Radical Shabbat: Free time, free people

Sojourners, May/Jun 2000 by Waskow, Rabbi Arthur

Our religious traditions teach that human beings need time for self reflective spiritual growth, for loving family, and for communal sharing. And the earth itself needs time to rest. Yet today's highstress, environmentally toxic economy and culture preclude this sort of spiritual deepening.

Indeed, most Americans today work longer, harder, and more according to someone else's schedule than they did 30 years ago. We have less time to raise children, share neighborhood concerns, or develop our spiritual life. This unremitting addiction to "doing" and "making" has intensified many forms of pollution of the earth. This life situation crosses what we usually see as class lines: Single mothers who are working at minimum wages for fast-food chain; and holding on by their fingernails to a second job to make ends meet feel desperately overworked; and so do wealthy brain surgeons.

Why is this happening? Because doing, making, profiting, producing, and consuming have been elevated to idols. While corporate profits have zoomed and the concentration of wealth has increased, real wages have remained stagnant for 20 years, and the pressure has intensified to work harder and longer just to stay in the same place.

Biblical "shabbat" is a critique of these idolatries.

Shabbat-the Sabbath-appears first as a cosmic truth in the creation story (Genesis 2:1-4), but seems to have had no effect on human life till just after the great liberation of the Israelites from slavery. In Exodus ( 16:4-30) Shabbat is made known, along with the manna in the wilderness. This story of food and rest echoes and reverses the tale of Eden.

In Eden, humans ate improperly from the earth-and brought upon themselves a history in which humans can eat only by working so hard the sweat pours down their faces, a history in which there is war between humans and the earth. (In Hebrew, the word for "earth" is adamah; the word for "human being," adam.)

But with manna and Shabbat, work is transformed in the context of food. The food comes gently; and for one-seventh of the time, there is rest from even that gentlest of work-rest that is a deeper practice than simply relaxing. With Shabbat, we get what Jewish tradition calls a foretaste (notice the reference to food!) of the Messianic Age, a higher Eden.

Not until after this direct physical experience of Shabbat does there come an explanation of Shabbat at Sinai. Shabbat is the most detailed and rich of the Ten Commandments. It appears in different forms in Exodus 20:8-11 and in Deuteronomy 5:12-15. In the first, God calls for restfulness to attune the people with God's own cosmic rest in the creation. In the second, God calls for restfulness to free all workers-home-born and alien, woman and man, servant and boss, human and animal. (As Jewish mystical tradition later asserts, these "two"---cosmic renewal and human freedom-are really one.)

IN BIBLICAL TRADITON, every landless person-most famously, Ruth the Moabite, immigrant from a despised nation-was entitled to walk onto the land of any farmer, to glean and eat from the corners of the field and whatever the harvesters had missed. This was not Boaz' charity. It was law. And Ruth's work was not demeaning-it was the work that most people of that era did.

Ruth's ability to do this honorable work depended on the regular fieldworkers limiting themselves in their own work: They put limits in space as well as the Shabbat limits in time upon their work. They did not pursue every ounce of economic efficiency, nor did they overwork themselves to gather every grain of barley. For their work to be honorable, they had to allow Ruth the space for honorable work. For Ruth to be able to rest and renew her spiritual life, she had to know that honorable work was available.

Honorable work, and restful renewal: both aspects of responsibility. Ruth, like every other citizen or foreigner, like every worker, even the earth itself and all its life-forms, was entitled and obligated to make Shabbat-the Sabbath. Time for selfreflection, time for family, community, and citizenship, time for God and spiritual pursuits.

This need for rest was not felt by human beings alone. The earth itself, says Leviticus 25, is entitled to rest. One full year of every seven, the earth must be given time to rest. No organized sowing or reaping; human beings could eat what they had stored up in advance, or what the earth gave freely as it had millennia before to hunting-gathering societies. For one year, there would be no slaves, no bosses. Rest for human beings from their toil, rest for human society from its hierarchies, rest for the earth from being used.

And what if human beings refused to allow this resting? Then, says Leviticus 26, the earth will get to rest anyway-on their heads! Through famine, drought, exile, disaster, the earth would rest. This law of rest is not merely being nice; it is the law of gravity.

WHAT DO WE MEAN by time for restful self-reflection? Do we mean turning away from community and society into individualistic fantasies and the mass media--or into a rhythm that society itself could breathe in, a rhythm that would breathe society? Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote this about the Sabbath: