There’s a quiet, countercultural lesson I keep having to learn-and relearn—as a rabbi, as a human being, and most of all as someone who loves people: Doing nothing is sometimes the most faithful, most courageous, most meaningful thing we can do.
Not nothing in the apathetic sense. Not checking out, not turning away, not giving up. I’m talking about a conscious kind of not-doing. A sacred pause. A decision to not react immediately. A practice of holding space. Of resisting the very natural, very loving impulse to fix.
This is a practice I struggle with more than I care to admit. I see someone in pain and I want to jump in. Offer a solution. Provide a plan. Say something comforting or wise. As a rabbi, people often look to me to do just that. And I want to show up for them. I want to help. But more and more, l’ve come to understand that the most loving thing we can do is not always to act—but to be with.
We live in a culture that worships productivity. We’re taught to measure our worth by how much we accomplish, how quickly we respond, how decisively we move forward. In meetings, in parenting, in pastoral care, even in prayer-we want results. We want clarity.
We want answers. Silence makes us squirm. Stillness feels like failure. And yet, both our Jewish tradition and the best of what we know from psychology and the spiritual life tell a very different story.
Stillness is not emptiness. Waiting is not weakness. Silence is not absence.
In fact, some of the holiest, most transformative moments in life happen precisely in the space between reaction and response. Viktor Frankl, the Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist, put it this way: “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. And in that response lies our growth and our freedom.”
That space-so often overlooked, so often rushed through—is where the sacred lives.
Carl Jung once said, “People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.” And I’ve come to believe that one of the ways we avoid our own souls-and other people’s—is by rushing to do instead of choosing to be.
Judaism, of course, understands this deeply. Our tradition has always taught that there is holiness in restraint. The very first thing we are commanded to do in the Torah, in the second chapter of Genesis, is not to do. God creates the world in six days-and on the seventh day, God rests. Not because God is tired. But because rest is part of the creation itself. And so we have Shabbat-our weekly training in sacred stillness.
Shabbat is not just about self-care or a 25-hour vacation. It’s about presence. It’s about unlearning the lie that we are only as valuable as what we produce. It’s about remembering that being is more foundational than doing. As Heschel wrote: “Six days a week we wrestle with the world; on the Sabbath, we care for the seed of eternity planted in the soul.”
On Shabbat, we stop working not because work is bad, but because the soul needs something else: stillness. Listening. Space.
The Talmud teaches, “Yeshiva shel talmidim marbeh chokhmah”- “The sitting of students increases wisdom” (Berakhot 6b). Not the arguing. Not the debating. The sitting. Just being present together. Holding the learning in community and in silence.
There is another teaching in Pirkei Avot—one you may know: “I have learned much from my teachers, more from my colleagues, but most from my students.” That line assumes a posture of humility. That wisdom doesn’t come from asserting, but from receiving. From waiting. From allowing the silence to speak.
And sometimes, silence really is the most powerful voice in the room.
Think of Moses, coming down from Sinai, seeing the Golden Calf. What does he do? At first-nothing. No speech. No rebuke. Just silence. And later, when Elijah flees into the wilderness, overwhelmed and afraid, he encounters wind, fire, and earthquake—-but God is not in any of them. God appears in a kol d’mamah dakah—a still, small voice. Or, as some translations render it: a sound of thin silence.
We often expect God to be loud. Obvious. Spectacular. But revelation doesn’t always arrive in lightning. Sometimes it whispers. And to hear it, we have to be quiet long enough, still enough, to notice.
In the world of Jewish mysticism, we find an even more profound expression of this idea: tzimtzum. The concept that in order for creation to exist, God had to withdraw to make space for something other than God. The first divine act was not presence, but absence.
Not speech, but silence. Not doing, but restraint.
That’s what made life possible.
And so maybe the challenge for us is to do the same. To create space. To let others speak.
To let emotions emerge without trying to shape them. To hold silence without rushing to fill it. To allow, not to fix. To be present, not to perform.
I think often of the Hasidic master Reb Simcha Bunim, who taught that every person should carry two slips of paper in their pockets. One reads: “For my sake, the world was created.” The other: “I am but dust and ashes.” The wisdom is knowing when to pull out which.
Maybe we need a third slip of paper. One that reads: “This moment doesn’t need me to act. It needs me to stay.”
This isn’t easy work. It doesn’t come naturally-not to me, and probably not to you. We’re trained to fill the silence. To fix the pain. To be useful. But often, love asks for something quieter. A gentler kind of courage. A deeper kind of strength.
So, yes, doing nothing is doing something. And in a world as noisy, reactive, and overstimulated as ours, it may be the most urgent thing we need to learn.
It may not feel heroic. It may feel like we’re failing. But as long as we stay present—and stay loving—we are not failing. We are practicing. We are learning. We are, in the most profound sense, doing holy work.
May we have the strength to wait. The courage to hold space. And the faith to trust that silence, too, can speak.
Shabbat Shalom
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