The Sabbath (review)

The Sabbath is likely Abraham Joshua Heschel’s most widely-read book. Widely translated, it merited a second translation into a resonant Hebrew. It achieved fame when published jointly with The Earth is the Lord’s (1950). The books complement each other: the earlier portrays the sanctity of space, the later expounds the sanctity of time. Together they express the Heschelian space-time dialectic.

From its biblical inception to its modern expression, no practice of Judaism has garnered more attention than the Sabbath. Heschel’s The Sabbath, subtitled “Its Meaning for Modern Man,” culminates a series of such attempts. In the century prior to Heschel’s The Sabbath, major explanations of the Sabbath were proffered primarily by German and Hasidic thinkers. In the late nineteenth century, Samson Raphael Hirsch stressed the idea that one rules the world six days a week, but ceases on the seventh in order to realize one’s creatureliness and appreciate one’s Creator. Herman Cohen in his essay on the Sabbath (1869) and in his book Religion of Reason (1919) stressed the social significance of the Sabbath as a realization of ideal human existence, the day on which God’s love is manifest, and a demonstration to humanity of pure monotheism. Two of Cohen’s followers, Leo Baeck and Franz Rosenzweig, also made contributions. Baeck underscored the Sabbath as a day of liberation for slaves and the oppressed, and as a balance to the bustle of the week. For Rosenzweig, the Sabbath whets our appetite for eternity by getting us to commemorate creation, sense revelation, and anticipate redemption. In the same year that The Sabbath came out, Erich Fromm published The Forgotten Language with its essay on the Sabbath, based on his German essay of 1927. For Fromm, the Sabbath is “man’s victory over time,” for “by stopping interference with nature for one day you eliminate time.” “Instead of a Sabbath on which man bows down to the lord of time, the Biblical Sabbath symbolizes man’s victory over time.”

None of these figure in Heschel’s otherwise heavily documented presentation (Cohen is cited once, but on a different subject) though he incorporates many of their insights when he writes, “Man’s royal privilege to conquer nature is suspended on the seventh day” or “The seventh day is the armistice in man’s cruel struggle for existence, a truce in all conflicts, personal and social, peace between man and man, man and nature, peace within man” (p. 29).

Instead, references to Rabbinic literature, the liturgy, Kabbalah, and Hasidic literature predominate. The Sabbath’s immediate precursors, especially on the subject of the sacredness of time, are Kedushas Shabbat of R. Zadok ha-Kohen of Lublin (1823–1900) and Sefas Emes of R. Yehudah Leib of Gur (1847–1905). Albeit rabbinically based, Heschel’s portrayal is drawn with liturgical-mystical hues. His chapters revolve around time, (Divine) Presence, eternity and holiness. The balance between space and time can be gauged by the ratio of their mention in the table of contents: five for time, two for space, and two more for time extended—eternity. His opening metaphor for the Sabbath, “A Palace in time”—elsewhere called “cathedrals in time”—is a classical kabbalistic image. Kabbalah loves to mix temporal and spatial metaphors. In fact, its focus on the Sabbath and Jerusalem is a focus on the sacred in time and space. Both the Sabbath and Jerusalem are the centers of their respective categories of the sacred. Jerusalem is the spatialization of the holy as the Sabbath is its temporalization. Therefore, were one to profane the Sabbath by treating it as one of the six days of the week, one could be ejected from the sacred center in space to the periphery of the exile. In the same vein, were one to properly observe the Sabbath in time, one could be restored from the profane periphery to the sacred center in space, namely Jerusalem. Thus the rebuilding of Jerusalem is dependent upon Sabbath observance.

Still Heschel rarely employs kabbalistic terminology, though it...