Reclaiming Our Day of Rest

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Thus it is not surprising that just as we realize the extent of today's new Global Gobble of human communities and of the earth itself -- from the Nazi Holocaust, nuclear weapons, and sweatshops to the burning of the Amazon basin, the privatization of water supplies, and global warming -- the need for rest, reflection, and calm comes back into our consciousness.

In 1951, in the aftermath of those grotesque mockeries of creation -- the Holocaust and Hiroshima -- Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (who later marched alongside Martin Luther King Jr. against racism and the Vietnam War) wrote in his book The Sabbath: '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 into weapons of 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 . . . on which [humanity] avows [its] independence of that which is the world's chief idol . . . a day of armistice in the economic struggle with our fellow [humans] and the forces of nature -- is there any institution that holds out a greater hope for [humanity's] progress than the Sabbath?'

Rabbi Arthur Waskow directs the Shalom Center (www.shalomctr.org) in Philadelphia. He is one of the pioneers of the Jewish Renewal movement, which seeks to bring traditional Jewish spirituality into relationship with contemporary currents such as feminism and environmentalism. This article is excerpted from Take Back Your Time (Berrett-Koehler, 2003), a collection of essays on the political, cultural, and spiritual impact of overbusy lives, edited by John de Graaf (www.timeday.org). It also appeared in Yes magazine (Fall 2003).

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