When a friend invited my family for Shabbat dinner, I noticed a highly unusual item on the table. Alongside the delicious food and beautiful dishes, was a live walkie-talkie placed close to the father.

My friend’s husband is a volunteer for Hatzalah, a Jewish volunteer ambulance service that provides emergency pre-hospital care. As a paramedic, he is on call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, providing life-saving assistance. The Torah permits (actually, commands) us to break the laws of Shabbat to save lives.

My friend told me that her husband often gets called in the middle of the night, occasionally, a few times a night. Sometimes, just as he is falling into a deep sleep, he’ll need to jump out of bed again. As the only paramedic in the area, he averages two to three calls every Shabbat.

Though her husband has a full-time job and is the father of a busy household of many children, including a toddler, he still finds time and energy for this holy work. My friend (who also works) and her children are incredibly proud of him. The kids speak passionately about his activities, even though it means that their father might leave a family celebration; they understand that each of them has to pitch in more to help.) The family understands the precious mitzvah of saving lives and knows that their encouragement and support enables him to do it.

In this week’s Torah portion, Joseph’s brothers sell him as a slave. While deliberating what to do with him, the brothers decide to throw him into a pit. “The pit was empty; there was no water in it.”1

If the pit was empty, isn’t it obvious that there was no water in it? The Talmud learns from this unusual wording that although there was no water in the pit, there were scorpions inside.2

The Chassidic masters comment on this passage: The mind and heart of man are never empty. If there is no life-nourishing “water,” there are “snakes and scorpions in it.”

In our lives, we need to be busy with something meaningful. Our minds and hearts are not empty vacuums; they will quickly fill. “Water” refers to Torah and its nourishing teachings. If our minds are occupied with Torah teachings—and our hearts and schedules are jam-packed with good deeds—there won’t be any space for negativity to creep in.

Not all of us need to be like my incredibly selfless friend, on call day and night saving lives. But as I left my neighbor’s home, I realized that despite how busy we all think we are, how much fuller our schedules can actually become.

Let’s find something positive that we feel passionate about and let’s work on filling up our days (to the brim!) with meaningful acts.