Is night time for sleep or for Torah?

by Raphael Morris

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On Shavuot, it is traditional to stay up all night studying Torah, a practice known as Tikkun Leil Shavuot. Maimonides wrote that although it is a mitzvah to study during both the day and the night, it is only at night that one acquires most of one’s wisdom.[1] According to Maimonides, one should spend one’s nights studying Torah, and not waste even a single night sleeping. One who studies Torah at night, he says, has a strand of favor extended over him during the day. Unfortunately for me, rabbinical school seems not to follow Maimonides here.

As I drag my weary bones out of bed each morning for my classes, I walk into school half-asleep, my mind far too foggy to acquire wisdom. As I rub my bleary eyes during morning prayers, the blessing[2] that credits God for removing sleep from the eyelids strikes me with an irony bordering on chutzpah. As if the weight of exhaustion each morning is not enough, I am expected to thank God for removing it?

Modeh ani[3] feels similarly audacious. Traditionally the first words uttered upon waking, the prayer thanks God for restoring one’s soul to one’s body. My mother once told me that her youth leader in Bnei Akiva once observed that most people start the day with a torrent of profanity, cursing the need to get out of bed. He suggested that it was better to start the day with a blessing.

Personally, I’m still partial to the torrent of profanity. But I’ll settle for a snooze button and five more minutes (and maybe five more after that). Thanking God is entirely off the table.

At night, however, I feel alert and awake. My mind races with far too many thoughts to settle down, and I often do much of my best work and study late at night, or even in the wee hours of the morning. Unless I’m sick, or severely sleep deprived, I almost always go to sleep well after midnight. It wasn’t until I was nearly 24 and had control over my schedule for the first time in my life that I realized that most people go to sleep because they are tired. It’s normally around 3 AM - at the earliest - by the time my brain begins to feel ready to wind down and call it a night. The night before I wrote this, I was up until nearly 6 AM, watching a fascinating YouTube video about various mammals.

Like Maimonides, it is only at night that I acquire most of my wisdom (zoology-related or otherwise).

However, Maimonides also wrote that one should sleep for eight hours, rise before dawn, and avoid sleeping during the day.[4] (Maimonides is not the first doctor who has given me this advice - though historically speaking, he may be the earliest.) But the contradiction has not gone unnoticed by traditional commentators.

Do we spend our nights in Torah study and avoid squandering them in sleep, ending up sleep deprived?[5] Or do we make sure to get a full eight hours, even if that leaves precious little time for studying Torah at night?

In fact, this machloket (rabbinical dispute) predates Maimonides. In the Talmud[6], Rav Yehuda asserts that night is created only for sleep. In contrast, Reish Lakish says that the moon[7] was created for study.[8] Rabbi Zeira claims that his teachings are sharp because he studied during the daytime. Rav Chisda stays up all night studying, and replies to his worried daughter with a statement to the effect of “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”

Is night for sleep, or for Torah? As usual, the answer is “yes”. Elu v’elu divrei Elohim Chaim - these and those are [both] the words of the Living God. Jewish tradition is nothing if not diverse. We contain multitudes.

As someone with Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome (DSPS)[9], I’m often simply unable to sleep at night. My ideal eight hours are from 4 AM to noon - and even if I am able to fall asleep before then, my sleep quality will be far poorer. I’m always going to feel groggy in the mornings. If I try to fall asleep before midnight, then, like King Achashverosh, “sleep eludes me”[10].

I also don’t want to be severely sleep deprived. Maybe Maimonides thought Torah scholars should push themselves beyond their physical limits. But like so many workaholics, Maimonides died early due to the “incessant travail” of his regimen[11]. Nor do I have any idea to worry my family and friends, like Rav Chisda did. Mindful of my physical, mental, and social health, I have no choice but to sleep during the day.

Alas, our society is not set up for this. As the earlier description of school mornings illustrates, I am often forced to make do with limited, poor-quality sleep during the week - and then try to catch it up during the weekend.

It need not be like this. DSPS could be the poster child for the Social Model of Disability. According to the Social Model, physical and psychological traits are not intrinsically disabling. Rather, they only become disabilities when society is structured in a way that makes it inaccessible to people with those traits. The basic Social Model is imperfect - it’s hard to argue that chronic pain and chronic fatigue are not inherently detrimental - but the core insight was a revolutionary paradigm shift in thinking about disability.

If I am disabled, that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s something wrong with me. Maybe there’s something wrong with a society that disables me.

DSPS perfectly exemplifies the Social Model of Disability. DSPS belongs to a group of disorders whose “major feature… is a misalignment between the patient’s sleep-wake pattern and the pattern that is desired or regarded as the social norm”[12]. There’s nothing essentially wrong with my sleep cycle - except that I live in a society that is inaccessible for me, and others like me.[13]

Strangely enough, social norms themselves may not line up with statistical averages. This is part of why the word “normal” is so insidious - it conflates social expectations with empirical prevalence. But there is no statistical rule that says that most people have to conform to a social norm on any given issue - and delayed sleep phase is a case in point.

More than half of adolescents have significantly later sleep cycles than most adults - and more importantly, than they are expected to by society.[14] Especially in the United States, where early high school start times have long been a social norm, this leads to frequent insufficient sleep and sleep of insufficient quality, which impacts mental health, wellbeing, and emotional regulation. The American Academy of Pediatrics and the Center for Disease Control have long urged high schools to move to later start times.[15] In the past few years, some school districts have finally started to heed this advice, with the Philadelphia School District moving start times to 9 AM in 2022.[16] But many schools still start far too early.

Under such conditions, most teenagers are disabled.

