Limits
In a fine new book on the Sabbath (Israel’s Day of Light and Joy: The Origin, Development, and Enduring Meaning of the Jewish Sabbath. Eisenbraun’s, 2024), Jon Levenson lingers on Exodus 23:10-12. The passage begins with the sabbatical year:
Six years you shall farm your land and gather its produce. For the seventh you shall let it go, let the land lie fallow. Let the poor of your people eat, and what they leave, let the wild animals eat. Do the same with your vineyard and your olive grove. (10-11, my translation)
Pause a moment on the wild animals. The rule in this passage requires a periodic rewilding of the cultivated land. Alexandra Grund in her 2011 book on the establishment of the Sabbath “finds [in this passage] a kind of controlled reintroduction of the chaotic, uncultivated world into the domain of human culture” (Levenson, 77). It’s the imposition of a limit on human enterprise. it requires the farmer every seven years to step back and allow nature to take over.
At least symbolically. We have no way to know if these rules were ever actually implemented. In the form we have them, they are thought to have come from a later time, after Israel had lost the land. They are, nevertheless, reminders to the people that the land does not belong to them but to the Lord. There are many such rules, reminders. Levenson mentions the rule that they were not to reap to the very edge of the field, leaving grain for the poor to harvest.
Sabbath is another such limit. In this passage, the rule on Sabbath follows immediately on the rule of sabbatical years.
Six days you shall do your work. On the seventh day, you shall stop so that your ox and your donkey may rest, and the child of your bondswoman and the refugee be refreshed. (12)
Levenson comments: “What is enjoined in all these instances is a human forbearance from making a claim to the totality: no fully harvested field, no set of seven consecutive days of labor.” “Forbearance from making a claim to the totality” gets at the heart of it. Remind yourself periodically, the Torah commands, that you live on borrowed land and borrowed days.
A Commentary on Our Time
These thoughts are found in a passage that throughout speaks in an unusually clear way to our own time. Consider the flow of thought in the verses leading up to those I’ve just cited (Exodus 23:1-9). The passage begins with a command not to spread false reports (1). False reports today are the currency of the land. The internet, once thought to promise the free sharing of information, has become a way for scammers to ply their wares. Social media, which began as an electronic version of the old college dating books, is now operated by algorithms that feed you what you want to see, regardless of the truth of it, and has become infected with bots, many of which are sent into our national circulatory system by hostile powers. And not just by hostile powers. We are daily fed false information by those who rule our land, lies so brazen and so many that they rarely occasion much comment. And we have only begun to see what AI can do in the way of deepfakes. Begin with honesty, we are told in Exodus 23. Do not spread lies.
From lies, the passage moves to malice. The setting assumed here is the ancient court of one’s peers. In the culture to which Exodus 23 speaks, justice was sought at the gate from the elders of the village. Abuses of this system must have been endemic. The passage calls out “malicious” testimony, where the Hebrew word for “malicious” includes a strong note of violence. Again, we are supplied everyday with examples of malice, often with implied violence. Enemies of those in power are threatened with litigation. Litigation itself, whether it has any basis in fact or law, is expensive and damaging. But these threats often come accompanied by death threats. Malice. At Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, in response to Erika Kirk saying that she forgave the shooter, the president professed his strong preference for malice. His preference has spread.
And then enemies: suppose, the passage says, you are walking along, and you come upon the ox or donkey of your worst enemy, collapsed under its load. Your every inclination is to say to yourself that it serves him or her right and walk on. They never should have overloaded the poor beast in the first place. It would be like our coming upon an overloaded pickup truck on the side of the road, still flying the flag, the driver wearing a red hat. I—perhaps you, too—would be inclined to laugh and drive on. But don’t, we are commanded (4-5). Stop, help your enemy raise up the poor beast (or the truck).
And bribes. Money. The passage speaks of the corrosive effect of money on justice. “Bribes blind those who should see and twists the words of those who are right” (8). And, last before coming to the command I cited above about the sabbatical year, refugees (Hebrew gēr):
Don’t oppress the refugee. You [of all people] should understand the life of the refugee, for you were once refugees in Egypt.
A nation of immigrants should, the Torah instructs, make room for immigrants (9).
