Shabbat Shalom

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org

Sept 18, 2011

 

Reading

Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath:  Its Meaning for Modern Man, Boston:  Shambhala, 1951, pp. ix-xviii passim.  Rabbi Heschel was one of the leading Jewish theologians and Jewish philosophers of the 20th century.

 

Technical Civilization is man’s conquest of space. It is a triumph frequently achieved by sacrificing an essential ingredient of existence, namely, time. In technical civilization, we expend time to gain space. To enhance our power in the world of space is our main objective. Yet to have more does not mean to be more. The power we attain in the world of space terminates abruptly at the border­line of time. But time is the heart of existence.

To gain control of the world of space is certainly one of our tasks. The danger begins when in gaining power in the realm of space we forfeit all aspirations in the realm of time. There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord. Life goes wrong when the control of space, the acquisition of things of space, becomes our sole concern….

Judaism is a religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time. Unlike the space-minded man to whom time is unvaried, iterative, homogeneous, to whom all hours are alike, quality-less, empty shells, the Bible senses the diversified character of time. There are no two hours alike. Every hour is unique and the only one given at the moment, exclusive and endlessly precious.

Judaism teaches us to be attached to holiness in time, to be attached to sacred events, to learn how to consecrate sanctuaries that emerge from the mag­nificent stream of a year. The Sabbaths are our great cathedrals; and our Holy of Holies is a shrine that neither the Romans nor the Germans were able to burn; a shrine that even apostasy cannot easily obliterate

The main themes of faith lie in the realm of time. We remember the day of the exodus from Egypt, the day when Israel stood at Sinai; and our Messianic hope is the expectation of a day, of the end of days….

The meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space. Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time. It is a day on which we are called upon to share in what is eternal in time, to turn from the results of creation to the mystery of creation; from the world of creation to the creation of the world.

Sermon 

Shabbat Shalom!  May  you have peace – wholeness – on this Sabbath day.

Just before Deedee & I left our home congregation in Ridgewood, NJ, some of the men gave a lay service that they billed as the first Father’s Day Service ever.  At that time the Unitarian Society of Ridgewood ended the church year in early June as we do at Second Parish; after all, we Unitarian Universalists are the only people God trusts to take the summer off. 

My friend Ed’s story has haunted me since I heard it.  On this Father’s Day he wanted to celebrate the fact that he was free of many of the rules that had restricted his own father’s behavior, rules requiring his father to play a certain set of roles:  earning a living, not getting too close to his children, and, in general, serving as a male role model.  Living in our more enlightened age, Ed could play with his children from the time they were very little, he had witnessed them being born, he even changed diapers!  He could really let his hair down with his family.  How wonderful it was to be free of all the restraints that had limited his intimacy with his father.  He had an excellent job that was challenging for him, exciting and financially rewarding.  Increasingly, though, he found that he had to work harder and harder to keep on top of his job, that phone calls, work brought home, and an unrelenting stream of emails were cutting into the time he had to spend with his family.  He thought back to his job of a few years before, with less pressure and no intrusion into his home life – but without the excitement and challenge of his current job or the tempting financial rewards.  He considered going back to that earlier job; but didn’t he owe it to his family to provide them with the best home, the best education, the best opportunities he possibly could?  Wasn’t he really working harder for them as well as for himself?  And so, almost without realizing it, he, too, had adopted a rigid set of role expectations, analogous to those he perceived as limiting his father a generation before. 

Ed’s story – and my own story on my journey to this Second Parish – is shared by far too many others in this country.  It’s a story about becoming enslaved by the unrelenting expectations we find laid upon us to do more, to do it better and faster, to become more and more productive and, as a result, less and less content.  Of course, at the bottom of the economic scale the story is far worse.  Wages have been stagnant for almost forty years; many wives have entered the work force to help make ends meet; and as a result parents are less available to their families and their communities.  Volunteer time is much harder to offer and to find.  For many families just keeping their heads above water seems like a near-impossible task.  But even the most prosperous of families often find that there is too little time to savor being alive.

