A quote to begin the Sabbath:
Jewish religious philosopher Abraham Heschel, in his meditations on the sabbath: ‘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.’ Whereas we move about in space in order to win space through the use of technology, and in order to deal with the ‘thing- ness’ of space, the goal in the realm of time is not to have but to be. The religions of ‘the nations’ concentrate on sacred places and sites. But ‘Judaism is a religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time’. The sanctification of time is not a disparagement of space. Both the conquest of space and the sanctification of time are part of the task assigned to human beings. But the sanctification of time has to be a commandment of its own, since it does not impose itself of itself, like the conquest of space. It is the necessary counter-weight to the life that usurps space, because it calls a halt to the threatening enslavement of the human being to technological civilization. So on the sabbath the tools which can so easily be beaten into weapons are laid aside, money dealings are avoided, and in the midst of the struggle for existence which seems so omnipresent, we can find an island of peace in which to live [emphasis mine].
- Prof. Bernd Wannenwetsch, University of Aberdeen
Political Worship : Ethics for Christian Citizens, p. 349
Abraham Joshua Heschel, Bernd Wannenwetsch, Ethics, Quotes, Sabbath, University of Aberdeen
| 
Abraham Joshua Heschel, Bernd Wannenwetsch, Ethics, Quotes, Sabbath, University of Aberdeen
A quote to begin the Sabbath:
If we ask what the sabbath is there for, we are asking about two different things. It is one thing to ask about its function, and another to ask what is meant by its ‘blessing’. (It is only in this sense that we can ask about a commandment.) What does it mean for us when God ‘blessed’ the seventh day? In the way the story of creation is told, it may first of all strike us that the human being celebrates the first sabbath before he himself has performed any work. So he shares God’s rest, not like God, by ‘celebrating from his (own human) works’, but by celebrating with God ‘from his (divine) works’. For the human being himself has as yet no works which he could contemplate. This relativity and relatedness remain the secret of the sabbath even after the human being has gone to work himself. The sabbath does not acquire its meaning from the act of working. It does not just belong to the people who have work. It belongs to all human beings. On the sabbath, human beings do not look at their own work, at least not primarily. Every sabbath is supposed to be like the human being’s first sabbath, when he had as yet no work of his own at which he could have looked back. The rest which is meant for human beings is to be found in the contemplation of God’s works, from which they live. If a person looks at these, his gaze becomes free. It is neither drawn downwards, because it is fixed on the part-work of his own hands, nor upwards at the success of his work, which elevates him above other people. It is not the fragments of what he does that he sees, and not the question of how he could perfect them; what he has before him are the perfect works of God.
- Prof. Bernd Wannenwetsch, University of Aberdeen
Political Worship : Ethics for Christian Citizens, p. 347
Comments (0) 
Themocracy