In the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, I led a number of college students on Jewish service learning trips to the Gulf Coast. Inevitably, participants would complain about our practice of stopping work for Shabbat. “We only have a week here,” they would say. “We could get so much more done with one more day.” In the conversations that ensued, we interrogated these assumptions. “How much more could we, as inexperienced volunteers, contribute in one more day? Do we only have a week, or is this an investment in a lifetime of service?”
Shabbat acts as a bulwark against the hubris that makes us believe that if we just worked a little bit harder, and a little bit longer, we could fix everything. God, according to the Torah, created the world in six days and then rested on the seventh. This doesn’t mean that the world was perfect at the end of the sixth day of creation. Rather, God models the necessity of taking just one day to experience the world as it is, while acknowledging our own limitations in perfecting it. Paradoxically, Shabbat simultaneously offers “a glimpse of the world to come”—a world of abundant food, rest, and community. This vision liberates us from the day-to-day slog of incremental change, and inspires us to continue our work in the next six days. Like my students on those service trips, many of us feel called to spend every day protesting, calling our legislators, and raising money for the organizations standing up for justice and democracy. After all, Israeli and American democracy are under siege, the earth is heating up, asylum seekers remain stuck at the border, and children are being shot in school.
Yet Shabbat is a crucial reminder that our success will depend not on the actions of one day, but on our cumulative actions over many years. It’s a day that forces us to confront the limitations of our abilities as humans, while restoring ourselves for the work ahead. If we are to bring about a perfected world, we need not only the combined efforts of human beings, but also a deep partnership with God.
Jill Jacobs is an American rabbi who serves as the CEO of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights. truah.org
