A searchable, downloadable PDF of the original review appears below. Reviewed by J.H. (Hans) Kouwenberg.
The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modem Man. Abraham Joshua Heschel. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1951 (14th printing 1988), 118pp.
This is a provocative, suggestive and allusive book! I read it through twice, last spring and this winter – not because I am such a great reader or good sabbath-keeper but because there is much in this book on which to ponder and reflect, drawing out its many-splendoured meaning, and because I need its strong and stirring motivation and reminder to “remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.” I need to see – as Heschel does – what a high and deep, wide and broad, creation (not concept, merely) the sabbath is. And I need to keep a sabbath moment each day, each week, and, on occasion, for several weeks each year.
I was brought up on sabbath observance. I recall with enjoyment, “sabbaths” spent in youth with “church” (the Christian Reformed Church) on Sundays, coffee after church at home or with family friends and Sunday afternoon car rides in the country. Of course, there was no buying of anything on the Sunday!
Growing up during high school and university years in the Presbyterian Church liberated me from “strict sabbath observance.” We did on occasion go to a restaurant after church. But “the Lord’s Day” was still special. It was a pause in the midst of ever-increasing busyness and study commitments. I wouldn’t do my homework on a Sunday. And I managed, now that I had become an intentional Christian, a fairly regular “quiet-time” each day during the week.
Graduating into the ministry, however, has not improved or increased my sabbath enjoyment or observance. To be sure, I still enjoy “going to church” on Sundays. I could not think of doing anything else. And I enjoy preaching and teaching and meeting with God’s people on Sundays. But the Sunday is far too busy to enjoy it or observe it with my family. And after two bouts of preaching in the morning, at 9:15 and 11:15 a.m., I need a rest before my evening teaching commitment, usually at 7:30 p.m. I dislike what this says and does for my wife and three children. I am, basically, not available, as my folks were, on Sundays. Sundays are not sabbaths anymore.
Heschel’s book, you see, has made me reflect on my sabbath-breaking (I can identify with Eugene Peterson in his recent article in Christianity Today on “Confessions of a Former Sabbath Breaker,” September 2, 19881). I have discovered that even reading and studying about the sabbath in theological school and thereafter (in such books as Paul K. Jewett’s The Lord’s Day: A Theological Guide to the Christian Day of Worship, and D.A. Carson’s From Sabbath to Lord’s Day: A Biblical, Historical and Theological Investigation) hasn’t done all that much to improve my sabbathkeeping. Being a Christian minister is no guarantee to sabbath appreciation and celebration. I know.
I got a three month sabbath opportunity (sabbatical) handed to me twice in the last two years. But even here I have squandered some of the time with mere indolence and slackness. Although there have been moments and days of real refreshing recovery following my hip fracture and subsequent surgery to pin it (on January 2, 1989) and my total hip replacement (on January 16,1990). I wasted some of the time given to me. Admittedly, some of the time was needed for recovery from surgery (and pain, the first time around). I did take opportunities to do things I hadn’t done before on Sundays, for example, watch some of the TV evangelists. I had time, also, to listen to other preachers in “my” pulpit. I learned how to listen to other preachers again on the sabbath. We at St. Giles’ were blessed by two good preacher-pastors during my absence, the Rev. Dr. Nick Willems, who gave devotional, evangelistic expositions of the biblical book of Ephesians during January to mid-April 1989, and the Rev. Neil Strohshein, who presented well-crafted, teaching reflections on gospel passages dealing with the temptation, suffering, teaching and challenge of Jesus Christ during mid-January to the end of March 1990. During my first period of recovery I found joy in keeping a daily journal from mid-January to mid-March 1989 and enjoyed two two-week courses at Fuller Theological Seminary in August and October 1989 on preaching and spirituality respectively. During my second period of recovery, I was able to keep a 20-day diary during my hospitalization in Vancouver in January 1990. And I’ve kept up, although fitfully, with reading a couple of psalms a day.
Yet most recently I’ve felt I’ve “lost” one and a half months from mid January through February 1990. Why is this so? While many would be overjoyed with the sudden removal of pain by the introduction of a total hip joint replacement, I’ve struggled with the grief and pain of loss. I would have preferred to have had the fractured hip heal. But that was not to be. I considered a hip replacement as being less ideal than the healing of my own bone.
Thankfully, now I’m back into the swing of the daily rhythm of getting up earlier, reading some psalms, and reading and writing as well as doing some office work at home. And rereading Abraham Heschel’s book has been like the opening up of some long-clogged pipes within. Heschel begins and ends his prose-poem on the sabbath with some reflections on the contrast between our paying more attention to the things of space than the moments of time. His insight that the sabbath aids us in our recovery of the sacredness of God’s creative and loving acts in time, of our special moments and relationships in time, touched me personally. While in the Vancouver General Hospital, one of our hospital visitors gave me one of our minister’s meditations on time: times through which we all have to go, good times and bad times, health times and unwell times, and that, above all, “my times are in Thy hands” (in God’s hands). God is the author of time; I merely go through it, experience it, but he is the Lord and Redeemer of time. And his sabbathtime is time to remember and recover how gracious and good God’s time and timing is now.
Heschel states clear but profound truths well:
We usually think that the earth is our mother, that time is money and profit our mate. The seventh day is a reminder that God is our father, that time is life and the spirit our mate. (p. 76)
Technical civilization, we have said, is man’s triumph over space. Yet time remains impervious. We overcome distance but can neither recapture the past nor dig out the future. Man transcends space, and time transcends man. (p. 98)
Time, then, is otherness, a mystery that hovers above all categories. It is as if time and the mind were a world apart. Yet it is only within time that there is fellowship and togetherness of all being, (p. 99)
Every one of us occupies a portion of space … Yet no one possesses time … we pass through time, we occupy space … Time is either all or nothing. It cannot be divided except in our minds. It remains beyond our grasp. It is almost holy. It is easy to pass by the great sight of eternal time. (p. 99)
But the sabbath doesn’t let us! It makes us once again attentive to time!
It is the dimension of time wherein man meets God, wherein man becomes aware that every instant is an act of creation, a Beginning, opening up new roads: ultimate realizations. Time is the presence of God in the world of space, and it is within time that we are able to sense the unity of all beings, (p. 100)
Abraham Heschel’s book The Sabbath opens one up to a larger place. His concept of spirituality and of the holiness of the sabbath day, is a broad, open-ended one.
I find it interesting how often he parallels Christ’s view of the sabbath. It is not merely a day of abstention but of affirmation.
The Sabbath as a day of abstaining from work is not a depreciation but an affirmation of labor, a divine exaltation of its dignity. To set apart one day a week for freedom, a day on which we would not use the instruments which have so easily turned into weapons of destruction, a day for being ourselves, a day of detachment from the vulgar, of independence of external obligations, a day on which we stop worshipping idols of technical civilization, a day in which we use no money, a day of armistice in the economic struggle with our fellow men and the forces of nature – is there any institution that holds onto a greater hope for man’s progress than the sabbath? (p. 28)
How relevant this is to our contemporary, shop-til-you-drop economic sense! This book is a love song – philosophy set to poetry – regarding the sabbath.
The only shift I have to make is that the bulk of my sabbath is more likely to be on Monday – for myself and my wife – and on a Friday night and sometimes on a Saturday, and especially on our holidays – for my family.