Q.2 How do you understand/connect with Shabbat? What is its function in your life? How can we make our Shabbat / the Shabbat dinner experience more meaningful?
Rav Baruch Frydman-Kohl
Beth Tzedec Congregation
Toronto, ON
Shabbat: Gift and Governance
Some years ago, the Wall Street Journal ran an article about how some New York financial workers and lawyers protect themselves from the brutal schedules and pressures they face: they become Sabbath observers. Not in the ritual sense, but with an awareness of the Jewish tradition. Some attend shul. Others play tennis. But they make it clear that they don’t engage in commercial activity of Shabbat.
“Rarely do we experience an obligation that is also a gift.” (Yossi Abramowitz and Rabbi Susan Silverman). But Shabbat is both a responsibility and an opportunity, an obligation and an occasion, a form of governance and a generous gift.
On Shabbat, we are commanded to cease the activities that usually define our lives and shape the world. We are commanded to leave behind the construction of the material, physical world for a day and to create what my teacher called “a palace in time”.
The Torah links Shabbat to two core events- the birth of the cosmos and the formation of the nation of Israel. On a universal level, Shabbat is a reminder of Creation, of the formation of life and of the cessation of creative activity by God. On a particular level, Shabbat recalls the liberation of our ancestors from Egypt, the freedom to control our own lives, and the opportunity to spend time with God.
Shabbat is connected to the environmental ideal of allowing the world to be, enabling us to take the time to walk, smell the flowers, turn off the switch, learn and relax. Shabbat is also seen as connected to an ideal of justice, “remember that you were slave in the land of Egypt and the Eternal your God freed you from there with a strong hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Eternal has commanded you to observe the Shabbat day”. In the Book of Shemot, the Torah speaks of Shabbat in the Ten Words, when detailing the cycle of the calendar, at the conclusion of the directions to construct the Wilderness Sanctuary and prior to commencing the building of the Mishkan. On this day, we, our children, and our workers shall rest from labour.
Delia Lloyd, a writer based in London, England, blogs for the Huffington Post:
A month ago, I committed myself to testing out a new personal resolution: I would no longer work on Saturdays. I defined work quite broadly for this purpose. It encompassed anything electronic (e.g. email, Facebook, Twitter, RSS feeds) as well as conducting interviews and, of course, writing. And because I’m more of an abstainer than a moderator, I gave these things up for the entire day, not just for a few hours.
I promised that after one month, I’d touch base to let you know how my attempt to celebrate a secular sabbath was going and whether I thought it was really doable. And I’m pleased to report that it was not only doable, it also gave me a huge happiness boost, in ways that I both did and did not expect. That’s not to say it was easy. There was not a Saturday that I wasn’t tempted to do at least a bit of work. But there also wasn’t a Saturday that I wasn’t glad that I had decided not to.
So here are five things I gained from taking Saturdays off:
1. I relaxed. My main goal in taking Saturdays off was to bring a few of my favorite things (cue Julie Andrews) back into my life: specifically, reading The New Yorker and going to yoga. …And now it’s part of my (new and improved!) Saturday routine.
2. I was more focused with my children. If you’ve ever attended a parenting seminar, one of the first things they’ll tell you is that if you really want to have quality time with your kids, you need to stop multi-tasking. … in the last month or so, I’ve actually sat down and focused on my kids for hours at a clip without feeling the need to simultaneously (fill in the blank): do dishes/check my email/scan the newspaper/etc. One day, my son and I actually took out the chemistry set that he’d gotten for Hanukkah … and — gasp — actually used it. And the more I focused on the kids and didn’t try to get 12 other things done simultaneously, the more relaxed I was with them.
3. I re-connected with old friends. One of the big changes that has come with taking Saturdays off is that I’m now back in touch with old friends. … Back when I was still living in the States, I used to call my friends during my daily 45 minute commute home from work in the car. [But overseas and] over time, I just started calling my friends less and less. Until now. Now that I’ve given myself leave not to use spare time on Saturdays to jump on the computer, I can usually find 30 minutes somewhere in the day to call a friend back in America. And it’s been really great to re-connect.
