Sabbath: a Day of Rest

What, just one?

I am, as the saying goes, spiritual but not religious, and consequently have spent much of my life looking in on certain religious customs like Heathcliff and Cathy looking in through the window of Thrushcross Grange (on a Sunday, no less!): drawn to and captivated by the beauty of certain elements within, whilst simultaneously repulsed by the behavior of some of its inhabitants, and knowing, ultimately, that I neither belong, nor particularly wish to belong, within its confines.

I very deliberately chose to send my children to a secular school, but I’ve often lamented just how much gets thrown out with the bathwater when conforming to society’s dominant religion becomes optional. When I was at school in England in the eighties and nineties, we still began most days with a religious (read: Christian) assembly that involved some sort of moral lesson followed by a few rounds of hearty singing from a little blue book of hymns. Whilst I’d prefer not to be forced to sing in support of a religion to which I don’t belong, the act of starting each day by singing in unison with others is not only enjoyable but also scientifically proven to be beneficial to our physical and mental health.

By far the most enviable of the religious traditions for which I have yet to find a satisfying secular or creedless spiritual alternative, however, is the practice and observance of a sabbath. The sabbath, an entire day set aside for the purpose of attending to one’s spiritual life in the company of one’s local community and in the presence of a spiritual leader who is (hopefully) further along the spiritual path than you, all done while wearing your best clothes and, if you’re lucky, followed by a hearty communal lunch and quite possibly a nap (so as to better integrate the morning’s spiritual lessons, naturally). What an unfathomable and enviable luxury this appears to me to be.

The sabbath I knew growing up was Sunday, but I now live in an area of Los Angeles where many of my Orthodox Jewish neighbors observe Shabbat, an even more appealing and mystical sabbath stretching from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday on which no technology or machinery at all is to be used. Just this element alone exerts an extraordinary pull on me. Perhaps you’ve noticed, as I have, how a certain tension drops from the air the moment there’s a power outage, or how thrillingly liberating it feels to be in an area so remote there’s no cell service at all. Now, more than ever, what a radical thing a weekly day off from technology seems, and how dearly I wish I belonged to a community for whom it was a shared and mutually agreed upon practice.

As I was preparing to write this piece I stumbled across the book, The Power of Ritual, by Casper Ter Kuile, and as so often happens “just so happened” to open it in the middle of a section about the sabbath. Ter Kuile himself quotes heavily from the 1951 Jewish classic, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man, by rabbi, philosopher, and professor of Jewish mysticism, Abraham Joshua Heschel—a meditation on the subject so beautiful it’s deserving of being quoted in its entirety, but from which, in the interests of editorial propriety, I’ll limit myself to extracting just this:

“To set apart one day a week for freedom, a day on which we would not use the instruments which have been so easily turned to destruction, a day for being with ourselves, a day of detachment from the vulgar, of independence of external obligations, a day on which we stop worshipping the idols of technical civilization, a day on which we use no money, a day of armistice in the economic struggle with our fellow men and the forces of nature—is there any institution that holds out greater hope for man’s progress than the Sabbath?”

Religious or not, anyone living in post-Industrial Revolution capitalism is likely to feel the truth of this reverberating deep in their bones.

For those of us without religion there is, I believe, an unfulfilled longing—nay, an imprint and expectation laid down over centuries and inherited epigenetically—a pull towards a pausing time, a time for reflection, contemplation, and communion, that we have not yet been able to satisfy. Rituals and rhythms go some of the way—Sunday brunch with friends, Sunday lunches with family—but even the most sublime lunch cannot touch the yearning for a shared experience of the divine.

And so, what are we to do, where are we to go, and how are we to set about carving out what Heschel so beautifully calls our own sacred “architecture of time”, a cathedral of spaciousness and community connection in our increasingly object- and obligation-filled weeks?

I come with no answers, only this offering: a weekly epistle, shared on a Sunday, featuring words of reflection and contemplation designed to be read in bed, or over coffee, or in any case on a day when I hope the pace of life is slower for you (though let’s face it, if you’re a parent and you’ve made it this far, you’re currently sitting on the toilet). If you’d like to join me, you’d be most welcome.  

Wishing you a peaceful, restful day,

Emma

Sunday in La Rochelle, Francine van Hove