“SABBATH IS
GOD’S GIFT”
I’m old enough to remember when
BlueLaws were in effect. Blue Laws were so-called because they were the leftovers
of a Puritan-like prohibition against Sunday commerce and were supposed to be
the thinking of blue-stockings (the nickname for
Oliver Cromwell’s excessively
moralistic allies) to the effect that, similar to the thinking of some
Pharisees of Jesus’ time, commerce ought to stop on the Sabbath. When I was
growing up in the 60s, there were still laws in New York forbidding stores and
other businesses from being open on Sunday, the implication being that the
public was better served by everyone focusing on God and religious ideas and
family instead. (I vaguely remember gas stations being exempt from this since
people still had to drive to church or to visit.)
My family was
Seventh-Day Adventist
and our church met Saturdays, so Sundays for us were sort of the icing on the
cake. I remember my mother being glad when the Laws were rescinded so she could
grocery shop Sundays, but my own memories of dull, home-bound Sundays were
actually pretty content. This might have been the result of being a kid and
when you're a kid anything beyond your immediate needs being met is
unnecessary. My Sundays began about 5:30 or 6 with a heaping bowl of cereal in
front of the TV, whose day was also just starting. (This was another result of
the changes in society: radio and television operating 24-7 were a decade
away.) I was a regular watcher of
Davey and Goliath and other
kid-centered, vaguely religious programming which were the only programs on Sunday
mornings. Our church services had been the previous day so my parents spent
their morning sitting around talking. My dad would drive to visit a former
neighbor, a widowed Italian immigrant, and when he came back he'd bring gifts
from Pop-Pop: a box of jelly donuts and the Sunday paper. Those days the comics
pages were actually up to ten pages long and printed large and there were more
than fifty strips, funny animal and adventure and holdovers from the heydays of
the 30s like
Polly and Her Pals and
Mutt and Jeff. I learned
from an episode of
Buzz Sawyer that you could swim safely among
piranha so long as you didn't have any cuts or scrapes.
Sabbath
as we understand it has probably been observed since prehistory.
All three
Abrahamic scriptures refer to it as
a long-held observance.
It’s likely that
in the earliest experiences of people there was a period, perhaps a portion of
midday when the sun was hottest, when exertions halted for rest.
This would eventually become a full day and
then the same day each week and then its existence attributed to the local
creator god.
Sabbath is given specific
times in the Abrahamic scriptures, during which worship of the Creator is
emphasized as well as emphasis on rest in appreciation of the cosmic Rest taken
by the Creator.
Jews,
of course, are the first of the Abrahamic tradition to recognize the
Sabbath.
Tanakh reads, “On the seventh
day God finished the work that He had been doing, and He ceased on the seventh
day from all the work that He had done. And God blessed the seventh day and
declared it holy, because on it God ceased from all the work of creation that
He had done” (Genesis 2:2-3).
Tanakh
recognizes Saturday, the final day of the week, its placement a holdover from
the
Babylonian calendar which the
exilic Jews would have been forced to use, as
a time of especial importance.
MonfordHarris calls it a period of covenantal intimacy.
The
Sabbath is God’s gift to Israel…[It] is
particularly associated with Exile. It
is during the long Exile that the covenant had to be strengthened and
confirmed. Exile can weaken Israel’s
sense of the covenant, for Exile can corrode the faithfulness of the
community…Sabbath guarded the Jews; for Sabbath strengthened Jewish covenantal
faithfulness. (10)
Harris emphasizes a person’s senses to bring him or
her closer to God during Sabbath, noting the particular importance of taste,
touch and smell.
“Sabbath is necessarily
the most sensuous time, since it celebrates the creation of this sensuous
world, and it is the senses that appropriate the world” (12).
This glorification of the world’s sensuality
is reflected in the book
Song of Songs
whose place is “as an allegory for the pining of the people of Israel or
perhaps the human soul for God…” (Chaim Rabin in Harris, 13).
Harris, whose repetitive emphasis on the
appropriateness of sex on the eve of Sabbath manages to seem both progressive
and creepy, expands Rabin’s argument that “Sabbath is intimate time between God
and the covenantal community” (17).
Christians
appreciated this emphasis on special worship of God and a time of rest, but
altered the day to Sunday, the beginning of the week, their newer testament alluding
to its importance by attributing a miraculous act by Paul to that day.
On the first day of the week, when we met to break
bread, Paul was holding a discussion…; since he intended to leave the next day,
he continued speaking until midnight…A young man name Eutychus, who was sitting
in the window, began to sink off into a deep sleep while Paul talked still
longer. Overcome by sleep, he fell to
the ground three floors below and was picked up dead. But Paul went down, and bending over him took
him in his arms, and said, “Do not be alarmed, for his life is in him.” Then Paul went upstairs; and after he had
broken bread and eaten, he continued to converse…until dawn; then he left. Meanwhile, they had taken the boy away alive
and were not a little comforted (Acts 20:7-12).
Paul’s diffidence may be attributable to his
certainty of his work in service to the Lord, but it may also be that he knew a
3-story fall—
about 15-20 feet at that time—was unlikely to be fatal to a young
person, putting his continued conversation in the face of the boy’s “death” in
a slightly different light.
In addition,
in his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul directs them (as he says he has
the Galatians) to “put aside and save whatever extra you earn” (16:2) for the
first day of each week.
