The Sabbatical Way of Living

As a committed daily reader of the JJ’s Roundtable, I was intrigued by a January 6 entry concerning the FIRE Movement (“Financial Independence, Retire Early”), which is catching “fire” among millennials. In a nutshell, the movement encourages young people to save and aggressively invest with the hope of retiring long before turning 65, perhaps as early as the mid-forties.

There is much that can be said about the pros and cons of retiring so early, but hearing about it reminded me of a Torah lesson I learned over 40 years ago, when I was in my early twenties. As part of my part-time job to help pay for law school, I met a man in his early thirties who was selling condominiums at a high rise in Santa Monica. He was talented at his job, a devout Christian who had been an NFL football player (for the New Orleans Saints when they were known as the Aints) before selling condos.

While chatting with him, I told him he could make such a fine living selling real estate for the rest of his working career. He knew I was Jewish, and he replied that his study of the Old Testament dictated how he handled his life in this regard.

I had no idea what he was talking about, so he explained, “Your Torah has a Sabbath — work six days and take the seventh day off. I work as hard as I can for those six days and I make sure I take full advantage of the seventh day of rest.” I knew what that was like.

But he then went on to talk about the Sabbatical in the Torah, which is fundamentally the same concept but applied to years. Work hard for six years and take the seventh year off. He told me he had decided to live his life that way.

The man told me he had decided to live his life like a Sabbatical — work six years and take the seventh off.

He explained further: the man stayed in the NFL for six years and then voluntarily retired. I had assumed he was injured, knowing that a six-year career in professional football is a long one, but, as he told me, he had planned all along to retire and take a seventh year of full rejuvenation and planning for his next six-year work period.

He further explained that when you know you will take a seventh year off, you do tons of planning and saving. What will you do for that seventh year? It’s not a two-week vacation. If you don’t do something that expands your horizons, then what’s the point? You also have to save money during the six years of work, probably for two years, as you cannot be certain what you will earn when you go back to work. About halfway through the Sabbatical year, the man would start thinking about what he would do next, using the year to focus his interest and intentions.

While on Sabbatical after his NFL career, the man knew he wanted to live near the beach, surf, sail and fish, so he picked Southern California. His love of the water and the beach directed him to pick as his “next career” something that would allow him to be close to it. He always enjoyed selling, so he found a job selling condos in Santa Monica.

He was halfway through the six years at this point, so I asked him what he was thinking of for his next Sabbatical. He told me he was considering moving to the mountains with his wife so that he could teach their kids the joys of fishing and hunting before they got too old. I was stunned, having never thought that way in my life.

And that is exactly what he did, after which his next working stint was starting a backcountry adventure business in Montana. I lost track of him after that and heard that he died of cancer a few years ago. I’m sure that if I had seen him as he was going through the final stages of his life, he would have told me how pleased he was that he had lived life so fully in the time God had allotted him. He would thank me, as a representative of the Jews, for providing the Sabbatical framework for his life.

Now, doesn’t the Sabbatical model seem to make for a more fulfilling life than “Financial Independence, Retire Early,” where you work like a dog so that you can retire at 50 and figure out what to do with the next 35 years? And we haven’t even mentioned the real FIRE that might occur — you’ve worked yourself to the bone for those 25 year or your post-work investment and planning didn’t work out too well, so that you run out of money at age 75 (25 years or more after retirement). And we haven’t even mentioned family, mortgages, college, etc.

Perhaps millennials should consider the Torah’s alternate method of a life well lived.

Avi Peretz has lived in Los Angeles since 1958. He is immediate past president of Temple Beth Am, Los Angeles.