JUDAISM HAS NOT ONE political theory but two. Not only does it have its own theory of the state, possibly the earliest of its kind, but it also has a political theory of society, something quite rare in the history of thought, and to this day a vision unsurpassed in its simplicity and humanity.
The theory of the state is briefly signaled in Deuteronomy and set out in much more detail in the book of Samuel. In Deuteronomy, Moses commands, or possibly permits, the Israelites to appoint a king once they have entered the land.1 For several generations they did not do so. They were led instead by a series of leaders appointed by circumstance, known as judges. Eventually, in the days of Samuel, they asked for a king. Samuel is distressed, sensing rightly that they no longer had faith in him—he was by then old— or his sons. God speaks to Samuel and delivers an unusually complex message. He tells Samuel not to be upset: “It is not you they have rejected as their king, but Me.” Then, despite the fact that the request is seen as a rejection of the rule of God in favor of the rule of man, God tells Samuel to grant the people their wish, with one proviso, that they fully understand what they are committing themselves to: “Warn them solemnly and let them know what the king who will reign over them will do.”2
Samuel duly issues a warning to the people. The appointment of a king will have a price, he says, and it will be high. He will take their sons and daughters and place them in his service. He will appropriate their property for his own use. “When that day comes you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, and the Lord will not answer you in that day.”3 But the people are insistent: they still want a king. Samuel duly anoints Saul, and Israel becomes a monarchy. No longer a confederation of tribes, for the first time it has a unified and central government.
What is going on in this sequence of events? In Samuel’s speech we have the earliest expression of an idea, reinvented in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by Hobbes and Rousseau, called the social contract. The idea behind it is that without law, or at least a central power capable of enforcing it, social life is at constant risk of anarchy, the state of affairs described in the book of Judges as “everyone doing what is right in his own eyes.”4 Hobbes memorably described life in such an environment as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”5 For Hobbes the real danger was that no one could be sure of his or her safety. No single individual is strong enough to be able to protect himself against the concerted attack of others. For the Israelites this does not seem to have been the problem. Their concern was foreign rather than domestic policy. They were less worried about the internal breakdown of order than about their continued vulnerability to attack by warlike neighbors.
In either event, Hobbes argues, everyone has an interest in the existence of a central power, vested in a person or an institution, which can ensure that laws are enforced and battles fought under a unified command. However, this power can be brought into being only if individuals are prepared to hand over certain of their rights of property and liberty. The king must be able to levy taxes and recruit an army, which means that he must be able to take something that otherwise would be mine. The existence of government is never painless. It always involves the transfer of rights and powers from the individual to the state. It also involves a risk that the power thus created will become tyrannical and corrupt. That, in essence, is the equation Samuel sets out. The Israelites nevertheless believed, as Hobbes thought rational individuals always would, that the price and the risk were worth it. Without government, life and liberty would be impossible to defend.
It is clear why this theory, the foundation of modern politics, made its first appearance in the Hebrew Bible. It was then that the key ideas emerged of the sanctity of life, the dignity of the individual, the integrity of private property and the insistence on freedom as the basis of society. For the first time, no power of one person over another—including the power of a king—could be taken as part of the natural order of things. The biblical revolution implies that no human hierarchies are self-justifying. Ideally, a society should be comprised of free citizens, none of whom has control over any other. All power structures, therefore, are necessary evils; none is good in itself. This is the single greatest difference between Greek and Jewish political thought, for the Greeks tended to see the state and political life as good in themselves. It also reminds us that in Judaism the measure of God is the measure of man. When God tells Samuel that, in seeking a king, the Israelites are rejecting Him, He also means that they are opting for something less than full human freedom.