Time spent with kids often gets routinized into lessons, classes, social events and highly competitive sports teams and clubs that claw away at private times for the whole family and not infrequently intrude into Sunday mornings, the one time of the week when it is possible to spend an hour of repose and spiritual nourishment.

If this story seems familiar, or if you are retired but your children or grandchildren are suffering from something like this time poverty, know that you are not alone.  Several years ago the Massachusetts Council of Churches promoted an initiative called “Take Back Your Time.” Here are some facts they note about American patterns of work:

·       Americans work an average of nine full weeks (350 hours) more per year than European workers.

·       From 1973 to 2000, the average U.S. worker added an additional 199 hours—that’s five forty-hour weeks—to his or her annual work schedule.

·       Americans have by far the shortest paid vacations in the industrialized world.

·       America is the only industrialized country that does not have a law guaranteeing paid vacation time.

Somehow we have come to believe that only by working as hard as we possibly can will we be able to avoid being made redundant or uncompetitive.  How is it that in the most powerful and wealthy nation of the world we must work so hard just to survive and to buy some little security for ourselves?  How is it that we have become so driven?  How have we allowed our perceived need for material security to rob us of time, the very substance of our lives – to enslave us?

This terrible pressure on the time of our lives, this demand for our very life stuff in return for survival or for keeping up or for meeting our obligations – this is a Sabbath problem.

Now I know that the very word “Sabbath” invokes images of dreadful obligation, of stupid restrictions, of endless tedium and above all of “holiness.”  I have to confess that the Sundays I grew up with as part of our little Pentecostal church in Madison, Wisconsin, were pretty drab affairs – chores, breakfast, Sunday School, church, Sunday dinner, nothing, nothing, nothing (grownups all napping), supper, chores, and church again.  My father honored the Sabbath and appreciated it, but he was too often exhausted from the work of the week, and the main thing he enjoyed was the opportunity to catch up on his sleep.  That was not a good context for a young person to learn about the joy of Sabbath.  In fact, Sabbath or Lord’s Day observance in the church where I grew up was one of many reasons I had to leave that church when I was sixteen.

Like so many religious concepts, I believe that the idea of the Sabbath has become encrusted with usages and traditions that rob it of the spirit in which it should be celebrated.

As I’ve been exploring the deeper meaning of the Sabbath, I’ve come to realize that it’s not my grandfather’s idea of how to spend Sunday.  Sabbath rest is for joy, for taking pleasure in this magnificent world and the people and things in it, for celebrating in the presence of the web of life in which we live, and move, and have our being.

Here in New England, our Puritan and Pilgrim ancestors passed censorious Blue Laws whose intent was to ensure that everyone would honor and respect Sunday, the Christian Sabbath day.  Like most attempts to legislate morality, though, these restrictions came to be seen as deadly legalisms that restricted individual freedom rather than promoting a true spirit of honoring a day of joy in creation.  I must confess to a certain sentimental attachment to one remnant of Blue Laws back in northern New Jersey where Deedee and I lived; the malls were closed on Sundays, and the horrible traffic, the pressure of shopping, all were stilled for Sunday.  No one could be forced to work in the malls on Sunday.  Jesus in his teaching challenged some of the prohibitions that the legalists of his own day had put in place in their zeal to defend the Sabbath, arguing that healing someone, for example, was not a violation of the kind of work that was permissible on the Sabbath.  As he puts it, “The Sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the Sabbath” [Mark 2:27] 

Distinctly different reasons for remembering the Sabbath are given in the two versions of the Ten Commandments.  In Exodus 20, the rationale is that “in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day.”  A way to hold this in our minds is to remember that God declared that the creation is very good.  The Sabbath is an opportunity to share in the joy and wonder of the creation, to stop trying to change and manipulate nature all around us, stop trying to wrest our living from the earth, and just enjoy it.  Love this earth which was given us as a garden. 

