Just after I was hired at Facebook, my manager flew from Dublin to London to meet me for the first time. I had spent months in interviews and assessments to get there. It was a year or two after the IPO and getting in felt almost impossible. Now I was finally in, and I was nervous. This was my first real meeting with the person I would be working for. I had prepared for every kind of question: strategy, leadership, my biggest failure, my five-year plan.

He asked me a different question.

“Michal, what do you care about?”

I opened my mouth and, before I could second-guess myself, I heard myself say, “I care about this new thing in my life. I don’t even fully understand it yet. It’s called Shabbat.”

I was as surprised as he was. I was not raised observant; I grew up in a secular home in Tel Aviv where Judaism was about identity and history rather than candles and blessings. I had spent most of my life being one of those people who would have said, “Shabbat is beautiful, but it has nothing to do with my life. I run a team. I have three small children. I am dialed in to three time zones at once. I cannot log off for 25 hours.”

And yet, there I was, telling my new boss that this thing I barely understood was the thing I cared about most.

This week, for the first time in American history, a sitting president has invited everyone into that same conversation. The proclamation of Shabbat 250, from before sundown on Friday, May 15, to after nightfall on Saturday, May 16, asks you to step into the rhythm Jewish families have been keeping for thousands of years, in honor of the country’s 250th birthday.

I want to talk to the people I know best: the executives, the founders, the bankers, the engineers, the always-on, always-replying people. The people who, like me a decade ago, would politely smile at the idea of Shabbat and quietly think, not for me.

This is for you.

The Day I Started

I was 38. I had everything that is supposed to make a person feel whole: a husband I love, three young children, the career I had been clawing toward since we moved from Tel Aviv to London. But I was anxious all the time. I had tried therapy, meditation, yoga, every self-help book on the shelf. None of it touched the noise inside.

One Friday afternoon, I came home and did something small. I lit two candles in my kitchen. I did not say a blessing. I didn’t know one. I just sat and watched them burn.

The next Friday, I did it again.

Slowly, over months and then years, my husband, Yair, and I started introducing Shabbat into our home. First, just dinner together. Then no phones at the table. Then a few hours of being properly off. Then more. By the time our fourth child was born, she was born into a home where Shabbat was already part of the air we breathed.

What Boundaries Actually Do

I studied organizational sociology and psychodynamics. I have spent my whole career thinking about how groups, teams, and families function. Here is something we know clearly from that field: humans do not feel free in the absence of structure. We feel lost. A child without bedtime is not a liberated child. They are an exhausted, anxious child. An adult without an internal stop signal is not a liberated adult. They are a burnt-out one with no sense of where they end and their inbox begins.

The thing that surprised me about Shabbat is not that it is restful. It is that it is contained. It begins at a specific moment and it ends at a specific moment, and inside those 25 hours nothing is asked of me except presence. I cannot scroll. I cannot perform. I cannot achieve. I can only be, with my husband, with my children, with myself, with G‑d.

For someone who had built her identity on doing, this was terrifying. And then it was the most healing thing I have ever encountered. When I later wrote my book, What Would You Do If You Weren’t Afraid?, this was one of the questions I kept circling back to: what would we actually do, who would we actually be, if we were not afraid to be?

People often assume Shabbat is a list of things you cannot do. From the inside, it is the opposite. It is the one day a week the world is not allowed to ask anything of me. That is not a restriction. That is a gift, written into the design of creation by a G‑d Who, the Torah tells us, rested on the seventh day not because He was tired but because He was teaching us how to live.

Yair’s Phone

The hardest convert in our house was my husband.

Yair is an investment banker. His clients expect him to be reachable. Deals close on weekends. A delayed email can cost real money. When we first talked about turning off his phone for a full day, he was honest with me. It wasn’t FOMO. It was fear. “I am going to lose a deal.”

That was almost a decade ago. He has not lost one.

What he has noticed, and he says this far more often than I do, is that some of the deals he is most proud of closed because he was unreachable on Shabbat. A negotiation that was tense on Friday afternoon would soften over the weekend. A reply he was about to fire off in frustration never got sent, because he physically could not send it. By Saturday night the situation had moved on its own. The other side had cooled down. A better email could be written.

There is something the best dealmakers know: the most powerful move in a negotiation is often not to respond. To make space. To let the situation breathe.

Shabbat does that for you whether you want it to or not. It is, quite possibly, the oldest productivity hack in human history.

The Friday Night Table

By the time I moved from Facebook to TikTok, Shabbat was no longer a new thing in my life. It was an integral part of who I am. I was open about it, proud of it, and as a natural evolution of falling in love with this day of rest, I started inviting my colleagues over on Friday nights. People of all faiths and religions, people with no faith at all, people who had never sat at a Shabbat table in their lives.

Those evenings became the most meaningful of my life.

There is something that happens at a Shabbat table that does not happen in a meeting room or at a work dinner. The phones are away. The conversation slows down. People talk about their parents, their kids, the things they are afraid of, the things they are hoping for. We sing. We bless the children. We thank G‑d for the bread and the wine. And somewhere between the soup and the dessert, the colleagues become friends, and the friends become family.

What Shabbat 250 is Really Asking

You do not have to keep Shabbat the way I keep it, or the way my Chabad rabbi keeps it, to accept this invitation. You do not have to know the blessings.

You can start the way I started. Light candles on Friday before sundown. Sit at a table with people you love. Put your phone in a drawer. Eat slowly. Talk about something other than work. See what happens at hour three, hour seven, hour twelve. Notice the silence where the notifications used to be.

Ten years in, I sometimes say this and I mean it: I do not keep Shabbat; Shabbat keeps me. It keeps me grounded in a profession built on speed. It keeps me a wife and a mother and not just a job title. It keeps me connected to my grandmother, who lit candles in a village in Poland before the war, and to her grandmother before her, and to a chain of women I will never meet but who I am holding hands with every Friday at sundown.

America is 250 years old this year. Shabbat is much, much older. On May 15, the two will meet for one weekend.

Try it once. See what it gives back.

———

Michal Oshman is the bestselling author of What Would You Do If You Weren’t Afraid?, the CEO of Maximize Consultancy, and a LinkedIn Top Voice on leadership and high performance. She was previously Global Head of Company Culture at TikTok and led international leadership and team development at Facebook. She lives in London with her husband and four children.