JESSE JACKSON AT CALVIN SEMINARY

When I was a seminary student, the late Jesse Jackson came to speak. In my memory, likely faulty, it was my first year at Calvin Theological Seminary, placing Jackson’s appearance in late 1968 or early 1969. Only months before, April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. Jackson was there when the shot was fired, below King’s balcony in the parking lot of the Lorraine Motel. These were fraught times for the civil rights movement and for the country as a whole.

Jackson—young at the time (26 or 27), charismatic, a compelling speaker—addressed us in the seminary auditorium, a place where mostly we heard lectures in Reformed theology. For us, it was an intimate and comfortable space, but not on that day. I came expecting Jackson to encourage all of us to join him in his campaign for racial and economic justice. I hoped to come away from his speech feeling like I was on the right side of history. That’s not what happened. Instead, Jackson rather sharply told us that our job was to tend our own garden. We needed to address our own racism. Our mission was not to black people but to white people.

I emerged from Jackson’s speech realizing that I had been caught out in my own limited view of the world. I had assumed that there were two kinds of people: the enlightened and the unenlightened. Since in my own mind I belonged to the former, and, surely, so did Jesse Jackson, we were on the same side. We belonged together in the fight. But Jackson didn’t see it that way. He saw us—me—as belonging to white culture, a culture that fostered racism, a culture of economic privilege. We were not the solution; we were part of the problem.

The View from the Village

For the first time I was forced to acknowledge the particularity of my place in the world. I imagined that we occupied a transcendent perch. I grew up with an Enlightenment view of the world, the notion that one could climb the high mountain of world culture and from that lofty perspective see things as they really are. Others may occupy their particular viewpoints; we saw things from the top of the mountain.

This was not a fully articulated idea; we were too young and naïve for that. We hadn’t thought it through. We just assumed that our point-of-view was objective. Jackson, in a way I had not experienced before, shook that assumption. Our point-of-view was privileged not by objectivity but by power. The position from which we saw the world rested on a long history of racism and colonialism. Our viewpoint was limited, particular, and local. There was much we could not see.

For many years now, at least in academic circles, the fashion has been to honor the particular. What we understand of the world is limited by where we stand. On that long ago day, Jesse Jackson pointed this out. I was a white kid from the Pacific Northwest, from a town in which the black population at the time was effectively zero. What did I know about Chicago or, for that matter, about growing up black in Grand Rapids (on that, see the opening chapter of Willie James Jennings book on colonialism, The Christian Imagination: Yale, 2010)? I needed to listen and to learn, and I still do. 

But particularity is not the whole truth. It cannot be. To understand particularity, we need some sense of the whole. We need to see our experience, as it were, from the outside. We need a sense of the lay of the land. And for that, we need to think globally, in broader terms.

We need both the particular and the global. To revert to the metaphor of the mountain, we need both the view from the top and the view from the valley. We need to say to those speaking from the perspective of the top of the mountain: you didn’t grow up in my village. You don’t entirely understand. And to those who only know the village, we need to say: what you know is too small; let me show you another point of view. 

The Enlightenment top-of-the-mountain idea is gone. There is no single objective viewpoint from which to see the whole. Instead what we have is confederation of local perspectives. If it’s not pushing the metaphor too far, we gain broader perspective by entering—visiting, as it were—other villages, other ways to see. And having learned something of another perspective, we return to our own place with a new appreciation (and critique) of our own neighborhood.

This all may seem obvious to you, not worth belaboring, but where it has not been obvious in my experience (in my village) is in theology. In theology, people tend to want to claim a top of the mountain perspective: their truth, they believe, is the only truth. They divide the world into believers and unbelievers. They call “unbelievers” those who don’t believe what they believe, not counting what others believe as believing anything at all. And they enlist God in this enterprise, claiming that if you don’t believe as they believe God one day will make you pay—eternally.

In adopting this top of the mountain perspective, these true believers lose, ironically, both what is particular and local and lovely in their own theological village and what they would learn from other perspectives. They lose both the particular and the global. 

