The
Value of Sabbath
July
26, 2021
Keeping sabbath
is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the Jewish faith and of God’s
Jewish people. It is said that the Jews kept the sabbath, and the sabbath kept
the Jews. Along with keeping kosher keeping the sabbath is one of the Torah
laws that many Jews at least attempt to obey. We find the commandment about the
sabbath very early in the Hebrew Bible, the Christian Old Testament. It is one
of the Ten Commandments. We read:
Remember the sabbath day and keep it holy.
Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath
to the Lord your God; you shall
not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your
livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and
all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and
consecrated it. Exodus 20:8-11.
Given the patriarchal nature of
ancient Hebrew culture we must assume that this command was directed
specifically to the men. It is odd therefore that the list here of who shall
not work on the sabbath doesn’t include the man’s wife, but never mind. This passage
from the Ten Commandments states what the priests of ancient Israel considered
to be a foundational law for the Jewish people. Jews have thought the same
thing ever since.[1]
The notion of a
sabbath day set aside for rest, prayer, and worship began with the Jews, but it
didn’t end there. The other two major monotheistic religions have adopted the
idea of a sabbath day and adapted it to their own needs and purposes. Christianity
adopted it first. The Jewish sabbath runs from sundown Friday to sundown
Saturday, though we usually just say that Saturday is the Jewish sabbath. The
Christian sabbath is Sunday because that is the day when Jesus rose from the
grave. It became the primary day when Christians gather for communal worship. Islam
also adopted the Jewish custom of observing a sabbath day once a week. Islam’s
sabbath day is Friday. The people gather on that day for communal prayer.
Although in most Christian countries this is no longer true, I remember a time
when Sunday as sabbath was reflected in community practice. Most stores were closed.
It was illegal to sell alcohol on Sunday. Today, perhaps sadly, most Christians
see Sunday not so much as sabbath but as the day we go to church if we go to
church at all, which unfortunately most of us don’t. Or in the fall we think of
it as the day when we watch NFL football. I suppose watching football could a
kind of a sabbath, but it certainly was not what Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam had in mind when they began to practice it.
The place where sabbath
is most strictly observed is Israel. There is a broad range of commitment to
observing the sabbath among Jews. Many Jews, in this country probably most
Jews, identify themselves as Jews but have little or nothing to do with the
Jewish faith. Most of them it seems, or at least the Jewish people I have
known, pay no attention at all to the commandment to keep the sabbath. In
Israel on the other hand conservative Jews keep the sabbath quite strictly.
They make the Israeli state and society observe the sabbath too. I’ve never
been to Israel, but I understand that the country largely shuts down from
sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. I have heard stories of some very
conservative Jews keeping the sabbath so
strictly that they won’t even flip a light switch on the sabbath because that
constitutes work. I hear tell that some Jews will even hire non-Jews to do that
sort of thing for them on the sabbath. I personally find observing the sabbath
that strictly to be not only unnecessary but actually a bit silly, though far
be it from me to criticize another person’s faith.
The degree to
which it was considered necessary to observe the sabbath by refraining from
work was an issue in Jesus’ day too. The Pharisees and the Sadducees insisted
on very strict observance of the sabbath.[2]
Jesus had a different view of the matter. The tension between the Pharisees and
Jesus over the sabbath appears early in the oldest gospel we have, the Gospel
of Mark. At Mark 2:23-28 we read that on a sabbath Jesus’ disciples plucked
grain, I suppose so they would have something to eat. The Pharisees say to
Jesus, “Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the sabbath?” In reply
Jesus refers to a story reported at 1 Samuel 21:1-6 in which David ate “the bread
of the Presence” which it was lawful only for the priests to eat. David gave
some of it to his companions too. Then Jesus says, “The sabbath was made for
humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath, so the Son of Man is lord even of
the sabbath.” Jesus commenting on the sabbath appears in other gospels as well.
In Matthew Jesus responds to an objection to his working on the sabbath day by
saying, “Suppose one of you has only one sheep and it falls into a pit on the
sabbath; will you not lay hold of it and lift it out?” Matthew 21:11. At Luke
14:5 he makes the same point using a child and an ox as the one who fall not
into a pit but into a well. These are of course rhetorical questions, for the
answer even from a strict Pharisee would certainly be yes. Jesus never let a
strict, literalist reading of the law of the sabbath (or any other Torah law
for that matter) stop him from doing good even if doing so appeared to violate
one of those laws.
So why do all
three major monotheistic religions designate a particular day as sabbath? Is
there something we can learn from them about the value of time in which we
intentionally don’t do any work? I think that there is. I certainly had it
drummed into my head in seminary that there is. Our instructors seemed to tell
us every chance they got, “Take your sabbath time!” Because many of us were on
our way to becoming Christian church pastors that didn’t mean take it on Sunday
necessarily. We could take it some other day, but we sure were told to take it.
Why? Why is
sabbath important? It’s important because the human spirit does not thrive if
it never has a break from work, a break from the pressures of everyday life and
the stress that invariably affects us as we go through our usual routines and
patterns of behavior. The human spirit does not thrive when it has no time set
aside for communion with spirit however a person may understand the spiritual
dimension of existence. For people of faith that communion with spirit most
often takes the form of prayer and worship. For both people of faith and people
of no religious faith it may take the form of communion with nature, with the
exquisite beauty of God’s creation that we can find anywhere if we’ll just look
for it.
Sabbath day is a
particularly appropriate day to engage in some regular spiritual practice. The
world’s religious traditions offer us a huge range of such spiritual practices.
Everyone should be able to find at least one of them that they find helpful.
They range from sitting quietly in stillness to physical prayer like walking
the labyrinth. Some involve words, others only silence. It really doesn’t
matter what you do with your sabbath time as long as you refrain from your
usual work. You can spend sabbath time alone or with other people. All that
really matters is that you practice sabbath and do it regularly.
I know it’s not
easy for those of us not used to doing it. We seminarians and pastors sometimes
confess to one another that we’re really quite lousy at keeping our sabbath
time. That unfortunate fact, however, does not diminish the spiritual value of
keeping it. So give it a try. You may be surprised by how much you gain from
it. And for heaven’s sake don’t let some law about sabbath time keep you from
doing good for others on the sabbath. Jesus didn’t. We mustn’t either.
[1] There’s
an interesting chronology problem here. The story that contains this
commandment is set early in the Exodus as the people are encamped at the base
of Mount Sinai. We are to understand that the event the story recounts took place
a very, very long time ago. Scholars tell us that if the Exodus happened at all
it would have happened some time around 1200 BCE. But the commandment refers to
the creation story of Genesis 1:1 to 2:3. Scholars date the writing of that
story to the late sixth or early fifth century BCE when the Hebrew people
returned to Judah after their enforced exile in Babylon. Thus the seven days of
creation story wasn’t written until many centuries after the time when this
story is set. We have here evidence of how the Torah was put together by Hebrew
priests after the Babylonian exile and how they projected things from their
time back into the time when their story is set.
[2]
Both of these were schools of Judaism They both saw observing the law of Moses,
especially the Holiness Code in Leviticus, as the heart of the Jewish faith.
The difference between them was that the Pharisees believed in a resurrection
of the dead at the end time and the Sadducees did not.
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