Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:25 — 1.3MB)

Subscribe: More

[One] who wants to enter the holiness of the day must first lay down the profanity of clattering commerce, of being yoked to toil. [S]he must go away from the screech of dissonant days, from the nervousness and fury of acquisitiveness and the betrayal in embezzling [her] own life. He must say farewell to manual work and learn to understand that the world has already been created and will survive without [his] help… Six days a week we wrestle with the world, wringing profit from the earth; on the Sabbath we especially care for the seed of eternity planted in the soul. The world has our hands, but our soul belongs to Someone Else. Six days a week we seek to dominate the world, on the seventh day we try to dominate the self…

The seventh day is a palace in time which we build. It is made of soul, of joy and reticence. In its atmosphere, a discipline is a reminder of adjacency to eternity…. How else express glory in the presence of eternity, if not by the silence of abstaining from noisy acts?

by Abraham Heschel (1907-1972), from The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man, published in 1951