Understanding that we have built societies where most of a population is disabled is a vital - if sobering - realization. Disability activists have long pointed out that ability is a temporary status, and everyone lucky enough to avoid a premature death eventually becomes disabled. But what’s happening here isn’t just a reckoning with the frailty of the human body. It is hostile design: social norms diverging so wildly from the reality of an average person’s lived experience that disability isn’t just for minorities anymore.

It doesn’t just happen with teenage sleep cycles. And it’s intersectional. When economic pressures mean that more and more people suffer debilitating work-related stress, when unrealistic beauty standards mean that many or most women struggle to find clothes that fit well or are flattering, when office jobs and long commutes force people to remain sedentary for extended periods of time, when food deserts make malnutrition endemic - disability becomes pervasive.

It’s easy to think that the problem lies in harmful, overly narrow, or misaligned social norms. That if we could just fix the alignment, then disability would go back to the margins. But that approach isn’t just insulting to those of us who’ve lived our lives on the margins. It misses the point entirely.

The problem isn’t that our social norms are inaccessible. The problem is that any monolithic social norm is harmful, because humans are not a monolith.

I am an outspoken skeptic of Universal Design - the idea that good design is when products, environments, and systems should be accessible and usable to the greatest extent possible by the greatest number of people.[17] The fundamental problem with the idea of Universal Design is that it fails to recognise that diverse needs are often in conflict with one another. To take one common example, consider light levels. Some people need high light levels to see and navigate their environment, perhaps due to visual impairments. Other people find bright light overwhelming on a sensory level, or a migraine trigger. It may not be possible to set the lighting at a level that is accessible to everyone.

The solution to the problem of inaccessibility is not one universally accessible system, space, or product. It is a plurality of systems, none valued higher than the others, so that everyone in a diverse population can find something that serves their needs.

Elu v’elu divrei Elohim Chaim. These and those are the words of the Living God.

So too it is with sleep. Our best psychological research suggests that there is considerable natural variation among human sleep-wake patterns, also known as chronotypes.[18] Some people naturally wake up very early and are alert in the mornings. Others fit the schedule that our society expects of them. Still others - myself included - don’t get sleepy until around midnight.[19]

What’s more, it is theorized that this variation was an evolutionary advantage that helped our ancestors keep watch against predators. Having different chronotypes in a population ensures that some people will always be naturally alert while the others sleep. Researchers observing the hunter-gatherer Hadza people in Tanzania found that over a period of 20 days, there were only 18 minutes when all 22 of the experimental subjects were simultaneously asleep.[20] The diversity of chronotypes may well have been vital to our ancestors’ survival.

So is night for sleep or for Torah? Again, the answer is “yes”. Elu v’Elu. Rav Chisda and Reish Lakish can study all night. Rav Yehuda and Rabbi Zeira can sleep at night and study during the day. My early bird classmates can wake up early and enjoy davening shacharit (praying the morning prayers).

And on Shavuot, I get a taste of a world for me and mine - a world where the night time is for Torah study, and I can acquire wisdom by the light of the sickle moon before going home to sleep during the day.

[1] Mishneh Torah, Torah Study 3:13

[2] Siddur Edot HaMizrach, Preparatory Prayers, Morning Blessings 26

[3] Siddur Edot HaMizrach, Preparatory Prayers, Modeh Ani 4

[4] Mishneh Torah, Human Dispositions 4:4-5

[5] Pirkei Avot 6:6suggests that sleep deprivation is a necessary step on the path to Torah anyway

[6] Eruvin 65a

[7] Which some commentators take as a metonym for the night. Resh Lakish expresses a similar sentiment in Avodah Zarah 3b, which combined with the Eruvin passage seems to form the basis of Maimonides’ ruling.

[8] Generally understood to mean Torah study, and not study of the moon itself, although due to its importance in the Jewish calendar, the moon itself is a topic of extensive Jewish study. There is even a lunar crater, Abenezra, named after the renowned medieval Jewish commentator and astronomer Ibn Ezra.

[9] Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome, Cleveland Clinic. Oct. 13, 2023.

[10] Esther 6:1

[11] Baron, Salo. “Moses Maimonides,” in Great Jewish Personalities in Ancient and Medieval Time, ed. Simon Noveck, B’nai B’rith Department of Adult Jewish Education, 1959, p. 227.

[12] International Classification of Sleep Disorders, Revised, 2001.

[13] It’s worth noting that DSPS is very strongly comorbid with ADHD. According to the Cleveland Clinic, approximately 75% of people diagnosed with ADHD also have a condition affecting their circadian rhythm.

[14] See, for example, Bartel, Kate et al. Sleep and mental wellbeing: Exploring the links. Victorian Health Promotion Foundation, 2018 and Gariépy, Geneviève et al. ‘Teenage night owls or early birds? Chronotype and the mental health of adolescents.’ Journal of Sleep Research, 11 Jul. 2019

[15] Most US middle and high schools start the school day too early, CDC, 2015

[16] ‘Philly High Schools Pushing Start Times to 9 a.m.’, NBC10 Philadelphia, Mar. 17 2022.

[17] ‘About Universal Design,’ Centre for Excellence in Universal Design

[18] See Breus, Michael J, ‘The Four Chronotypes: Which One Are You?’, Psychology Today, 10 Apr. 2021 for one model, although the connections to personality traits are controversial.

[19] Though even in this group, I lie on an extreme.

[20] Samson et al. ‘Chronotype variation drives night-time sentinel-like behaviour in hunter-gatherers,’ Proc. Biol. Sci. 284 (1858) Jul. 12 2017.

Raphael Morris (he/they) is an AuDHD rabbinical student at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. He feels privileged to be part of an intellectual tradition where his preferred modes of cognition, learning, and communication are not just tolerated but actively valued. In his spare time, he enjoys wiki walking, Talmud, long rambling conversations and anything else tangential.