A palace in time

Abraham Joshua Heschel was born in Warsaw in 1907, into a long line of Hasidic rabbis. He left Warsaw just weeks before the German invasion in 1939, and reached America in 1940. His mother and the sisters who stayed behind were killed in the Holocaust.

In America he became one of the best-known Jewish thinkers of his century, and in 1965 he marched alongside Martin Luther King Jr. at Selma. In 1951 he published a short book called The Sabbath. In it, he described Shabbat not as a day off but as a sanctuary built out of time: "a palace in time".

Most of the week, Heschel wrote, we are busy with things: making them, getting them, fixing them. Shabbat sets aside a stretch of time when you stop producing, and simply are.

Overwhelm and overwork often come with the feeling that rest has to be earned, once everything is done. It never is all done. A palace in time turns that round: the rest comes first, and it is protected, like an appointment you would not cancel.

It doesn't have to be a whole day. An evening, a morning, an hour without screens or tasks can be a small palace of its own. What matters is the boundary, and keeping it.

• Christianity

  Many Christians keep Sunday as a day of rest, drawing on the same commandment to keep the Sabbath.

• Psychology

  Research on "psychological detachment" finds that mentally switching off from work in your free time is linked to better wellbeing and less exhaustion.

Think about the week ahead, and where a small, protected block of rest could fit.

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You're overwhelmed and plan to rest "once everything is done". What would a palace in time suggest?