So biblical Judaism has a carefully elaborated theory of the state. Oddly enough, though, this is only its secondary concern. Far more fundamental is its theory of society and its insistence that the state exists to serve society and not vice versa. The state came into existence with the appointment of a king. Israelite society came into being centuries earlier at Mount Sinai. The difference between them is that the state is created by a social contract, but society is created by a social covenant.6
The logic of the covenant, unlike the social contract of the state, has nothing to do with rights, power and self-interest. Instead it is defined by three key words— mishpat, tzedek and hessed. Mishpat means, roughly, justice-as-reciprocity. It is the principle of the covenant with Noah: As you do, so shall you be done to. It is the legal equivalent of Hillel’s famous saying, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor.”7 Mishpat is the universal minimum of a just society. Wrong is punished, injury redressed. All persons are equal under the law, and all have access to it.
Tzedek or tzedakah is a far more radical idea. The word tzedakah is usually translated as “charity,” but in fact it means social or distributive justice. In biblical law it involved a whole series of institutions that together constituted the first-ever attempt at a welfare state. The corners of the field, the dropped sheaf, and grapes and olives left from the first picking were to be left for the poor. A tithe was to be given to them in certain years. Every seventh year, debts were canceled, slaves went free, no work was done on the land, and the produce of the fields belonged to everyone. In the fiftieth year, the jubilee, anyone who had been forced through poverty to sell ancestral land was given it back. Tzedek, the Bible’s welfare legislation, is built on the premise that freedom has an economic dimension. Not only does powerlessness enslave, so too does poverty.8 So no one is to forfeit his independence or dignity. One may not take a person’s means of livelihood as security for a loan or hold on to items of clothing they need, nor may one delay payment to an employee. The vision of tzedek—a republic of free and equal citizens—is best expressed by the prophet Micah: “Every man will sit under his own vine and under his own fig-tree and no-one will make them afraid.”9
One way of understanding tzedek is to contrast it with two other political theories: capitalism and socialism. Capitalism aims at equality of opportunity, socialism at equality of outcome. The Judaic vision aims at a society in which there is equal access to dignity and hope. Unlike socialism it believes in the free market, private property and minimum government intervention. Unlike capitalism it believes that the free market, without periodic redistributions, creates inequalities that are ultimately unsustainable because they deprive some individuals of independence and hope. Tzedek is built on the idea that there is a distinction between possession and ownership. Judaism—despite its two great communist experiments, the Essenes in second Temple times and the kibbutz in modern Israel—affirms the concept of private property, possession, for the reason that John Locke did in the seventeenth century. It is the best defense of the individual against the state. The great prophetic denunciations of Nathan against King David, Elijah against King Ahab, were provoked by kings seizing what belonged to someone else. A society without private property leaves citizens at the mercy of rulers. Capitalism tends to democracy.
Large-scale communism leaves inadequate space for individual rights.10
So Jewish law protects possession, but it distinguishes it from ownership. All things ultimately belong to God and therefore what I have, I hold in trust. “The land,” says God in Leviticus, “cannot be sold in perpetuity, because the land is Mine—you are strangers and temporary residents with Me.”11 There is no ultimate ownership in Judaism. What I possess belongs to God, and I am merely its legal guardian. Hence Judaism’s environmental legislation: We may not needlessly destroy even the things that are ours.12Like Adam in Eden, we are placed in the world “to serve and protect” it,13 handing it on intact or enhanced to the next generation. Hence also tzedek legislation: what I give to others in need is not charity but justice, not giving away what is rightfully mine, but rather honoring the conditions under which I hold it in trust.
And finally there is hessed, usually translated as “kindness” but in fact meaning covenantal love. Hessed is the loyalty I owe to those who are members of my family—and a covenantal society is one in which all citizens form a single extended family, as the children of one God. Much of the Bible’s welfare legislation, especially those provisions that concern rescuing someone from servitude, is introduced by such phrases as, “If your brother becomes poor.”14 God Himself uses the language of family in announcing the redemption of the Israelites from Egypt: “My son, My firstborn, Israel.”15 This is the origin of the concept of fraternity invoked in the French Revolution. As a secular concept, though, it has never succeeded because the necessary theological foundation—the brotherhood of man under the parenthood of God—is lacking. Hessed represents the idea that a gracious social order can never be constructed on the basis of rights and obligations alone. There are times when we must go “beyond the letter of the law,” beyond the requirements of equity and reciprocity. Hessed is the personal, unquantifiable, I-Thou dimension of society, the compassion and humanity that can never be formalized as law but instead belong to the quality of relationships, to the idea that the poor, the widow, the orphan and the stranger are my brothers and sisters.
