Life is crazy. The world has gone mad.
Technology overwhelms, wars crush, society fractures, people are alienated from each other and themselves.
What’s truly nuts is that sentence could have been written at any time in the past 5000 years.
The surface of things change and move around but structures remain the same.
Jewish people know something about surviving and thriving in the chaotic fluidity of an ever-shifting modernity, in all its painful messiness.
“As much as Yisrael has kept the Shabbath, the Shabbath has kept Yisrael.”
– R Shim’on b. Laqish
I can’t imagine going more than a week in this world or lifetime without Shabbath. Shabbath doesn’t just offer respite and rejuvenation, it offers a taste of a different life, a different world order, a different way of being in the world.
The Shabbath is also a Sign between the Creator and the covenantal people – communicating the ideas that a) the world was created by a first cause who set a natural order for the world and b) the first cause subordinated the deterministic order of natural and human history to a higher order of participatory justice and holiness.
What a mouthful.
But imagine how much personal and world peace can be obtained through slowly internalizing over time the truth of these two ideas.
And how we realize them simultaneously – through rest.
It’s almost poetic in its simplicity.
Six days a week you engage with the material world and its events fully, creatively, with real presence and person.
One day a week you
– disengage from the creative world of tekne
– share three meals with family, friends, and loved ones
– devote extra time to praying together and studying things that inspire awe and wonder
That’s the core.
It’s survived – and enabled the survival of – every imaginable historical circumstance.
Those of us who are bound by the Sinai covenant have a full list of obligations, requirements, and legal prohibitions for the day, which work in harmony to create a unique experience of holiness once a week.
But anyone – really, anyone, in any situation, from Jerusalem to Tehran to Tokyo to LA to London to Lagos – can practice the principles of Shabbath.
In a world of oppression, it’s a day of hope.
In a world gone mad, it’s a day of sanity.
It’s truly a taste of the coming world.