We commonly say "time is fleeting" but Heschel points out that only things don't last. When the Romans destroyed Jerusalem's temple, Jews re-conceived a temple in time, "an insight that made history" (53). Judaism remains; the empire of Romans, supreme conquerors of spaces, passed long ago. Judaism already differed from their neighbors' worship of gods identified with sacred objects, sacred animals, and sacred sites. The burning bush that manifests God to Moses is an image for time: "Though each instant must vanish to open the way to the next one, time itself is not consumed" (100).
Heschel's book is on the reading list of Education for Ministry (EfM), an extension of the Episcopal School of Theology at The University of the South, Sewanee TN. Our group had just considered the way that Mary's song Magnificat conceives of past and future being already present, as if time were a building or container, not a road. One of our students with close knowledge of Spanish told us that Spanish expressions for time speak of volume, not passage. So I was primed to read the first chapter of this book, "A Palace in Time."
But I got pretty confused pretty quickly. Noting that EfM calls The Sabbath a "prose poem," my EfM co-mentor Susan says that I shouldn't try to find a sustained argument in the book.
Good idea. I came to the book expecting the rabbi to enumerate good things that stem from obedience to the third commandment. I would say a day of rest, with a worship service, is a ritual that solidifies a religious community; is a nice retreat from the pressures of civilization; is good for your mental health; is for (everybody say it together) "recharging your batteries" before the work week. His daughter Susannah Heschel shoots down all of those ideas in her preface, adding that, for her father, "the Sabbath was a complement to building civilization, not a withdrawal from it" (xiii).
Heschel's real mission is to open us up to loving the Sabbath, an "intuition of eternity" (ch. VIII) that crowns the work week. "Work with things in space," he writes, "but be in love with eternity" (48). The book is a grab bag of ways to help us to see the Sabbath.
He cites ancient Rabbis who called the Sabbath both a bride to be loved and a queen to be obeyed (62), and he takes some time to write why we should take the metaphor seriously, but not literally -- which would be idolatry (59). To think of the day as a bride is "not personification of the Sabbath but an exemplification of a divine attribute...God's need for human love" (60).
To me that seems a stretch, but I'm not sure if Heschel's colloquy with rabbis of other centuries is not a sort of scholarly banter, a game. How seriously are we to take a rabbi's statement that telling a falsehood on the Sabbath is impossible, not because lying is forbidden, but because of the nature of the day itself (20)? Heschel relates some weird allegorical stories --such as one about a rabbi who spends 24 years in a cave buried naked in sand up to his head -- and then derives lessons from the stories. As he piles on the lessons, I feel like he's sculpting with smoke.
He mines more solid material when he and the rabbis pick at lines in Scripture. We read that God on the seventh day both "rested" and "finished creation." How could He be said to do both? Heschel and his rabbi friends of ages past offer the ingenious solution that God finished creation by creating the day of rest. That makes the Sabbath, not an absence of work, but a positive presence, the crown of all creation (22). When Exodus 19.1 tells us "on this day" the Hebrews came to Sinai, why doesn't it read "on that day?" Heschel concludes that this day is that day, an everlasting eternal event (98). I'd call it a typo, but I'm glad to see it Heschel's way.
Chapter VII is more poetry than prose, an insider's view of Sabbath liturgy, an appreciation of how chanting from the Psalms and Song of Solomon can affect us.
Just as I was reading Heschel's book, the latest issue of The Atlantic (Jan-Feb 2021) arrived with an article about "the Sunday scaries," an affliction that staff writer Derek Thompson describes as a "flood of anxiety" that we feel "as the weekend winds down." We feel worry about not being prepared for the work week ahead, and guilt for being unproductive. Thompson reviews an anthropologist's recent book about a tribe of hunter-gatherers who seem nonchalant about the future and indifferent to getting ahead of each other. Thompson concludes that anxiety on Sunday is a price we pay for civilization, at least until we can tamp down our need to compete with each other.
Thompson could look closer to home for a solution. His article never mentions church or sabbath.
Heschel's prescription for the Sunday scaries is also his prescription to make Americans truly free and independent. "There are many who have acquired a high degree of political and social liberty, but only very few are not enslaved to things" (89). He advises, "All our life should be a pilgrimage to the seventh day," not as a day off, but as the day that gives the other six days their meaning.
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