Interestingly,
despite the tradition among Jews of both worshipping and resting on the
Sabbath,
Hoyt Hickman notes that, while “Sunday stood out above all other days
because it was the weekly anniversary… [commemorating] the Lord’s passion,
death, and resurrection…”, it was not a day devoted to rest “until an edict by
the
Emperor Constantine in AD 321” (18).
Farmers were excused from enforced relaxation.
Finally,
Islam, which
Karen Armstrong characterizes as a very practical religion,
building on the faiths of the other
People of the Book, again relocated the Sabbath
day, this time to Friday, pointing to Sura 62 of the Quran, itself named
“Friday:”
“Oh you who believe! when the
call for prayer is made on Friday, then hasten to the remembrance of Allah, and
leave off trading…[When] the prayer is ended, then disperse abroad in the land
and seek of Allah’s grace, and remember Allah much…” (:8-9).
HuseyinAlgul writes, “’Friday is the measure of the week, Ramadan the measure of the
year, and the hajj the measure of one’s lifetime’…[If] one prays Friday prayer
in full consciousness of all that it means, then one is more likely to
experience for a whole week the abundance and blessings that arise from it…”
(22)
Again reflecting Islam’s identity
as a particularly practical faith, Algul emphasizes
It is considered a good action for a Muslim to take
a full bath (ghusl) on Friday, to
clean the parts of the body that need to be cleaned, to brush the teeth, to put
on a light, pleasant scent, to wear clean clothes, and to smile and be
pleasant…Muslims should cleanse themselves both spiritually and physically,
becoming completely clean…Muslims who make wudu
(ritual washing for prayers) carefully and go to the mosque to pray on Fridays,
who listen carefully to the sermon, and pray on two successive Fridays, would
be forgiven the sins they had committed in between. (22)
This vision of God as a stern
disciplinarian out of a 50s educational film on physical hygiene is reinforced
by the insistence in several Suras against transgressing against the Sabbath,
going so far in Sura 7:163 as to blame a poor fishing day on it: “[Ask the unjust] about the town which stood
by the sea; when they exceeded the limits of the Sabbath, when their fish came
to them on the day of their Sabbath, appearing on the surface of the water, and
on the daly on which they did not keep the Sabbath they did not come to them;
thus did We try them because they transgressed.” This
is not, of course, limited to Islam.
Harris notes “It has long been noted that Sabbath is richer in
prohibitions than in positive acts…[They] are massive and detailed, broad and
minute…[They] are intrinsic to the Sabbath…Sabbath is not a natural
reality…[It] is different from other days; it is blessed by God. The prohibitions are aspects of the personal”
(14). And Christians, particularly
Protestants, in America long advocated Sunday Blue Laws (apparently without
recourse to Scripture since many also insist in a literal reading of Matthew
12:8 that “The Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath” rather than, say, local
zoning boards).
My family has never been big dinner
people so we didn't celebrate Sunday with chicken or roast beef feasts. Lunch
was usually a sandwich or soup, and then we'd visit someone, usually nursing
home residents my folks knew for decades or the widowed members of one of their
fraternal organizations. I was always bored and brought a book with me. Afterward
we'd drive just for the sake of motion and novelty. There was a security sitting in the back seats
of those cars, the rarely-used seatbelts clanking emptily against the exposed
steel of the doors. All was right with the world or at least my part of it was.
I had few demands outside those long, dull visits with people I never really
knew except the demands of homework before a bath and bed. Sundays were quiet
days when naps were allowed and music played softly from the TV or the car
radio, gospel punctuated by isolated shouts from the congregation.
There is something to be said for
the religious requirement of there being nowhere to go and nothing to do
outside the home except visiting friends or spending the day in a park or the
forest or on the road, acquiescing to the enforced demands of worship and rest.
My wife and I have regular Sabbaths during which we do nothing except read
together, preferably outside. There is
an ease to life shredded by the personal need to shop. Silence in the absence of TV or radio signals
(or even of the internet if that was possible), while I suspect it would drive
many—including me—crazy, would also press us to rely on ourselves and our
friends for conversation and news. There is an argument to be made that there
is secular benefit to reining in the demands of contemporary life by making
certain everyone had the day off (outside necessities like law enforcement and
hospitals). To avoid showing favoritism it needn't be Sundays or even another
weekend day. It could be midweek providing
nearly everyone with same day off, the lack of outside electrical entertainment
and commerce making nearly everyone reliant on one another, an enforced
companionability. It probably wouldn’t work, at least initially. But there is nonetheless
a certain peace had by having nowhere to go and nothing to do.
WORKS CITED
·
Algul, Huseyin. 2005. The Blessed Days and Nights of the Islamic
Year. Somerset, NJ; The Light, Inc.
·
Berlin, Adele, and Marc Brettler,
editors. 2004. The
Jewish Study Bible. New York, NY;
Oxford University Press.
·
Coogan, Michael. 2007. The New Oxford Annotated Bible (NRSV). New York, NY; Oxford University Press.
·
Harris, Monford. 1992. Exodus and Exile: The Structure of the Jewish Holidays. Minneapolis, MN; Augsburg Fortress Press.
·
Hickman, Hoyt, Don Saliers, Laurence
Stookey, and James White. 1992. The New
Handbook of the Christian Year: Based on
the Revised Common Lectionary.
Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press.
·
Shakir, M.H., translator. 2004. Quran.
Elmhurst, NY; Tahrike Tarsile Quran, Inc.
·
Yuksel, Edip, Layth Saleh al-Shaiban,
and Martha Schulte-Nafeh, translators and annotators. 2010. Quran:
A Reformist Translation. [Unknown];
Brainbow Press.
