A Renewed Practice of Sabbath

When we look at religious history, God introduced the concept of Sabbath to humanity thousands of years ago in the 10 Commandments, telling us we need to set aside one day a week to disconnect from our work and instead to connect with our deeper selves, our families and friends, and with God himself. It's a practice many have let slip away, but it's one we need to look at with renewed interest in light of our stressful, always-achieving, constantly-tech-connected lives today. Christopher Award-winning documentarian Martin Doblmeier explores that topic in his latest film, Sabbath, which is available to view for free at JourneyFilms.com and on various PBS stations.

In the film, Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, the senior rabbi of Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York City, calls Sabbath - or Shabbat - a "revolutionary concept" introduced to the world by the Jewish people. During a Christopher Closeup interview, Doblmeier explained, "If you go back 3,000 years, there was no sense of a rhythm [to life], a day off. It was the first time in human history that there was a mandated day off. And in the Hebrew tradition, the Shabbat is the day of rest. That, in some ways, transformed humanity."

Doblmeier joined a Jewish family for its celebration of the Shabbat meal on a Friday evening, which begins with the lighting of candles. He notes that the atmosphere in the room changed immediately afterwards to one of peace, rest, and putting worldly cares out of everyone's mind. Civil rights activist Abraham Heschel's daughter reveals a similar family tradition, noting that her father never discussed politics on Shabbat. Doblmeier observed, "I thought that was refreshing because it's one thing to say, 'I'm not going to go to work today, but I'm still going to talk all day long about the culture wars.' . . . Not just the body, not just the mind, but the soul in some way needs that relaxation, to stop for 24 hours and say, 'I'm not going to think about these kinds of things because they infuriate me. . . . Today is my day of disengagement. I owe it to myself and I owe it to God.'"

Doblmeier also wondered what it would be like to practice Sabbath in a place already removed from the wider world and focused on prayer. That’s why he visited the Trappist monastery St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts. The monks, grounded in the concept of "Ora et labora" (prayer and work), labor on the land to produce the crops they need to make the jams and beers they sell. They also pray seven times a day every day. So what makes they're celebration of Sabbath special?

"St. Benedict, 1,500 years ago, gave a prescription for what Sabbath was supposed to be like for the monks," said Doblmeier. "Not only did he want the brothers to stop work for that particular day, but he also wanted them to study, to actually use the time for sacred reading. . . ..Lectio Divina, sacred reading, winds up being the focal point of why monasteries going back centuries were the place of education. The rest of the world was not literate, monks were literate. And why was that? That was because they had the insistence of St. Benedict that Sabbath in particular was the day that was set aside for sacred reading. You have to learn to read and then you have to be able to share that with others. So, it gave us another dimension to the whole Sabbath story."

This essay is a recent "Light One Candle" column by Tony Rossi, Director of Communications, The Christophers; it is one of a series of weekly columns that deal with a variety of topics and current events.

Background information:

The Christophers