Judaism’s theory of the state paved the way for the great works of Hobbes and Locke, the architects of modern constitutional government. But the biblical theory of society was far more original and has never been rivaled, let alone surpassed. States are sustained by the instrumentalities of power: governments, armies, police, courts, and the use of force, actual or potential, to resolve conflict. Societies depend on quite different institutions: families, communities and schools, the things Judaism most cultivated and nurtured.
A covenant is not held in place by power but by an internalized sense of identity, kinship and loyalty. This can never be taken for granted. Hence the centrality in Judaism of education, the festivals, prayer and the reading of the Torah. In education we pass on our ideals from one generation to the next. In festivals we transmit our history and memories. In communal prayer we remind ourselves that what we seek, we seek together. When we read the Torah, our covenantal constitution, we reaffirm our existence as a community under the sovereignty of God. I know of no more majestic vision of what it might be to build a society of justice and compassion.
This, then, is where the Jewish journey leads. It began with Abraham’s cry at the palace in flames—a world of oppression and servitude. Covenantal society is the attempt to put out the flames and to create a society of collective moral beauty and grace, one that honors the image of God in every person and thus becomes a home for the Divine presence.
Why then, why there, and why them? Why did these astonishing and still powerful ideas suddenly appear as if from nowhere among a tribe of nomads wandering in the desert more than three thousand years ago? As W. N. Ewer famously put it: “How odd/Of God/To choose/The Jews.” And despite the many ripostes, the question remains. If God, maker of the universe, had all time and all humanity to choose from, why the Jews, and why then?
The answer may lie in their marginal, detached situation. Perhaps the nomadic life of the patriarchs allowed them to see the moral failings of the great empires around them. Perhaps the stark landscape of the Sinai desert, between unyielding earth and remorseless sky, gave the Israelites a unique setting in which to feel the naked encounter between God and man. Perhaps Moses’ personal history— brought up as an Egyptian prince, then seeing his people enslaved—gave him unusual qualifications to be a revolutionary leader. Each of these is possible, but I want to hazard a different explanation.
The Mosaic books, Judaism’s foundational document, sound a repeated note that is altogether strange. Time and again, when we would expect something quite different, there is a reference to education, the transmission of knowledge, teaching, as the essential institution of the covenant. When messengers come to tell Abraham and Sarah that they will at last have a child, God adds: “For I have chosen [Abraham] so that he will instruct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just.”16 This is the only place in the Bible where we are told why Abraham was chosen—not because he was righteous, which he surely was, but because he would be a teacher.
The same, as we saw earlier, was true of Moses. On the brink of the Exodus, instead of speaking to the Israelites about freedom, he instructed them to educate future generations. The most famous of all prayers based on biblical passages, the Shema, returns yet again to the theme: “And you shall teach these things repeatedly to your children, speaking of them when you sit at home or walk on the way, when you lie down and when you rise up.”17 There is an intimation here, too clear to be missed, that education is central to the Divine project of a free society under the sovereignty of God. It is fundamental to our understanding of man as the image of God.
What makes man unique among life forms is that he is a learning animal. Unlike other animals, in whom “learning” takes place unwittingly through genetic variation and natural selection, human beings consciously formulate ideas and pass them on through teaching. Doubtless in the first instance this took place by nonverbal training through imitation, as it still does among the primates. At a later stage, there were stories told around the campfire. Almost certainly, this was the birthplace of myth. Later still, more sophisticated forms of communication allowed education to emerge as a specialized function and exposed teachings themselves to critical reflection. Only at this stage, when words have developed a certain autonomy as the language of the imagination, are human beings first able to detach meaning—and thus God, author of meaning—from nature and the world around them.
