The Sabbath

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SABBATH

THE LIBRARY
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LOS ANGELES

THE SABBATH

By
The CHIEF RABBI. PROF. J. L. LANDAU.

To The

WEUVERBAND der SCHOMRE SCHABBOS.

== Published by ==

The Ivri Publishing Society, Ltd.. =

JOHANNESBURG. 1

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THE SABBAT!

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The CHIEF RABBI, PROF. J. I. LANDAU.

To The

WELTVERBAND der SCHOMRF SCHABBOS.

Published by

The Ivri Publishing Society. Ltd..

JOHANNESBURG.

By The CHIEF RABBI, PROF. J. L. LANDAU

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^HULAMMITE in the " Song of Songs " exclaimed:

" Look not upon me that I am swarthy, for the
sun has tanned me."

Those words rose to my mind when I decided to write the
following essay on "The Sabbath." This first and most
sacred Institution of the Jcivish nation has, in the course
of history, passed through so many transmigrations, and
has received so many misinterpretations both by religious
fanatics and heretics, that its true meaning and merits arc
no longer appreciated, and the people can no longer derive
from this glorious and ancient Institutiot the benefits and
blessings it was supposed to confer upon them.

I therefore cherish the hope that the following sketch
will serve some useful purpose, will at least induce some
of its readers to devote to this subject a few moments of
serious thought.

It is gratifying to state that there are at the present
moment two strong movements, which strive to restore to
the Sabbath its ancient, its original, dignity and influence.
One is known by the name of " Oneg Sabbath," with its
headquarters in Tel-Aviv, the other is spreading rapidh/
with the slogan of "Shomre Sabbath," it is controlled by a
strong and influential Committee in Berlin under the
presidentship of a well-known scholar, Dozent Dr. Samuel
(Iriinberg. A great and imposing Mass Meeting in favour
of the "Shomre Sabbath," which took place in Berlin on
the 16th of February, was addressed by a number of leading
Rabbis and scholars. Author's Note.

The Sabbath

THE teleological doctrine is the basis of the Jewish
religion. God created the world for a definite purpose.
The final cause of Creation is the ultimate destiny of
man, whom Providence has endowed with a free-will to
enable him to fulfil his great mission in history. In his
hard and desperate struggle for his existence, exposed to
the hostile elements of nature, and more especially to the
brutal rivalry of his fellow-men, his will is often curbed
and repressed and diverted from its natural bent. The
Sabbath was, therefore, instituted as a day of perfect rest
and freedom, on which he should be in a position to allow
all his faculties — physical, mental and moral — full play
without any interference from without. The Bible, there-
fore, connects the Sabbath both with the creation of the
world and with the redemption from Egypt. In the Ten
Commandments it occupies the next place to the proclama-
tion of the oneness of God, whose name must not be taken
in vain and applied to false idols. It reads: "Observe the
Sabbath day to keep it holy, as the Lord thy God
commanded thee. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all
thy work; but the seventh day is a Sabbath unto the
Lord : in it thou shalt not do any manner of work,
thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, nor thy man-
servant, nor thy maid-servant. . . . And thou shalt remem-
ber that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt, and the
Lord thy God brought thee out thence by a mighty hand
and by an outstretched arm : therefore the Lord thy God
commanded thee to kep the Sabbath day." (Deut. v.
12-15.)

2069452

:-THE SABBATH -;

It was for this reason that the period of service of any
Hebrew who sold himself because of dire distress was
limited to six years. The seventh year was his Sabbatical
year, on which he regained his liberty. It was, moreover,
the duty of his relatives, and, if sold to a Gentile, the
duty of the whole Jewish community, to ransom him. If
he himself, for any private reason, preferred to continue
his servile work in spite of his Sabbatical year, he was
publicly disgraced and branded as a slave. And even he
was set free par force in the year of Jubilee, the seven times
hallowed Sabbatical year. "For," says the Lord, "unto
Me the children of Israel are servants, whom I brought
forth out of the land of Egypt" (Lev. xxv. 55); not the
servants of servants, explain the Rabbis.

II.

IT is thus clear that the main object of the Sabbath and
of the Sabbatical year was to impress every Jew with
the idea of personal freedom, of his higher mission as a
member of the human race, and thus also with the idea of
the equality of all men. From the story that Moses had a
man stoned to death because he was found gathering sticks
on the Sabbath day (Num. xv. 32-36) we can see how
strictly it was observed in ancient times. Jeremiah, who
witnessed the decay and fall of Judaea, rebuked the kings of
Judah and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem for their disre-
gard of that sacred injunction. "Take heed for the sake of
your souls," he exclaimed, "and bear no burden on the
Sabbath day .... neither do ye any work, but
hallow ye the Sabbath day, as I commanded your
fathers." (Jer. xvii. 20-22.) In Iisaiah (Chap, lvi.)
we read: "Happy is the man that doeth this, and
the son of man that holdeth fast by it ; that keepeth the
Sabbath day from profaning it, and keepeth his hand from
doing any evil. . . . Also the aliens that join themselves to
the Lord, to be His servants. Everyone that keepeth the

i-THE SABBATH -;

