Kurt Vonnegut once said: “I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.”
He wasn’t being lazy. He was making a case for presence. For gathering. For the kind of time that doesn’t produce anything.
The Hebrew word for synagogue isn’t “house of prayer.” It’s beit knesset, house of gathering. The prayer is almost (but not quite) secondary. What social stuff that happens before and after the service: the catching up, the whisky, the life cycle celebrations folded into an ordinary Saturday … that’s an essential component of the activity.
We’ve built an entire productivity culture around the idea that time only counts if something comes out of it: A deliverable. An outcome. A metric.
But there’s another kind of time. The kind where you sit with people you only see once a week, ask how things are going, and genuinely wait for the answer.
That time isn’t wasted – it might be the most important kind there is.
