As most of the world finds itself in lockdown, many are forced to get acquainted with an old friends, including isolation and boredom, having run out of activities to do. Daily work and rituals have been interrupted and life has ground down to a slow crawl — unless you are on the frontlines of healthcare. Most people, however, must turn to find some alternative activity to engage their attention while obediently ‘social-distancing’, either no longer having work or during long weekends which used to be filled with other ‘social-closeness’ activities. Now, books, long overdue home projects, video games, news, television, and browsing online must replace these cancelled engagements. We must find something to fill our time until our heavy eyelids compel us to locate our bed, to be repeated the following day. These are enforced days of rest — sabbaths — and perhaps it is suggestive of our age when we find the experience so uncomfortable?
The sabbath was established in Torah as a day of rest, when no commercial or other activities were to be pursued, even during the busy seasons of planting and harvest.
Remember the sabbath day and keep it holy. Six days you will work, but the seventh is a sabbath for Yahweh your god; you will not do any work — nor will any person or animal in your home — because in six days Yahweh made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and on the seventh he rested. Therefore Yahweh blessed the seventh day and made it holy.[1]
The Sabbath as practiced by the ancient Israelites was unique. On this day of rest, people would instead gather for worship[2] and spend time among family and friends. Over time, an interest in really understanding what it meant to work on the sabbath, led to increasing religious legislation about what was allowable on a day of rest. We mustn’t risk the wrath of god… Jesus (among others) saw much of this as missing the point, but expected continued observance.[3] He insisted that the Sabbath ought to be a joy and benefit to people, giving them rest from their labor to focus on the more important things in life: god, family, friends, and time alone.
This perspective became prevalent across Judaism and Christianity, in which the sabbath is seen as a gift. A gift which we have spent a great deal of effort abandoning. The empty streets in town and shutters drawn over every shop — an eery, chilling site today, but a common one not so long ago (or in certain towns still today). Every sabbath, work would shut down so that god could be remembered, family could be enjoyed, and one could simply relax: pick up a book, take a walk under the gentle sunshine, or play football.
In fact, when the sabbath is discussed again three chapters later in Exodus 23, it is described as ‘refreshing’ all those in the household: family, slaves, and animals alike. Today as western culture has largely abandoned sabbath practice, psychology studies are showing that the overworked, always busy, anxiety-filled modern workers are actively hurting themselves.[4] Instead, taking extended breaks from labor reduces stress, improves sleep, reduces fatigue, and aids physical and emotional recovery — though, with the number of sedentary jobs, a day of rest also provides the opportunity to be physically active. And now we are legally compelled to take a sabbath, so make the most of it. Disengage from the fears and uncertainty of the world, and connect with family and friends. Technology provides avenues to accomplish this, with the affordability of online video communication.
And, when the sabbath is no longer required for ‘social-distancing’, perhaps we can take god and Jesus’s advice and continue the practice.
- Exodus 20.8f; cf. Deuteronomy 5.12f when the reason is given to ‘remember the exodus’
- See, e.g., Leviticus 23.2f
- See Mark 2.27f. Other Jewish teachers raised similar points, e.g., Jubilees 2.17 and the second century rabbi Simeon ben Menasya.
- Many resources, e.g., Comer’s Ruthless Elimination of Hurry and references on blogposts like https://blog.rescuetime.com/deliberate-rest/ or https://blog.rescuetime.com/weekly-roundup-meaningful-breaks/.