wash, rinse, repeat.

It would be so easy to turn to Kohelet’s opening lines and just sink there:

הֲבֵ֤ל הֲבָלִים֙ אָמַ֣ר קֹהֶ֔לֶת הֲבֵ֥ל הֲבָלִ֖ים הַכֹּ֥ל הָֽבֶל׃ Utter futility! — said Kohelet — Utter futility! All is futile! (1:2)

Perhaps our key is the Hebrew text itself:

לַכֹּ֖ל זְמָ֑ן וְעֵ֥ת לְכָל־חֵ֖פֶץ תַּ֥חַת הַשָּׁמָֽיִם׃ To everything there is a time/season, and a moment/occasion to every hefetz under heaven.

The Byrds translate hefetz as “purpose.” And I think they’ve got it all wrong.

I’ve always been a perfectionist; I even have a tattoo that reminds me to fight against this tendency. Hearing that there is “a time to every purpose under heaven” leads me down the slippery perfectionist slope. There lies an obsession with material success and an unrelenting tunnel vision homed in on so-called productivity.

In Hebrew, though, the text decidedly does not say “a time to every productive endeavor under heaven” or “a time to every item capable of being checked off on a list.” It says “a time to every hefetz,” a time to every delight, every desire, every longing, every pleasure. That’s why the online Hebrew library Sefaria gives the translation, “a time for every experience under heaven.”

Back in January, NYU eliminated my position; for eight years, I had been a campus Rabbi at the pluralistic campus Jewish center. Losing the position felt like losing my purpose. It certainly meant losing productivity, at first because it was challenging to continue working to the best of my ability when I knew there was no future in it for me. And then the pandemic hit, and the whole notion of productivity eluded me, eluded so many of us.

Over the summer, time changed for me. I worked to create the structure that would enable me to experience time in delineated chunks, moments that might contain either productivity or purpose, and sometimes even both. Freelance contract work reconnected me to the kind of purpose-with-a-paycheck that the perfectionist in me prefers.

And then the year turned. Rosh Hashanah. And I found myself in the park with extended family.

“Have you ever thought about being a high school English teacher?”

Here’s the thing: Yes, I have. When I was fourteen or fifteen and learned with the greatest high school English teacher ever, Mrs. Jean Steinberg. And again in college, when I wasn’t really sure what kind of career might spark my soul, and when I was sure that literature and reading and writing are things I deeply value. But, since those moments, so many experiences have shaped me in ways that tell me how ill-suited I am to such a full-time job, and how frustrated it would leave me.

The question, though, knocked me back to adolescence, when grown-ups would ask, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” But I’m not a girl. I’m a 43-year-old woman with a wife, two children, one cat, one refinanced mortgage, almost no college debt, two Master’s degrees, a PhD, and smicha (rabbinic ordination). I also have desires, longings, trauma, challenges, and values.

Instead of confidently standing in those truths, I nearly got sucked into the success-obsessed, accolade-seeking, perfectionist trap. I nearly bought into a narrow, confining, limited notion of what success means. Hurry up. Get a full-time position, any full-time position you’re capable of performing. Earn the right kind of paycheck. Focus on material success. To everything there is a purpose. An adult has a purpose, and it’s called a job.

In Pirkei Avot, The Sayings of our Ancestors, Rabbi Yehuda ben Teima offers some guidelines on the purpose that characterizes each stage in our lives, helping set some parameters for what it might mean, according to Jewish tradition, to be an adult. Interestingly, though, Ben Teima sees change throughout our adult lives; we do not turn thirteen and then freeze, having achieved everything we will ever achieve, being driven by every purpose that will ever motivate us. Instead, Ben Teima urges us to see nuance within our adult experience:

[…] Eighteen [is the age] for marriage; twenty, for pursuit; thirty, for strength; forty, for understanding; fifty, for counsel; sixty, for mature age […] (Pirkei Avot 5:21)

Let’s immediately remind ourselves not to get caught up in the trap of literalist reading. This isn’t about the age at which a person “must” or even “should” be married, for example. Rather, it’s a lesson in setting our expectations that change is constant, that adulthood is not a stage achieved once and permanently, that nuance and change and shifts of focus will happen for us throughout our lives.

I am in my forties, the time for understanding. It makes sense to me: part of why I balk at the notion of “just getting a job” is that I understand myself well. I understand my strengths. And, like most of us, I want others to understand me, to see me, to recognize me. As a rabbi, as a parent, as an adult. It’s why I correct people who call my wife and me “girls” or assume we’re sisters. We’re grown, adult human beings who have forged a life together, who raise children together, who build chosen family together.

The thing is, there’s a time and a season for every longing, every desire, every purpose in the deeper sense of the word. What’s my purpose? Why am I here, now?

My purpose: to embody and to teach and to enable and to nurture queer belonging, sex positivity, creative lifecycle, and inclusive Judaism. My purpose is chosen family and love and inquiry and utopia, the dream and hope of a future in the midst of a critique of the present.

I don’t know what your purpose, your desire, your longing might be, now, in these turbulent and portentous times. I do know that it’s very likely you’re surrounded by people and apps and other things that pressure you to focus only on material success, on what David Brooks called “resume virtues,” as opposed to “eulogy virtues.”

And maybe, like Kohelet, you’re feeling that everything is hevel, is vanity, is mist, is a breath on the wind that will be blown away before you know it.

True, it’s not the time for physically embracing, if we value human life and the protection of our collective health. But it is, simultaneously, the time to embrace the truth: that, though “the sun rises, and the sun sets,” it is also true that “[the sun] glides back to where it rests” (Kohelet 1:5). Turn, turn, turn: everything keeps changing, and you can count on that.

I’ve often looked at Kohelet cynically, particularly when the author enjoins us to forget everything but the pursuit of happiness and goodness, as if it were empty hedonism (see 3:12). I think that’s the wrong approach to this perspective-offering text.

Kohelet is asking us to turn our focus, to adjust it like the lens of a kaleidoscope, so that we can see new combinations, new foci. Kohelet offers a new purpose, and encourages us to look at time in the smallest possible increments: this very moment:

וְגַ֤ם כָּל־הָאָדָם֙ שֶׁיֹּאכַ֣ל וְשָׁתָ֔ה וְרָאָ֥ה ט֖וֹב בְּכָל־עֲמָל֑וֹ מַתַּ֥ת אֱלֹהִ֖ים הִֽיא׃ And also: everything a human being does eat, and drink, and see as good, out of all their striving — that is a gift of God. (3:13)

In just a matter of days, we will enter the sukkah, that impermanent, temporary home. We will welcome guests, and feast, and we will, as we are commanded in the Torah, rejoice. We will rejoice in every hefetz, every savory mouthful, every smile and every touch.

To every hefetz, every tug at our heartstring, there will be an eit, a precious, present moment. What’s yours? When’s yours? Where’s yours?