College students like to sleep. Everyone in higher ed knows about the old stereotype of the lazy college student who won’t schedule a class before 11am because it will interfere with his/her sleep. Last semester one of my profs suggested that we schedule a make-up class for 10pm on a Wednesday, because, “you guys don’t even wake up until 8pm.” A friend recently informed me that he usually goes to sleep around 3 or 4am, wakes up for class at 9, then takes several short naps throughout the day to make it through. And that’s not all that uncommon, I don’t think. In high school I usually went to bed anywhere between 11pm and 1am, and got up at 6:30 for school every week day. Now I go to sleep no earlier than 1 on any given night, and drag myself out of bed for my 10:30 morning class. But over the summer while working at Jew Camp, I went to be around midnight or 1 and got up at 7:30 to wake up my campers, no problem. What is it about college that makes us so darn shleepy? A super-duper unhealthy lifestyle is a likely candidate. Combine the partying, bad food, navigating a stressful social environment, mad amounts of school work, ready availability of drugs and alcohol, and the demands of co-currics from trombone to climate justice activism that the average college student confronts on a weekly basis, and you’ve got yourself one heck of a Saturday (or Tuesday) afternoon nap.
So, on one distant but inevitable day, each one of us young scholars will don the mortarboard and head off into the real world (or grad school). And shortly after that fateful day, another day will come when we will have to get up and go to work, most likely by 9am. And mom or dad won’t be there to yell “up and at ’em, boy” every few minutes until we lumber downstairs for a bowl of Basic 4 and some OJ before sprinting for the bus as it passes our house (I had a very idyllic childhood). And that’s a scary thought. I might have to rig some kind of bullhorn/alarm-clock system to ensure that my blissful sleep (or as I prefer, the diminutive ‘shleep’) comes to an abrupt but irreparable end.
An alternative to this depressing scenario might be found in…you guessed it: the Jewish tradition. Observant yids the world over get up with the sunrise every morning to daven Shacris to Hashem in the words of some observant folk I met last week. A number of the prayers in the Shachrit (Morning) prayer service make explicit reference to aspects to the waking and the beauty of the morning, e.g. Birkot HaShachar (the morning blessings) and Modeh Ani. I hardly ever get up on my own to daven Shachrit, but the times I have have led to sweet days. To be honest the practice of laying tefillin freaks me out a little bit, but the prayers of the Shachrit service are among the most beautiful in our tradition, in my opinion. And memories of the sound of Modeh Ani, Birkot HaShachar, Shema etc. put to guitar music from daily (fun-datory) Shachrit services during my many blissful summers at Jew Camp have certainly established a positive association for me with the morning prayers. Because, let’s face it, the early morning is a pretty sweet time to be awake, especially after a solid night’s shleep.