Sabbath from profaning it, and holdeth fast by My
covenant, even them will I bring to My holy mountain and
make them joyful in my house of prayer." Nehemiah
regarded it as one of his most meritorious deeds, for which
he deserved the blessings of God, for having instructed the
Levites to keep the gates of Jerusalem closed to sanctify
the Sabbath day. When Antiochus Epiphanes tried to
force on the Jewish people the profanation of the day of
rest, many of the faithful fled to the caves of the mountains
of Judah and to hiding-places in the wilderness to find
shelter and to resist the commands of the tyrant. When
the king's officers "ran after them and set the battle in
array against them on the Sabbath day," calling upon them
to surrender to the will of the king, the besieged would not
profane the sacred day even by blocking up their hiding-
places, but said: "Let us die in our innocency." Arid they
all perished, they and their wives and their children.
(1 Mace. ii. 29-38). It was Mattathias and his friends who
first determined to defend their lives if attacked on the
Sabbath. For, they argued, "if we all do as our brethren
have done ... we shall soon be destroyed from off the
earth." That decision was later vindicated by the school
of Shammai. Yet, when Pompey (63 b.c.e.) stormed the
fortress of the Temple, the besieged did not defend the
walls against the attack of the invaders on the Sabbath
days., "and it thus happened that upon one Sabbath, in
the month of Sivan, a breach was effected by which the
Romans forced a way into the sanctuary." (Josephus.
"Wars," I. vii. 3.)

Maimonides (1135-1204 c.e.), the greatest codifier of
Jewish law, concludes his chapter on the importance and
observance of the Sabbath with the following remark : "The
injunctions regarding the Sabbath are just as binding as
those framed against idolatry; they surpass in importance
all other laws. The desecration of the Sabbath is therefore
tantamount to idolatry." (xxx. 15.) These words fully

5

I- i HE SABBATH -■""""**"""""!"

and forcibly endorse the definition of the Sabbath as a day
intended to restore to man his freedom of will and human
dignity, and thus to enable him to realise his position and
mission as a member of the human race.

Heinrich Heine embodied this idea in his famous poem
"Princess Sabbath," in which he describes a man, whom
God created in His own image, suddenly changed by "a
witch's art to the figure of a dog. As a dog with doggish
notions, all the week his time he muddles through life's
filthiness and sweepings, to the scavengers' derision. But
upon each Friday evening, just at twilight, the enchant-
ment ceases suddenly — the dog once more is a human
being. As a man with human feelings, with his head and
breast raised proudly, dressed in festival attire, his
paternal halls he enters." (Heine's poems, translated by
Bowring.)

III.

NEEDLESS to say that the Sabbath was instituted for
all men alike, that the law makes no distinction
between the rich and poor, but it cannot be denied that it
mainly benefits the working man. To the rich every day is
a festive day. He often finds the day too long, and tries
to kill time by various amusements. But the labourer
whose hand has to raise the heaving hammer for many
hours, or to lead the plough and to swing the pruning-knife
in the burning sun, or to expose his face to the irritating
glow of the furnace, he who sits bent over his work for
hours and hours, and for days and days, so that his bent
back aches, and his sore eyes burn with pain; all those
poor men and women who return to their desolate homes
and hard couches worn and weary, unable to turn their
thoughts to any subject that demands a clear and rested
mind; all those wretched human beings who sink gradually
but surely deeper and deeper into the morass of sensualism,
and whose brutalised feelings can only be gratified by mere

::::::::::::::::::::::::- THF SABBATH -=

physical pleasures; they alone are able to appreciate a
whole day devoted to rest, rest of body and mind. They
are thus enabled, at least once in seven days, to give some
thought to the nobler duties and ambitions of man.