These instructions are of a piece with the instructions about the sabbatical year and the seventh day. They have to do with limits, with not assuming we have the right to impose ourselves on others, or on the land, or on nature itself. These are community values. Community requires truth, good faith, impartial justice, respect even for our enemies, fairness untainted by the corrosive effects of money, and concern for those who have to us for shelter. Community includes those we live among, whether long in the land or new to us (gēr), those we love and those we find it hard to love. It includes our fellow creatures, tame and wild. And it includes the land itself, all gifts from our maker.
Sabino Canyon
In the winter months, Adria and I live near Sabino Canyon, part of the Coronado National Forest. I visit the lower part of the canyon nearly every day. And every day, the canyon is different. Sabino creek runs through the middle of the canyon, sometimes a torrent, sometimes a trickle. Saguaros blanket the hillsides. One meets on the trails javelinas, deer, coyotes, bobcats, Gila monsters, and sometimes rattlesnakes. If you are lucky, you might see a coatimundi.
The canyon is popular. A road, built in the 1930s, runs up the canyon for four and half miles, crossing the creek many times. An hourly shuttle takes people to the top of the canyon and back. There are trails leading off the road in several directions. It’s a shared space.
It might not have been so. When the road was planned, it was intended to go as far as Mt. Lemmon, a 9,000-foot peak some 17 miles distant from the top of the canyon road. The plan was not only to gain access to Mt. Lemmon but to develop the canyon itself for private houses. What now is shared with many would have been the property of the few.
Like all of our national parks and national forests, Sabino Canyon represents a limit. We say about those spaces: let this place be as it is. Not, of course, as it was, for we have already encroached on these spaces and compromised them, but we can still say: leave it as it is. In Sabino, the forest service for this reason has abandoned paved paths, allowing them to crumble into desert dust. The mistletoe grows freely in the mesquite trees. No one prunes it out. The mountain lions take down javelinas. It’s not nature as it was, but as it is, a shared space.
Time and Space
I began this essay with Jon Levenson’s new book on the Jewish Sabbath. I’ll return to it in a future post; there’s more to say about the book, especially about the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. But for now, I’ll end where Levenson ends, with another book on the Sabbath, Abraham Heschel’s justly famous, The Sabbath (1951).
Heschel makes a distinction between holy space and holy time. In most religions, space is sacred. Temples are sacred space. But in Judaism, time is sacred. The Sabbath, says Heschel, is a “palace of time.” He writes: “In technical civilization we expend time to get space.” In contrast, “The Sabbath is the day on which we learn the art of surpassing civilization.” It’s “Spirit in the form of time.” For Heschel, Sabbath pushes back on the arrogance of modern ways of life. It says you are not your work, your work is not your god. It says stop. Consider others. Consider what is beyond you. Too little of that in our culture, I think.
Levenson pushes back a bit on this theme from Heschel. He says that things that occupy space are also important for Sabbath. He mentions “objects, sights, sounds, tastes, [and] smells.” I want to propose with Levenson that we need both, that both are sabbatical. We need the sacredness of time, Sabbath in the strict sense, but we also need the sacredness of space. Both are part of accepting limits.
Sabbath limits our use of time. Our time does not entirely belong to us. There is a time to stop. And in the stopping we discover delights that we otherwise would not know. Sabino and places like it limit our use of space, and in those places we again discover delights that we otherwise would not know. We need them both. We need time and space untrammeled by the imposition of our control.
We live in an age in which those in power seem to believe that there are no limits. Living without limits flattens human experience into something as thin as Disney, as trivial as television, and as hopeless as Vegas. I put before you again the wisdom of the Torah:
Six years you shall farm your land and gather its produce. For the seventh you shall let it go, let the land lie fallow. Let the poor of your people eat, and what they leave, let the wild animals eat. Do the same with your vineyard and your olive grove.
Six days you shall do your work. On the seventh day, you shall stop so that your ox and your donkey may rest, and the child of your bondswoman and the refugee be refreshed. (Exodus 23: 10-12)
How we might translate these instructions into action requires commitment and creativity, but if we are to live long in the land we have been given, we should get started.
Clay