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“Come, let us sing joyously to the Lord;
Let us shout for joy to the rock of our salvation.”
With these words every Friday night, Jews welcome Shabbat, the Sabbath – day of rest and delight. What is Shabbat? The Bible tells us that for six days God created the world and on the seventh day He rested. So we were instructed that for six days we too should labour to create, and on the seventh day we should rest. Why, though, does the Bible include rest in the scheme of creation and set aside a day in every week to celebrate it? Does an all-powerful God need to rest? And if we sometimes need to relax, can we be said to be imitating God?
Perhaps the simplest answer is this. All of nature is creative, but only God and humanity create consciously for a purpose. So that for us, unlike the plant or animal kingdoms, creation is not a process of ceaseless activity. It involves moments of contemplation when we reflect on why we act. We need time for thinking as well as for doing. So the Sabbath is holy time, meaning time set apart, time out from the relentless pressures of activity: a day dedicated to thinking about the purpose of what we do.
As we pause to contemplate, we see that the natural world is not just an infinite collection of atoms endlessly colliding in random ways. Seen through the eyes of science that may be all there is. But heard through the ears of faith, it too has a purpose. The universe sings a song of praise to its Creator. The mere fact that it exists, testifies to the One who spoke and brought it into existence, endowing it with majesty and meaning.
One of the Psalms we say on the Sabbath gives voice to this “song of the earth”:
“The heavens declare the glory of God;
The skies proclaim the work of His hands.
Day pours forth speech unto day,
Night imparts knowledge to night.
There is no speech or language
Where their voice is not heard.
Their voice goes out through all the earth,
Their words to the ends of the world.”
•
The landscape of Shabbat is vast: creation and our purpose in it. And yet for most Jews, myself included, the mood of the day is intimate. It is a time in which we celebrate family and children, the home, and just being together.
Imagine the experience of coming home on Friday afternoon. The week has flown by in a rush of activity. You are exhausted. And there, in all its simplicity and splendour is the Sabbath table: candles radiating the light that symbolises shalom bayit, peace in the home; wine, representing blessing and joy; and the two loaves of bread, recalling the double portion of manna that fell for the Israelites in the wilderness so that they would not have to gather food on the seventh day.
Seeing that table you know that until tomorrow evening you will step into another world, one where there are no pressures to work or compete, no distractions or interruptions, just time to be together with family and friends.
So, after the Friday evening service, we bless our children. Jewish husbands say to their wives that lovely passage of praise from the book of Proverbs, “A wife of noble character who can find? She is worth far more than rubies.” And after we have said the blessings over the wine and bread, we take turns to speak about the weekly Bible reading, and we sing zemirot, family songs in praise of God.
Relationships take time, and Shabbat is when we give them time – to listen to one another, praise each other, share in a meal, sing together, and sense the blessedness of one another’s company. Adam and Eve, said the rabbis, were spared one day in the Garden of Eden before they were exiled into the world of toil. That day was Shabbat. And for those who observe it Shabbat becomes a way back into Eden, paradise temporarily regained.
Peace in the home is where world peace begins, so that for Jewish mystics the seventh day was a kind of cosmic wedding and the Sabbath itself was the bride. And in our Friday evening prayers, as we finish Psalm 29 with its promise of peace, we sing the mystical song, Lekha dodi:
“Come my beloved to meet the bride.
Together let us welcome the Sabbath.”
•
The great Hassidic master, Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev, was once looking out of his window watching the crowds of people rushing as they went about their business. He leaned out and asked one of them, “Why are you rushing?” The man replied, “I’m running to work to make a living.” “Are you so sure,” asked the rabbi, “that your livelihood is running away from you and you have to rush to catch it up. Perhaps it’s running toward you, and all you have to do is stand still and let it catch up with you.”
I understand what the rabbi meant. We can sometimes work so hard that we forget why we work at all. We don’t live in order to labour. We labour in order to live. And the Sabbath is the day we stand still and just live, and let all the blessings we have accumulated catch up with us.
The Sabbath was and remains a revolutionary idea. Many ancient religions had their holy days. But none had a day on which it was forbidden to work. The Greeks and Romans were frankly perplexed. Seneca said it was because Jews were idle that they devoted a seventh of their time to rest. Rabbinic tradition says that when the Hebrew Bible was first translated into Greek, the translators changed a sentence to make it comprehensible. Instead of “On the seventh day God finished the work He had made,” the translators wrote “On the sixth day….” It is as if they knew that the Greeks could understand that in six days God made the universe, but not that on the seventh He made rest – that rest itself is a creation. But the rabbis knew otherwise. “After six days, what did the universe lack? It lacked rest. So when the seventh day came, rest came and the universe was complete.” Rest is the creation which allows us to enjoy all other creations. Just as clear space surrounds a page or frames a picture, so clear time is the frame in which we set our work, giving it the dignity of art.
The Sabbath has been part of Judaism from the beginning, one of the first of the biblical commands. In the three thousand years of its history the world of work has been transformed from labour to industry to technology. But Shabbat has renewed its meaning in each generation. For my grandparents it meant rest from sheer physical exhaustion. For my contemporaries it means release from psychological fatigue, from stress and the pressures to compete and win. Shabbat today is a world in which there are no phones or faxes, no urgent messages, no deadlines. It remains an oasis of serenity, the still centre at the heart of time.