The second version of the commandment in Deuteronomy anchors the celebration of the Sabbath to a different memory:  “Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the LORD your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.”  Now that you aren’t slaves, it seems to say, you can rest.  Remember that – celebrate that freedom – every Sabbath.  That rest was extended to everyone in the land of Israel:  to sons and daughters, slaves and servants, residents aliens, and even to oxen and donkeys and all other livestock!

I have to say a word in favor of following rules as a way of honoring the Sabbath.  Sometimes we imagine that we can follow a spiritual practice but only observe the parts that we like.  Time has this peculiar quality of disappearing from our lives if we don’t behave intentionally in using it.  Rabbi Michael Lerner was counseling a couple that resisted the rigors of practicing the Jewish Sabbath on the grounds that they wanted to have the restful balance of Sabbath every day, not just on the seventh day.  Rabbi Lerner suggested they try that and report back how it had gone after a year.  “Not surprisingly, half a year later they reported what many others have reported:  the pressures of the world of work are so powerful that they had not been able to create that kind of balance.”  They came to realize that the Sabbath carefully observed represented the redemption of one day from the logic of the marketplace.  When this couple began to observe Shabbat, the Sabbath, they found that it was in fact “the high point of their week and that they felt far more spiritually nourished than they had ever felt while they were trying to work the energy of Spirit into the rhythm of every day.”[i]

There are further extensions of the Sabbath idea in Jewish thought.  The Sabbath each week is a temple in time, a day for admiring creation as God admired the creation and declared it “Very Good.”  But the earth, too, deserves a Sabbath, and so the laws called for the land to have a year of Sabbath rest every seven years.  In this way the soil was also preserved so that it could last through the generations.  Here we see the wisdom of allowing the land to lie fallow, resting as humans are to rest and restore themselves each week.  More than that, any one of the people of Israel who had been forced into slavery for debt in the course of the previous cycle of seven years was to be freed from slavery—the children of Israel had been taken out of slavery in Egypt and were not to re-introduce life-long enslavement of one another.  Might there not be some wisdom in forgiveness of indebtedness in this manner to ease the burdens of those who have lost out in the struggle for survival in our hyper-competitive world?

These ancient laws and practices remind us that we did not create what we have come into possession of, that we are stewards of the earth and of our possessions.  Nothing we own now can accompany us when we die.  At a time of insecurity and growing inequality, we would be well served to remember this ancient wisdom.  If we don’t step back, if we don’t take Sabbath time, we become wrapped up in the work of the moment and we readily forget what our life force should really be expended on, what gifts we bring to the building of the Beloved Community.  “Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt.”

There are some practical steps we can take to defend the Sabbath for others and ourselves.  We can use this day as a day of enjoyment with our families, adopting such rules as we find helpful to ensure ourselves that this is a day of rest, of enjoyment, of regeneration, of wonder at all that we have been blessed with.  We can turn off the TV for the day and keep the commercial world at a distance.  We can try to reduce the pressure on our children’s time from the over-scheduling of events that pack our days and leave us frazzled.  We can encourage others to join us in Sabbath joy here in worship and in peace – wholeness – during the rest of the day.

We can also expand the spirit of the Sabbath beyond one day.  Let me close with a poem by Wendell Berry, our modern Henry David Thoreau: 

“Manifesto:  The Mad Farmer Liberation Front.”

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,

vacation with pay. Want more

of everything ready-made. Be afraid

to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.

Not even your future will be a mystery

any more. Your mind will be punched in a card

and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something

they will call you. When they want you

to die for profit they will let you know.

 

So, friends, every day do something

that won't compute. Love the Lord.

Love the world. Work for nothing.

Take all that you have and be poor.

Love someone who does not deserve it….

Give your approval to all you cannot

understand. Praise ignorance, for what man

has not encountered he has not destroyed.

 

Ask the questions that have no answers.

Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.

Say that your main crop is the forest

that you did not plant,

that you will not live to harvest….

 

Laugh. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts….

 

Swear allegiance

to what is nighest your thoughts….

Practice resurrection.[ii]

Shabbat Shalom.

 

Amen.

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