A Palace in Time

September 15, 2002

Rev. Victoria Weinstein
And on the seventh day, the old creation story tells us, God rested. The heavens and the earth,
and all they contain, were completed. By the seventh day God had finished the work which God
had been doing; and so ceased from all work.

"Barukh ata, adonai eloheinu, melekh ha-olam, osseh ma' asseh b'reishit." In the Hebrew,
"Blessed are you, oh Lord our God, Ruler of the Universe, Who made the wonders of creation."

What concerns us here this morning is a soul-question put to every Jew at this time of year, and it
is a question that I think many of us have pondered quietly in our souls in 2002. The question is
this: "will you be written in the Book of Life?" In cosmic terms, the Book of Life is God's great
record of who will receive eternal blessing and who will be denied it. The Jewish religion has no
Hell as does the Christian faith; failing to be inscribed in the Book of Life is as close, perhaps, as
Jews come to that concept. "Will your name be inscribed in the Book of Life?" Over the past
nine days, observant Jews have taken that question seriously. The high holy days present an
opportunity for every faithful Jew to assess his or her life and to look honestly and unflinchingly
at pain they may have caused others. In this time, they make reconciliation and atonement for
those wrongs. Because of God's grace, if one has been written in the Book of Death it is possible
to reverse that sentence and change one's ways. What is required, though, is difficult: a direct and
sincere apology to those one has harmed. Mere confession is not enough.

Will we be written in the book of Life? When you search your soul, how is it with you? Is there
cause for regret? Repentance? Apology? Have you loved yourself as you would be loved, and
with the kind of tenderness and forbearance you extend to those who love you? Have you
acquainted yourself with the person you are outside of your many roles and responsibilities?
Standing naked and unadorned before the throne of your own conscience, are you acceptable in
your own sight? If not, this is a good time of year to make it right, or perhaps a bit better.

All religions worth their salt set out rules and ways and hints as to how humans can achieve
harmony with the Higher Law. The problem is, many of them teach that the truest way to reach
our own most divine potential is to skip out entirely on what you and I might refer to as the "real
world." This is simply not an option or a desire for the vast majority of us. But there is a way, a
little way, that we can step back on a regular basis and take stock with ourselves, desist from
rampant materialism and workaholism, and get back in a more humane stride. It is called the
Sabbath, and the Jewish tradition teaches that God created it for our salvation.

Remember the Sabbath day, and when we almost kept it sort of holy? Remember when stores
were all closed on Sundays? Remember when the population generally understood the point of
that? You might not devote the day to study and prayer, but at the very least, you did not spend it
at the Mall worshiping the gods of the Gap and the Lord of Lord & Taylor. I recall enduring
some very dull Sundays as a child. Sometimes we went to church in the morning and that was
okay, unless my parents stayed forever at coffee hour. Sunday was a day for visiting with my
parent's friends, going to see the aunts and uncles and cousins, or just sitting around digesting
brunch. As there was no VCR, no CD players, no computers in the home and no Nintendo, we
read books or played outside. Occasionally we whined that we were bored, to which my parents
usually replied that that was fine, and if I wanted something to do I could go out and weed the
driveway. But the dullness was good for me, typically over-extended kid that I was. I think a
little bit of boredom is good for children today. There is so little quiet in their lives; so little
opportunity for them to learn how to be alone with themselves in a peaceful and non-anxious
manner. So little time for them to listen to their own thoughts, to feel the pulse of their own
hearts.

Biblically, the institution of the Sabbath day comes during Moses' interview with God at Sinai,
during the giving of the ten commandments. Interestingly, the passages on the sabbath are longer
than for any of the other commandments. "Remember the Sabbath day, to hallow it. For six days,
you are to serve, and are to make all your work, but the seventh day is Sabbath for YWHW your
God: you are not to make any kind of work, not you, nor your son, nor your daughter, not your
servant, nor your maid, nor your beast, nor your sojourner that is within your gates. For in six
days YHWH made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in it, and he rested on the
seventh day; therefore YWHW gave the Sabbath day his blessing, and he hallowed it."
(Translated by Everett Fox, The Five Books of Moses)

A day of rest so important, so holy, that God Itself enforces it as part of the ultimate ethical code
of His people. This is not like your boss telling you to take the rest of the afternoon off because
you don't look well. This is not your travel agent encouraging you to take that weekend in
Florida because you deserve it (and because she would like your commission). This is the
commander of the universe telling Moses that he and his people must take one day off a week for
the sake of creation, for the sake of humanity and for the sake of humanity's relationship to God.
Humans must "say farewell to manual work and learn to understand that the world has already
been created and will survive without [our] help. Six days a week we wrestle with the world,
wringing profit from the earth. On the Sabbath we especially care for the seed of eternity planted
in the soul." (Heschel, p 13)

