There’s a comedian I’ve heard with a bit in which his three-year-old daughter is acting up. To distract her, he gives her a cookie.
“Here, honey,” he says, “you like these—have a Fig Newton.”
“No, Dad. They’re not called Fig Newtons. They’re called Pig Newtons!”
And here the comedian knows he ought to just laugh off the error, but instead, for some reason, he feels compelled to correct her.
“No, honey,” he calmly replies. “They’re called Fig Newtons.”
“No!” his daughter responds again even more furiously than before. “You don’t know anything, Dad— they’re called Pig Newtons!”
She’s just three years old, the father thinks to himself. She is, of course, entitled to be wrong, but it’s just the complete lack of humility that he can’t get past. The absence of any self-doubt. The pure arrogance the child is exhibiting. He pulls the box of cookies down again from the cabinet and shows it to her.
“Really?” he says to her. “I’m the one that doesn’t know anything? I’m reading it right off the box. You’re three. I’m forty-one. What are the odds—the sheer odds—that you’re right about this, and I’m wrong?”
Unfortunately, it’s not just three year olds that can be so headstrong. We can be too.
In addition to being a great and rollicking story, the book of Exodus is a profound moral document that articulates a distinctive protest against pharaohs, oppression, and idolatry but also against all the harried, bustling ways of the world, which so degrade human life. And it’s the Ten Commandments in general, and the sixth commandment in particular, that pushes back against this degradation most effectively:
Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work...For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but He rested on the seventh day. Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
In his poetic book, The Sabbath, Rabbi Abraham Yeshua Heschel points out that Creation was not wholly completed until God made something holy. However, it wasn’t something physical that God chose to make holy but rather time itself, or more particularly a slice of time when God rested on the seventh day and blessed it, as we’re told here in Exodus as well as back in Genesis.
Everyone will admit, Heschel wrote, the Grand Canyon is more awe-inspiring than a trench. Likewise, he writes, everyone knows the difference between an eagle and a worm. But, he asks, do we have the ability to discern that the seventh day has a very different climate to it than the other six days? Time isn’t homogenous, Heschel insists. Rather, there’s a distinct magnificence about the Sabbath. There’s a special feel of it. Or there should be.
As the Sabbath approaches each week, Heschel suggests we ought to release ourselves from all of our time-bound clattering acquisitiveness and, as we exodus from its tension, care for the seed of eternity that God has implanted inside our souls. We must, he writes, feel ourselves cross over a boundary, a dividing line, a threshold, to enter into what he calls “a palace in time” to then inhabit on the Sabbath—a palace made “of soul, of joy, and reticence.”
It’s not hard to imagine God looking at how we so often fail to do this, then taking a sacred breath and beat and saying to us, besides being a commandment, I am offering to you a great blessing if you obey this directive. I made you, God is saying. I know how you are designed. I want for you a time of rest. A period of holiness. You need it. You are human. Why do you kick against the goads? I am God. What are the chances that with regard to this matter you are right, and I am wrong? What are the odds?
What we’re called to do when the Sabbath approaches each week is not to see it as merely another day or even just a day off. And what we’re called to do on the Sabbath itself is not just to rest for a few hours. It’s much more significant than that. We each are being asked to witness and to experience a foretaste of the resurrection of our very souls. The Sabbath, as Heschel so profoundly puts it, is really Eternity in disguise.
God—May we honor the Sabbath. Amen.
