SHABBAT
IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE
by RABBI DAVID GEDZELMAN
R ecently, my wife and I invited a young African-American Christian family who live in our building in Harlem over for a Shabbat dinner. We went to some length to explain in advance what, exactly, a Shabbat dinner entails: the food, the blessings, the learning, the celebration. Before we’d finished the explanation, our neighbors assured us that they’d enjoyed many Shabbat dinners at Hillel during their years at Yale as well as in friends’ homes after college, and knew all about it.
So it is in America today. In the early 21st Century, Shabbat seems to be in the public sphere. And more than any other aspect of Shabbat ritual and celebration, the Friday night Shabbat dinner has attained greater cultural familiarity now than at any other time. This is true of non-Jews of a certain educational background and socio-economic status, but it is also true of Jews. I would venture to say that the average American Jew who came of age (early twenties) in the late 1990s or mid 2000s had far more familiarity as teens and young adults with Shabbat experiences, especially the Shabbat dinner, than my peers who went to college beginning in the mid to late 1970s, when I believe Jewish connection and identity bottomed out in America.
Outside of what was then a small Orthodox community, the elite Havurah movement and very committed members of the Conservative movement, the home ritual of the Friday night Shabbat dinner was virtually unknown to the masses of assimilating American Jews in the 1960s and 70s. In fact, by the 1950s, liberal synagogues had created a structure of Jewish communal life centered on late Friday night services that precluded inspired Friday night dinners at home for those committed to the life of the synagogue. I remember when I was teaching eighth grade Sunday school in a liberal congregation in the early 1980s, I was organizing a Shabbat dinner with parents of students at one of their homes only to be rebuffed by the rabbi, who informed me that it was a violation of Temple policy to organize any event that would compete with Friday night services. In the past 30 years, however, a growing number of synagogues have become open to supporting an array of activities inside and outside the synagogue building that can now happen even when the rabbi preaches his or her weekly sermon.
More and more young Jewish adults and families find this special time of personal connection, spiritual elevation and physical enjoyment a most welcome antidote to the never-ending demands of work and the relentless pace of life in our contemporary world. Young people without formal affiliation to synagogues and other Jewish institutions are invited to the homes of friends for Shabbat dinners and invite friends over for the same. The mainstream media makes references to Shabbat dinners without explanation, making clear the assumption that they are familiar in the general culture.
The question is whether we can capitalize on this cultural familiarity in order to champion and teach the values implicit in Shabbat from which American Jews and perhaps the general culture can benefit. The idea that time can be experienced not as fleeting but as full, not as limited but as temporarily infinite on a weekly basis, can speak to a culture in which one’s work is never finished, in which there is always one more email to write, one more issue to deal with. A world in which one is never complete and always in need of improvement sorely needs the sense of wholeness and perfection that can come from a commitment to regard one’s work as done and complete every Friday evening, no matter what is left to do, and from a spiritual discipline that puts one in an altogether different relation of action to the created world. There are reasons why sitting down with family and friends as darkness falls after a week of work, to lift a glass of wine and invoke the possibility of transcendence in one’s life appeals to those living in a culture and society that can drain such possibilities away. If the Shabbat dinner is somewhat in the public sphere, does the general culture’s familiarity with Shabbat end with dinner, or might that dinner experience inspire an appreciation for the overall spiritual discipline of what the Jewish Sabbath represents in all?
In the end, many Jewish Americans will find it easier to appreciate the spiritual wisdom of the Jewish Sabbath if they see that their non-Jewish peers, friends, co-workers and family members see its value as well. This doesn’t mean that for Jews to find the rhythm of some kind of regular Shabbat practice compelling, the non-Jews in their lives need to be Sabbath observers. It means that the more the general culture affirms and applauds the virtues of what Shabbat can mean, the less uncomfortable Jews will be with trying it on. For that reason, educational programs, institutional incentives and community campaigns that work to make Shabbat a habit in the lives of American Jews would be mistaken to make such endeavors parochial and exclusive.
In the Torah, only one particular practice or observance is called, in and of itself, an Eternal Covenant. The centrality of the Sabbath to the whole system of Jewish spiritual wisdom and practice moves us to understand that the very ethos of the Jewish people balances the tension between acting in the world and viewing it as complete, between working towards improving the world and knowing that Creation is awesome and majestic just as it is. The Friday night Kiddush over wine tells us that Shabbat is both a remembrance of the reality of Creation and a monument to our moving from slavery to freedom. Shabbat inspires us to profoundly appreciate that the static and the dynamic, the unchanging and the changing, can be experienced as one in transcendent moments that we can share together. The Jews have something that everyone else needs. Let’s not be greedy. ■
Rabbi David Gedzelman is Executive Vice President of The Steinhardt Foundation for Jewish Life.
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