Sabbath: Heschel and Levenson

What brought this to mind was a session I recently attended at the annual meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature in Boston. The SBL is the oldest and largest academic society for scholars of the Bible and topics related to the Bible. Its annual meetings summon scholars from every part of the world. At any given hour at the annual conference, there are scores of sessions meeting simultaneously, on topics as widely separated as the Hebrew accent system and the Bible in popular movies. 

One of the sessions I attended this past year was a review of a new(ish) book by the Jewish scholar Jon Levenson: Israel’s Day of Light and Joy: The Origin, Development, and Enduring Meaning of the Jewish Sabbath (Eisenbraun’s, 2024). Central to the discussion was how to view Sabbath, and along with Sabbath, how to view the relationship between Judaism and Christianity generally. Should we see Sabbath in particular terms, as “Israel’s day of light and joy”—note the possessive—or should we see Sabbath in global terms, as something shared among Jews and Christians and, for that matter, with the rest of the world?

This question about how to view the Sabbath is in part an intra-Jewish discussion. Levenson in Israel’s Day contrasts his position with that of the late Abraham Heschel, whose slim volume, Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man (1951), remains one of the most compelling discussions of Sabbath ever written. Heschel, writing immediately after the 2^nd World War in the wake of Holocaust, presents Sabbath in global terms as a practice that can go far in repairing the world. He regards it as a distinctly Jewish contribution, but a contribution for all humanity. 

In Sabbath, Heschel famously contrasts space and time. Civilization, Heschel says, is built mostly on the conquest of space. Objects, land, countries, borders, our own bodies—all of these are spatial. But Sabbath offers us a different architecture, the architecture not of space but of time. It suggests that there is a structure in time.

In his book, Heschel invites us to Sabbath, not necessarily to the particular practice of Sabbath in Judaism. For Levenson, this will not do. Sabbath is not an abstract idea; Sabbath is a practice with specified ceremonies and requirements. Apart from these, it’s not Sabbath. For Heschel, Sabbath can be universal; for Levenson, Sabbath is inherently particular.

Cultural Appropriation

Levenson saves his strongest opprobrium for Christian pastors who simultaneously recommend Sabbath and disparage Judaism’s practice of Sabbath as legalistic. He cites one such, A. J. Swoboda, who in a recent book, Subversive Sabbath: The Surprising Power of Rest in a Nonstop World (Brazos, 2018), presents his own “Sabbath” practice as what his family does on Tuesday. They have two rules for their “Sabbath”: no making of beds and eating pancakes, lots of pancakes. It sounds charming, fun for the family, and Levenson has no problem with Swoboda taking Tuesdays off, leaving beds unmade, and eating pancakes, but Swoboda is not content with just that. He wants to make the point that he gets right what Jews get wrong:

So even if we do remember the Sabbath, we often add or subtract from it. On the one side, moralists and legalists add precept upon precept to the Sabbath, as the Pharisees and Sadducees did during the times of Christ, a tendency that time and again infuriates Jesus in the Gospels. (Subversive Sabbath, p. 8; quoted by Levenson, p. 168).

For Swoboda, Sabbath is what he and his family make of it; for Levenson, you don’t have Sabbath without the biblical rules and the long rabbinic discussion that frames the rules. Sabbath is a particular practice, a practice that is embedded in Jewish life. 

Without a fairly comprehensive body of sabbatical law, then, there is no Sabbath in the sense the term holds in the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic Judaism. This is not to deny that there are valid and valuable spiritual insights and practices that have spun off from the Jewish Sabbath in various directions, including the Christian Sabbath. But the ancient Jewish institution has survived in large part precisely because it is more than a set of spiritual insights and practices. It is also a matter of law and obligation, individual and communal (172).

Acknowledging Others

I’ll leave the Sabbath debate there. My point is not about Sabbath; it’s about the particular and the global in theology. For Swoboda, and to a lesser degree, Heschel, Sabbath is a religious idea that can be practiced in various ways—on Tuesday, say, rather than the seventh day of the week. It’s an idea that offers benefits for society, even if that society is not Jewish or not religious at all. For Levenson, Sabbath is a practice deeply embedded in thousands of years of Jewish practice and reflection. Outside of that context, regardless of what you call it, it’s not Shabbat.