One of the most lovely and poetic works on the Sabbath was written by Hasidic rabbi Abraham
Joshua Heschel. Heschel was beautifully attuned to the world of soul as well as to the world of
society. What strikes me most about his simple and eloquent book is his discussion of the
Sabbath as a way for humankind to break our obsession with material existence -- "the things of
space." We labor, says Heschel, for things of space – to fill our lives with things we can see,
touch, hear, smell, enjoy on the material plane. But what God does through the creation of the
Sabbath is to render a holiness in time. Rabbi Heschel tells us that it is a surprising departure
from "accustomed religious thinking" that God did not make a sacred place after the creation of
heaven and earth. Rather, God created a sacred time.

Heschel explains that Jewish ritual may be characterized as the art of significant forms in time,
as architecture of time." Given the history of the people, this makes sense. A temple can be
destroyed; a people dispersed, and so it happened for the Jews many times over thousands of
years. But a Sabbath day cannot be burned, smashed or shattered. "The Sabbaths are our great
cathedrals" says Heschel, "The seventh day is a palace in time which we build."

I am quoting heavily from Heschel today, but let me give you one more passage from this lovely
book, because I find it so powerful: "The higher goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth
of information, but to face sacred moments. We must not forget that it is not a thing that lends
significance to a moment; it is the moment that lends significance to things."

The Sabbath is such a moment. But we must understand that the intent of the day is not to rest so
that we can work that much harder in the days to follow. No. We rest for the sake of life itself. If
we are appropriately oriented toward the Sabbath, we begin to understand that every day is, in
fact, a preparation for the Sabbath. What we do the other six days of the week will plant the
seeds of selfhood that we are invited to reacquaint ourselves with on our sabbath day.

So the Sabbath is not so much about abstinence as it is about intimacy: intimacy with Self, with
God, with one's purpose in God. Or if you prefer, the sabbath is our occasion to encounter the
world's need for us, life's inherent love for us and what we can be, and for what we already are.
In this spirit of intimacy, the Jews have beautifully romantic imagery to describe the sabbath:
The Jewish people are the bridegroom welcoming and honoring the bride, the Sabbath, which is
always referred to in the female pronoun. The Sabbath is always "she."

To hallow the Sabbath day, to sanctify it, is described in the Book of Exodus in the Hebrew term
"le-kadesh" – the same term used in reference to a man betrothing, consecrating a woman.
Heschel writes, "[humanity's] relation to the spirit is not one-sided; there is a reciprocity between
[humanity] and spirit. . . At the beginning of time there was a longing, the longing of the Sabbath
for humankind."

For me, this means that dismissing the necessity of a Sabbath day is like rejecting someone who
deeply loves you, who desires intimacy with you. When I began to understand the spiritual
power of this, I began to take my days off far more seriously, to guard them as one would
carefully reserve quality time for a spouse, or a child.

I began to treasure the part of Jewish tradition that lifts up the mutual desire and yearning
between humanity and the spiritual source that is our common origin and end.

For orthodox Jews, welcoming and honoring the Sabbath means doing no work at all. None. No
driving a car, or answering a phone, or turning on a light, or cooking. Does this seem like
punishment? It is not meant to be. Instead, it is meant to be a radical return to being rather than
doing. From an environmental perspective, we can see that such observance of the Sabbath not
only gives us a break, it gives the Earth a break as well. All of creation needs a Sabbath time.

Arthur Waskow, a Philadelphia-based Jewish leader who heads the Shalom Center, is at the
center of a movement to restore a Sabbatical spirit to our culture. Speaking to the environmental
benefits of the Sabbath, Waskow remarked in a recent interview, "Leviticus 26 asks, what
happens if you won't let the Earth rest and make a Shabbat? The answer is this: the earth gets to
rest anyway. The earth gets to rest through plague and famine and exile. The earth does get to
rest. The only question is whether human beings learn to live with this law in a joyful and
celebratory way or whether the earth rests at our expense." (Call To Action, Spirituality and
Justice. Interview by Bill Wylie-Kellerman) Those who have farmed the land have always
known this. You don't plant and harvest every field every year. It will strip the soil of essential
nutrients and the land will not yield.

I appreciate the urgency of Waskow's tone. He speaks not only with concern for Earth but with
deep love for all of us, with grief about the fact that we use and use and create and make and
spend and build and go and go and keep on going without cultural permission or inner respect for
the necessity of STOPPING. His call for a Sabbath renewal in this country is not a sectarian
concern; he is not speaking merely to Jews but to the whole nation, which he believes is
collectively suffering the madness of obsessive doing.