•
Shabbat is more than family time. It is collective time. Even those who have been too busy to come to the synagogue during the week do so on Shabbat, joining others in prayer and listening with them to the weekly Bible reading. If the synagogue is the centre of community space, Shabbat is the centre of community time.
I used to be the rabbi of a synagogue in the centre of London. It was near many hotels, so that on Shabbat our congregation would not merely be local. We would be joined by visitors from across the world. There would be Jews from Texas and Australia, from India and Gibraltar and South America, many from Israel, some from Eastern Europe. Each week, as I said the Friday afternoon prayer just before the holiness of the day began, I used to say with special devotion the phrase, “Blessed are You, O Lord, who gathers together the dispersed of His people Israel.” Only two things draw Jews together in such a way: the land of Israel and Shabbat, one a place, the other a time. I used to marvel at this strange congregation of people who dressed and spoke so differently, converging from so many parts of the world on this place at this time, never having met before, many never having been here before, yet instinctively belonging: for they were fellow citizens of the world of Shabbat, at home in its rhythms and words and melodies. Shabbat turns strangers into friends.
We would pray together, and then after the service we would make Kiddush (Sanctification) together over wine and fishballs and cake, for much of Judaism is about turning physical pleasures into spiritual pleasures: “Taste and see that the Lord is good.” Then we and other members of the congregation would invite the visitors back to our homes for a meal. Since the days of Abraham, who sat at the entrance of his tent looking for passers-by to whom to offer hospitality, we have known that a home must be open, and friends and strangers invited in. “Welcoming visitors,” said the rabbis, “is greater than receiving the divine presence.”
Shabbat is not private time, but shared time, a time for sharing, not owning. I discovered, when we moved from the suburbs to the heart of London, that the places of densest population can also be the loneliest, that in the blocks of flats surrounded by traffic and crowds and noise there were all too many people living alone. Shabbat brought us together and redeemed us from our isolation. It was time without walls.
•
Not working on the seventh day is more than relaxing and meeting. The Hebrew Bible sees the Sabbath as the education of a people in two fundamental truths.
Today we would probably call the first environmental. The Sabbath reminds us that the universe is created – meaning that ultimately it belongs to God and we are merely its guardians. Adam was placed in the Garden to “serve and protect it,” and so are we. One day in seven we must renounce our mastery over nature and the animals, and see the earth not as something to be manipulated and exploited, but as a thing of independent dignity and beauty. It too is entitled to its rest and protection. More powerfully than any tutorial or documentary, the Sabbath makes us aware of the limits of human striving. It is a day, if you like, of ecological consciousness.
But it is also a day of history and politics. The Bible tells us to rest because of the exodus from Egypt and liberation from slavery. It is a time of freedom, and the greatest freedom is the freedom to be masters of our own time. On Shabbat we may not work, meaning that one day in seven we are no one’s servant except God’s. Nor may we force anyone to work for us. Even our servants should be able to rest the way we do.
Tyrannies make people slaves by making them forget the taste of freedom. But no one who observes the Sabbath can ever forget what it is to be free. Jews know more than most what it is to have spent long centuries in homelessness and persecution. Yet every week, for a day, however poor they were, they gathered their possessions and celebrated like royalty. The Sabbath was their political education, a regular reminder of liberty.
•
The Jewish mystics tell the story of the rabbi who once asked his son, “Where does God live?” The child could not understand the question. Where does God live? Where does He not live? “Surely,” said the child, “He fills the heavens and the earth?” “No,” said the rabbi. “God lives wherever we let Him in.” Perhaps that is the religious secret of the Sabbath. It is the day when we cast off our own devices and desires and let God in.
For centuries philosophers and scientists argued over the existence of God, as if it were a matter of speculation or hypothesis that could be proved or disproved. What they held in common was the idea that if God existed, it should be obvious to everyone. But it was the prophet Elijah who discovered that God was not in the fire or the hurricane or the earthquake but in the still small voice. To hear God we have to learn to listen, and to listen we need to create a kind of silence in our soul.
During the week our lives are filled with noise: radio and television, the pulse and press of daily events, the hectic sound of secular time. But stand in the streets of Jerusalem on the Sabbath and you can hear the silence. In it I have sensed the sheer wonder of existence and the mystery at the heart of all living things. Which is why the greatest command of Judaism is not to prove or know or believe, but simply Shema Yisrael, “Hear,” or better still, “Listen, O Israel. The Lord our God is One.”
The Sabbath is not just a day of leisure and relaxation. It is holy time. We are used to the idea of holy places and holy people. But the first thing the Bible calls holy is not a place or a person. It is a day: “And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy” – as if to say that God has given us one precious gift, time itself, that fleeting span of years which makes up a human life. The Sabbath is our moment of eternity in the midst of time. Within the cycle of the week it creates a delicate rhythm of action and reflection, making and enjoying, running and standing still. Without that pause to experience family, community and God we risk making the journey while missing the view.
Jewish thinkers have called the Sabbath many things: a day of light and joy, a sanctuary in time, a period in which we feel as if we have been given an “extra soul.” The prophet Isaiah said simply: “You shall call the Sabbath a delight.” A delight it is to all those who enter its world.
