“We must not forget that it is not a thing that lends significance to a moment; it is the moment that lends significance to things.” Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath, pg. 6.
I’ve been reading The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel, one of the leading Jewish theologians of the 20th century. He opens his book with the bold claim that “technical civilization is man’s conquest of space.” In other words, the more we build, own, and even create and collect things the more we have controlled the space around us. We need space to survive, he allows for this, but he criticizes the lengths we go to to own and control more space than we need.
There is a security in space, we especially like our spacious homes and privacy, and look for other things to fill that vacuous space to ensure we’ve claimed it as our own. Space is power and borders are guarded heavily; space is comfort when it has been tailored to fit wo/men placed in the center.
Daniel and I have experienced the discomfort of not having a space to call our own home, to leave behind many of our things that fill space, and live in a space that in unknown to us and governed by another family’s customs. Though they are a family that in many ways lives simply in comparison to many Americans (heat with wood in MN winter, limit their water use, limit their appliance and electricity use, and reuse every piece of plastic, glass and tin available) they too seem just as bound by things as any other family. And indeed, Heschel talks about how many people are liberated from many things, but few are liberated from the lure of owning space.
You may notice I’ve been talking about things as space, a delineation Heschel uses in his definition. He does not go so far to say that all things unnecessary for life should be omitted from life, but rather we should be independent of such luxuries. Simply put, “to have them and to be able to do without them” (p. 28). This is one goal, I think, of the Sabbath, to practice time rather than space. To use the historical practices as examples, to stop use of transportation, light, stoves, etc., and to dwell in a kind of time that is different and less dependent on things in space. This is one aspect of Sabbath and Daniel and I are modestly attempting to practice.
As I continued to read I thought about how I also treat time as a thing, a commody to be bargained and gained or lost. But Heschel has a much clearer understanding that time is in fact one thing we cannot conquer or possess. Furthermore, it is not as monolithic as we mistake it to be. Time is not just one minute, or hour, or day that marches steadily on. There is a diversity to time, one that Heschel claims the Jewish faith is built around. The festival days are markers of events in time rather than signifying a triumph or space or number. The Sabbath is the ultimate example of a differentiated time, it is holy time, time that will be holy with or without us, but time in which we may choose to dwell.
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As I’ve entered into my Sabbath time, I have thought a lot about sanctification and how I participate in my own and in the world’s through my practices. But Heschel redirected me by returning to the Genesis text. God hallowed the day in Gen 2:3, creation (space) was declared good after the first six days, but on the seventh, God created and blessed time, a particular time.
And so perhaps it is that simply by being in that time, within the Sabbath rather than achieving Sabbath, I too become sanctified. In my active cessation I have enjoyed the bliss of creation, the wonders of life, and have glimpsed the eternity Heschel describes as the climax of living in the holiness of Sabbath.
Heschel’s daughter wrote the introduction to the book saying, “The Sabbath appeared at a time when American Jews were assimilating radically and when many were embarrassed by public expressions of Jewishness…For them, the Sabbath interfered with jobs, socializing, shopping and simply being American” (p. xii) I’m afraid much hasn’t changed for many Americans, Jew, Christian or otherwise.
When do we stop and submit to time set apart for matters of the spirit? When do we stop and submit to time at all? When do we leave our spatial conquest to dwell in time that reflects a world where space is no longer an expression of greed and pride, but an expression of the beauty of creation and a God who loves us regardless of space acquired.
Even as I take three months of intentional time, time I know will end, time for which I have been hungry, I can feel my grip on space, on things, on security and comfort grow stubborn. I must remember that the Sabbath is not idle rest for the weary, not a day that depends upon me to exist, but a holy time blessed by God for the sake of life and the celebration of it.