Waskow's work is not merely toward spiritual health but economic justice as well, for he has
seen and analyzed how the lack of personal and societal respect for the necessity of a Sabbath
damaged us emotionally and economically. Like the ancient Romans who disdained the Jews for
their Sabbath rest, accusing them of rebelliousness and indolence, modern day Americans have
largely internalized the attitude that ceaseless production is the measure of one's worth. Am I
right? Is there anyone here who measures their own worth (or the worth of others) by their work?

This is an issue that transcends class. All kinds of people are overworked. At the top of the
economic brackets, executive and top management types overwork and reduce the numbers and
quality of jobs available to others. Think about it. If one person in a company puts in a 60 or 70-
hour week, not only are they overworked, the company doesn't have to hire another part-time
employee. Multiply this times hundreds of thousands of American employees. The 8-hour work
day (for which the labor rights activists of the 1930's fought so hard) is a rarity nowadays. Our
perspectives have changed over the decades, and now some of us have not even had time to
realize that we have lost our way. Most tragic, I think, is that our overwork has undermined our
ability to create community. When we are all exhausted, we simply have no time to devote to the
establishment of community programs, relationships and resources.

Arthur Waskow writes:

"So – who is to say it's Ôoverwork' if people choose to do it? Anyone who really feels burnt out
can just slow down, no? Any malaise that people feel is just a result of their own choices, no?
And of their refusal to face the consequences of their own choices, no?

No.

É There is an economic and cultural system that is driving most Americans into overwork. There
are deep human needs for rest and reflection, for family time and community time. That system
is grinding those deep human needs under foot. And that system can be changed." (Art Waskow,
"Free Time For a Free People" from "The Witness" Jan-Feb 2000)

How? Waskow's campaign, called Free Time For Free People, urges American political,
economic and cultural leaders :
  to reduce the hours of work imposed on individuals without reducing their income.
 to strongly encourage the use of more free time in the service of family, community and
spiritual growth.
 and to advocate for all workers to secure full employment in jobs with decent income,
health care, dignity and self-direction – jobs secure enough and decent enough to let
workers loose their grip on fear and seek Free Time.

It says in Genesis "on the seventh day God finished His work." But the seventh day, we thought,
was entirely for rest. Why does it not say "on the sixth day God finished His work?" Ancient
rabbis concluded that there must have been at least one act of creation on the seventh day. A
little piece de resistance. On the seventh day, God created menuha. This is a gorgeous word.
Menuha. You could translate it as "rest," but it has a far richer meaning than that. Menuha is
"tranquility, serenity, peace and repose." When the miserable Job of the Old Testament later
laments the former joy he has known, he refers to it as menuha. "It is the state wherein
[humanity] lies still, wherein the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest. It is the
state in which there is no strife and no fighting, no fear and no distrust. The essence of good life
is menuha." What a blessed peace.

So perhaps we could strive for menuha in our families on our chosen Sabbath day. Instead of
waiting for menuha to come to us, we might actively seek it. Leave the house and walk in the
woods. Ride bicycles rather than drive the car. Tell the children we will not fight on the Sabbath
day, we are seeking menuha and we all need it! Eat very simple meals (it's really okay to have
cereal for dinner some of the time). Keep the television off. Unplug the computer. Meet with
neighbors and friends for a book discussion, a quilting bee, or to play music together. Take up
the study of poetry or Scripture or any form of literature you enjoy. Come to church. Go look at
some art, or create some of your own. Put away money; try not to spend any on material goods
or to think about finances. Don't do your taxes. Stare at the ceiling. Walk in the garden instead of
pruning and weeding it. One day a week.

The point is that this is not a luxury. It is for the sake of creation itself. That this should seem so
radical a commitment should tell us something about how deeply we've been absorbed into the
things of space, rather than constructing our lives as a palace in time.

Just being here, we are declaring ourselves in favor of the Sabbath. Just by being here, we are
making a statement about wanting to feel the value of our being rather than our doing. I want to
encourage you to make the hour of worship a true Sabbath observance by considering the
Postlude a part of the service, and to receive the musical offering as a gift for your spirit. If you
wish to leave for coffee hour before the conclusion of the Postlude it would be nice to do so
quietly. But why not enjoy the music? How many times during the week do you get such a
pleasant moment?

May your Sabbath day be strength and solace to you. May you keep it holy, as holy as you can,
honoring creation's need for you and your place in it. In doing so, may you be written in the
Book of Life for a sweet new year. L'shanah Tovah. Happy New Year. Amen. Shalom.
(I recommend the Shalom Center website www.shalomctr.org to anyone interested in the works
of Art Waskow.)