by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, September 21, 2003
The old story about Moses receiving the ten commandments from God on Mount Sinai is told in the book of Exodus, in what we call the Old Testament and what the Jewish faith knows as the Torah. The third of those commandments, as some of you might remember, is this: "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 God made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested on the seventh day; therefore, God blessed the Sabbath day and consecrated it."
The language is straightforward and emphatic: no one is supposed to work on the Sabbath. Later on in the same book of the Torah there are lots more elaborations on all of the commandments, mostly amounting to a longer list of what not to do. And in those sections, just to make things crystal clear, we're told that those who fail to honor the Sabbath by putting aside their work will actually be put to death: one sure way to force us to rest, I suppose. So at least in ancient Israel, the third commandment was taken with mortal seriousness.
But what does it mean? What does it mean to "remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy"? When I was growing up as a Catholic child, the commandment was always interpreted for us to mean we were supposed to go to Mass on Sundays. As far as I remember, that was the only thing we were supposed to do to honor the Sabbath. And because Mass was not very appealing to me, the notion of keeping the Sabbath in this form was kind of a dreary business.
Later on, when I started to learn about more rigid forms of Christian belief, I realized I didn't have a clue what 'dreary' really meant. Friends who were raised within the Salvation Army or other strict systems of belief told me that movies and television, dancing and parties and playing cards or other games, were all things banished from Sundays. That was how they were taught to honor the Sabbath and keep it holy. That made the day not only boring but fraught with danger: keeping the Sabbath was sort of like entering a state of high alert, rigid with awareness of the rules that would be broken with one misstep.
For Unitarian Universalists, as for many other people in our modern world, even the language of these ancient commandments feels a little foreign. We don't use the word 'Sabbath' very often, so it sounds like something that belongs to someone else. But as with so much of our religious vocabulary, if we throw out the language we risk losing the idea as well. So what would it mean to visit the land of Sabbath, to see whether even as tourists we might come across something we could take home with us, something that might change us or deepen us?
For me, that journey starts with listening to those who are at home in the Sabbath, which is why I read the book Abraham Joshua Heschel published in 1951 called The Sabbath. Heschel was raised in Europe, not only as a Hassidic Jew but as one of almost royal lineage, descended from a long line of rabbis who stretched back to the Baal Shem, the founder of Hassidism. Until he was overtaken by the Holocaust and escaped to this country in 1940, Heschel was immersed in the Hassidic community, in which life revolved around the Torah and, especially, around the Sabbath.
It's in listening to the voice of someone like this that we can begin to get a sense of what it could really mean to keep the Sabbath as a spiritual discipline. For Heschel, it had nothing at all to do with guilt and rules and prohibitions. It had to do with reclaiming the essence of life, by paying attention to time and the ways we live within time.
The Sabbath day is a time to rest, but not in order merely to catch our breath so we can start up the work week again. It is supposed to be a time of rest so we can pay attention to something more essential than our work: our lives themselves. We all know the ways in which our busyness, our constant activity, make us distracted and harried. The time whips past us, and when we notice it at all it's because we can't believe it's already eleven o'clock, or already September, or already the end of the year.
Heschel saw that kind of pace as soul-murder. He understood the Sabbath as a way to catch hold of the time of our lives, to stop ourselves in mid-stride (or mid-gallop) and pay attention to a different sort of flow, down below the constant activity. He greeted it with joy and honor. It was the anchor around which all the other days revolved. It was a beloved and longed-for guest, something he wrote about almost as a living presence. He told a story about one ancient rabbi, Hanina the Great, who at the sunset of Sabbath eve would clothe himself in beautiful robes, burst forth in a dance and exclaim to his friends and family, "Come, let us go out to welcome the Queen Sabbath!"
Heschel was a mystic, someone for whom a sense of the holy was always present; but he turned his face toward the holy most consciously through celebration of the Sabbath. He wrote, "Out of the days through which we fight and from whose ugliness we ache, we look to the Sabbath as our homeland, as our source and destination. It is a day in which we abandon our plebian pursuits and reclaim our authentic state, in which we may partake of a blessedness in which we are what we are….All week we may ponder and worry whether we are rich or poor, whether we succeed or fail in our occupations, whether we accomplish or fall short of our goals. But who could feel distressed when gazing at glimpses of eternity -- except to feel startled at the vanity of being so distressed?"
The Sabbath was a way to regain perspective, and in that sense is akin to every spiritual discipline. Regular practices of prayer and meditation or journal-writing, yoga and mindful walking and the other spiritual disciplines we find or create for ourselves, are all ways of shifting our attention. They help us calm our minds and hearts and bring us Sabbath moments.
What I wonder, when I read the wisdom of someone like Heschel, is why we have been willing to settle for only Sabbath moments. To imagine a full day of Sabbath seems an extraordinary luxury -- a full twenty-four hour span that for the observant Jew begins at sundown Friday and continues until dusk on Saturday. And yet it's one that I find myself yearning for, sometimes aching for, and I wonder whether it is as much out of our reach as we think it is.
To spend a whole day in meditation or in focused contemplation probably is out of our reach unless we go on retreat. But that isn't what most of us need every week. What we need instead is a way to live into our lives more deeply, to tug ourselves back from the rush with enough regularity, enough rhythm, that we can know we're living our lives the way we want to live them.