Knowledge and its mode of transmission are crucial to our sense of ourselves and our place in the universe. There is a technology of knowledge, and there is also a politics of knowledge, which has to do with its distribution within society. Francis Bacon put the point most famously when he said that “knowledge is power.” Like all power, it has been jealously guarded. At almost all times and places there has been a “knowledge elite” that maintains a monopoly on access to information, above all to that most fundamental form of knowledge, literacy. Not until the nineteenth century, when the Industrial Revolution created the need for a skilled and mobile labor force, did universal compulsory education eventually make its appearance in Europe and the United States.
One of the most stunning gestures of Judaism was to overturn the whole idea of a hierarchy of knowledge,18 for if there are inequalities of learning, they will be replicated through all other social structures, giving some people unwarranted power over others. This is the great insight of the Jewish vision, from which all else followed: A free society must be an educated society, and a society of equal dignity must be one in which education is universal. No other people saw this so clearly or so early or put it into practice with greater consistency. And this offers a clue as to “Why them, why then?”
Writing was invented in Sumeria some six thousand years ago. But the three earliest forms—Sumerian cuneiform, the hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt and the pictographic script of the Cretans—were not systems everyone could learn. With symbols standing for whole words or syllable groups, there were simply too many of them to be mastered by more than a specialized group, priests and officials. The decisive breakthrough came with the invention of the alphabet, the first mode of writing that was in principle teachable to an entire population. The first alphabets in history were the family of scripts known as West Semitic that began to appear in the age of the biblical patriarchs in the region known as Canaan.19
Their precise origin remains obscure. They may have been developed by any of a number of peoples in that area, among them Phoenicians, Canaanites and the early Hebrews. The very word “alphabet,” from aleph-bet, reminds us of its Semitic origins. It was later adopted by the Greeks, who turned aleph, bet into alpha, beta, and added letters signifying vowels. It is unlikely that the Israelites invented the alphabet, but they were close in time and place to its birth, and they were certainly the first to grasp its world-changing possibilities.
We know from the experience of late medieval Europe that changes in the way information is stored and transmitted are the most potent transformers of a civilization.20 The invention of printing in the fifteenth century made possible the Reformation in the sixteenth. All the key ideas of the Reformation had already been formulated two centuries earlier by John Wycliffe in Oxford. But it took the invention of printing and the widespread ownership of Bibles before Martin Luther could appeal successfully to the authority of Scripture against that of the Church. Most scholars attribute the later growth of European individualism and all that flowed from it to that one decisive event.
The invention of the alphabet heralded, for the first time in history, the possibility of a universally literate people. No development could have been more revolutionary in extending human horizons. The knowledge of God, preserved in texts, would then be accessible to everyone—hence, no elites. In almost every other culture, priesthood meant membership in a literate elite. For example, the word hieroglyphic means “priestly script”—the script only priests could read. The word clerical, which means both “priestly” and “secretarial,” reminds us of the long period in English history in which literacy was the preserve of the Church through its control of schools and universities. Only against this background can we fully understand the significance of the phrase that introduced the Sinai covenant—that Israel would become a “kingdom of priests.” It means a society in which everyone can read and write, and thus have access to knowledge, power and dignity on equal terms. A kingdom of priests is a society of universal literacy. The invention of the alphabet made this a possibility.
We do not know in detail how the educational system worked in early biblical times, but the Bible has left us one tantalizing glimpse, and archaeology another. In the eighth chapter of the Book of Judges, Gideon is returning after a successful military campaign. Earlier he had asked the people of Succoth for some bread for his exhausted and hungry troops, but they refused. Now he wants to punish the elders. We read the following: “He caught hold of a young man of Succoth and questioned him, and the young man wrote down for him the names of the seventy-seven officials of Succoth, the elders of the town.”21 Even at that earliest stage of Israel’s national history, Gideon takes it for granted that a young man, seized at random, would be able to write.