This idea, which has revolutionised modern society,
was so strange even to the ablest thinkers of the ancient
world that it became the subject of scorn and ridicule. In
a world where the needy and destitute were treated as
slaves, as outlaws, as soulless beings, the demand for a
day of rest on such a day and the claim for equal rights
and privileges seemed preposterous and outrageous. Apion
spread the slanderous story that "the Jews celebrated the
Sabbath because, travelling from Egypt for six days, they
had buboes in their groins, but on the seventh day they
rested and called that day Sabbath, for that malady of
buboes was called Sabbatosis by the Egyptians." ("Contra
Apionem.") Juvenal maintained that the Jew was lazy
and slothful, wasting a sevnth part of his life in perfect
inactivity. (Sat., xvi. 105-106: "Sed pater in causa, cui
septima quceque fruit lux ignava et partem vitte non attigit
ullam.") And Seneca sarcastically remarked, that "to
remain idle every seventh day is to lose a seventh part of
life." (Quoted by Augustine, "De Civ. Dei.," vi.) Tacitus
and other leaders of Roman thought whose knowledge of
Jewish rites was mainly drawn from wrong and misleading
sources, joined in that chorus of slander. Yet, even in
those days, in spite of all those venomous calumnies, the
idea of the Sabbath gained many admirers and strong
adherents, even among the Greeks and Romans. Josephus
("Contra Apionem," ii. 40) could boast, without fear of
contradiction, that there was in his time no city of the
Greeks, nor any barbarian city, where the Sabbath was not
reverently celebrated by the non-Jewish inhabitants, by
kindling the Sabbath lamps and by observing it as a day of
rest. That statement was fully endorsed by similar re-
marks of Seneca and Dio Cassius. According to the Acts

;-THE SABBATH -=

(xiii. 16, 34), Paul addressed in a synagogue in Antioch, in
Pisidia, on a Sabbath day, a number of Gentiles or Prose-
lytes who attended divine service. "And on the next Sabbath
day came almost the whole city together to hear the word
of God." (Ibid., 44.) A purer conception of human life,
and of the divine as manifested in human life, gradually
penetrated the befogged minds of the idolatrous multitude
which had come under the religious influence of their
Jewish neighbours, or of individual Jews who endeavoured
to spread a better and purer knowledge of their religious
ideas and institutions. Josephus and the Talmud mention,
even the conversion of a whole royal family, of Queen
Helene of Adiabene with her sons.

IV.

THE first serious objections to the strict observance of
the Sabbath were raised, according to the Gospels, by
the founder of Christianity and his disciples. Thig is not
the place for a discussion of the authenticity of the various
versions referring to this fact; the fact itself can hardly be
disputed. "The Sabbath, with its many restrictions and
regulations," which, even in the opinion of a modern Jewish
scholar and admirer of Jesus, "was upon the whole a joy
and blessing to the immense majority of Jews throughout
the Rabbinic period," was suddenly regarded and renounced
as a legal burden, the violation of which was justifiable, as
the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.
As an indirect refutation of that objection may be quoted
Jehudah Halevi's verses in Mrs. E. N. Salaman's trans-
lation ("Songs of Exile," 1901): —

" Servants of time, lo! these be slaves of slaves;
But the Lord's servant hath his freedom whole.
Therefore, when every man his portion craves,
' The Lord God is my portion,' saith my soul."

T[D^::::!!x::T:::-THE SABBATH-:

The late Dr. Schechter showed the fallacy of that anti-
Sabbath argument in the following eloquent and telling
sentences: "On the one side we hear . . . that the law
was a most terrific burden, and the life under it the most
unbearable slavery, deadening body and soul. On the other
side we have the testimony of a literature extending over
about twenty-five centuries, including . . . scholars, poets,
mystics, lawyers . . . tradesmen, workmen, women
simpletons, who all . . . give unanimous evidence in favour
of the law, and of the bliss and happiness of living under
it. And this the testimony of people who were actually
living under the law, not merely theorising upon it, and
who experienced it in all its difficulties and inconveniences.
The Sabbath will give a fair example. This day is described
... in the most gloomy colours. . . . But, on the other
hand, the Sabbath is celebrated by the very people who did
observe it, in hundreds of hymns which would fill volumes,
as a day of rest and joy, of pleasure and delight; a day in
which man enjoys some presentiment of the pure bliss and
happiness stored up for the righteous in the world to come."
(Jew. Quart. Eeview, vol. hi., pp. 762-763.)

While Peter and his adherents among the Judeo-
Christians continued to respect and to observe the religious
customs and institutions of their people, Paul, either
inspired by hostile feelings against his national traditions,
or anxious to facilitate the conversion, of the heathers to
Christianity, advocated the abrogation of all those laws
which he characterised as mere ' 'shadows of the things to
come." "Let no man judge you in meat," he impressed
upon his audiences, "or in drink, or in respect of an holy
day, or of the new moon, or of the Sabbath days." (Col. ii.
16.) The spirit of the Sabbath, however, had taken such
hold of the new converts that they, notwithstanding their
master's rebuke, turned again and again towards the
observance of those religious rites which he ridiculed as
"weak beggarly elements." (Gal. vi. 9.) It seems that it
was mainly during the second century, when the observance

I-THE SABBATH -=

of the Sabbath was severely punished by the Boman
authorities, that the neo-Christians introduced the Sunday
to take the place of the Sabbath, and, according to the
"Epistle of Barnabas, "the Eesurrection, which was believed
to have taken place on the first day, was sufficient reason
for such a change. There was, however, yet another reason
which is not frankly admitted. The change was thought
imperative in order to preclude the weak members of the
young Christian community from attending divine services
in the Synagogues, from listening to sermons delivered by
Rabbis, and thus, from "turning to bondage," that the
"labour bestowed upon them' might not be frustrated.