What’s at stake here is the relationship between Judaism and Christianity in broader terms. And not only that relationship, which has its own shape, but the relationships between our faith and other faiths generally. Christians are in the habit of thinking about Judaism as an earlier and defective form of Christianity: biblical faith without Jesus and with too many rules. This comes in part from a careless reading of the New Testament (I’ll say more about that another time). But Judaism is not Christianity without Jesus; it’s a faith based in Torah and in the long rabbinic discussion of Torah. Torah in Judaism is not legalistic; it’s a grace, a way of life, a great joy.

For this, Sabbath is a paradigmatic example. Keeping Sabbath is not about the rules; the rules are about creating the conditions for Sabbath. Both Heschel and Levenson trade on lines from Isaiah 58:13-14, as did the rabbis before them:

If you keep your foot from the Sabbath,
from doing whatever you want on my holy day,
you will call Sabbath “Delight” [ʿōneg],
the holy [day] of the Lord “Honored.” (My translation)

For Christians, two things need to be considered in relationship to Sabbath. The first is a deeper understanding of what in Judaism Sabbath is about. How important it is. Heschel’s book on Sabbath comes with a loving introduction by his daughter, Susannah Heschel. She writes of Sabbath at the Heschel home:

When my father raised his kiddush cup on Friday evenings, closed his eyes, and chanted the prayer sanctifying the wine, I always felt a rush of emotion. As he chanted with an old, sacred family melody, he blessed the wine and the Sabbath with his prayer, and I also felt he was blessing my life and that of everyone at the table. I treasured those moments. Friday evenings in my home were the climax of the week, as they are for every religious Jewish family. My mother and I kindled the lights for the Sabbath, and all of a sudden I felt transformed, emotionally and even physically. 

You hear in Susannah’s Heschel’s description the joy of the day, the honor and respect the Heschels gave to Sabbath. 

And the Levensons, as well. In the SBL session, several of the panelists responding to Levenson’s book talked about being invited to the Levenson home for Sabbat. They spoke about the delight that the Levenson family took in their celebration of Sabbath, the joy in it. No dour legalism, in concert with Isaiah 58, the Levensons made Sabbath a delight.

That first then: our responsibility to understand Judaism from the inside out, as well as we can without being Jewish. We need to give up sermons that trot out for the umpteenth time that the Jews of Jesus day were a bunch of pettifogging legalists who took the joy out of life. We need to understand better what the issues were in Second Temple Judaism and how Jesus and the Christian movement fit into that. 

And if we do this for Judaism, we need to also do it for other faiths: try, as much as we can, to understand them from the inside out, to gather from them the wisdom and joy around which their religious life centers. 

And then, second, we need to own our own faith practices in the light of what we have learned about other practices. Not to adopt these other practices but to deepen our own. To take the example I’ve been using, we need to find the wisdom and ways of our Sunday. Tend our own garden. The Christian Sunday is not the Jewish Sabbath. We frame our Sunday celebration differently than the Jews frame their Sabbath. (For an example of how to do this, Levenson recommends the apostolic letter from Pope John Paul II, Dies Domini.) Even the day on which we celebrate our weekly worship, the first as opposed to the last day, expresses a profound difference in how we understand what Sunday means compared to Sabbath. And in this appreciative understanding of the differences, we will refresh and deepen our practice of the Lord’s Day.

And if this is true for Sunday, the Lord’s Day, it is true generally. The deeper we understand other faiths, the better we will understand our own faith. Our love of our own theological village will deepen as we learn to appreciate the particularities of other villages. And, I might add, if this is true for our relationships with other faiths, it is also true for our relationships to other perspectives on our own faith—other neighborhoods, as it were. A little time in other theological neighborhoods might help see both the beauties and the difficulties of our own.

Clay