In the part of the Jewish world I live in, we are approaching the third and final cycle of what are lovingly (well, maybe not entirely lovingly) referred to as “Three-Day Yontifs.”

An explanation: Since ancient times, Jewish communities outside the land of Israel have observed not one, but two days of yom tov–holidays on which work is prohibited–at the beginning and end of Passover, on Shavuot, during the beginning of Sukkot, and on Shemini Atzeret.

Why? Because the dates of the holidays are set according to the New Moon, and according to the understanding of the Rabbis of the Talmud, the New Moon had to be proclaimed by Sanhedrin (the Rabbinic High Court) after they received testimony from witnesses who had seen it. Once they had proclaimed the New Moon, the date of the month could be fixed, and messengers would be sent out to let everyone know, e.g. “Last Tuesday was the New Moon!”

But it could take some time for those messengers to reach their destinations, and in the meantime the Jews in Huppetzville might be wondering, “According to our calculations, the New Moon should have been on Tuesday–but it also could have been early Wednesday. So is Sukkot/Shavuot/Sukkot on Tuesday, or Wednesday?” Thus, it would seem, the custom arose of keeping two days of yom tov–to cover their bases. And even though at this point we have lived with a fixed calendar for longer than the Rabbis were in the proclamation business; and even though today such proclamations would be transmitted instantaneously via livestream and text messaging, many communities including my own still keep two days of yom tov.

(One last note: Rosh Hashanah is the one holiday that occurs on the New Moon itself, which means this uncertainty applies equally inside or outside the Land of Israel. Thus the custom arose to observe two days of Rosh Hashanah worldwide. And Yom Kippur, for reasons that should be obvious, is only one day all over the world–because who could fast for 50 hours?!)

All of this means that, in a year when the holidays start on Wednesday night, those of us who celebrate two days of yom tov (=yontif in Yiddish, which is a lot more fun to say) have Thursday and Friday–and then a Shabbat immediately afterwards: i.e. a “Three-Day Yontif.” And if that happens in the fall, it happens three times. For people like me, it means that fully ten out of the 30 days of the month of Tishrei this year are Shabbat or Yom Tov. That’s a lot of time with family, a lot of time in shul, a lot of time not at work and off screens and away from the news–and also a lot of meal planning, shopping, cooking, eating, and dishwashing.

Yet I find it can also generate an effect that’s something like a retreat, or a series of retreats. Three days of immersion–times three (plus Yom Kippur, which is its own immersive experience–the Talmud compares it to a mikveh). While as a younger person I kind of resented these three-day yontifs, as I’ve gotten older I’ve come to embrace them as a gift–an extended series of retreats that supports making the month of Tishrei a month of renewal.

One of the challenges of the three-day yontif phenomenon, though, is experiencing Shabbat as different. It isn’t a three-day Shabbos. Why? Perhaps the biggest distinction between Shabbat and Yom Tov is that on Yom Tov the halakha allows us to prepare food and cook it. While there’s plenty of preparation required, it’s not like Shabbat, on which everything has to be ready beforehand. So Yom Tov isn’t quite full rest. Shabbat is still unique.

That leads to a poetic aspect of this intensive Tishrei experience. After all this activity and this extended series of spiritual retreats, we arrive back at the beginning of the Torah–at the elemental materials of creation: making, forming, shaping, dividing, beholding, naming. And I experience that as an invitation to bring this awareness of Shabbat into everything we do: to be mindful of our words, which bear the power of creation and destruction; to be conscious of our actions, through which we can increase or reduce life, love, and compassion in the world; to be aware of our hearts, which can be a home for the divine presence if we simply attune them properly.

This year, we conclude the chagim and begin a new cycle of reading the Torah amidst war, violence, and profound worry. We need this last retreat as much as ever. So: Whether or not you observe a three-day yontif, I hope you can find an opportunity during this final holiday of the season and the Shabbat Bereshit that follows it to drink from the cups of yom tov and Shabbat, and to re-enter the world renewed from this long Tishrei retreat.

