Sabbath: An Apprenticeship in Becoming Ourselves

Within the biblical imagination, work and Sabbath are two halves of an inseparable pair. Neither can be fully understood apart from the other because each one provides the essential context in which the other’s purpose is clarified and fulfilled. Rest without work is just extended leisure, a permanent vacation that rejects the imago dei’s inherent creativity. But without rest, work loses its limits and can become an addiction or an idol, even a form of slavery—an equal rejection of the imago dei’s inherent need for rest. Both extremes have a similar consequence: the diminishment of the imago dei, and the separation of a person from their true self.

The book of Exodus offers the Bible’s most substantive reflection on the nature of work in relation to Sabbath rest. Exploring the connection can help us make better sense of both. 

Work and Rest in Exodus

Throughout the book of Exodus, two words are used to compare the “work” the Israelites did in Egypt under Pharaoh’s iron thumb with the “work” they performed in the wilderness constructing the Tabernacle for the Lord. In both cases the Israelites constructed building projects at the behest of a higher power, but the two types of work couldn’t have been more different. 

The Hebrew word avodah (ah-voh-DAH) is related to the word for “servant/slave” (eved) and describes Israel’s forced labor under Pharaoh’s yoke of oppression. Avodah is work that disregards the inherent limits of human capacity and the earth’s resources. It is work without Sabbath: unceasing, exploitative, all-consuming, soul-crushing. It is work fueled by anxiety. Israel built storehouses to hold Pharaoh’s surplus because Pharaoh was terrified of scarcity. Avodah’s only metric is productivity. Pharaoh cared about little more than how many bricks were built by the end of each day—and how much wealth he amassed by the end of each year.

Does this sound familiar? A work culture fueled by anxiety and scarcity, measured by productivity and profit, which is inherently exploitative and denies the dignity of both worker and land? According to Bible scholar Ellen Davis, Egypt is the biblical analogue of industrial work systems like ours in the US.[1] And the book of Exodus offers a resounding critique of such systems, which deny God as Creator by diminishing or dehumanizing that which God created good.

The critique Exodus is making comes in the contrasting form of work introduced after God liberates Israel from Egypt and gives them instructions for building the Tabernacle in the wilderness. Constructing God’s house involved not avodah but melakhah (meh-lah-KHAH). Melakhah refers to a quality of work we would call “craftsmanship and handiwork.” Melakhah conveys immense dignity.[2] It is the word used to describe God’s “work” in creation (Genesis 2.2–3). Its emphasis falls on skilled labor and its benefits—to the workers, to the community, to the earth that offers its resources, and ultimately to God in whose creativity melakhah participates, and from which it flows. Melakhah is work that reconnect Dei and imago dei.

Moreover, melakhah is work defined by the limits of Sabbath—this work must give way to rest every shabbat. But the spirit of Sabbath also permeates melakhah with the sense that it is contributing to something larger. Melakhah is fueled not by anxiety but by God’s abundant sufficiency. God works, then stops to rest and delight. We can too. So why do so few of us actually do it, then?

A Misunderstood Sabbath

The American Christian Sabbath imagination has been heavily influenced by the legacy of the Puritans, for whom Sabbath observance was a central pillar of faithful piety. Central to their legacy were the so-called “blue laws,” which legislated piety and made Sunday Sabbath-keeping central to civic duty. The blue laws required businesses to stay closed on Sundays and prohibited the sale of alcohol on Sundays. The blue laws represent a commitment to the letter of the Sabbath commandment and a failure to appreciate its spirit. 

In many communities influenced by this tradition—including my own—the emphasis tended to fall on enforcing Sabbath rather than experiencing it. And when the goal is control, even the greatest gifts can be drained of their power. Too often the desire to universalize Sabbath simply infused it with legalism, reducing it from a practice of liberation and delight to a performance of piety or a list of prohibitions without a meaningful context. This is what legalism does, it erodes a practice of its joy.[3]

A big part of why I wanted to write The Sabbath Way was out of a longing to reconnect Sabbath with delight. Delight is an overlooked aspect of the biblical vision of Sabbath. Growing up, “Sabbath” and “delight” were never uttered in the same sentence. And yet Isaiah 58.13 implores us to “call the Sabbath a delight.” Which begs the question: What is delight? 

Delight is the Point

Delight is not a happy-clappy denial of difficulty, an escape from stress, or a way to numb our pain through distraction. It is the experience, unique to each of us, of being fully awake—fully present—to life, whatever it holds. Sabbath delight is a fulsome delight. It includes adjacent emotions such as gratitude, wonder, connection, and joy. Poet Ross Gay has called it “the pleasurable evidence of life,” love, and connection.[4] Howard Thurman famously described it as the thing the world needs most: “people who have come alive.”[5]

And yet, we live in a world not with rising rates of joy and delight and aliveness, but of anxiety and fear, loneliness and exhaustion. And while the reasons for this are layered and complex, it is clear that our work is a contributing factor. It can provide meaning and purpose and joy and connection, of course, but it can also suck the life out of us while paying us half as much as we deserve. 

The Sabbath is a weekly invitation to pause, reset, and regain a sense of perspective about who we are, what brings us life, and what matters most to us. It is easy to lose sight of all this over the course of a week with its obligations and uncertainties. The Sabbath seeks to apprentice us in developing the weekly habit of reconnecting to our essence, our truest self. 

The Hebrew word for this is nephesh. It is the closest Hebrew equivalent to the “true self.” It refers to all that constituted “Life”—with a capital L—for the people of Israel. Nephesh is one’s essence, shaped by one’s body and intimate relationships. Contrasting with the English word “soul” (as it’s often translated), nephesh is profoundly embodied. You do not have a nephesh; you are a nephesh. 

Sabbath Re-Nepheshes Us

Exodus 31.17 names the restoration of the nephesh as the goal of a Sabbath practice. “[Sabbath] is an everlasting sign between me and Israel that in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day God rested and was refreshed.” Nephesh is the root of the word translated “was refreshed.” 

The verb used in Exodus 31:17 suggests that Sabbath “re-nepheshes” us. Slowly, over a lifetime, it helps stitch the broken and fragmented threads of our hearts and souls back together. Delight plays a critical if underappreciated role in this process. And Sabbath—that counter-cultural, upside-down, you-can’t-earn-it-if-you-tried gift of grace—flips the script and compels us, one day each week, to put delight first rather than last. It reminds us to stop rescheduling our joy. Because every time we do so, we become even more “distant from the hope of [ourselves],” as Mary Oliver put it.[6]

There is a Hasidic tale that captures poignantly both the urgency and the paradox of becoming the nephesh that we are. In the tale, near the end of his life, Rabbi Zusya says, “In the coming world, they will not ask me: ‘Why were you not Moses?’ They will ask me: ‘Why were you not Zusya?’”[7] Rabbi Zusya’s wisdom is echoed in the words of Master Shifu when he reveals his purpose to his puzzled pupil, Po, the Dragon Warrior of Kung Fu Panda 3, saying, “I’m not trying to turn you into me; I’m trying to turn you into you.”[8] 

The Sabbath is a companion to us on the journey of becoming ourselves, of finding again what T. S. Eliot called “the Life we have lost in living.”[9] The hope is that when that fateful day comes, Rabbi Zusya’s question won’t even need to be asked, since our life—our nephesh—will have already lived the answer.