At Tel Lakhish, in southern Israel, chance has preserved another piece of evidence. There, scratched into the plaster of an ancient staircase, are the first five letters of the Hebrew alphabet, carved in the eighth century B.C.E. by a schoolboy learning how to write—the world’s oldest surviving example of alphabetical instruction.22 Long before anyone else, Israel had created schools, not for an elite but as part of the normal process of initiation into adulthood. As H. G. Wells noted in his Outline of History, “The Jewish religion, because it was a literature-sustained religion, led to the first efforts to provide elementary education for all children in the community.”23
There were many great milestones later in the journey: when the prophets began teaching their message to the people, when Babylonian exile forced Jews to think about the mechanisms of cultural continuity, when Ezra set about his educational reforms, and when, in the days of the second Temple, Simon ben Shetach and Joshua ben Gamla created the world’s first universal network of schools. But all the evidence suggests that Israel, from its earliest days, had grasped the connection between the invention of the alphabet, the possibility of universal literacy, and the dignity of the individual, shaping its entire theology.
The word Torah means “teaching.” God reveals Himself to mankind not in the storm, the wind, the sun, the rain, but in the voice that teaches, the words that instruct. The covenant is contained in a text comprehensible not only to kings and their attendant priests, but to every member of the nation, so that each becomes party to its terms and each must give his or her consent before the covenant is binding. The heroes of Israel—Abraham, Moses, the prophets, scribes and sages—are not kings, emperors or warriors but educators; and not just guardians of esoteric wisdom but teachers of the people, meaning everyone. The central institutions of the Jewish people—the family, the Temple, the Sabbath, festival rituals, and later the synagogue—all became educational in character, contexts of learning.
Above all, the key experience of Judaism, from Mosaic times to today, is studying the Torah. This is more than a spiritual and intellectual activity, though it is both. For us, scholarship, study, regular engagement with Judaism’s texts, is a political event of the highest magnitude. Every Jew is an equal citizen of the republic of faith because every Jew has access to its constitutional document, the Torah, and is literate in its provisions. As Josephus was able to write with a sense of wonder nineteen hundred years ago, “Should any one of our nation be asked about our laws, he will repeat them as readily as his own name. The result of our thorough education in our laws from the very dawn of intelligence is that they are, as it were, engraved on our souls.”24 A free society—that precarious balance between the conflicting principles of liberty and order—exists not through the rule of law alone, but through a system of education that allows every individual to internalize the law and thus become its master, not its slave. Liberty is not just a society of laws but a society of lawyers, citizens articulate in their own law, each a guardian of justice. No other society has seen things this way. No other faith has made education its supreme religious experience.
Like the invention of the Hubble space telescope, which allowed mankind to pick up signals from the farthest reaches of space and time, so the invention of the alphabet allowed the development of a form of human consciousness that for the first time was able to hear God as the voice directed to the human person as such, and to the construction of a society based on individual dignity and collective freedom. That was the gift of history to the Jews. But there was one other institution central to the idea of a free society, and this was the gift of the Jews to history. Its name was the Sabbath.
