GOOGLE YOUR PESAH

Have you ever taken a mental health day?  Mental health days are days during which you skip whatever it is you are supposed to do, and do whatever it is your little ole’ heart desires.  It is a day when submission to the tyranny of your daily routine will do no one any good—not your clients or customers, not your superiors or co-workers, not any member of your family, and above all, not you.  When the drudgery of what some call “the daily grind” feels stifling or overwhelming, that is the perfect day for a mental health day.  Most people, so entrapped in the routine of daily life, are unaware of the mental health day’s dividends or profits.  And they are the poorer for it.  They ought to learn from a leading tech company in our own day:  GOOGLE.

At GOOGLE, employees are allowed 20% free time to do whatever they would like, as long as it is tangentially connected to company productivity.  This may sound like a direct attack on the American work ethic, but GOOGLE, mindful that creative minds need to dream, scheme, and envision, expect their employees to break their routines and indulge in something totally different, believing as it does that the dreamers will inherit the earth.   Does it work?  Guess where the idea for Gmail was conceived:  20% time.  The future belongs to the creative.

The Jewish people are master routine smashers.  We smash routines through sacred time, that is, allowing Yom Tov or a festive day to remove us from the work place, the school, or whatever the flavor of our daily grind, in order to do something wholly other—living out the myths of our people, pondering the values we cherish, examining our lives as individuals and as part of a collective, and thereby thrusting our potential to evolve into high gear.  Many an employee or boss, educator or student might object to so many sacred days off as literally counter-productive.  The truth may prove just the opposite.

If one were to religiously observe all the Shabbatot and Y’mei Tov  (plural of Yom Tov) that our tradition asks us to observe, we would be removing ourselves from the daily grind about 18% of a year, less than GOOGLE’s 20% but more than 3M’s 15%, which started in the 1940’s.  It was during 3M employee Art Fry’s 15% that he came up with a simple idea that revolutionized our lives: the post-it note.  So imagine what the Jewish people could do with their 18%.    We would have time to reflect, ponder deep truths, critique, self-analyze, face difficult realities and consider solutions to profound problems.  Our creativity as Jews is a reflection of a divine attribute—the power to create—but as we all know, the Creator ceased from such creativity on the seventh day. I suppose even God needs 20% time (actually 1/7 is about 14% or 2 x 7, a sacred Jewish number and the number of days needed to create the universe).  

It may seem like a lot to ask people to take a day off from work or skip school for a Yom Tov.  But as some wonder how they could afford it, I wonder how they cannot afford it.  Our tradition teaches us how to live a mental health life.   You might want to start slow and take just one of the Y’mei Tov off.  Thus does the Lord your God deliver you from the House of Routine, which is another name for Egypt, which is the land from which God wishes to rescue us at this time of year, and actually,  each and every day of our lives.  So this year break habit and routine.  Stay home.  Exercise your creative potential.  Experience an exodus out of your own Egypt.