Rabbi

Editor’s note: Hannah Brencher’s new book The Unplugged Hours is for all of us. We’re so distracted and overworked these days with constant connection to our computers, phones, and electronics and we need to embrace powering down, putting the phone away, and actually be present with those around us and especially with our Rabbi, Jesus. Enjoy this excerpt. 

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We are a follower-obsessed culture — that much is clear. We follow news headlines. We follow trends. We follow stocks in the market and the relationships of celebrities. We follow diets and we follow advice. We follow spiritual leaders and TV shows, weather reports and sports teams.

When Twitter and Tumblr emerged at the forefront of the social media landscape in the early 2000s, the notion of “friends” we’d grown used to through MySpace and Facebook shifted into “followers.”1

The world changed, and we changed with it. Suddenly, we became interested and engaged observers of the lives of people we didn’t know. We started consuming bits and pieces of one another’s lives — thoughts and opinions, workout routines and organization hacks. 

So many of us wake up following. We go to bed following. I know the morning routines of some people I’ve never met (which is both strange and sort of fun). I follow some cold cases so closely that being an armchair detective feels like it’s a second job. I follow parenting accounts and cooking accounts, and there are some people I genuinely love watching through a screen even though I’ve never met them in real life.

But more and more, I’ve started to wonder if Jesus knew when He declared, 

Come and follow Me,

that we would be here, two thousand years later, deeply obsessed with following one another so closely.

When the unplugged hours began, my faith was going through what I’d call a sifting process. As a writer, I care deeply about the words I use to describe things, and “sifting” feels right to put down on the page. The experience wasn’t abrupt or abrasive. It began as a yearning within me to go deeper. To examine things more closely — to strain out the noise and opinions I’d picked up over a decade of following Jesus and get back to the root of things.

I’d met dozens of different versions of Jesus over the years. There was the Jesus I met at the megachurches. The Jesus I heard about from that religious group. The Jesus of Instagram. The Jesus who showed up in the Catholic church, who was a starkly different Jesus than the One who appeared in the Episcopalian church nestled next to the brewery downtown. There was Pandemic Jesus. There was Election Jesus. There was N95-Masked Jesus, and there was Anti-Vaxxer Jesus. Jesus seemed a bit like Barbie — so many versions to choose from; scan the shelves until you find the one you want to take home.

And yet, if you had pressed me before the sifting started to occur, it would have been clear I was completely unaware of the nitty-gritty details of what Jesus did when He walked this earth. I knew the grand sweeping motions and the timeline of events, but I didn’t know the backstories, the cultural clues, the deep Jewish roots that shaped Him.

• I knew the rhythms and routines of certain influencers online more than I knew the waking, breathing life of the One I call Savior.

Perhaps this sifting sounds like a faith crisis, but I promise you it wasn’t. It was more like deciding to get to know a parent after many years of never asking them questions or bothering to know about the life they lived before you came along. It was the opposite of a crisis in so many ways — it was a stabilizing.

I dared to ask: Might we meet again, all these years later, and find a deeper level of intimacy?

This question blazed a path forward for me as I moved in closer to the Rabbi who once lived in a body on earth and walked, healed, and broke bread among His people. 

Jesus was a first-century rabbi who grew up in Galilee, a profoundly spiritual place. Galilean Jews held a deep reverence for the faith and memorized the Oral Torah, which was part of a collection of rabbinic teachings called the Talmud. Young men underwent a rigorous education process, and very few would get to the point where a rabbi would be their teacher. If selected, they would leave home and follow the rabbi everywhere, learning how he moved and spoke. They would be his little shadows.

When a rabbi selected a student to follow him, it’s believed there was a common blessing friends and family would extend to the student: “Hevei mitabek b’afar raglehem.” In English,

“May you be covered with the dust of your rabbi.”2

That was the hope — that the students would follow the rabbi so closely, so intently, that they would be covered in the dust kicked up by the rabbi’s sandals as they walked along the roadside together. A layer of dust coating their being. That’s how intimate we’re talking. When Jesus uttered the words, “Come, follow me,” it wasn’t a half-hearted invitation. It was always meant to be an all-day, every-day, whole-life kind of following.

