Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now | Walter Brueggemann
Practicing Rest
Rest in peace! I was very sad when I found out that Walter Brueggemann had
died just about a month ago. He was an appreciated Biblical scholar and theologian focused on the Old
Testament. He was especially well known for his understanding of prophetic work: “It is the vocation of
the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing future
alternatives to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one”. According to this
understanding, he himself can definitely be seen as a modern day prophet: he was very critical of American
consumerism and nationalism.
This book is definitely not missing a certain prophetic dimension in that sense. It is a study of the concept of Sabbath in the Jewish tradition, its underlying principles and what applying them in today's world could look like.
As most readers will know, at its most basic, Sabbath can be defined as a religious ritual in Judaism in which "certain workaday activities and ordinary busyness are suspended and brought to a halt" once a week for a whole day. While Orthodox Jews are still living out this ritual in a quite radical way, according to the "letter", so to speak, Brueggemann insists more on the "spirit" of this law.
Generally he understands it as a "cultivation of inaction in body and spirit". Nowadays we are used to being on "the initiating end of all things" - we want to always be in control. In contrast to this, during Sabbath rest, one "tries to stand in the cycle of natural time, without manipulation or interference". From my personal experience I can say that this is a refreshing and needed exercise which always leaves my mind refreshed.
Even more than just a personal exercise, Sabbath has a societal dimension for Brueggemann. In our current context of market society, it serves as an act of resistance: by keeping Sabbath one is visibly insisting that our lives are not defined by the production and consumption of commodities. In some countries, such as Germany for example, this might manifest as the fact that almost all shops are closed on Sundays and maybe even in the fact that parking is free almost everywhere on Sunday here.
What Brueggemann points at is indeed a huge problem. In our consumerist society we define ourselves by what and how much we can buy. As others have pointed out, the fact that we constantly compare ourselves with each other (especially now in the age of social media), is something that keeps us busy (work more to be able to buy more) and keeps us from uniting against the exploitative powers that be (to use the expression as coined by Walter Wink). One needs only to look at the CEO-to-worker pay ration from the 1970s in comparison to today to understand that something deeply wrong has happened. While in 1970 the ratio was at about 11:1, by 2023 the average CEO of a major U.S. company earns more than 260 times what the median worker in the same company earns. I could write much more about this and how the doctrine of individualism is used to mask such injustices, but let us for now return to Brueggemann and the concept of Sabbath.
Inequality is hardly a new phenomenon, and Sabbath, according to Brueggemann, has an equalizing power: "Sabbath is the great day of equality when all are equally at rest. Not all are equal in production. Some perform much more effectively than others. Not all are equal in consumption. Some have greater access to consumer goods [...] Because this one day breaks the pattern of coercion, all are like you, equal—equal worth, equal value, equal access, equal rest."
This equality fosters what Brueggemann understands as the final purpose of Sabbath: the creation of the "neighborly reality of the community beloved by God", which can be understood, among other things, as an environment of security, respect, dignity and love.
I want to end the review with one final quote from the book which sums up the problem again, and thus indicates why the idea of Sabbath is still prophetically potent, even if each one of us might find his or her own way of practicing it: "Indeed, our consumer society is grounded in the generation of artificial desires, readily transposed into urgent needs. The always-emerging new desires and new needs create a restless striving that sets neighbor against neighbor in order to get ahead, to have an advantage, and to accumulate at the expense of the other. The power of such a compulsion to 'get,' of course, negates neighborly possibility."
This book is definitely not missing a certain prophetic dimension in that sense. It is a study of the concept of Sabbath in the Jewish tradition, its underlying principles and what applying them in today's world could look like.
As most readers will know, at its most basic, Sabbath can be defined as a religious ritual in Judaism in which "certain workaday activities and ordinary busyness are suspended and brought to a halt" once a week for a whole day. While Orthodox Jews are still living out this ritual in a quite radical way, according to the "letter", so to speak, Brueggemann insists more on the "spirit" of this law.
Generally he understands it as a "cultivation of inaction in body and spirit". Nowadays we are used to being on "the initiating end of all things" - we want to always be in control. In contrast to this, during Sabbath rest, one "tries to stand in the cycle of natural time, without manipulation or interference". From my personal experience I can say that this is a refreshing and needed exercise which always leaves my mind refreshed.
Even more than just a personal exercise, Sabbath has a societal dimension for Brueggemann. In our current context of market society, it serves as an act of resistance: by keeping Sabbath one is visibly insisting that our lives are not defined by the production and consumption of commodities. In some countries, such as Germany for example, this might manifest as the fact that almost all shops are closed on Sundays and maybe even in the fact that parking is free almost everywhere on Sunday here.
What Brueggemann points at is indeed a huge problem. In our consumerist society we define ourselves by what and how much we can buy. As others have pointed out, the fact that we constantly compare ourselves with each other (especially now in the age of social media), is something that keeps us busy (work more to be able to buy more) and keeps us from uniting against the exploitative powers that be (to use the expression as coined by Walter Wink). One needs only to look at the CEO-to-worker pay ration from the 1970s in comparison to today to understand that something deeply wrong has happened. While in 1970 the ratio was at about 11:1, by 2023 the average CEO of a major U.S. company earns more than 260 times what the median worker in the same company earns. I could write much more about this and how the doctrine of individualism is used to mask such injustices, but let us for now return to Brueggemann and the concept of Sabbath.
Inequality is hardly a new phenomenon, and Sabbath, according to Brueggemann, has an equalizing power: "Sabbath is the great day of equality when all are equally at rest. Not all are equal in production. Some perform much more effectively than others. Not all are equal in consumption. Some have greater access to consumer goods [...] Because this one day breaks the pattern of coercion, all are like you, equal—equal worth, equal value, equal access, equal rest."
This equality fosters what Brueggemann understands as the final purpose of Sabbath: the creation of the "neighborly reality of the community beloved by God", which can be understood, among other things, as an environment of security, respect, dignity and love.
I want to end the review with one final quote from the book which sums up the problem again, and thus indicates why the idea of Sabbath is still prophetically potent, even if each one of us might find his or her own way of practicing it: "Indeed, our consumer society is grounded in the generation of artificial desires, readily transposed into urgent needs. The always-emerging new desires and new needs create a restless striving that sets neighbor against neighbor in order to get ahead, to have an advantage, and to accumulate at the expense of the other. The power of such a compulsion to 'get,' of course, negates neighborly possibility."