by Rabbi Neil Gillman
professor of Jewish philosophy at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and author of The Death of Death: Resurrection and Immortality in Jewish Thought and The Way Into Encountering God in Judaism.

The prohibition against working on Shabbat is repeated numerous times in the Torah. It appears again this week at the head of the listing of sacred times. The familiar formulation is that on six days of the week we may do all manner of work, but on the seventh day, “there shall be a Sabbath of complete rest, a sacred occasion. You shall do no work.”

But what constitutes “work”? What precisely is prohibited? The Hebrew word is “melaha,” but what does the word mean? It is a halachic category, but how do we define it?

The talmudic rabbis base their definition of work on the Torah’s juxtaposition of the prohibition of working on Shabbat with the building of the desert sanctuary (Shemot 31:12-17). What is forbidden is any form of work that went into constructing the sanctuary. That definition yields 39 major categories of work and their “offspring,” which are minutely codified in Halacha.

Our challenge today is to translate that prohibition into terms that speak to our own times. We are not familiar with building sanctuaries, nor do some instances of work forbidden by Halacha seem to be that labor intensive. For example, Halacha forbids writing on Shabbat even though writing does not demand much physical effort; it is not “work” as we understand that term. Or, pushing the button to summon an elevator is forbidden because it involves kindling fire — an electric current, that is — but walking up 10 flights of stairs is permitted, though the latter is clearly more “work” than the former.

Clearly, then, the words “labor” or “work” are misnomers. They do not capture what the original biblical tradition and its rabbinic interpretation intended to prohibit. If we are to convey the full impact of what Shabbat observance could mean to our contemporaries, we have to seek a different way of making sense of the prohibition. Our challenge is not simply a matter of translation, but rather of education.

One of the more interesting attempts to make sense of this Shabbat observance is conveyed in Eric Fromm’s The Forgotten Language. Fromm was a prominent psychoanalyst who also wrote extensively on the broader issues of modern culture. In his early years in Germany, Fromm was exposed to serious Jewish text studies and to Jewish living, and this volume’s brief chapter on “The Sabbath Ritual” reflects his personal appreciation of that institution.

The subtitle of Fromm’s book is “An Introduction to the Understanding of Dreams, Fairy Tales, and Myths.” What unites these three forms of expression is that they all use the language of symbols. Symbolic language is Fromm’s “forgotten” language. One form of symbolic expression is ritual, and it is here that Fromm’s understanding of Shabbat emerges. Ritual is one more form of symbolic behavior.

Technically, a “symbol” always refers to another reality beyond itself. It is a way of capturing some other elusive reality in concrete terms. For example, a national flag captures our complex feelings about the nation “for which it stands” in a vivid, concrete way. It is a symbol of that nation.

Here is Fromm’s interpretation of the Shabbat prohibition against work: “‘Work’ is any interference by man, be it constructive or destructive, with the physical world. ‘Rest’ is a state of peace between man and nature.”

By observing the Shabbat, then, we restore a state of complete harmony between humanity and nature. Nature returns to its original state, the state it enjoyed at the climax of creation. But it is not a restoration of a primitive harmony alone; every Shabbat is also an anticipation of the ultimate harmony, the messianic era when all of creation will live in a state of harmony. In traditional literature, recall, every Shabbat is seen as a foretaste of the messianic era, which itself is called a “continuous Shabbat.” Refraining from work on Shabbat is our symbolic way of expressing this elusive awareness.

Fromm reminds us also that we rest on Shabbat because God rested on that first Shabbat. But why did God rest on Shabbat? Not because God was tired. Rather, because “great as creation is, greater and crowning creation is peace.” God must rest because God “is free and fully God only when he has ceased to work. So is man fully man only when he does not work, when he is at peace with nature and with his fellow men.”

Which is why on Shabbat, we greet each other with “Shabbat shalom”— a peaceful Shabbat.

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