V.

BUT though they changed time and name, though they
decreed: "Dies Dominions non Judceis sed Christianis
rcsurrectione Domini declaratus est," the Sunday retained
the festive character of the Sabbath. Their effort to exclude
the idea of any transference of obligation from the Sabbath
to Sunday proved futile. Publicly they would not identify
the Lord's day with the Jewish Sabbath, but the "Jdaical
element" gradually increased during the Middle Ages, and
especially since Luther and Calvin. It was admitted: "that
human nature requires a day of rest from labour, the soul
requires leisure for joint worship, therefore a day must be
fixed for all. "

The Jewish idea of the Sabbath in a different garb.

In the seventeenth century leading English Protestants,
Calvinists, and Puritans, aroused by "the scandals of the
sixteenth-century Sunday," created a movement to restore
to the Jewish Sabbath its ancient meaning, dignity, and
importance. Nicholas Bownd with his "Sabbathum Veteris
et Novi Testamenti" (1595), and Heylin with his "History
oi the Sabbath," created quite a stir throughout the British
Isles, and Parliament decided in favour of the Puritan

10

=-THE SABBATH

Sabbath (1648-1656). Nicolas Bownd's book, which was
translated into many Continental languages, created in
Holland, Switzerland, and Bohemia a strong Sabbatarian
movement. Francis David, first Unitarian Bishop of
Transylvania (d. 1597), who won the adherence of over 400
preachers with their churches and professors with their
colleges, helped to raise the authority of the Sabbath.
Unitarians to-day wield world-wide influence, and the
Sabbatarian movement has its branches in the United
States, in many countries of the European Continent, and
possesses strong congregations even in South Africa.

The prohibition of work on one day of the week, which
the Grecian and Koman, writers ridiculed as a barbaric
practice, is now a law enforced by the Parliaments of all
civilised nations, compelling cessation from labour on Sun-
days. This undoubtedly leads back to the Jewish Sabbath,
and has proved a great boon and blessing to the working
classes. "Looking at the question from a merely physical
and industrial point of view, it cannot be doubted that the
average health, strength and power of the race are
immensely increased by the fresh air, exercise, and rest
which the Sunday holiday secures. The addition it makes
to human happiness, the benefits it bestows on those large
classes whose whole weekday lives are spent in labour too
jading and incessant to leave any margin or disposition for
mental culture, can hardly be over-estimated." (Lecky,
"Democracy and Liberty," vol. ii.)

And these are not its only advantages.

VI.

THE Fourth Commandment reads: "Remember the
Sabbath day to keep it holy." The only way to
sanctify the Sabbath is self-sanctification.

"The influence of the Sabbath upon the general
spiritual improvement of the human race," says Professor

11

^111- THE SABBATH

Lazarus, "and particularly in the way of religious eleva-
tion . . . was gradually made clear by successive generations
of Rabbis. Granting as it does the posibility of a spiritual
life, leisure is regarded as a condition of sanctificati. n.
Even in the Torah the Sabbath is presented from this point
of view, when it is designated as ' holy convocation.' ..."
("Ethics of Judaism," § 186.) But though the main object
of the Sabbath was devotion to intellectual pursuits, it was
at the same time intended to be a day of joy, of pleasure
and happiness, on which fasting and mourning are strictly
forbidden. The Rabbis, too, maintained that the Sabbath
was instituted for the benefit of man, and not man for the
benefit of the Sabbath. But the pleasures of a physical
nature are raised into the realm of the spiritual.

Abraham Ibn Ezra (1088-1167) expressed this idea in
the following verse, which orthodox Jews still sing every
Sabbath morning at their dinner table :

" This is indeed, a glorious day,
It crowns my fervent wishes ;
I shall indulge in sparkling wine,
In all the tempting dishes.
Cheer up, 0 man, profane it not
With painful thoughts and sorrow,
Rejoice in all its blessings
Before the dawn of morrow."

At the beginning of this century some Assyriologista.
headed by Friedrich Delitzsch, tried to dispute the Jewish
origin of the Sabbath. They were impelled not by purely
scientific motives, but by the desire to minimise the
importance of the Bible by tracing the origin of its laws
back to Babylonian influences. But that hypothesis has
long since been exploded, and the Jewish claim to indis-
putable priority has been vindicated beyond any doubt.
(Cf. J. Barth, "Babel und israelitisches Religionswesen, "
Berlin, 1902.)

13

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Reprinted from " THE 1VRV

by request of the

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