4. I went shopping. For myself. … I am not a natural shopper. And so, even when I desperately need something… I will always opt to get some work done, rather than go out and shop. … In the past month, I’ve purchased some running shoes, a new jacket, some earrings, even a colorful scarf to brighten up this dreary London winter.
5. I’m more productive. … taking Saturdays off has also helped my productivity. … mow I think about Saturdays as “my time” — a chance to re-charge those proverbial batteries. And then, when I do sit down on Sunday morning to tackle that cluttered in-box, I actually have more energy. (Sabbath Saturday: 5 Things I Gained By Not Working On Saturdays February 2, 2010)
From a traditional Jewish perspective, shopping or doing chem projects with a child may not be within the framework of Shabbat permitted activities, but Delia Lloyd may be on to something.
In traditional Judaism, Shabbat is understood as having two aspects: (1) zakhor- remember – a gift and opportunity to grow our souls and our family life, and (2) shamor- observe – a limitation on our activities to create the space needed to develop the first. Think of them as the two parts of breathing – in order to inhale fresh air, we must exhale to make space in our lungs for the new breath.
We are given Shabbat as a gift. In the Ten Words, asseret hadibrot, Shabbat is the only ritual mitzvah that is presented. This is best understood in the prelude to the Sinai covenant when we are told of a special relationship between God and the people of Israel, “for I treasure you … and you shall be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation”. Shabbat is a blessing which involves an obligation and responsibility.
In the Wall Street Journal, Mollie Ziegler Hemingway reviewed two books by non-Jews pointing to the neglect of the Sabbath in our culture and the corrosive impact of such neglect on human life.
Of all the gifts Jews gave the world, that of a weekly day of rest is certainly one to be cherished. And yet the Sabbath is now marked more by its neglect than its keeping. … The so-called blue laws that were a part of American culture–closing down bars and preventing the sale of liquor on Sunday–were commonplace well into the 20th century.
But the Sabbath today is at odds with commercial culture. To generalize shamelessly from personal experience: My brother-in-law, who manages a national retail store in Colorado, works on Sundays, following church. He was shocked recently to find out he is now required to open the store on Easter Sunday. Easter used to be the one Sunday each year when retail stores closed. No longer.
What happened? It is hard to say. … our religious practices are more and more isolated from the habits of the broader culture. … We live now on two tracks, a secular and a religious one, shuttling between them all too easily. Craig Harline writes that “Sundays changed when the world changed,” Stopping farming in the Middle Ages was easy. But to close restaurants, shut up amusement parks or clear the airwaves when Americans with money were trying to spend it that day was impossible.
The flip side to the prosperity we enjoy is that we have lost our day of rest for another day of consumption. The pace of commerce and technology provide unheard of options for ignoring family, religion and rest–not just on the Sabbath but every day of the week.
Christopher Ringwald would like to see the Sabbath restored to one track–if not a strictly religious one, then one not actively secular. Taking a day of rest protects us from ourselves, he writes, from “our urge to always be doing, improving, earning, getting, spending, having, consuming–all the ways we hurry on toward death.” (“The Decline of the Sabbath: Less praying, more working and playing”, Mollie Ziegler Hemingway, Wall Street Journal, June 15, 2007)
When the people of Israel are instructed to build a Wilderness Sanctuary for worship, they are twice told of the importance of the project and twice reminded: Akh…But, as important as this construction job is, stop working to observe the Shabbat.
Melakhah, the labour prohibited on Shabbat, is defined by the rabbis of Mishnah and Talmud as related to 39 types of activity that were involved in the construction of that Wilderness sanctuary, the Mishkan. These activities fall into seven areas: growing and preparing food, producing and preparing cloth and garments, writing and working with leather, building shelter, kindling fire, doing something that completes a task, and transporting/carrying from one area to another.
Historically, Shabbat was a day when we stepped away from the cruel world and spent time with God. Our world now is not so punishing – at least for us in North America – but it is still a demanding one. People who have any executive or professional role feel on-call 24/7. The demands of, the BlackBerry, the I-phone and the e-mails never seem to cease.
More people are thinking again about Shabbat. In fact, a new book will be appearing this month by a woman who is a regular writer for the NY Times. In the article that gave rise to The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of time, Judith Shulevitz wrote of her experience reacquiring Shabbat.