That's the gift Heschel and others in his tradition received from their Sabbath. It wasn't a day to shut down activity and stare at the wall. It wasn't a day to stop all motion, but a day to break out of the regular motions of life enough to pay attention. So meals were prepared and the home was cleaned and made ready all ahead of time, so that the quiet of the home and the pleasure of the meal could be pure enjoyment. You were not allowed to drive, but you could walk; you were not allowed to work, but you could dance, sing, talk with your family and friends, visit one another, read, pray, contemplate. What you were supposed to do above all was appreciate: sink down into awareness of the life you were living until joy and gratitude rose up and opened up your eyes.
Heschel wrote, "The Sabbath is not a day to shoot fireworks or turn somersaults, but an opportunity to mend our tattered lives." And I feel envious when I think about that kind of Sabbath, that chance every single week to slow down so completely that we could actually feel ourselves stitching our lives back together, mending ourselves into a saner way of life.
There are modern writers and thinkers who have felt the same yearning and looked for ways to reclaim a Sabbath. Rabbi Zalman Schacter-Shalomi has said, "[The Sabbath should be] an experience of spaciousness and delight…It is easy to talk of prohibition, but the point of the space and time created is to say yes to the sacred: to spirituality, sensuality, sexuality, prayer, rest, song, delight. It is not about legalism and legislation but about joy and the things that grow only in time…The way to begin the Sabbath is to simply say, 'Today I am going to pamper my soul.'"
What a great idea! "Today I am going to pamper my soul." And what a profound tool of mindfulness, to carve out some sacred space that we devote to "joy and the things that grow only in time." What are the things that grow only in time? Wisdom. Understanding. Relationships, with our children, our spouses, our friends. Skill in playing an instrument. A good, rich stew that becomes what it is only through hours of simmering. Yeasted bread, that has to rise in its own good time. Calmness and serenity, the visitors to our hearts who rarely knock when we're all wrapped up in the busyness of our working days.
So what might we do to claim such a Sabbath for ourselves? We don't have the support around us that nurtured Heschel's experience of the Sabbath. He lived in a time and place where whole neighborhoods, sometimes whole towns, were Jewish. Everyone he knew honored the Sabbath, everyone he knew followed the same rhythm, so the day of rest and the customs for honoring it belonged to the whole community.
We don't have that level of support for our practice, but we do have a faith community. The purpose of this religious home of ours, after all, is to help us deepen in our wisdom and understanding, help us live into our spirituality and feed our souls. We can help each other honor the Sabbath -- maybe not as fully or in the same ways as in an orthodox Jewish community, but nevertheless in ways that feed us and bring some peace and serenity into our hearts.
One thing we can do is keep Sunday mornings as our sacred time. It's easy not to do that. It's easy to plan meetings right after the service, or caucus over coffee with other members of our various busy committees, or whip out our calendars and start working out our schedules and agendas. I'm just as guilty of it as any of you; and it may be that some of that planning and caucusing is inevitable -- but not all of it. If we made a conscious decision that Sunday morning is Sabbath time, we would probably find that nearly every bit of work and planning and worry we have in mind can actually wait for Monday to roll around.
Sunday morning is the soul of our community. When we gather to worship, the whole point is to carve a time out of regular time. And in that conscious little bubble we've formed amid the tumult, we can turn our minds and hearts together toward those things that evoke in us awe and reverence, those teachings that might help us grow a little wiser.
We don't have to let that time, that Sabbath time, end with the benediction. We can bring it with us into the ways we greet each other over coffee. We can ask not about tomorrow night's meeting or the Board report but about the state of our lives, with hearts and minds quiet and open for the listening. It might sound a little odd or awkward to actually ask, "How is it with your soul?" But that's the question of the Sabbath: How is it with your soul?
It's hard for us to let go of the hundreds of busier sorts of questions we could ask, because we are never more than a half-step away from our own busyness, our own preoccupations. Our work is never done; and the life of this congregation, just like our lives at home, is often a jumble of half-finished projects and new ideas just beginning and routine labors that repeat themselves each week or each month. We always have an end-point in mind, the moment when something will be done and wrapped up; and then we'll give ourselves a break. But if we waited until the work was over, we would never even take Sabbath moments, much less a whole day.
In his book about the topic, Wayne Muller writes, "The traditional Sabbath begins precisely at sundown, whether that comes at a wintry 4:30 or late on a summer evening. Sabbath is not dependent on our readiness to stop. We do not stop when we are finished. We do not stop when we complete our phone calls, finish our project, get through this stack of messages, or get out the report that is due tomorrow.….The old, wise Sabbath says: stop now. As the sun touches the horizon, take the hand off the plow, put down the phone, let the pen rest on the paper, turn off the computer, leave the mop in the bucket…"
It's a tricky practice for us to try to adapt to our own lives. I wouldn't be one to look to as a role model in doing it either, since I feel like I'm doing pretty well just to carve out twenty or thirty minutes of meditation time in a day, a little beaded string of Sabbath moments. But it's a good thing to have aspirations, even if we don't see ourselves living up to them very consistently. And one of the aspirations I have for us as a religious community is that we recognize how badly we need our sacred time together. We're not Hassidic Jews, we're 21st century Unitarian Universalists, and we'll put our own spin on what it means to remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. But I don't think we need it any less than Heschel needed it, or any less than the ancients who first came up with the idea.
The Christian writer C.S. Lewis said that it's in claiming holy time for ourselves that we can notice "the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited." We need that tune, and we need that news, in our lives. May we help each other listen for them, and may we learn better how to invite the Sabbath into our lives, and how greet its gifts with open arms. AMEN.