The Sabbath was a totally new institution in human history, and at first no one else could understand it. Jewish tradition has left us a poignant record of one such moment of incomprehension. It is said that when the Torah was translated into Greek for the first time, there was one sentence that had to be deliberately mistranslated. It was the verse, “On the seventh day God completed the work He had made.” The Greeks could not understand this. Eventually, to make it intelligible, the line was translated as “On the sixth day God completed . .. “25
What was it that they could not understand? Every religion had its holy days. But none before had ever had a day whose holiness was expressed in the prohibition of work. Greek and Roman writers ridiculed the Jews because of this. They were, said Seneca, Plutarch and Tacitus, a lazy people who took a day off because they did not like labor. Neither Greeks nor Romans could understand the idea that rest is an achievement, that the Sabbath is Judaism’s stillness at the heart of the turning world, and that it was this that God created on the seventh day. “After six days,” said Judaism’s sages, “what did the world lack? It lacked rest. So when the seventh day came, rest came, and the universe was complete.”26
The Sabbath (in Hebrew, Shabbat) is a religious institution, a memorial to creation, the day on which God Himself rested. But it is also and essentially a political institution. Shabbat is the greatest tutorial in liberty ever devised. Passover tells us how the Israelites won their freedom. Shabbat tells us how they kept it. One day in seven, Jews create a messianic society. It is the day on which everyone, master and slave, employer and employee, even animals, experience unconditional freedom. We neither work nor get others to work, manipulate nor allow ourselves to be manipulated. We may neither buy nor be bought. It is the day on which all hierarchies, all relationships of power are suspended.
Shabbat was, of course, the antithesis of Egypt—the free society as opposed to a society of slaves. Slaves work without rest at the will of their masters. So the first mark of the Israelites’ freedom was a day of rest for everyone:
On it you shall do no work, neither you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your ox or donkey or any of your animals, nor the stranger within your gates, so that your manservant and maidservant may rest as you do. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and the Lord your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day27
But Shabbat was also a way of enacting, while on the way, the journey’s end, the destination. Slavery was not immediately abolished; it existed in most parts of the world until the nineteenth century. Even today there are lesser forms of servitude—insecurity, workaholism, the hundred stresses and anxieties of everyday life. And as Marx never tired of telling us, slaves get used to their chains. So, within time itself, everyone had to experience unconditional freedom so as never to lose the love of liberty, even though as yet it lasts only one day in seven. Jews never lost those two memories: the taste of affliction on Pesach, the taste of freedom on Shabbat.
Shabbat is also a way of living out another idea, the concept of possession without ownership which is at the heart of Judaism’s social and environmental ethic. Every week, for a day, Jews live not as creators but creations. On Shabbat the world belongs to God, not us. We renounce our mastery over nature and the animals. We see the earth as a thing of independent dignity and integrity. We become God’s guests, as Judah Halevi put it, recognizing the limits of human striving. But above all else, Shabbat is covenantal time, the working out of Judaism’s vision of a society of equal dignity and hope.
Not far from where I live, in northwest London, is Regent’s Park.28 Completed in 1827 and opened to the public in 1838, it is one of John Nash’s finest achievements. Stretching across some five hundred acres—originally a hunting ground of King Henry VIII—it is a glorious mixture of lakes, tree-lined avenues, open spaces for games, and flower beds that for half the year are a masterpiece of blazing color. There are coffee shops and restaurants, a zoo and an open-air theater and a magnificent rose garden. There are places for children to play and for people to have picnics or rowboats on the lake or simply stroll and enjoy the view. Around it are the great Nash terraces, originally villas, now luxury apartments, with their Corinthian columns, domed towers and decorated facades. I don’t know enough about landscape gardening or domestic architecture to appreciate the finer points of this complex creation, but it is varied and beautiful, and like millions of others, I am glad it’s there.
What defines the park and makes it so gracious a part of city life is that it is public space. It is somewhere we can all go—rich and poor, newcomer or resident—on equal terms. It is surrounded by private homes, places that I and most of the others who use the park could never afford. But that regret is tempered by my knowledge that something far more magnificent, the park itself, is ours. A park is a public good, something that exists in virtue of being shared. And public goods, by definition, are things I as an individual cannot buy, or make, or own. I can only participate in them by being part of the “We” that creates the shared arena for the “I.”
