Then Charlie King began singing a song with the refrain, "What ever happened to the eight-hour day? When did they take it away? ... When did we give it away?"

And the audience roared with passion. Not nostalgia. This was our lives, not something from the past.

I was startled. Suddenly I saw that my own sense of overwork, of teetering on the edge of burnout, was not mine alone. Something was hovering in the air.

Juliet Schor of Harvard wrote a book about it: The Overworked Americans. She showed that the promise made to us 30 years ago - that the new computer technology would give us more leisure time - had been betrayed. Most Americans worked longer hours, under more tension, than they had one generation ago.

Other studies followed. Some of them pointed out the increase in temporary workers, part-time workers - suggesting that Schor was mistaken. But it has become clear that "underwork" and "overwork" are in fact closely related. Corporations that seek to keep workers "part-time" and "temporary" so as to pay them less and avoid providing medical or pension benefits drive workers into finding extra jobs, just to keep hanging on by their fingertips to a barely adequate income. The underwork breeds overwork.

And conversely, the overwork of some - 12-hour days, 60-hour weeks - reduces the numbers and the quality of jobs that are available to others. Overwork breeds disemployment.

Indeed, the overwork, overstress reality runs across class lines. From wealthy neurosurgeons to single mothers making minimum wages at fast-food stop-ins, tens of millions of Americans are overworked.

No.

Treating overwork as a private, personal life-choice and a sense of burnout as a result of internal confusion and incompetence is like - very like - saying that women who felt discomforted and disempowered, ill at ease, in the 1950s were simply choosing their lifestyle and their discomfort. Many of those women felt themselves to blame for their unease. For many, it took Betty Friedan to put a name to their lives, and to show that it was a systemic and political structure that was oppressing them. And that they could do something about it.

I think we are in much the same situation today. There is an economic and cultural system that is driving most Americans into overwork. There are deep human needs for rest and reflection, for family time and community time. That system is grinding those deep human needs under foot. And that system can be changed.

For all the traditions that take the Hebrew Scriptures seriously, there is a teaching: For the sake of remembering and taking to heart the grandeur of Creation and for the sake of freeing both ourselves from others' pharaonic power and others from our own oppression, we make "not-making": we celebrate Shabbat. (The word is usually translated into English as "Sabbath," but that is really mere transliteration; the word comes from the Hebrew verb for pausing, ceasing, calmly sitting.)

In Exodus 20: 8-11, the reason given for the Sabbath is to recall Creation; in Deuteronomy 5:12-15, it is to free all of us from slavery. In Jewish tradition, it is taught that these seemingly two separate meanings are in fact one. Meditate on them, and we can see them that way.

And we are taught not only the seventh-day Shabbat: there are also the seventh year and the seven-times-seven-plus-one year, the 50th year, the Jubilee (another mere transliteration, from "yovel": translator Everett Fox renders it as "Home-bringing"). (Lev. 25 and 26: 34-35, 43-45; Deut. 15: 1-18)

These year-long observances that the Bible calls "shabbat shabbaton," "Sabbath to the Sabbatical power," "deeply restful rest," are times of enacting social justice, and times of freeing the earth from human exploitation, and times of release from attachments and habits, addictions and idolatries.

Indeed, in these most radical socially revolutionary passages of Torah, the text never uses the word "tzedek" - justice - but instead the words "shmitah" and "dror," which mean "release." What Buddhists today call "non-attachment." The deepest root of social justice, according to these biblical passages, is the profoundly restful experience of abandoning control over others and over the earth. And conversely, the deepest meditation intended to free us from our egos cannot be experienced so long as we are egotistically bossing other human beings or the planet.

Not that the tradition of Shabbat taught this restfulness and utter non-attachment was the only path to walk. The tradition taught a rhythm, a spiral of Doing and Being in which the next stage of Doing was always to be higher, deeper, because a time of Being had preceded it. And in which we could bring a fuller, more whole self to the Being because we had Done more in the meantime. In which both Doing and Being were more holy because we had integrated them into a life-path.

Already in 1951, in the aftermath of those grotesque mockeries of triumphant Making - the Holocaust and Hiroshima - Abraham Joshua Heschel (who later marched alongside Martin Luther King against racism and the Vietnam War) wrote in The Sabbath: "To set apart one day a week for freedom, a day on which we would not use the instruments which have been so easily turned into weapons of destruction, a day for being with ourselves, a day of detachment from the vulgar, of independence of external obligations, a day on which we stop worshipping the idols of technical civilization, a day on which we use no money, ... on which [humanity] avows [its] independence of that which is the world's chief idol ... a day of armistice in the economic struggle with our fellow [humans] and the forces of nature - is there any institution that holds out a greater hope for [humanity's] progress than the Sabbath?"

Christianity, Islam, and Rabbinic Judaism all reinterpreted these biblical teachings in their own ways. But all of them, as well as Buddhism and perhaps all the world's other spiritual traditions, taught the necessity of periodically, rhythmically, calming one's self for inward reflection, for time to Love and time to Be.

You might think the labor movement would do something about it. After all, the eight-hour day that now seems lost to many of us was the result of labor struggles beginning in the 1880s: "Eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, eight hours for what we will!" Similar in meaning was the slogan of women Wobblies, garment workers who were members of the IWW, Industrial Workers of the World: "We want bread - and roses too!"

And there have indeed been some recent stirrings of interest in the American labor movement toward curtailing overtime - often in the hope of opening up more jobs for the disemployed. In Europe, especially in Germany, unions in several industries have won a 35-hour week. But in America, anxieties among workers about making more money in the short run have so far drowned out most of these wistful desires for more rest.

What would it mean for the different religious communities to undertake the effort that their own traditions teach?

Over the past year, a network of Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists, initially brought together by The Shalom Center, have been examining these questions. They have been developing a statement called "Free Time/ Free People," and circulating it among a broader group of religious leaders and activists. Over the next several months, the Free Time committee intends to bring the statement to public attention to encourage the religious and spiritual communities themselves to enrich their own offerings of "sabbath" rest and release in many forms, and to begin developing specific policy proposals that would carry these teachings into the world of economics and politics.

Reawaken in their own members the wisdom of restfulness, willingness to open more of their own time for Being and Loving, and the richness of prayer, meditation, chant, and ceremony that can make this real; and take action in the world of public policy to free more time for spiritual search, for family, and for community.

For the sake of this second sphere, there is every reason for the religious communities to reach out to the labor movement, the environmental movement, to groups that seek to nurture the family and "family values," to women's organizations.

Indeed The Shalom Center and the Free Time committee took part in the recent conference of the National Interfaith Committee for Workers' Rights, held in Los Angeles while the AFL-CIO met there as well.

The Free Time committee intends to urge American political, economic, and cultural leaders:

The creation of Free Time could be accomplished in many different ways. One of them, however, is profoundly and strategically important: making more time available for face-to-face neighborhood and community volunteer activism.

Such a beginning would free volunteers to put new effort into grass-roots democratic change and grass-roots communities and institutions, like our congregations themselves. It would make possible more grass-roots effort to achieve Free Time.