There
are a few things that have distinguished the Jewish people throughout the ages,
and it’s not Nobel prizes, bagels, or respected medical doctors. It’s love of Torah, Kashrut (the Jewish
dietary laws), and Shabbat. Shabbat, in
particular, has been keenly associated with the Jewish people. Because we have literally closed shop one day
each week, we have been both hailed as psychological wizards and condemned as
lazy good-for-nothings. During periods of
exile and poverty, we saved every penny (every kopeck?) to have enough to
celebrate Shabbat in relative abundance.
In times of war, some Jews chose to die rather than violate the sanctity
of holy time. Asher Tzvi Hersh Ginsberg
(1856-1927), a cultural Zionist and Hebrew essayist known more popularly as Ahad
Ha’am (meaning: One of the People)
wrote: “More than the Jews have kept the
Sabbath, the Sabbath has kept the Jews.”
Love
of Shabbat, however, is not universal.
To the contrary, some among us still remember Shabbat as an oppressive Day
of Don’ts: don’t drive, don’t smoke,
don’t cook, don’t use electricity, don’t purchase, don’t sell, and so forth. It’s not that Shabbat is without a list of
Do’s—there are plenty of those. But
because the Don’ts ruled the day, they ruined the day. People knew what they couldn’t do, but had
little idea of what they could do. The
very meaning of Shabbat retreated beneath a pile of Don’ts and as such, its
popularity diminished significantly. In
1950, Conservative rabbis moved to lighten up Shabbat by making driving to
synagogue and the use of electric lights permissible. In retrospect, they were minor tweaks in a
Jewish world losing its connection with Jewish Law, but many saw the move as an
assault on Jewish law. Even today, some
view those decisions as the beginning of the end for Conservative Jewry.
Fast
forward to 2015, 65 years later, and the Orthodox World has come up with an
answer to electricity on Shabbat. It is
known as the Kosher Switch and allows Sabbath-observing Jews to do what they have
never been able to do in the past: turn a light on or off on Shabbat. For a more detailed version of how the switch
works, check out the following website:
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/kosherswitch-control-electricity-on-shabbat. The video’s narrator explains how the switch
works and includes testimony of several poskim (rabbis who answer questions
about Jewish Law) who give their 100% approval to this new device. Review of the device is treated with great
seriousness, but within certain circles, its kashrut is still a matter of
debate.
I
have watched the video three times now and each time, I find it more irrelevant. I realize that in modern times, Shabbat has taken
a brutal beating. But now, emanating
from the world that is Shomer Shabbat—protective or observant of Shabbat—a
device has been invented that is hailed to make Shabbat better, and presumably
more kosher, than ever before. Really? So this is for the past two thousand years
what we have saved our pennies for, staked our lives on, even died for…a kosher
way to turn the lights on? Somehow, when
God rested on the seventh day, or took us out of Egyptian bondage, both
incidents cited as reasons for Shabbat—I don’t think God imagined electrical
challenges on Shabbat as the focus of His/Her holiest of all days. The reality that the observance of Shabbat
has been reduced—better yet, trivialized!—into a decision as to whether one can
turn on or off an electric light may be proof that no one in the Jewish world
truly observes Shabbat anymore.
Shabbat
is a gift to the Jewish people from God.
What is the point of this holiest of all days? My sense is that Shabbat has something to do
with being alive. I don’t mean the
heart-beating, lung-pumping, neuron cells-firing kind of being alive. I mean the kind of being alive that makes our
lives significant in the eyes of others, both family and friends, and ultimately
significant in our own eyes as well.
Decades after Jews assumed leadership roles in the labor movement, and
sought to limit the kind of hours that drained people of their humanity, we
have now achieved the very opposite of what the great labor leaders of the
past, Samuel Gompers and David Dubinsky (not to mention Moses), fought
for. We have never worked harder,
longer, or more willingly sacrificed down time, than we do today. It’s as if our careers were our lives. Maybe for some of us, that’s true. Who
are you? A lawyer? A doctor?
A banker? A retailer? A small business owner? Is that who you really are? Or is that what a career-obsessed economic
structure expects you to be? Are you a
parent, a child or a sibling? Are you
any good at it? Are you a musician, an
artist, a poet? How much time do you
devote to that? Or perhaps you don’t
devote time to it because of a social structure that values time only if
reduced to billable hours. Do we ever
have time—or make time—to be whom we want to be?
There’s
one fundamental Don’t on Shabbat: Don’t
work. What’s work? You know what work is. Shabbat is the day when we don’t do
that. As for the Do’s, do what you want
as long as it isn’t work.
The
saddest day in people’s lives is the day they realize they didn’t do all the
Do’s they wanted to, because they never integrated into their lives that one
fundamental Don’t. Once every seven
days, give up work and do the Do’s that you’ve always wanted to do. Here’s the truth: you’re never going to have time to do all the
Do’s you want to do. But that’s the
reason for Shabbat: it is the system whereby we create time for the Do’s. The essence of Shabbat is not how to turn on
a light, it’s how to turn off mindlessness and turn on living fully and meaningfully. Now that’s what I call a Kosher Switch.
