Ezra's Bookshelf

The Sabbath

by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel · 132 pages · ~2.5 hrs

Religion & SpiritualityPhilosophy

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Abraham Joshua Heschel's short 1951 meditation argues that Judaism is fundamentally a religion of time rather than of space, and that the Sabbath is its central architecture: a sanctuary built not of stone but of hours, what he famously calls a palace in time. Modern technical civilization, Heschel observes, is devoted to the conquest of space and the accumulation of things, and in that pursuit people lose their relationship with time, treating it only as something to be used up. The Bible points the other way. The first thing God calls holy in Genesis is not a place or an object but a day, the seventh, and Jewish tradition has sanctified moments and seasons rather than shrines. The Sabbath, in this account, is not merely a day of rest that restores people for more work; it is the goal of the week, a foretaste of eternity in which one stops struggling with the world and attends instead to being. Heschel draws on rabbinic legends, Hasidic teachings and the liturgy, including the imagery of the Sabbath as a bride and a queen, to evoke the joy, beauty and stillness the day is meant to hold. Heschel was born in Warsaw in 1907 into a family of Hasidic rabbis, earned a doctorate in Berlin, escaped Europe shortly before the Holocaust, and became a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary and a prominent civil rights activist who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. at Selma. Lyrical and brief, illustrated with woodcuts by Ilya Schor, the book speaks to religious and secular readers alike who are looking for a way to resist the tyranny of constant productivity.

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