by Bill Wylie-Kellerman

Bill Wylie-Kellermann: You have been active in trying to restore an understanding of the Sabbath in the Jewish community. Are you seeing a strong movement of renewal?

Arthur Waskow: In the last 25 years, there has emerged a movement for Jewish renewal which is taking meditation and the protection and healing of the earth much, much more seriously.

The mystical root of the tradition, which is the one in all traditions that affirms being, is now much stronger than it was 25 years ago. There is a flowering of that outlook in the Jewish world. It is not big enough yet, but it is very much growing. Sometimes it has grown in strange ways. People have sometimes gone outside of Jewish life when they felt that modernity had infected Judaism. People found some of the eastern traditions' ways of reaccessing meditation, restfulness and being. Now there's a really interesting return in which Jews who have deeply experienced Buddhist or Sufi or Native American meditations and chantings are rediscovering the possibilities of this in Jewish life -- both in traditional forms and in new forms.

B. W.-K: What kind of ways of marking and celebrating the Sabbath, both ritual and otherwise, do you commend to people?

A.W.: Traditionally the Sabbath was celebrated by not using artificial means of transportation. People walked. Given our situation where the automobile is one of the major contributors to global warming, it really would make sense to decide not to use gasoline, not use automobiles or airplanes, one day a week or a month. That's one absolutely traditional way of celebrating the Sabbath that would make good sense in our present context.

Now other aspects -- borrowing from and transmuting Jewish tradition -- the Shabbat should be a day on which people look at issues of wisdom, value and truth, justice and decency, whether they are using a so-called religious text or poetry or other stories. People need to do it -- not on the mass media, but with each other -- face to face in circles. People may choose a text and read it together. What does this teach? What are the problems that it stirs in me? What are its implications? The questions should have a special concern about how our lives affect the planet as a whole.

The Shabbat is also a day of celebration, for dancing and singing, of really taking joy in the world and the earth. It should be a day not of competition, not of exhibition dancing or star dancing -- but of folk dancing, of creating art together, of creating poetry and drama together, of reading each other's work together, of taking joy in each other's crafts. You might think of it as a miniature folk arts festival.

B.W-K.: My image of the Sabbath has always included the household gathering around candles to pray. What does this teach us?

A.W.: In Jewish tradition lighting lights is a way of bringing the Sabbath in an archetypal sense. In English, people speak of enlightenment as expanding one's consciousness, although the mystics always taught that there was mystery in darkness also.

The traditional story of the journey of the people in the wilderness is that there was a pillar of fire and a pillar of cloud. We sometimes forget that the point of the cloud is that it was dark and mysterious. In dark as well as in light there is a teaching. We might think about how we might meditate on both dark and light. Darkness enables us to see the world not as ignorance to be conquered (although that's partly true) but also to see mystery in the world that needs to be celebrated, not conquered.

B.W-K.: Could you say a little bit about the origin and history of the Sabbath?

A.W.: The Sabbath is the longest of the 10 utterances at Sinai -- but it actually emerges in the consciousness of the people before Sinai. It emerges after the crossing of the Red Sea with the coming of the manna. The manna comes in such a way that when people try to gather too much it rots away -- except on the sixth day when there's a double portion. When people gather the double portion it doesn't rot. The people are puzzled, so Moses explains that this is because this is the Shabbat.

It's very powerful -- the coming of this special food for which you don't have to work with the sweat pouring down your face in order to eat. This food that the earth gives -- not grudgingly, along with thorns and thistles -- but freely.

Those two sentences I've just used come from the warning at the end of the Garden of Eden, right? It says that human history after the Garden is going to be one in which the relationship between human beings and the earth is almost warlike.

It's interesting that the crack in history that comes from Eden, comes as a result of an incorrect way of eating and that the redemptive possibility of Shabbat comes with a new kind of food, manna.

The whole sacrificial system is really about food and the relationship of human beings and the earth -- in Hebrew adam and adama. Adam and adama -- aside from all sorts of specific teachings of Torah -- teach us that human beings and the earth are intertwined.

Shabbat and the whole question of food are intertwined over and over again, not only the Shabbat of the seventh day, but the shabbat of the seventh year where the land becomes fruitful not despite letting it rest on the seventh year, but because you let it rest on the seventh year.

Leviticus 26 asks, what happens if you won't let the earth rest and make Shabbat? The answer is: the earth gets to rest anyway. The earth gets to rest through plague and famine and exile. The earth does get to rest. The only question is whether human beings learn to live with this law in a joyful and celebratory way or whether the earth rests at our expense.

