Protect the Shabbat
Friday March 10, 2023
Congregation B’nai B’rith, Santa Barbara CA
About five years ago, Marian and I were on a backpacking trip in the Desolation Wilderness near Lake Tahoe and we planned the trip to allow us to observe Shabbat. We hiked long days all week long, and then on Shabbat we just stayed put, all day long, in one beautiful spot by a lake, and did nothing but sit and read, eat and daven, and doze all day long. It was a glorious day of stillness high up in the mountains.
I spent several hours that day sitting and thinking about Shabbat in my life.
Feeling grateful for the gift of a day of rest, and for so many Shabbat memories: of communal prayer, of singing, of Saturday afternoon naps, of mornings of Torah study, of puzzles and board games when our kids were young, of storytelling to the little kids sitting on my lap, and of long Shabbat afternoon walks on the Ellwood bluffs, with Marian or with a friend, discussing our lives, our kids and our parents, watching the birds and the waves, and gazing into the sun setting over the Pacific. Shabbat has been a source of blessing in my life.
But sitting there, high in the mountains, I also thought about the ways I that wished Shabbat in my life might be more, or different. I reflected on how my job as a rabbi has often prevented us from including friends and family around our Shabbat dinner table. I wished that we lived within walking distance of the Temple so that I would not have to drive on Shabbat. I wished that many more members of our community would be drawn to the Temple on Shabbat. And I wished that I was not in the habit of typing my Torah study handouts on my computer early on Saturday morning. I wished I felt free to turn off my electronic devices on Shabbat.
Sitting there meditating, I was struck by a realization. Some of those things are out of my control, I realized, but not all. Until I retire, we are not going to regularly have friends and family around our Shabbat dinner table. And I’m not about to retire. And we are not planning to sell our house and to move to within walking distance of CBB. So I will have to keep driving on Shabbat. But I could, with planning and with discipline, rearrange my schedule to always prepare my Torah study handouts before Shabbat. If it was important to me, I could stop turning on my devices on Shabbat. I will tell you how that worked out, but first…
In 2010, New York Times journalist Judith Shulevitz wrote a marvelous book called The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time. I had never read anything like it. In her book, which became a best seller, Shulevitz offered a deeply researched, beautifully written, profound meditation on the meaning of Shabbat for our generation. It is moving and inspiring. But most importantly for me, Shulevitz states openly in her introduction: “this book is about my ambivalence toward Shabbat.” There are no other deep and brilliant books about Shabbat that I’m aware of that are open and honest about the author’s uneasiness and uncertainty toward Shabbat. Her intense yearning for the peace and wholeness of a traditional day of rest, but also her inner resistance. The traditional Shabbat is not only a day of rest but a day of rules. “I don’t like being told what to do,” she says, “and I don’t like being told what to do with my time.”
So that night while Marian and I were eating our rehydrated meal up in the mountains I told her about my epiphany. Even if a traditional Shabbat was not possible, without a huge reorganization of our lives, I could choose to turn off my computer and my cell phone before Shabbat, and to live liberated from screen technology every week, from sundown Friday to three stars on Saturday night. And I did it, for a few years.
Then Covid came, and we could not physically gather together. For more than a year, the only way this congregation could meet for Friday night services was by zoom, using our computers. My decision to commit to a screen-free Shabbat was undone by the pandemic, and once I was using my computer to connect to my community by zoom, I saw no reason not to tap a few additional keys and to post my sermons to Facebook…since I was so desperate for feedback and interaction. Of course, once I had posted to Facebook, I immediately began to receive comments, thumbs up and hearts. I could not resist checking, all day long. The wizards of Silicon Valley had hacked into my mind, grabbed hold of my brain chemistry, and I had lost control of my Shabbat.
In the Torah this week, we read a passage which is traditionally chanted every Friday night and Saturday morning, V’shamru v’nei Yisrael et haShabbat. The Children of Israel will guard the Shabbat, to make the Shabbat throughout their generations, an eternal covenant. The word v’shamru means “they shall guard.” They shall watch and observe. They shall protect. With this word, the Torah evokes the fragility of Shabbat, it’s vulnerability to all the storms and tides and winds that threaten to erode it. Shabbat is so fundamental to our lives as human beings and as Jews that it is actually one of the Ten Commandments, along with the prohibition of idolatry, the obligation to honor parents, the prohibitions against murder, adultery, robbery and false testimony. And when Moses reminds the people of the Ten Commandments in Deuteronomy, before he dies, he uses the same word: Shamor et yom haShabbat. Guard the Shabbat. Watch it. Protect it.
Judith Shulevitz argues that Shabbat is one of the greatest inventions in human history. Perhaps the most radical idea in the entire Torah. The radical idea is that everyone gets to rest. Not just the king. Everyone. Peasant, worker, women, men, children. Even animals. Moreover, everyone rests at the same time, on the same day. Shabbat forces us to step away from our work, all together, all at once, and to come together as a community….for the sake of being together. It turns out that true rest, she says, is something we do in a group. And the fact that the group is doing it, all together, is what guards the Shabbat. The community keeps the Shabbat, and the Shabbat keeps the community.
This is perhaps the most famous teaching of the early 20th century Zionist philosopher Asher Ginsberg, better known as Achad Ha’am. "More than the Jewish people has kept the Shabbat, the Shabbat has kept the Jewish people."
This move to Trinity for the sake of our Building Dreams project has further disrupted my already fractured Shabbat practice. I am trying to be in all of the many places that our community meets on Shabbat. I come here…I mean, I drive here….for Torah Study at 9:00am, which is one of the highlights of my week. Then at 10:30 I drive over to our CBB campus where the young families Library Minyan is still meeting out the playground. That is the minyan where Marian and our daughter Rachel and her husband Zach and our granddaughter Lailah come for Shabbat. I have to be there. But then if there is a Bar or Bat Mitzvah, I drive back over here at 11:45 to be here for the end of the Torah reading, and for the dvar Torah, and the discussion which I lead, and for the parents’ speeches. I want to be here! So much driving, so far from the Shabbat of my dreams.
But I do take some comfort in picturing our community Shabbat once the construction project is complete. Shabbat is at the heart of our Building Dreams vision. In about a year and a half, Shabbat at CBB will be a day for families, for children, for seniors, all to be together. Not just on Friday night, but all day Saturday. A day of picnics, and music, and kids playing outside. Not just once in a while, but every week. And we will look forward to coming together, not because it is a rule. Not because it is a commandment. But because we are drawn together, by our love for each other. Shabbat shalom.