TIME NOT SPACE

SHARON BROUS: There's a great Jewish teaching that as much as the Jewish people have kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath has really kept the Jewish people. That part of the reason that the Jewish people have been able to sustain ourselves over the course of thousands of years of often very fraught and rigorous history is because we've had the Sabbath. And the way that the Sabbath was preserved was in many ways through very carefully constructed prohibitions and obligations. What we are not allowed to do and what we are called to do during those days. And what Abraham Joshua Heschel did, without denying any of that structural, foundational piece of Shabbat, was say just remember that it's not only about the prohibitions, it not about what you're not allowed to do, it's about the space that you create in your life when you don't do those things.

SUSANNAH HESCHEL: I think for my father the Sabbath is central, of course, and he felt civilization will perish not for want of information but for want of appreciation. And the Sabbath is every week a day to remember how to appreciate, how to appreciate life, our lives, our families, our community. To appreciate the Torah, to appreciate also what it means to have an atmosphere that we create, what it means to make a period of time holy.

JAMES RUDIN: Judaism is a religion of time, not space, you don't need big spaces, you need to sense of time and he is really talking about the Sabbath. Making that special, making that seventh day mean something. We're using your life in a special way, a sense of time. Because as we all know, the only thing we have is time and that runs out for all of us. So Heschel was asking, what are you going to do with your time? What is Judaism going to do with time? What are religions going to do with time? Are you going to waste it, trivialize it, make it frivolous, or are you going to use the time for enhancement, for strength, so forth. So that's a brilliant concept.

MICHAEL LERNER: One of the key insights that he put forward was that, to be in real connection to God was to be in awe and wonder and radical amazement at the universe that God created and to celebrate that on the Sabbath but also in all kinds of ways that the Jewish commandments or mitzvoth, as we call them in Hebrew, that the commandments were telling us to do. They were all vehicles to get you into the place where you could see the beauty of this universe and the awesomeness of this universe and to stand in wonder and, as he puts it, “radical amazement.”

BENJAMIN SAX: The Sabbath is very popular among many liberal-leaning Jewish communities precisely because it takes issue with technological time, in that we are working too much, technology is taking over aspects of our life at too great a speed for us to catch up. And here’s Heschel taking a traditional concept and saying that we have a moral and theological responsibility to stop, to take a pause once a week, to reconnect to our families, to reconnect to our communities, to reconnect to God. No matter how fast society is moving, no matter how great technological advancements are, we need to pause. And that was something that connected to a lot of liberal Jews in a way that you couldn’t have anticipated because he’s using a traditionalist Jewish motif to address a secular, contemporary problem in a compelling way.

MICHAEL LERNER: And what I say as a rabbi now is anybody who will try Shabbat for 25 hours each week for 6 months will never want to give it up. It’s self-validating and really is something that anybody in the world, regardless of your religion if you just follow the rules of Shabbat for one 25 hour period and did that for a few months, you would have such a beautiful spiritual experience that you’d never want to give it up.

ARNOLD EISEN: Heschel and a bunch of other Jewish thinkers have the task of adjusting people to America and showing them that you can be a good American, but you can also retain the fullness of your Jewish identity. Maybe not in the same way as in the past, but you can do it here. So, when Heschel makes his famous statement in The Sabbath about building a palace in time and argues that Jews sanctify time and not space, what he's doing sociologically, politically, is saying, okay your space is now the United States, your space is no longer the shtetl. You're no longer living in an integrated Hasidic community in Warsaw, or wherever it is. Your space is now Gentile space, but your time can be Jewish time. You can make this a place in your life that is sacred, that is going to enable you to be fully Jewish even in the larger society. And that's, I think, the first and fundamental reason for his appeal, that's what Jews needed to hear.

One of Abraham Joshua Heschel’s most enduring works is a short volume published in 1951 called The Sabbath. In that book, Heschel reflects on the importance of Sabbath-keeping as a way of reconnecting with God, family, and community; of honoring God’s gift of rest and renewal; of reorientation and stepping out of the rush of ordinary time; and of practicing important rituals and traditions that reinforce religious and cultural identities. Sabbath-keeping is 28 especially important in the Hasidic tradition from which Heschel descended, an acknowledgement of God’s gift of creation and the wonder of it. In The Sabbath, Heschel writes of Judaism itself as “a religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time.” Rather than focusing on holy spaces, Heschel suggests that, by insisting on the demarcation between ordinary time and sacred time, Jewish ritual “may be characterized as . . . [an] architecture of time.” Christianity may have its magnificent churches and Islam its grand mosques, but for Jews, Heschel asserts that “[t]he Sabbaths are our great cathedrals”---the times when we pause, pray, worship, and reorient ourselves to God, one another, and creation.

1. What do you think Heschel means when he suggests that Judaism is a “religion in time” rather than of space? Here is a quote to consider: “The meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space. Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time. It is a day on which we are called upon to share in what is eternal in time, to turn from the results of creation to the creation of the world” (The Sabbath, 10).

2. Rabbi Sharon Brous suggests that “it is actually Shabbat, the experience of the Sabbath, that has kept the Jewish people alive over the course of thousands of years through all kinds of struggle.” What do you think she means by this? How might Sabbath-keeping have helped Jews to maintain their unique identity and to survive diaspora and persecution over the centuries? Would secular Jews disagree with this assessment?

3. Arnold Eisen of the Jewish Theological Seminary suggests that Sabbath-keeping has helped American Jews maintain their cultural and religious identities over against the powerful forces of assimilation. Eisen suggests that part of Heschel’s message to readers of The Sabbath is, “Your space is now Gentile space [America], but your time can be Jewish time. You can make a place in your life that is sacred, that is going to enable you to be fully Jewish in the larger society. . . .” Do you agree with Eisen’s assessment? Has Sabbath-keeping enabled American Jews to retain a unique identity within the larger, diverse American culture?

4. Scholar Benjamin Sax asserts that, “When you live in a world in which you look forward to a Sabbath day every week, it gives you hope, it gives you some sort of redemption.” Do you practice a Sabbath day in your tradition (whether Jewish or not)? Do you agree with Sax’s assessment that Sabbath-keeping offers a sense of hope or redemption? Why or why not? What difference might it make if you did practice a Sabbath day each week, as Heschel suggests?

5. In Jewish tradition and many others, Sabbath-keeping is associated with specific and recurring rituals and practices that help to reinforce its meaning and resonance. What are some of the 29 important rituals that Heschel and his family practiced? If you practice Sabbath-keeping in your own tradition, what rituals do you associate with it? How does the practice of specific rituals and traditions help to make the Sabbath “eternal” as Heschel suggests it is?

6. Consider Heschel’s assertion in The Sabbath that “[t]he Jewish contribution to the idea of love is the conception of love of the Sabbath, the love of a day, of spirit in the form of time” (16). What do you think he means by this? How might the Jewish love of the Sabbath be a contribution to an understanding of love itself?

7. In the film, Christian theologian Walter Brueggemann suggests that, in The Sabbath, Heschel’s “articulation helped us see that Sabbath is intensely Jewish, but then, it’s not Jewish at all, it’s human. . . . “ Is the idea of Sabbath and of Sabbath-keeping something that could or does have universal application? Could it apply to everyone, regardless of tradition? What does Sabbath mean in your tradition?