“God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation.”

Genesis 2:3

1. Both Bishop Robert Barron and author Dana Trent speak of Sabbath as a time of creation and re-creation. According to the Book of Genesis in the Jewish scriptures, God rested on the seventh day after creating the universe and everything in it (Genesis 2:2-3). According to the Christian gospels, Jesus performed miraculous healings on the Sabbath and was sometimes criticized for doing so. Bishop Barron describes Jesus as “the agent of God, renewing [God’s] creation,” when Jesus heals on the Sabbath.

   Do you think of the Sabbath as, in some way, the culmination of a week of work? As the respite that comes after hard labor, as imaged in the Book of Genesis?

   How, in your experience, is Sabbath connected to ideas of creation and restoration? Is it connected in any way?

   Do you think of Sabbath as a time of healing---physically, spiritually, or emotionally? If you already have some type of Sabbath practice, how might it change if you were to think of Sabbath as a time of creation and restoration for yourself, your community, the world?

2. In Part 1, we meet Daniel Singer, cantor of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in Manhattan. He describes the traditional blessing that occurs at the end of the Friday evening service at the beginning of the ritual Sabbath in Judaism. Singer says that “the blessing over the bread is a reminder of our connection to the earth. . . . [of] the drawing forth of bread from the earth.” Singer goes on to describe the web of connections between human beings and the rest of creation that is emphasized in Sabbath ritual:

   “Shabbat is not only for us, it’s for our planet,” Singer says. “It’s for us to heal the world, heal ourselves. It’s about smells, the smell of Shabbat. There’s light on Shabbat with the candles, there’s tastes with the wine, with the challah. The sustenance it brings us. And it reminds us of our connection to one another and to the earth.”

   Do you typically think of the Sabbath as a time for reflecting on the gifts of creation and of our connections with it? Or in your experience, is Sabbath more often focused exclusively on human being and human nature? How would our approach to Sabbath change if we thought of it, as Jewish tradition often does, in terms of the act and gifts of creation depicted in Genesis 1-2:3?

3. Theologian Norman Wirzba reminds viewers of the tenuousness of our relationship to the earth and to the sources of life itself, explaining that, ultimately, food itself “is a gift” that sustains us.

   So we live in an industrial food system. Food just appears. We have no idea of its coming to be. We have no appreciation for its fragility, for its vulnerability. But agricultural people have known from the beginning, you can’t ever take food for granted. Right? With the shopping experience you don’t have a moral obligation to what you purchase. It’s mine. But when you’re in a garden, when you’re on a farm, when you’re a hunter or a gatherer, you know that you live by receiving life rather than grasping and purchasing life. At the end of the day food is a gift.

   How would you describe your relationship to the food you eat, the land from which it is grown, and the labor that produced it? Do you think of food as a “gift,” rather than simply a commodity to be bought and sold? How does thinking about food as a gift relate back to Sabbath? Does thinking of food in this way reinforce the idea of Sabbath itself as a gift, a time of rest from labor?

4. In Part 1 of SABBATH, we meet Princeton Theological Seminary Professor Nathan Stucky and his students, who run the “Farminary,” a 21-acre farm dedicated to regenerative agriculture. At the Farminary, students’ theological training is informed by an intimate engagement with the land. Reflecting on the connection between humanity and the rest of creation, Stucky says that

   One of the things . . . we have been painfully slow to recognize is that our exhaustion and the exhaustion of the broader creation are two sides of the same coin. The creation is exhausted because we don’t know how to stop. There’s not a single instance that I can find anywhere in Scripture where God gives Sabbath to an individual. It’s always to the community. It’s to the whole of creation. It’s to the gathering of God’s people. Sabbath in all its fullness is an exercise of a community.

   To what extent do you think humanity bears responsibility for the “exhaustion” of the world? Do you agree with Stucky that Sabbath-keeping is not (and should not be) an individualistic thing, but a communal practice? What about the idea that Sabbath was a gift intended for all of creation, not just humanity alone? Does that idea surprise you?

   Do you tend to think of human nature and external nature as part of one “community”? How might that perspective change the ways we treat the earth and our fellow creatures?

5. As noted elsewhere in this guide, in SABBATH, Part 2, we meet the community behind Abundance Farm in Northampton, Massachusetts, a Jewish-led creative farming project serving the community, especially the food insecure. Here we learn about Sabbath practices regarding the earth, specifically, the year of schmita (the Sabbath of Sabbaths), when, in accord with Jewish law, the land is allowed to rest. Rabbi David Seidenberg, a consultant with Abundance Farm, explains that in a shmita year (every seventh year in a seven-year cycle), “anyone can go into anyone’s field, rich or poor. It doesn’t matter where you come from, Jewish, not Jewish. You go into anyone’s field and take whatever you want, because nobody owns anything.”

   Do you find this idea surprising? Does the idea of mandated rest for the land make sense to you? What about equal and open access to its fruits, regardless of who labored to grow them? How, in your mind, does this relate to the historical American emphases on self-reliance and individualism? On ownership of property?