About a decade ago I developed a full-blown weekend disorder …. Perhaps because I am Jewish, it came on Friday nights. My mood would darken until, by Saturday afternoon, I’d be unresponsive and morose. My normal routine, which involved brunch with friends and swapping tales of misadventure in the relentless quest for romance and professional success, made me feel impossibly restless. I started spending Saturdays by myself. After a while I got lonely and did something that, as a teenager profoundly put off by her religious education, I could never have imagined wanting to do. I began dropping in on a nearby synagogue.
… I sat in the back … and discovered that I had no interest in praying, which I hardly remembered how to do. What I wanted to do was listen to the hymns, which offered the uncanny comfort of songs heard in childhood.
It was only much later, after I joined the synagogue and changed my life in a million other unforeseen ways, that I developed a theory about my condition. … In the Darwinian world of the New York 20-something, everything — even socializing, reading or exercising — felt like work or the pursuit of work by other means. … Workaholism … has become the norm, and the Sabbath, the one day in seven dedicated to rest by divine command, has become the holiday Americans are most likely never to take.
…. The eclipse of the Sabbath is just one small part of the larger erosion of social time, with its former generally agreed-upon rhythms of labor and repose. ”After hours” has become a strictly personal concept, since the 24-hour convenience store, gas station, pharmacy, supermarket, movie theater, diner, factory and bar all allow us to work, shop, dine and be entertained at any time of day or night. We greet each shift of an activity from weekday to evening or weekend as proof of American cultural superiority… Ours is a society that pegs status to overachievement; we can’t help admiring workaholics. Let me argue, instead, on behalf of an institution that has kept workaholism in reasonable check for thousands of years.
Most people mistakenly believe that all you have to do to stop working is not work. The inventors of the Sabbath understood that it was a much more complicated undertaking. You cannot downshift casually and easily, the way you might slip into bed at the end of a long day. As the Cat in the Hat says, ”It is fun to have fun but you have to know how.” This is why the Puritan and Jewish Sabbaths were so exactingly intentional, requiring extensive advance preparation — at the very least a scrubbed house, a full larder and a bath. The rules did not exist to torture the faithful. They were meant to communicate the insight that interrupting the ceaseless round of striving requires a surprisingly strenuous act of will, one that has to be bolstered by habit as well as by social sanction.
Take the Puritan Sunday. It would be excruciating to us, and yet the restrictions were not pointless. They made of the day something rare and otherworldly….. ”Sweet to the Pilgrims and to their descendants was the hush of their calm Saturday night and their still, tranquil Sabbath,” wrote the 19th-century historian Alice Morse Earle, … ”No work, no play, no idle strolling was known; no sign of human life or motion was seen except the necessary care of the patient cattle and other dumb beasts, the orderly and quiet going to and from the meeting, and at the nooning, a visit to the churchyard to stand by the side of the silent dead.” Anyone who has experienced the eerie serenity of the ultra-Orthodox sections of Jerusalem or Brooklyn on Saturdays would be in a position to conjure a Puritan Sunday.
…. So counterintuitive is the idea of organized nonproductivity, given the force and universality of the human urge to make things, that you can’t believe anyone ever managed to lift his head from his workbench or plow long enough to think of it. To the first-century Stoic philosopher Seneca, the Sabbath was absurd, a way for Rome’s backward Jewish subjects to waste ”almost a seventh of their life in inactivity.”
The Israelite Sabbath institutionalized an astonishing, hitherto undreamed-of notion: that every single creature has the right to rest, not just the rich and the privileged. Covered under the Fourth Commandment are women, slaves, strangers and, improbably, animals. The verse in Deuteronomy that elaborates on this aspect of the Sabbath repeats, twice, that slaves were not to work, as if to drive home what must have been very hard to understand in the ancient world. The Jews were meant to perceive the Sabbath not only as a way to honor God but also as the central vehicle of their liberation theology, a weekly reminder of their escape from their servitude in Egypt.
In other words, we have the Sabbath to thank for labor legislation and for our belief that it is wrong for employers to drive their employees until they drop from exhaustion. So what do we do, today, with this remarkable heritage…?
We relax on the run and, in rare bursts of free time, we recreate. We choose from a dizzying array of leisure options and pursue them with an exemplary degree of professionalism and perfectionism. We rush our children from activity to activity, their days a blur of tight connections.
