Welcome to TBE's Own Book Review Section
Below are book reviews submitted by our on TBE congregation members. We hope you will find them helpful in choosing your next book. Don't forget to use our Amazon link on the home page when ordering new books!
The Sabbath
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Heschel (1907 – 1972)
The following information about Abraham Joshua Heschel is taken from Rabbi Telushkin’s book Jewish Literacy.
Marched with Martin L. King at Selma in 1965.
Heschel believed that the power of the Bible came from its ability to address every human being in every generation. It was not limited to the scholars
All of scholarship is worthless and all of worship is futile if they do not penetrate one’s bones.
On occasion, Heschel ruefully noted the greater attention many Jews pay to ritual rather than ethical laws. “The Jewish people, he declared, “are a messenger who have forgotten their message.”
Heschel was deeply attracted to Jewish spirituality in general, and to mysticism in particular.
Born in Germany and rescued prior to WW II by the HUC in Cincinnati, in 1945 he left HUC for the faculty of the Conservative Jewish Theological Seminary. He produced a steady stream of books in an eloquent, poetic English, a remarkable feat for a man who did not learn the language until he was past 30.
The Sabbath
Time and Space - Quotes
Technical civilization is man’s conquest of space… To gain control of the world of space is certainly one of our tasks. The danger begins when in gaining power in the realm of space we forfeit all aspirations in the realm of time. There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord. Life goes wrong when he control of space, the acquisition of things of space, becomes our soul concern.
Technical civilization stems primarily from man’s desire to subdue and manage the forces of nature. I.e. farming, building houses, manufacturing tools. The minds preoccupation with things of space affects, to this day, all activities of man.
The primitive mind finds it hard to realize an idea without the aid of imagination, and it is the realm of space where imagination wields its sway. Of the gods it must have a visible image. … we have sacred monuments flags, banners, shrines which have become so important that the idea it stands for is consigned to oblivion. Yet a god who can be fashioned, a god who can be confined, is but a shadow of man.
Reality to us is thinghood; even God is conceived by most of us as a thing. The result of our thingness is our blindness to all reality that fails to identify itself as a thing.
Indeed, we know what to do with space but do not know what to do about time, except to make it subservient to space. Most of us seem to labor for the sake of things of space.
The higher goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information, but to face sacred moments. In a religious experience, it is not a thing that imposes itself on man but a spiritual presence. What is retained in the soul is the moment of insight rather than the place where the act came to pass. A moment of insight is a fortune, transporting us beyond the confines of measured time.
Heschel does not intend to disparage the world of space. Because by doing that is to disparage the works of creation, the works which God beheld and saw “it was good.”
Time and space are interrelated. To overlook either of them is to be partially blind. What he pleads against is man’s unconditional surrender to space, his enslavement to things. We must not forget that it is not a thing that lends significance to a moment; it is the moment that lends significance to things.
The Bible is more concerned with time than with space. It sees the world in a dimension of time. It pays more attention to generations, to events, than to countries, to things; it is more concerned with history than with geography. To understand the teaching of the Bible, one must accept its premise that time has a meaning for life which is at least equal to that of space; that time has a significance and sovereignty of its own.
Judaism transformed agriculture festivals into commemorations of historical events:
Passover (originally a spring harvest festival) commemorates the Exodus from Egypt
Shavuot (old harvest festival at the end of the wheat harvest) celebrates the giving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai
Succot (old festival of vintage) commemorates the dwelling of Israelites in the wilderness
Judaism is a religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time. Judaism teaches us to be attached to holiness in time, to be attached to sacred events.
Jewish ritual may be characterized as the part of significant forms in time, as architecture of time. Most of its observances – the Sabbath, the New Moon, the festivals, the Sabbatical and Jubilee year – depend on a certain hour of the day or season of the year. It is, for example, the evening, morning, and afternoon that brings with it the call to prayer. The main themes of faith lie in the realm of time.
One of the most distinguished words in the Bible is the word qadosh, holy; a word which more than any other is representative of the mystery and majesty of the divine. Now what was the first holy object in the history of the world? Was it a mountain? Was it a place?
It is, indeed, a unique occasion at which the distinguished word qadosh is used for the first time; in the Book of Genesis at the end of the story of creation: And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy.” There is no reference in the record of creation to any object in space that would be endowed with the quality of holiness. God did not create a holy mountain, a holy place whereupon a sanctuary is to be established. Yet it seems as if to the Bible it is holiness in time, the Sabbath, which comes first.
At Sinai “Thou shalt be unto me a holy people.” It was only after the people had succumbed to the temptations of worshipping a thing, a golden calf, that the erection of a Tabernacle, a holiness in space, was commanded .The sanctity of time came first, the sanctity of man came second, and the sanctity of space last.
