Parashat Va’ethanan: Shabbat for All Times

Hebrew

In Deuteronomy, Moses repeats many things reported previously in Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers. He also introduces some changes, some more significant than others. Some of the more conspicuous changes appear in the Ten Commandments, especially regarding Shabbat.

In Deuteronomy (5:12-15), Moses tells the people who are about to enter the Land:

Observe the sabbath day and keep it holy, as the Eternal your God has commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of the Eternal your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your ox or your ass, or any of your cattle, or the stranger in your settlements, so that your male and female slave may rest as you do. Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt and the Eternal your God freed you from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore, the Eternal your God has commanded you to observe the sabbath day.

In Exodus (20:8-11), the Israelites who left Egypt heard:

Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath of the Eternal your God: you shall not do any work… For in six days the Eternal made heaven and earth and sea, and all that is therein, and God rested on the seventh day; therefore, the Eternal blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it.

In both instances, it is clear that rest on the seventh day comes after six days of work, and that the obligation to rest applies to the entire society. But there is a key difference.

It was important that the newly freed slaves hear that Shabbat was embedded in creation. After experiencing uninterrupted labor throughout the years of slavery, as did their parents and grandparents before them, they may have found it hard to believe that the new Master who had defeated Pharaoh with great force and was now handing down orders did not also demand constant work. Therefore, the connection to creation is essential.

The lives of the desert generation were completely different from life in Egypt. For forty years, one of their primary activities was collecting (and eating) manna. They were familiar with Shabbat because on Fridays they needed to gather a double portion because none would descend from heaven the next day. For them, Shabbat was built into their life routine. What was foreign to them was ongoing work and employer-employee relations. On the border of the Land, just before beginning a naturally productive life, they needed to hear a different Torah and emphasizes that the people should not imagine themselves as employers like the Egyptians. It is forbidden to learn from Pharaoh. There is life beyond work.

During the first Babylonian exile, another voice strengthened Shabbat with new meaning. With the Temple in ruins, the Israelites’ religious life contracted, leaving Shabbat as the main communal expression of Jewish identity in a foreign land (Moshe Greenberg, “The Experience of Shabbat”).

In varying combinations, the Shabbat of creation with an avoidance of creative work, Shabbat as a remembrance of the Exodus from Egypt with refreshing rest for all and Shabbat that unites communities accompanied the Jewish people until the modern era. In the early days of Zionism, prominent leaders fought for Shabbat to be kept even among “secular” Zionists, as Haim Nahman Bialik urged members of the Kevutzat Geva:

It is Shabbat, not the culture of oranges or potatoes, that preserved the existence of our people during all the days of its wanderings, and now that we are returning to the land of our forefathers, you want to discard it like an unwanted object? …Without Shabbat, there is no Divine image and no human image in the world (letter, 1933).

More than 90 years have passed. Social and economic life in Israel and around the world has changed. In my opinion Shabbat is more important than ever. Not as a mountain of laws hanging from a hair (Mishna Ḥagigah 1:8) but rather as a stand against consumerism, driven by frantic shopping, and challenge the culture in which a person is primarily a consumer. Human life is not limited to productivity. The economy exists to serve society.

“Without Shabbat, there is no Divine image and no human image in the world.”