B.W-K: What are the implications of what is said about the Sabbath at Sinai?

A.W.: If you look at the two passages on Shabbat in Exodus and Deuteronomy, they are quite different. One says Shabbat is about the cosmic truth -- remembering the creation of the world. The other says Shabbat is about freedom -- it's to guarantee the freedom in the future, just as it came out of freedom in the past. It's the guarantee that you and your maidservants, all the animals and all the earth get to be free.

My sense is that "remember" means a kind of deep emotional, intellectual acceptance and affirmation of the truth of the cosmic need for rest. The first version asserts the cosmic truth. The second version is a kind of prophetic "Don't just remember it, do it! Take this cosmic truth into your lives and make it real."

B.W-K.: Christian scholars tend to downplay both the Sabbath and the jubilee as never really having been practiced.

A.W.: For the jubilee, it's probably rarely been practiced. But for the sabbatical year, there's lots of evidence. The Romans reported that they couldn't collect taxes in the seventh year, the sabbatical year, because the damn Jews wouldn't work!

With biblical Judaism under the pressure of Hellenism, there was an intense struggle within the Jewish people. What rabbinic Judaism did was to refocus from the seventh year Shabbat -- which only worked if you had a land that you could make agricultural, economic and environmental policy on -- to the seventh day.

B.W-K.: Invoking Jeremiah and Deuteronomy calls the Babylonian exile into this. The Sabbath became enormously important in the exile as well, right?

A.W.: Yes. Ezekiel spends a lot of time bemoaning the failure to observe the Sabbath which suggests that in Babylonia it became clearer to people how important it was.

B.W-K.: I can hear implications of this in our own time. Can you say something about the importance of not only the economics, but the liberation of the cosmic rhythm in our own time, and maybe say something about the artificial rhythms of our own culture not really being earthbased?

A.W.: In my own work I've suggested that the deepest mistake of modern, industrial, technological life has been to treat Shabbat as if it were literally a waste of time. All of the natural cycles -- the day, the month and the year -- are observed in sevens. Each of the sevenths become the sacred day, month or year of reflection and being. This makes Jewish time into a spiral rather than a circle or a straight line. It does move forward, but it doesn't move forward in a straight line. You're always taking the past into serious account and you're always reinterpreting the past in order to move forward.

For the last 500 years the human race has not made a Shabbat. I mean this in the sense, the profound sense, of pausing to reflect -- to absorb, digest and celebrate the great project of modernity instead of being addicted to it.

We have invented extraordinary ways of working, doing, making, producing, consuming, which have been in some ways a great blessing: producing much more food, much more housing, much more healing and many more people than has ever been true in human history before. At some level that's a blessing.

But if you never pause to make Shabbat, the tradition teaches that in a very serious way the blessing turns into a massive disaster. That is, over-making, over-producing, over-doing -- without ever being. That means you stand on the precipice of nuclear holocaust, of global warming, of the shattering of the ozone layer, of Auschwitz. All that is a result of extraordinary feats of doing without any reflection, without any pause for being which can bring you back to a center and remind you to examine the purpose of the doing. That's what Shabbat is.

In Jewish life Shabbat is the time when you stop doing -- you study Torah, you sing, you dance, you celebrate and you reflect on what the previous six days have been. If there were a single piece of Jewish wisdom that was most important to impart to the human race at this very moment of its history it would be the importance of Shabbat. I mean the generally profound sense of pausing to be, to reflect, and to break the addiction to working, producing, making, inventing. We need to be able to say, "HEY! We have done extraordinary things, now let's pause."

Artists have said to me, "There's a moment in painting when you're laying brush stroke after brush stroke after brush stroke and each one's beautiful and each one enhances the painting. Then comes the moment when you put one more brush stroke on and it would seem that brush stroke was just as beautiful as any one before it, but suddenly you have ruined the painting." You've got to know when to stop, when to catch your breath and say "Whoosh! This one's over! I'll put up another canvas. But in the meantime, I have to pause long enough to digest what I've done. Otherwise, I destroy it."

That's where the world is right now. We have done this amazing painting of modernity and instead of taking it off the easel, looking at it, learning from it and then beginning some new project which will go in a different direction, we are still putting on brush strokes which, in fact, are making it uglier and uglier.

Bill Wylie-Kellermann is editor of Keeper of the Word: Selected Writings of William Stringfellow, Eerdemans, 1994.

Reprinted with permission from The Witness, an independent journal with an ecumenical readership, owned by the Episcopal Church Publishing Company. Ten issues a year, $25. The Witness, 7000 Michigan Ave., Detroit, MI 48210. (313) 841-1967.