Festivals celebrate events that happen in time in the month, either the full moon or a specific date. In contrast, the Sabbath is entirely independent of the month and unrelated to the moon. Its date is not determined by any event in nature, such as the new moon, but by the act of creation. Thus the essence of the Sabbath is completely detached from the world of space.
The meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space. Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time. It is a day on which we are called upon to share in what is eternal in time, to turn from the results of creation to the mystery of creation; from the world of creation to the creation of the world.
A Palace in Time
How precious is the Feast of Booths! Dwelling in the Booth, even our body is surrounded by the sanctity of the Mitzvah,” said once a Rabbi to his friend. Whereupon the latter remarked: “The Sabbath Day is even more than that. On the Feast you may leave the Booth for awhile, whereas the Sabbath surrounds you wherever you go.”
He who enters the holiness of the day must first put lay down the profanity of clattering commerce…He must say farewell to manual work and learn to understand that the world has already been created and will survive without the help of man. Six days a week we try to dominate the world, on the seventh day we try to dominate the self.
To the biblical mind, labor is a means towards an end, and the Sabbath as a day of rest, as a day from abstaining from toil, is not for the purpose of recovering one’s lost strength and becoming fit for the forthcoming labor. The Sabbath is a day for the sake of life.
The Sabbath is not for the sake of the weekdays; the weekdays are for the sake of Sabbath. It is not an interlude but the climax of living.
The Sabbath is a dimension in which the human is at home with the divine; a dimension in which man aspires to approach the likeness of the divine.
The love of the Sabbath is the love of man for what he and God have in common.
The Sabbath is given unto you, not you unto the Sabbath.
That shalt sanctify the Sabbath with all thy heart, with all thy soul and with all thy senses. “Sanctify the Sabbath by choice meals, by beautiful garments; delight your soul with pleasure and I will reward you for this very pleasure.
Unlike the Day of Atonement, the Sabbath is not dedicated exclusively to spiritual goals. It is the day of the soul as well as of the body; comfort and pleasure are an integral part of the Sabbath observance. Man in his entirety, all his faculties must share its blessing.
To observe the seventh day does not mean merely to obey or to conform to the strictness of a divine command. To observe is to celebrate the creation of the world and to create the seventh day all over again, the majesty of holiness in time, ”a day of rest, a day of freedom,”…
The seventh day is like a palace in time with a kingdom for all. It is not a date but an atmosphere.
It is not a different state of consciousness but a different climate; it is as if the appearance of all things somehow changed. The primary awareness is one of our being within the Sabbath rather than of the Sabbath being within us.
The difference between the Sabbath and all other days is not to be noticed in the physical structure of things, in their spatial dimension. Things do not change on that day. There is only a change in the dimension of time, in the relation of the universe to God. The Sabbath preceded creation and the Sabbath completed creation; it is all of the spirit that the world can bear.
Sabbath/ menucha /rest is the state in which there is no strife and no fighting, no fear and no distrust.
Beyond Civilization
Technical civilization is the product of labor, of man’s exertion of power for the sake of gain, for the sake of producing goods. It begins when man, dissatisfied with what is available in nature, become engaged in a struggle with the forces of nature in order to enhance his safety and to increase his comfort. To use the language of the Bible, the task of civilization is to subdue the earth, to have dominion over the beast.
How proud we often are of our victories in the war with nature, …what we have invented and produced… Yet our victories have come to resemble defeats. In spite of our triumphs, we have fallen victims to the work of our hands; it is as if the forces we had conquered have conquered us.
The faith of the Jew is not a way out of this world, but a way of being within and above this world; not to reject but o surpass civilization. The Sabbath is the day on which we learn the art of surpassing civilization.
To set apart one day a week for freedom, a day on which we would not use instruments which have been so easily turned into weapons of destruction, a day for being with ourselves, a day of detachment from the vulgar, of independence of external obligations, a day on which we stop worshiping the idols of technical civilization, a day on which we use no money, a day of armistice in the economic struggle with our fellow men and the forces of nature – is there any institution that holds out a greater hope for man’s progress than the Sabbath?
The solution of mankind’s most vexing problem will not be found in renouncing technical civilization, but in attaining some degree of independence from it.
…On the Sabbath we live, as it were independent of technical civilization: we abstain primarily from any activity that aims at remaking or reshaping the things of space. Man’s royal privilege to conquer nature is suspended on the seventh day.
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; a day on which handling money is considered a desecration, on which man avows his independence of that which is the world’s chief idol. The seventh day is the exodus from tension, the liberation of man from his own muddiness, the installation of man as a sovereign in the world of time.
The Sabbath is a day in which we abandon our plebeian pursuits and reclaim our authentic state, in which we may partake of a blessedness in which we are what we are, regardless of whether we are learned or not, of whether our career is a success or a failure; it is a day of independence of social conditions…an island in our lives…
All week we ponder and worry… The Sabbath is no time for personal anxiety or care, for any activity that might dampen the spirit of joy.
Compiled by Chuck Lisner
