opinion
BY ANDREW SILOW-CARROLL
I hadn’t heard of “quiet quitting” until
about 10 minutes ago. Since then
every major news outlet has done a story
on this purported trend, defined as a
movement among office workers to draw
firmer work-life boundaries by doing less
work. It means closing your laptop at 5 p.m.

when your cubicle-mate is staying late
to finish a project. It means turning off
notifications on your phone so you can’t
check your work emails after hours. It
can mean doing the bare minimum and
still hanging onto your job.

On a grander scale, it means cooling
your hottest ambitions in favor of a saner
work-life balance.

Of course, to a certain kind of devotee
of the attention economy, this sounds
like nothing less than slacking off. “Quiet
quitting isn’t just about quitting on a job,
it’s a step toward quitting on life,” huffed Arianna
Huffington in a LinkedIn post. The Fox News host
Tomi Lahren said it’s just a euphemism for being
“LAZY” (she added an expletive).

I don’t have a dog in this fight, since I am not a
“quiet quitter.” (I am more a “person without any
hobbies or little kids, who if he closes his laptop at
5 p.m. doesn’t know what to do with himself.”) But I
understand the impulse. Technology and corporate
culture conspire to blur the lines between work and
office. The demise of unions has shifted the work-
place power balance to employers. For those who
could work at home, the pandemic obliterated the
boundaries between on and off hours.

“Quitting” is a terrible way to describe what is
really doing your job, no more and no less. It only
feels like “quitting” to a culture that demands that
you sacrifice private time to your employer or
career. This peculiarly American “ethic” shows up,
for instance, in vacations: Americans get on aver-
age 10 fewer vacation days a year than Europeans
because, unlike the European Union, the United
States does not federally mandate paid vacation
or holidays.

Just reading a New York Times article about
how eight of the 10 largest private U.S. employ-
ers are using tracking software to monitor their
employees made me feel guilty and anxious —
even though I was reading the article as part of
my job.

16 SEPTEMBER 1, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
If quiet quitting were actually slacking, it would
run afoul of Jewish law.

“Jewish employees are obligated to work at
full capacity during their work hours and not to
‘steal time’ from their employers,” writes Rabbi Jill
Jacobs in a responsa — legal opinion — called
“Work, Workers and the Jewish Owner,” written
for the Conservative movement in 2008. And
yet this warning aside, Jewish law is much more
concerned with employers who take advantage of
employees rather than the other way around.

Jacobs — now the executive director of T’ruah,
the rabbinic human rights group — describes
nine principles of workplace justice in the Torah,
and nearly all are addressed to the employer.

These include treating workers with “dignity and
respect” and paying them a living wage and on
time. “The ideal worker-employer relationship should
be one of trusted partnership,” she writes, “in
which each party looks out for the well-being of
the other, and in which the two parties consider
themselves to be working together for the perfec-
tion of the divine world.”
This is not exactly what we now know as the
“Protestant work ethic.” The rabbis of the Talmud
did not tie hard work and economic success to
divine salvation. No doubt, they understand that
people need to and should work for a living. “In
traditional sources, work is often regarded as nec-
essary, and certainly better than idleness
(which can lead to sin),” according to a help-
ful article from My Jewish Learning.

And yet, because the study of Torah
is considered the ideal use of one’s time
(assuming you are a man, anyway) the
rabbis were clearly wary of occupations
and ambitions that demanded too much
of a worker. In Pirkei Avot, the collection
of ethical sayings from the Mishnah, Rabbi
Meir says, “Minimize business and engage
in Torah.” The rabbis, My Jewish Learning
explains, “were clearly worried that exces-
sive pursuit of material well-being would
distract from higher pursuits.”
The artist Jenny Odell’s 2019 manifesto
about quitting the “attention economy,”
“How to Do Nothing,” similarly rejects “a
frame of reference in which value is deter-
mined by productivity, the strength of one’s
career, and individual entrepreneurship.”
Easier said than done, however. Her anti-
dote — to “stand apart,” to embrace “soli-
tude, observation, and simple conviviality”
— is perhaps more feasible if you are an artist
rather than an office-worker, let alone a factory
worker, home health aide or Amazon warehouse
runner. (She spends a lot of time birdwatching and
retreating to mountain cabins.)
To her credit, Odell quotes Samuel Gompers,
the Jewish-British immigrant and labor leader who
championed the eight-hour workday as far back
as 1886. In an address asking “What Does Labor
Want?”, Gompers answered by quoting Psalms: “It
wants the earth and the fullness thereof.”
What most people want, I suspect, is simply
more control over their time and mind-space, and
to keep work from leaking into their private lives
— and maybe vice-versa. They want to do work
that matters, and the private time to decompress,
reconnect and take care of stuff.

It’s telling that there is no commandment in
Torah to work, but there are plenty to rest.

Shabbat is a literal day of rest, but it is also a mind-
set. It strictly defines profane productivity, in order
to carve out space and time for the sacred. This
Jewish attitude toward work and rest is not about
quitting, but it is about occasional quiet. JE
Andrew Silow-Carroll is editor-in-chief of the New
York Jewish Week and senior editor of the Jewish
Telegraphic Agency. He previously served as
JTA’s editor in chief and as editor-in-chief and CEO
of the New Jersey Jewish News.

PHOTO BY HEIDE BENSER/GETTY IMAGES
‘Quiet Quitting,’ the Sudden Trend
in Work, Sounds Sort of … Jewish?
(Hear Me Out.)