What the park is in space, Shabbat is in time. Shabbat is not simply a vacation, “free time,” time that is mine to dispose of as I wish. It differs from a vacation the way a park differs from a private garden. It is a world that exists only in virtue of it being shared by a community. As political philosopher Michael Walzer puts it, “Sabbath rest is more egalitarian than the vacation because it can’t be purchased: it is the one thing that money can’t buy. It is enjoined for everyone, enjoyed by everyone.”29 On it, rest is not merely something “in here.” It is “out there,” as anyone who has experienced a Shabbat in Jerusalem knows. The shops are closed, the streets are quiet, there are no cars on the roads. In the midst of the city you hear the leaves rustle, the birds sing, the sound of children playing, the songs of families around the table. You can feel the Divine presence in the public square. This is peace as the prophets envisaged it at the end of days: utopia in the present. Shabbat is what we possess by not owning—it is public time.
The Sabbath sustains every one of Judaism’s great institutions. In the synagogue we reengage with the community, praying their prayers, celebrating their joys, defining ourselves as part of the “We” rather than the “I.” Hearing and studying the Torah portion of the week, we travel back to join our ancestors at Sinai, when God spoke and gave us His written text, His marriage contract with the Jewish people. At home I spend time—sacrosanct, undisturbed—with my family, my wife and children, and know that our marriage is sheltered under God’s tabernacle of peace. I once took Britain’s leading childcare expert to a Jewish school where, for the first time, she saw young children rehearsing the Sabbath table—five-year-old parents blessing five-year-old children and welcoming five-year-old guests. She, a non-Jew, was enthralled. She asked the children what they liked most about Shabbat. They replied: “It’s the time when mum and dad don’t have to rush off.” She said to me afterwards: “You are giving those children the greatest gift, the gift of a tradition. And it is saving their parents’ marriages.”
Shabbat is where a restless people rested and renewed itself. In ages of oppression it reminded Jews they were free. For my grandparents and their generation, it meant rest from physical exhaustion. For my contemporaries it means release from psychological fatigue and stress. Judah Halevi once said that on Shabbat the poorest Jew was freer than the greatest king,30 and he was right. In political terms it was the day on which Jews, often oppressed by the world outside, relinquished their burdens and breathed free air. In human terms it was and is the time when we stop making a living and instead simply live.
The Hassidic master Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev was once looking out of his window, watching people rushing across the town square. He leaned out and asked one, “Why are you running?” The man replied, “I’m running to work to make a living.” The rabbi replied, “Are you so sure that your livelihood is running away from you and you have to rush to catch it up? Perhaps it’s running towards you, and all you have to do is stand still and let it catch up with you.”31 Shabbat is the day we stand still and let all our blessings catch up with us.
Shabbat is the holy time of a people that found truth in time. The ancient world had holy places, holy objects, holy people. But the first thing the Bible calls holy is time itself: “God blessed the seventh day and made it holy.”32 So Shabbat became our moment of eternity in the midst of time, our glimpse of a world at peace under the sovereignty of God. Within the cycle of the week it creates a delicate rhythm of action and reflection, making and enjoying, running and standing still. Without that pause, Jews might never have continued the journey. Still today, without Shabbat, we risk making the journey while missing the view. It is Judaism’s great messianic institution.
But now I want to move on, from biblical to post-biblical Judaism, from Sinai to the last days of Jerusalem. In the wilderness, Moses had given the Israelites their constitution of liberty, their political vision as a free nation under the sovereignty of God. Much of the rest of the Bible tells the story of how they wrestled with this vision, regressing often, but always reminded by the prophets of what their mission was. Several times they came close to collapse— when the northern kingdom was conquered by the Assyrians and ten of the twelve tribes lost to history, and again when Judah, the southern kingdom, was taken captive by the Babylonians. But the worst moment by far was the destruction of the second Temple by the Romans. This time there were no prophets and little hope. It was precisely then, in its darkest hour, that the Jewish people made some of its greatest spiritual advances. It needed to. This time, the palace really was in flames.