I was boarding an airplane recently when the man in front of me, who looked to be about 20 years my senior, turned and asked, “How long have you worn a kippah?” He was not wearing a kippah, so I was a little startled by this very direct question. But my mind picked up on other cues and quickly filled in a story that he was Jewish and was asking this question out of a sense of solidarity.

My oldest son, Jonah, was the first to introduce me to the contemporary idea of the “multiverse.” While the concept, and even the term, have been around for centuries (Wikipedia tells me William James used it in 1895), the notion has gained particular traction in today’s media. The TV show “Rick and Morty,” which Jonah loves, is built on the idea of “infinite timelines, infinite possibilities” in infinite universes that the scientist Rick has figured out how to travel between. There are the recent Spiderman movies, which feature a multiverse containing infinite varieties of Spider-people (and even a SpiderPig). Even if you’re not familiar with these more recent vintages, much science fiction writing about time machines is built on the notion of multiple possible timelines/storylines and the ability to alter history (see Star Trek, for example).

I speculate that one reason the concept seems so prevalent today has to do with the internet, which has opened up so many possible storylines. Jonah is 20 years old, meaning he has never really known a world without Google or YouTube or even social media. Don’t like the story? Then just create a new one and post it. A second reason might also be the calamitous storylines we seem to be on–climate change in particular–and the implicit promise that either we might somehow change them through accessing the multiverse or that, even if our world is headed in the wrong direction, there are other versions of us out there who are ok.

This last observation points up a kind of fulcrum on which the multiverse hinges: It can offer us an optimistic vision (“We can change the story!”) or a rather nihilistic coping mechanism (“We’re done for, but it’s okay because humanity in a parallel universe is living harmoniously on solar energy and fusion and eating plant-based food.”). Sitting on that see-saw can be exhausting, as one moves from optimism one moment to pessimism the next. Perhaps that’s where mindfulness practice comes in: to allow us to sit calmly at the fulcrum, neither dreaming about a hopeful future nor dreading a hopeless one, but just being present in the present with what’s here and real right now in our experience.

One of the striking things about Parashat Chayei Sarah is that a large chunk of it is devoted to telling and then retelling the same story, that of Abraham’s servant to find a wife for Isaac. (I wrote about this in my essay on Chayei Sarah in Eternal Questions.) The differences in the accounts of the omniscient narrator and the servant himself are not major; they don’t take place, as it were, on separate timelines. The differences are so imperceptible that the medieval commentators don’t make much of the story, even though it takes up a good deal of real estate in the Torah portion. But I think one of the lessons the Torah is teaching in repeating the story is that we, ourselves, are capable of telling different versions of the same story. We are capable of imagination. While, yes, we aim to see clearly the truth of what is happening, we simultaneously acknowledge that the truth can be experienced and told in multiple ways. Perhaps, that is to say, we already live in the multiverse.

For me, as for many, this Shabbat is going to begin and end an hour earlier than it did last week because we turned back the clocks. I have always found the effect of this clock change on my Shabbat experience to be striking. Through an act of collective consciousness, we have agreed that the sun now sets at 4:35 this week instead of 5:43 last week where I live in Skokie, and that changes the storyline of my day and even my week. Though the sun still rises and sets in more or less the same parts of the sky as it did a week ago, my relationship with the colors and rhythms of the natural world, not to mention with work and family schedules, is changed considerably. It’s jarring and a bit mysterious, a little thrilling and a little scary (and a little crazy-making: I’ve been waking up before 5 am all week).

Shabbat itself is, of course, an act of imagination: While the Rabbis maintain that Shabbat exists every seven days whether we observe it or not, our experience is that we have to collectively choose to make it for ourselves–or, perhaps, we have to allow ourselves to be chosen by Shabbat. (Yes, this calls to mind Ahad Ha-Am’s famous line: “More than the Jewish people has kept Shabbat, Shabbat has kept the Jewish people.”) We might think of Shabbat as a gift from the multiverse (which might itself be another name for the Infinite), telling us that there is a different way to live, a different way to be, than the way we experience the world the other six days of the week–and it doesn’t involve escaping to somewhere else or hoping for a superhero to save us, but is, instead, available to us right here, right now. With all the suffering we and so many others are enduring today, that is a gift I want to give myself, you, and everyone.