Six Hours at the Dealership

I finished the first draft of my Rosh Hashanah sermon unusually early this year, thanks, improbably enough, to a car dealership.  I had been thinking about the sermon for a while and had the basic ideas in mind, but I had not yet worked out the argument and structure or actually begun writing it. And then, last week I brought my car in for its New York State inspection, an oil change, and a few recall repairs. They told me it would take two and a half hours, so I brought my laptop. There was a waiting area, coffee and snacks, and I figured I would get a little work done.

Six hours later, my car was finally ready. And so was the first draft of my sermon.

Since then, I have been pondering why I was able to accomplish so much there. There was nothing particularly inspiring about the surroundings. But I couldn't go anywhere. No one was going to knock on my office door. There were none of the many small tasks that would normally compete for attention. I had one large piece of work to do, and one large block of time in which to do it.

Sometimes focus is less a matter of willpower than of environment and context. Maybe disciplined people are simply better at ignoring distractions, but part of discipline is arranging our lives so that there are fewer distractions to ignore.

The Rabbis teach in Pirkei Avot, עשה תורתך קבע, “Make your Torah fixed.” Rav Aharon Lichtenstein explained that even someone who values Torah deeply still needs, practically speaking, to translate that commitment into the structure of his day. It needs protected space. Otherwise, however important it may be in theory, everything else has a way of crowding it out. For six hours, accidentally, the car dealership gave me that kind of keva.

But finishing the sermon early has also left another question open. Normally, at this point in the summer, the sermon would barely exist. Over the coming weeks, I would normally be spending hours figuring out exactly what I wanted to say, working through the argument and the structure, writing and deleting and writing again. This year, much of that is already done. Surely, I will still revise the sermon, but the hours I would have spent actually writing it are suddenly available for something else.

Rav Lichtenstein addressed almost exactly this question in the same essay. He observed that the things we value most do not necessarily occupy the greatest number of hours in our day. We have obligations: We have to sleep and to work, and we have families and responsibilities. The more revealing question is what happens to the time that remains. It is there, he writes, that “the question of what is primary and what is secondary comes to the fore.”

Of course, I know full well that these extra hours will not actually remain empty. There are plenty of other things to do. I have classes to prepare, programs to plan, people to meet with, and other projects that require my attention. The sermon getting written early does not suddenly give me an extra two weeks of vacation.

But the fact that there is plenty to fill the time is precisely what makes Rav Lichtenstein’s point so relevant. Usually, the competition for our time is not between something important and something obviously trivial. That is the difficulty: there is no shortage of worthwhile things to do. The question is which of them I want to make room for. For those six hours at the dealership, I did not really have to make that choice. One thing had protected space, and I discovered how much could be accomplished when everything else was kept at bay. Now the challenge is to not let the time that has opened up be claimed by whatever comes next, but to give some thought to what deserves that space.

Ultimately, that is part of the point of עשה תורתך קבע. Counterintuitively, the things we care about most are often the very things we need to make time for deliberately.