Why God and the Bible were right about your work schedule all along

Preponderance units of time are based on nature A day is one rotation of the Earth A month is the moon s orbit A year is the Earth s path around the sun But a week There s no natural explanation for it See the video at the top of this article That s why ancient cultures defined the week in vastly different means four days in West Africa in Egypt in China THE SECRETS OF A MEANINGFUL AND LIFELONG GRANDPARENT-GRANDCHILD BONDIn the s the Soviets tried to eliminate the seven-day week entirely first replacing it with a four-day week then a five to facilitate the struggle to eliminate religion They were at least right about the source The seven-day week comes straight from the Bible In Exodus God commands Six days you shall work and on the seventh you shall rest That short verse carries deep insight First it applies to everyone Second it treats work not as a necessity but as a value The Torah doesn t say work must be done but that you shall work The work itself matters regardless of the outcome This work doesn t need to be paid Volunteering and child-rearing certainly count as long as the activity is demanding consistent and productive The second insight can be seen in the life of Joseph the only person in the Bible called a success twice This happened once as a slave and once as a prisoner and all the time with God by his side whom he constantly cited even as he unlike his father Jacob and grandfather Abraham never spoke with God Still work must stop The seventh day Shabbat is not just a break It s a weekly reset a day to gather reflect and reconnect The Jewish tradition calls it a taste of Heaven on Earth Modern heritage though swings between extremes For majority of of the th century work was considered an unfortunate financial necessity to be escaped We see this in popular music such as Heigh Ho to and Taking Care of Business all songs about how work is meaningless drudgery MOVES TO BETTER MENTORING FOR LIFE AND CAREER A MULTITUDE OF POSITIVE BENEFITS Popular commercials in the s and ' s portrayed the ideal life as one of leisure playing polo loading fancy dogs into a car and diving off a yacht into the ocean Then around the year everything flipped Suddenly busyness became the new badge of honor A new locution entered the lexicon that people are crazy busy This strange expression became so commonplace that it became the quintessential humblebrag It even took on a shortened version for those who were too busy to say the whole four syllables that one s schedule is crazy Neither extreme works The leisure advocates need to understand what modern studies show time and again Happiness at work is key to happiness in life This is partially because we spend much of our time at work and it is hard to enjoy life if we dislike how we spend the greater part of our work hours Contemporary research has shown that we can enjoy and find meaning in any job as long as we frame it correctly This is called job crafting A Wharton review exposed that hospital custodians who job craft and viewed their work as part of healing patients were more fulfilled and more fruitful than those who saw it as menial labor The biblical Joseph would have been proud But that s not the whole story Numerous studies have located that there is a productivity ceiling The first research on this topic was done by the British Ministry of Munitions which established a committee in to assess the work that resulted in equipping the soldiers in the Great War They concluded that the British war effort required giving workers a Sabbath so that the workers would produce more The assessment in part declared that the evidence is conclusive that Sunday labor by depriving the worker of his weekly rest offers him no sufficient opportunity for recovering from fatigue Seven days labor only produces six days output and reductions in Sunday work have not involved any appreciable loss of output For more Lifestyle articles visit foxnews com lifestyleA century later John Pencavel a professor at Stanford analyzed the records using modern tools He determined that production correlated with work hours for the first hours a week The rate of production slowed for the hours to However there was no increase in output from hours to The Economist in reviewing Pencavel s work concluded That extra hours was a waste of time And so we now have the number of what we have termed the productivity ceiling It's hours a week And here s the amazing and maybe divine math A Sabbath observer can work hours a day for five days a week He can really only work half a day on the sixth as he requirements to prepare for Shabbat leaving him with a -hour work week So God was right The good life isn t all leisure or all work It s six days of meaningful work followed by a seventh day of sacred rest Mark Gerson's new book is God Was Right How Modern Social Science Proves the Torah Is True published by BenBella Books and distributed by Simon Schuster June This article is the second in a series 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