In my own study, I scaled back on sermons and other people’s insights and focused on the Scriptures alone. I pitched my tent in the Gospels — the four accounts of Jesus’s life. I started reading at a slower pace, learning to lean in and notice the rhythms and routines of Jesus.

How He treated people.
His relationships.
The way He used his time.
His compassion and concern for strangers.
His attitude when things didn’t go smoothly.
The stories He emphasized and themes He wove throughout His teaching.
What He did with His spare time.
The small things He did on repeat.

There was so much to behold, and new observations came to the forefront all the time. I’d read a few lines from one of the Gospels and ask,

• “What can I notice today?”

It was my way of following closely — of daring to go beyond always looking for personal applications so I could instead be more curious about the text itself.

I noticed Jesus’s lack of hurry. I marveled at the way He took time, even in the most chaotic moments, to make individual people feel seen and known. I leaned in even closer.  Perhaps most striking was noticing the number of times Jesus exited the noise of the world and pressed into secret places. When it wasn’t convenient. When the timing didn’t seem right. One might say He had His own practice of unplugged hours — using precious time to go away in solitude to pray.

He often retreated at times when I might have said, “Now? Right now? Just when things are getting good? Just when the crowds want to press in? Now You want to get away from it all? This is Your moment!” The parts of me that still ache to be seen don’t understand His decision-making process. But still, He made the space. Even when things didn’t go according to plan, He fought to enter the stillness. 

It’s a hard prescription for those of us who have long correlated faith with doing. When I found faith a decade ago and put down roots within a church, I fell in love with all the moving and the shaking — all the ways the Bible felt like a Nike ad. I loved the parts about producing things. About running your race. About winning the prize and cutting off all hindrances. I loved knowing faith is something you do.

I was utterly entranced by the words of Isaiah: “Here I am, God. Send me.” I wanted to be God’s little soldier, not His child. For so long, my prayer was, “Use me, God.”

But then I started to realize that “use me” was the wrong  prayer entirely. If I think back to the people who’ve used me, those people had motives. They had an agenda. They didn’t value me — they wanted what I could offer them. And when I strip away the veneer, that’s not love; that’s a transaction.

I didn’t realize I was slowly losing intimacy with God because I was caught up in all the momentum, resisting the stillness — and the isolation I thought would come from that stillness — at all costs.

If Jesus needed to create space in His days to retreat and press into stillness, how much more do we need to do the same? And what might be waiting for us there?

1. Lauren O’Neill, “Goodbye to the Influencer Decade, and Thanks for Nothing,” Vice, December 12, 2019, https://www.vice.com/en/article/vb55wa/instagram-influencers-history-2010s.
2. John Mark Comer, “Practicing the Way,” November 5, 2021, in John Mark Comer Teachings, podcast, https://open.spotify.com/episode/1zHCuL4l1HsxTmoPKxPwk9?si=vxFCw1pXT5mHE2s9adZt4w&nd=1.
3. Blaise Pascal, quoted in Adam Wernick and Annie Minoff, “A New Study Found People Are Terrible at Sitting Alone with Their Thoughts. How about You?,” The World, July 19, 2014, https://theworld.org/stories/2014-07-19/new-study-found-people-are-terrible-sitting-alone-their-thoughts-how-about-you.

Excerpted with permission from The Unplugged Hours by Hannah Brencher, copyright Hannah Brencher. 

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Your Turn 

What would change if we started the morning saying out loud, “Lord, I want to be covered in Your dust, my Rabbi. I want to be that close”? Instead of doing, let’s pause and just follow Him, watch Him, read what He said and did, and notice… whatever the Holy Spirit points out to us! ~ Devotionals Daily