What Christians Can Learn From Judaism: The Sabbath

Orthodox Rabbinic Judaism celebrates the Sabbath in a very different way than the different flavors of Christianity as well as Reform and Conservative Judaism. The Sabbath for most Christians as well as for non-Orthodox Jews usually means attending a religious service for an hour or two, meeting, greeting, and eating with the community afterward, driving home, and then usually proceeding as though it was any other day of the week.

The Orthodox community treats the Sabbath differently, however. Since the Rabbis enforced a highly legalistic system with a gazillion and one laws regarding the Sabbath, any conceivable form of productive work becomes impossible for anyone in the community. Since driving is forbidden on the Sabbath, the entire Orthodox community must live within walking distance of the Synagogue. This has the added benefit of making all the members of a synagogue live within walking distance of each other, making it much easier for them to get to know one another. Imagine if everyone at your church lived within walking distance of each other.

The Sabbath is a 25 or so hour experience, from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday. As a single adult, let me tell you about my Sabbath experience with the Orthodox community. It begins with the Friday evening service. Technically, it is supposed to begin with lighting candles, but as a single guy who at this time lived outside the community, it began at the synagogue. Anyway, after a relatively short evening service, I was walking outside the synagogue and one of the Orthodox people, I think his name was Ben, asked me "do you have a place to eat and a place to stay" at this point, not knowing exactly what he meant by it, I shrugged my shoulders and he said to me "Ok, you're coming with me." Already, I knew that this experience was different than the other denominations of Judaism, where you simply leave after the service.

Ben led me to his house, where he was having several other guests for his obligatory Sabbath meal. I got to meet his guests and made several friends even in that evening. After the extended meal was over, he let me spend the night in an extra bedroom, as Jews are not allowed to drive on the Sabbath, and I got to better meet his wife and several children.

The next morning I was awakened fairly early, and walked with his family to the synagogue. After making it through the three hour Shacharit morning service, I visited another man named Ari and his family for the midday Sabbath lunch. He pointed me in the general location of his house beforehand, but because I did not walk with him to his house, I had to sort of guess which one it was. During lunch, I made the joke that I knocked on the door and hoped that it was the right house. He told me that almost anybody on his street would have been happy to have me over for the meal. It was at this point that I realized being part of an Orthodox community is like being part of a large extended family.

He, too was having several guests, including Josh, a young college student who became Orthodox a few years prior. During the afternoon, we walked around the neighborhood and dropped in on many of the other families in the community. Since everyone was under the restrictive Orthodox Sabbath laws, no one had the excuse of being too busy to meet with us. So I got to meet a lot more people in a very short period of time.

In our cold and somewhat paranoid modern society, we have forgotten the art of hospitality toward strangers. Have you ever been to a church where people you don't know invite you over to their house for a meal with their family? No church that I have ever attended has extended that type of hospitality. Can you imagine what would happen if a group of volunteer families at a church actually did that? It would make single men like myself, who are a very non-churchgoing demographic more likely to attend church in the first place, because it would make it so much easier to get to know everyone. Introverts like myself have a much easier time when meeting in these settings rather than in large crowds.

There is also something to be said about being unplugged from our connected world for a full day. It helps to reduce the stress a great deal. Because the Orthodox view of the Sabbath is to cease from any sort of productive activity, including the use of electronics, it helps people take their minds off of their concerns and helps them enjoy the moment. And that is the point of the Sabbath, to be an island in time, where for one day we can take our focus off our constant planning for the future and simply enjoy the moment.