Seminar Day 4: A Day of Rest (Shabbat)

Every week needs a day of rest. I get very few days like that back at MIT - days where I just do absolutely nothing and just relax - so it felt out of the ordinary for me to do nothing productive the morning of Shabbat.

Janice and I woke up around 9am and grabbed a bite at the hotel's buffet breakfast (freeflow shakshuka!). Then, I grabbed a two of the only books in English from the bookshelf and read them by the pool: "24 Essential Lessons for Investment Success" and "Learning to Let Go".

You know those wooden puzzles where you have to try and fit the four pieces into the square or to untangle the ring from the jumble of strings? I was never good at them growing up, but I loved doing them. The hotel set up a spread of them right by the pool, and Eileen and I knocked out six of them. Unheard of. Maybe that's what happens when you give your brain a real rest.

Post-lunch, I practiced some Zumba routines in our hotel room and did some abs-on-bed exercise with Janice which doesn't do us much good but we felt like we needed to do some form of physical exercise after yet another buffet meal.

Around 5pm, we toured the Nof Ginosar kibbutz next to our hotel, and in the evening, we attended a private concert by Ammon Abutbul. He and his band were fantastic performers, and he prefaced each song with a story of why he wrote the song. By the end of the show, we were all up and dancing and clapping our hands.