Posted by When we look at religious history, God introduced the concept of Sabbath to humanity thousands of years ago in the 10 Commandments, telling us we need to set aside one day a week to disconnect from our work and instead to connect with our deeper selves, our families and friends, and with God himself.
It’s a practice many have let slip away, but it’s one we need to look at with renewed interest in light of our stressful, always-achieving, constantly-tech-connected lives today.
Christopher Award-winning documentarian Martin Doblmeier explores that topic in his latest film, “Sabbath,” which is available to view for free at JourneyFilms.com – and which will begin airing on PBS stations around the country this month.
In the film, Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, the senior rabbi of Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York City, calls Sabbath – or Shabbat – a “revolutionary concept” introduced to the world by the Jewish people.
During a “Christopher Closeup” interview (podcast below), Doblmeier explained, “If you go back 3,000 years, there was no sense of a rhythm [to life], a day off. It was the first time in human history that there was a mandated day off. And in the Hebrew tradition, the Shabbat is the day of rest. That, in some ways, transformed humanity. And it was not just for human beings. The law says it’s not only you who shall rest, but your family, the worker, the foreign person on your land, your animals get a day off…We have to grant the earth that we live on its day of rest…and that should happen every six days.”
Doblmeier joined a Jewish family for its celebration of the Shabbat meal on a Friday evening, which begins with the lighting of candles. He notes that the atmosphere in the room changed immediately afterwards to one of peace, rest, and putting worldly cares out of everyone’s mind. “I think that’s one of the privileges that’s been given to humanity,” commented Doblmeier, “to be able to light the candle and say, ‘It’s time to rest.'”
That rest involves leaving behind the stress and negativity of the prior week. Rabbi Manis Friedman observed that Shabbat conversations focus on “why you’re alive, not how you’re alive.”
And civil rights activist Abraham Heschel’s daughter reveals a similar family tradition in the film. Doblmeier said, “Despite the fact that her father was always active in the civil rights movement, always active against the war in Vietnam, always active in the concern for Soviet Jews – on Shabbat, you never talked about any of that. And I thought that was refreshing because it’s one thing to say, ‘I’m not going to go to work today, but I’m still going to talk all day long about the culture wars.’…Not just the body, not just the mind, but the soul in some way needs that relaxation, to stop for 24 hours and say, ‘I’m not going to think about these kinds of things because they infuriate me…Today is my day of disengagement. I owe it to myself and I owe it to God.'”
That kind of disengagement is also a boon to our mental health. As such, the film “Sabbath” has a natural appeal to both religious audiences and spiritual seekers/nones, because everyone can relate to needing an antidote to feeling burned out.
That holds true for parishioners at Our Lady Queen of Angels Catholic Church in downtown Los Angeles, where the large and vibrant Latino community find comfort in communion with each other and with God every weekend at Mass.
Doblmeier said, “The congregation in Los Angeles was unique in the sense that many of those people are undocumented…They’re the working class…And so, there are a lot of people who come into the congregation with emotional stress, a sense of insecurity of who they are in a strange land. How biblical it is because many of them, like in the Old Testament, they left oppression, traveled across a desert, find themselves strangers in a strange land. This is the biblical story.”
“But coming to a place like La Placida,” continued Doblmeier, “which is the name that is given to Our Lady Queen of Angels with affection…that provides them a space where they can be with people who are struggling in the same way that they are…When you can actually be in the presence of other people who understand clearly what you’re going through and are able to sympathize with the struggles that you have, that becomes its own form of Sabbath rest. One of the ways they reciprocate is they bring their children into La Placida. Visually, it was just wild to see as many as 50 or 60 baptisms on a given weekend.”
Doblmeier also wondered what it would be like to practice Sabbath in a place already removed from the wider world and focused on prayer. That’s why he visited the Trappist monastery St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts.
The monks, grounded in the concept of “Ora et labora” (prayer and work), labor on the land to produce the crops they need to make the jams and beers they sell. They also pray seven times a day every day. So what makes they’re celebration of Sabbath special?
“St. Benedict, 1,500 years ago, gave a prescription for what Sabbath was supposed to be like for the monks,” said Doblmeier. “Not only did he want the brothers to stop work for that particular day, but he also wanted them to study, to actually use the time for sacred reading….Lectio Divina, sacred reading, winds up being the focal point of why monasteries going back centuries were the place of education. The rest of the world was not literate, monks were literate. And why was that? That was because they had the insistence of St. Benedict that Sabbath in particular was the day that was set aside for sacred reading. You have to learn to read and then you have to be able to share that with others. So, it gave us another dimension to the whole Sabbath story.”
The monks aren’t the only ones with a spiritual foundation for working the land. New Jersey’s Princeton Theological Seminary includes a program called “Farminary.” Led by theologian and author Nathan Stucky, it combines farming with seminary.
Doblmeier explained,”They’re trying to teach people that [farming] is a collaborative event between the Creator and us, whereby we can put the seed into the ground, we can care for the earth that is going to produce for us, we harvest from it…These pastors now are learning this through a hands-on way, what it means to be part of creation. They may not turn out to be farmers in the end, but in fact, they’re going to be the pastors who will be clear about the connection between the earth that we’re entrusted with living in – and our responsibility to it and what that all means…They’ve got a lot of vegetables out of 21 acres…They give a lot of that to the people in need in the community. So, it’s both an educational laboratory to learn where everything is done on theological grounds, and at the same time, they’re providing a necessary gift to the community.”
The film “Sabbath” will also be a gift to all who view it. Though it is two hours in length, it can serve as the starting point for people who want to explore the practice of Sabbath further. For those purposes, Doblmeier has extensive resources on his website JourneyFilms.com.
He concluded, “We spent a lot of time unpacking the film in terms of themes and commentary that we couldn’t put into the film…You can use the film, go to our website, and talk about the themes of Sabbath and creation, Sabbath and the environment, Sabbath and social justice, Sabbath and what it means to be holy. So, this is encouraging and facilitating people not only to watch the film, but have conversation afterwards…and say, ‘Look, this idea of Sabbath, we have to think about it at a deeper level.” Hopefully the film, plus all that additional material on our website, can help people have those fruitful and beneficial conversations.”
(To listen to my full conversation with Martin Doblmeier, click on the podcast link):
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