“In our own contemporary context of the rat race of anxiety, the celebration of Sabbath is an act of both resistance and alternative. It is resistance because it is a visible insistence that our lives are not defined by the production and consumption of commodity goods. Such an act of resistance requires enormous intentionality and communal reinforcement amid the barrage of seductive pressures from the insatiable insistences of the market…” -Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance
Sabbath, or the spiritual discipline of resting one day every week, is practiced today by many orthodox Jews but virtually unheard of in most Christian circles. Yet in my own spiritual journey, it has been a healing antidote to the many idols of modern life. To set aside a 24-hour period every week where no work is to be performed helps me to reset, be rejuvenated, and detox from the toxic ideology that my worth is in what I can produce.
Below are a series of selections taken from Walter Brueggemann’s book, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now. Walter Brueggemann is a legendary professor of theology at Columbia, focused on the Old Testament, and I love his insights. I hope you enjoy the selections I posted below, and recommend you read his entire book if you want to learn more!
The lack of rest inherent in Egypt’s system
“In the [Bible], the gods of Egypt are stand-ins for all the gods of the several empires. What they all have in common is that they are confiscatory gods who demand endless produce and who authorize endless systems of production.
It is clear that in this [Egypt’s] system there can be no Sabbath rest. There is no rest for Pharaoh in his supervisory capacity, and he undoubtedly monitors daily production schedules. Consequently, there can be no rest for Pharaoh’s supervisors or taskmasters; and of course there can be no rest for the slaves…the “Egyptian gods” also never rested, because of their commitment to the aggrandizement of Pharaoh’s system, for the glory of Pharaoh, surely redounded to the glory of the Egyptian gods. The economy reflects the splendor of the gods who legitimate the entire system, for which cheap labor is an indispensable footnote.
All parties at [the giving of the 10 Commandments]–YHWH, Moses, Israel–could well remember what it had been like in the world of Pharaoh:
- They could remember that Pharaoh was regarded, and regarded himself, as a god, an absolute authority who was thought to be immune to the vagaries of history, a force with insatiable demands.
- They could remember that Egypt’s socioeconomic power was organized like a pyramid, with a workforce producing wealth, all of which flowed upward to the power elite and eventually to Pharaoh who sat atop that pyramid.
- They could remember that Pharaoh, even though he was absolute in authority and he occupied the pinnacle of power, was an endlessly anxious presence who caused the entire social environments to be permeated with a restless anxiety that had no limit or termination…
- They could remember how that nightmare of scarcity… led to rapacious state policies of monopoly that caused the crown to usurp the money, the cattle, the land, and, finally, the bodies of vulnerable peasants (Genesis 47:13-26).
Pharaoh was remembered at Sinai. But Pharaoh was not at Sinai. He was left helpless at the bottom of the waters. At Sinai, while Pharaoh was remembered, YHWH was front and center as the decisive force who enwrapped Israel in new promises and new social responsibilities…
God introduces Sabbath to His people
Thus the Sabbath command of Exodus 20:11 recalls that God rested on the seventh day of creation… [and moreover shows]
- That YHWH is not a workaholic,
- That YHWH is not anxious about the full functioning of creation, and that the well-being of creation does not depend on endless work…Such divine rest serves to delegitimate and dismantle the endless restlessness sanctioned by the other gods and enacted by their adherents.
Sabbath becomes a decisive, concrete, visible way of opting for and aligning with the God of rest. The same either/or is evident, of course, in the teaching of Jesus. In his Sermon on the Mount, he declares to his disciples: “No one can serve two masters, for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth” (Matt 6:24). The way of mammon (capital, wealth), is the way of commodity that is the way of endless desire, endless productivity, and endless restlessness without any Sabbath. Jesus taught his disciples that they could not have it both ways.
Sabbath as Resistance to the Anxiety and Violence of Unrestrained Capitalism
And of course, every facet of this restlessness is grounded in and produces anxiety that variously issues in aggression and finally manifests in violence:
- violence expressed in military adventurism that enjoys huge “patriotic” support;
- violence against the earth that is signaled by overuse;
- violence in sports, now with evidence of “paid injuries”;
- violence in the neighborhood, with guns now the icon of “violent security”;
- violence against every vulnerable population, sexual aggression against the young, and the “war on the poor,” which are accomplished by law and by banking procedures.
It is impossible, is it not, to overestimate the level of anxiety that now characterizes social relationship in our society of acute restlessness? That violent restlessness makes neighborliness nearly impossible. None of this is new; all of it is much chronicled among us. All of it is as old as Pharaoh’s Egypt.
Such faithful practice of work stoppage is an act of resistance. It declares in bodily ways that we will not participate in the anxiety system that pervades our social environment. We will not be defined by busyness and by acquisitiveness and by pursuit of more, in either our economics or our personal relations or anywhere in our lives…
And as the work stoppage permits a waning of anxiety, so energy is redeployed to the neighborhood. The odd insistence of the God of Sinai is to counter anxious productivity with committed neighborliness. The latter does not produce so much, but it creates an environment of security and respect and dignity that redefines the human project…
The Seduction of Prosperity
Moses regards the land of Canaan, it being so fertile, as an enormous temptation and a huge seduction to Israel…Moses knows that prosperity breeds amnesia…Moses understands, as do the prophets after him, that being in the land poses for Israel a conflict between two economic systems, each of which views the land differently…if the land is a possession, then the proper way of life is to acquire more. If the land is inheritance, then the proper way of life is to enhance the neighborhood and the extended family so that all members may enjoy the good produce of the land…
“All are to rest: ‘sons and daughters, slaves, oxen, donkeys, livestock, immigrants….Sabbath is a great day of equality when all are equally at rest…
In Deuteronomy 15:1-18, Moses enunciates the most radical extrapolation of Sabbath in the entire Bible. Every seven years, in an enactment of the sabbatic principle, Israel is enjoined to cancel debts on poor people. The intention in this radical act of “seven” is that there should be no permanent underclass in Israel. Moses, in this instruction, anticipates resistance to the radical extrapolation of Sabbath, that Israelites may be “hard hearted” and “tight fisted”. But that is because they have fallen into coercive patterns whereby the poor are targeted as objects of economic abuse rather than seen as Sabbath neighbors…
Multitasking is the drive to be more than we are, to control more than we do, to extend out power and our effectiveness. Such practice yields a divided self, with full attention given to nothing…
[In Isaiah 5:8-10] the indictment is against those who “join house to house” and field to field”, exactly the language of the commandment and of the Micah oracle. The process consists of buying up the land of small peasant farmers in order to develop large estates. The vulnerable peasants are then removed from their land and denied a livelihood, and now coveters can bask in their newly secured isolated self-indulgence…in our time, the same crisis might refer to urban gentrification that dislocates the poor and the vulnerable…
Sabbath is an antidote to anxiety that both derives from our craving and in turn feeds those cravings for more. Sabbath is an arena in which we recognize that we live by gift and not by possession, that we are satisfied by relationships of attentive fidelity and not by amassing commodities. We know in the gospel tradition that we may indeed ‘gain the whole world’ and lose our souls (Mark 8:34-37). [Sabbath fights against that temptation.]”