A Letter in the Scroll by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

Author:Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press

The Sabbath was a totally new institution in human history, and at first no one else could understand it. Jewish tradition has left us a poignant record of one such moment of incomprehension. It is said that when the Torah was translated into Greek for the first time, there was one sentence that had to be deliberately mistranslated. It was the verse, “On the seventh day God completed the work He had made.” The Greeks could not understand this. Eventually, to make it intelligible, the line was translated as “On the sixth day God completed . .. “25

What was it that they could not understand? Every religion had its holy days. But none before had ever had a day whose holiness was expressed in the prohibition of work. Greek and Roman writers ridiculed the Jews because of this. They were, said Seneca, Plutarch and Tacitus, a lazy people who took a day off because they did not like labor. Neither Greeks nor Romans could understand the idea that rest is an achievement, that the Sabbath is Judaism’s stillness at the heart of the turning world, and that it was this that God created on the seventh day. “After six days,” said Judaism’s sages, “what did the world lack? It lacked rest. So when the seventh day came, rest came, and the universe was complete.”26

The Sabbath (in Hebrew, Shabbat) is a religious institution, a memorial to creation, the day on which God Himself rested. But it is also and essentially a political institution. Shabbat is the greatest tutorial in liberty ever devised. Passover tells us how the Israelites won their freedom. Shabbat tells us how they kept it. One day in seven, Jews create a messianic society. It is the day on which everyone, master and slave, employer and employee, even animals, experience unconditional freedom. We neither work nor get others to work, manipulate nor allow ourselves to be manipulated. We may neither buy nor be bought. It is the day on which all hierarchies, all relationships of power are suspended.

Shabbat was, of course, the antithesis of Egypt—the free society as opposed to a society of slaves. Slaves work without rest at the will of their masters. So the first mark of the Israelites’ freedom was a day of rest for everyone:

On it you shall do no work, neither you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your ox or donkey or any of your animals, nor the stranger within your gates, so that your manservant and maidservant may rest as you do. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and the Lord your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day27

But Shabbat was also a way of enacting, while on the way, the journey’s end, the destination. Slavery was not immediately abolished; it existed in most parts of the world until the nineteenth century. Even today

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