Sabbath Devotional :: Holy Time

YouTube: Hymn – *Anthem on the tune O quanta qualia, Op 394*

There are lots of commandments I don’t especially enjoy, but I have been an enthusiastic Sabbath keeper for most of my adult life. In college, I enjoyed sanctifying my laziness by declaring that I wouldn’t do homework on Sundays, and I loved explaining (while wearing a black turtleneck, of course!) that I was being radically countercultural by refusing to participate in the capitalist economy for one day each week. When my children were small, Sunday sanctified my generally inept housekeeping and let me feel virtuous about putting them in front of a churchy video and taking a nap. But it was reading a sermon by the Jewish poet Maxine Silverman that helped me really understand what observing the Sabbath was meant to do, the practical effect that Sabbath-keeping should have in our lives.

All week, but especially on Friday as Sabbath approaches, I run around like the proverbial chicken with its head cut off, trying to finish up the work, hurrying, hurrying. But on Friday afternoon, . . . just before I light the candles, I take off my watch and step out of time, as though my work were done. Enough, it’s time to stop. And the blessing of it is, for me, it’s not my decision. It’s a mitzvah, a commandment, and that makes it easier for women and other compulsives, whose work has no clear-cut beginning, middle, and end.

Candles, wine — blessings over both — the food, the children. And tomorrow, when I wake up, I will leave my bed unmade. Notice the language is positive, the tone triumphant, rather than the guilt-tinged “I didn’t make my bed.” . . . the choice of leaving my bed unmade has its roots in childhood, mine, and in my relationship with my mother, who taught me the domestic art of making one’s bed (and lying in it). . . . I was always the last one up and dressed, the last one at the breakfast table, the last one out the door for school. . . . I had a hard time making my bed, and I had a hard time with my mother because of it.

. . . So it is easy to discern, without the help of an analyst, why my first decision about observing Shabbat would be to leave my bed unmade. I love it! Even as I write these words I feel intense pleasure. All week long as soon as I get up, good daughter that I am, I make the bed, but on Shabbat, I rest.

One Sunday as we rushed to get out the door, the boys to school, my husband and I to morning minyan, I realized that I had not made the bed. Oh well, I thought, just this once I won’t. But habit and Lord knows what else were stronger, and I returned to the bedroom. As I folded the blanket under the mattress, I had an insight so strong I stopped, the mattress lifted up, just stopped. The understanding was so powerful I couldn’t move:

If I observe Shabbat, in part, by leaving my bed unmade, then making it all week is also part of that observance. All week long I make the bed so that leaving it becomes significant, becomes holy, the fulfillment of a commandment.

There is a part of the Shabbat service that talks about ennobling the workweek by resting on Shabbat. I had never understood it before, not really, I had never taken it into my consciousness by taking it into my body. Standing there with the mattress lifted and everyone shouting at me to hurry was a scene from my childhood with a twist. A saving twist of meaning, of reframing, a saving grace.

. . . I have felt that thoroughly shaken and joyous only a few times in my life . . . I stood there with that uplifted — and uplifting — mattress. I understood at a level of meaning below language, that when I cease from my work on Shabbat, that “work” means more than earning a living and feeding the family. It means that all the days of the week are lived in anticipation of Shabbat.

Since reading this sermon, I have been more deliberate about the work that I actively choose to leave undone on Sundays, and (on good days) more thoughtful about those same chores as I try to do them “in anticipation of Shabbat.”

I find another truth about the Sabbath (unsurprisingly!) in a hymn I love — the English translation of Abelard’s 12th century anthem O Quanta Qualia. It’s typically sung for All Saints’ Day, when the unity of all those who have lived and died with faith in Christ is celebrated. I have come to love and draw strength from the way that keeping the Sabbath connects me with believers of the many traditions that observe a holy day each week — it reminds me that the time that matters is God’s time, the eternity we step into on the Sabbath. It doesn’t matter so much whether it is Friday or Saturday or Sunday that we observe, and it doesn’t matter whether we are keeping the Sabbath in 1122 or 2022 — keeping the Sabbath reminds me that I am constantly surrounded by eternal, holy beings, and that my encounters with them are not mere transactions. I am connected through time and across chasms of language and belief to God and to God’s children, simply by the recognition that the world of busy-ness and business, of getting and spending, is not the only world there is, and not the world that will endure.

1. Oh, what their joy and the glory must be,
Those endless Sabbaths the blessèd ones see!
Crown for the valiant, to weary ones rest;
God shall be all, and in all ever blest.

2. What are the Monarch, His court, and His throne?
What are the peace and the joy that they own?
Oh, that the blest ones, who in it have share,
All that they feel could as fully declare!

3. Truly Jerusalem name we that shore,
Vision of peace, that brings joy evermore;
Wish and fulfillment can severed be ne’er,
Nor the thing prayed for come short of the prayer.

4. There, where no troubles distraction can bring,
We the sweet anthems of Sion shall sing;
While for thy grace, Lord, their voices of praise
Thy blessèd people eternally raise.

5. There dawns no Sabbath, no Sabbath is o’er,
Those Sabbath-keepers have one evermore;
One and unending is that triumph-song
Which to the angels and us shall belong.

6. Now, in the meanwhile, with hearts raised on high,
We for that country must yearn and must sigh;
Seeking Jerusalem, dear native land,
Through our long exile on Babylon’s strand.