And yet … few elective activities will ever rise to a status higher than work in our minds, and therefore cannot be relied upon to counterbalance our neurotic drive to achieve. Most of us will jettison plans to go skiing if a deadline looms near. We will assign a high priority to a non-work-related hobby only if we have committed to it in some public manner, as we do when we join a volleyball team or a choir…
And not even our group leisure activities can do for us what Sabbath rituals could once be counted on to do. Religious rituals do not exist simply to promote togetherness. They’re theater. They are designed to convey to us a certain story about who we are without our even quite noticing that they are doing so. (One defining feature of religious rituals, in fact, is that we often perform them for years before we come to understand what they mean; this is why ministers and rabbis are famously unsympathetic when congregants complain that worship services or holiday rites feel meaningless.) The story told by the Sabbath is that of creation: we rest because God rested on the seventh day. What leads from God to humankind is the notion of imitatio Dei: the imitation of God. In other words, we rest in order to honor the divine in us, to remind ourselves that there is more to us than just what we do during the week.
Talk of God may disturb the secular, so they might prefer to frame the Sabbath in the more neutral context of aesthetics. The Sabbath provides two things essential to anyone who wishes to lift himself out of the banality of mercantile culture: time to contemplate and distance from everyday demands. The Sabbath is to the week what the line break is to poetic language. It is the silence that forces you to return to what came before to find its meaning.
After joining that synagogue in Brooklyn, I began to incorporate into my life the most elemental rudiments of a traditional Jewish Sabbath: lighting the candles and eating at home on Friday night; going to religious services on Saturday morning; sleeping or reading or going to a museum in the afternoon. Orthodox Jews will scoff when they read of my subminimal level of observance; my secular friends think I’ve become a fanatic. Sticking to these few rituals, however, is the hardest and least unconscious thing I’ve ever done. I fail to keep the Sabbath more than I succeed, … by myself, rather than in a group or family setting. I didn’t know how else to attain the self-possession that eluded me, the sense of owing nothing to anybody except perhaps God. The conventional weekend felt claustrophobic. Silent, solitary contemplation was not sustainable. The ceremonies performed by my ancestors for the past two millenniums had at least the virtue of having been previously tested and found to be effective.
Do I think everyone else should observe a Sabbath? I believe it would be good for them, and even better for me, since the more widespread the ritual, the more likely I am to observe it. It is much easier to keep the Sabbath, for instance, when your family does, too, though getting children to agree to do anything their friends don’t do may prove insurmountable. (The greatest benefit of this may be that it makes a habit of unstructured family intimacy, without which parents must resort to so-called quality time, which tends to leave everyone feeling self-conscious.)
…. If the Sabbath you choose to observe isn’t a religious one, you should nonetheless be religiously disciplined in your approach to it, observing it every week, not just when it’s convenient.
…. it seems arrogant to tell someone what keeping the Sabbath would do for him, because it’s impossible to know how a ritual will affect a person until he has performed it. ”Holy days, rituals, liturgies — all are like musical notations which, in themselves, cannot convey the nuances and textures of live performance,” the historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi has written.
…. I think of something two rabbis said. Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague, best known for his tales of the golem, pointed out that the story of Creation was written in such a way that each day, each new creation, is seen as a step toward a completion that occurred on the Sabbath. What was Creation’s climactic culmination? The act of stopping. Why should God have considered it so important to stop? Rabbi Elijah of Vilna put it this way: God stopped to show us that what we create becomes meaningful to us only once we stop creating it and start to think about why we did so. The implication is clear. We could let the world wind us up and set us to marching, like mechanical dolls that go and go until they fall over, because they don’t have a mechanism that allows them to pause. But that would make us less than human. We have to remember to stop because we have to stop to remember. (“Bring Back the Sabbath”, New York Times Magazine, Judith Shulevitz, March 2, 2003)
Perhaps the time has come for us to try once again to receive the gift of Shabbat along with its governing mitzvot. Ahad Haam once famously remarked, “More than the Jews preserved Shabbat, Shabbat preserved the Jews. Now the scale is global and universal. We all need Shabbat. It keeps us human.
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