Program’s Mission: Stimulate critical thought in order to realistically redefine our narrative and positively reshape our reality through dialogue with self-determination.
Dedication: Mary Mcleod Bethune -was a prominent educator, political leader, and social visionary whose early twentieth century activism for black women and civil rights laid the foundation for the modern civil rights era. Inspired by leaders such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Josephine St. Pierre-Ruffin, Bethune mobilized African American women’s organizations to challenge racial injustice and demand first class citizenship. Mary Jane McLeod was born on July 10, 1875, the 15th of 17 children of Samuel and Patsy McIntosh McLeod, former slaves in Maysville, South Carolina. As a child, she quickly discovered the value of education. Unlike her parents and all but two of her siblings, Bethune was born free and was formally educated at the Maysville School, a Presbyterian Mission School for African Americans. Shortly after her graduation in 1886, Bethune continued her education on a scholarship at the Scotia Seminary for Girls (now Barber-Scotia College) in Concord, North Carolina. Upon graduation in 1894, Bethune initially planned to become a Christian missionary in Africa. After teaching and working among South Carolina blacks, however, she realized that “Africans in America needed Christ and school just as much as Negroes in Africa… My life work lay not in Africa but in my own country.
Perspective: “If we accept and acquiesce in the face of discrimination, we accept the responsibility ourselves. We should, therefore, protest openly everything … that smacks of discrimination or slander.”
Exodus 34.21-24
Six days you work, but on the seventh day you rest – in ploughing time and in harvest you rest. And perform the Festival of Weeks for yourself, of the first-fruits of wheat harvest, and the Festival of Ingathering at the turn of the year. Three times in the year all your men are to appear before the Master, יהוה, the Elohim of Yisra’ĕl, for I dispossess nations before you, and shall enlarge your borders, and let no one covet your land when you go up to appear before יהוה your Elohim three times in the year.
Deuteronomy 5.12-15
Guard the Sabbath day, to set it apart, as יהוה your Elohim commanded you. Six days you labour, and shall do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath of יהוה your Elohim. You do not do any work – you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your ox, nor your donkey, nor any of your cattle, nor your stranger who is within your gates, so that your male servant and your female servant rest as you do. And you shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Mitsrayim, and that יהוה your Elohim brought you out from there by a strong hand and by an outstretched arm. Therefore יהוה your Elohim commanded you to observe the Sabbath day.
Isaiah 58:13-14
“If you do turn back your foot from the Sabbath, from doing your pleasure on My set-apart day, and shall call the Sabbath ‘a delight,’ the set-apart day of יהוה ‘esteemed,’ and shall esteem it, not doing your own ways, nor finding your own pleasure, nor speaking your own words, then you shall delight yourself in יהוה. And I shall cause you to ride on the heights of the earth, and feed you with the inheritance of Ya‛aqoḇ your father. For the mouth of יהוה has spoken!”
Jeremiah 17.19-27
Thus יהוה said to me, “Go and stand in the gate of the children of the people, by which the sovereigns of Yehuḏah come in and by which they go out, and in all the gates of Yerushalayim. And you shall say to them, ‘Hear the word of יהוה, you sovereigns of Yehuḏah, and all Yehuḏah, and all the inhabitants of Yerushalayim, who enter by these gates. ‘Thus said יהוה, “Guard yourselves, and bear no burden on the Sabbath day, nor bring it in by the gates of Yerushalayim, nor take a burden out of your houses on the Sabbath day, nor do any work. And you shall set apart the Sabbath day, as I commanded your fathers. But they did not obey, or incline their ear, and they made their neck stiff not to hear and not to receive instruction. And it shall be, if you diligently obey Me,” declares יהוה, “to bring in no burden through the gates of this city on the Sabbath day, and set apart the Sabbath day, to do no work in it, then sovereigns and heads sitting on the throne of Dawiḏ shall enter in through the gates of this city, riding in chariots and on horses, they and their heads – the men of Yehuḏah and the inhabitants of Yerushalayim. And this city shall be inhabited forever. And they shall come from the cities of Yehuḏah and from the places around Yerushalayim, and from the land of Binyamin and from the low country, from the mountains and from the South, bringing burnt offerings and slaughterings, grain offerings and incense, bringing offerings of praise to the House of יהוה. But if you do not obey Me to set apart the Sabbath day, and not to bear a burden when entering the gates of Yerushalayim on the Sabbath day, then I shall kindle a fire in its gates, and it shall consume the palaces of Yerushalayim, and not be quenched.” ’
Mark 2.23-28
And it came to be that He went through the grainfields on the Sabbath. And as they went His taught ones began to pluck heads of grain, and the Pharisees said to Him, “Look, why do they do what is not right on the Sabbath?” And He said to them, “Have you never read what Dawiḏ did when he had need and was hungry, he and those with him? How he went into the House of Elohim, while Eḇyathar was high priest, and ate the showbread, which is not right to eat, except for the priests, and he gave it also to those who were with him?” And He said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Aḏam is also Master of the Sabbath.”
Sabbath Political Resistance by Ana Levy-Lyons
…Time is the ultimate form of human wealth on this earth. Without time, all other forms of wealth are meaningless. It is this insight about time — patently obvious but frequently forgotten — that makes keeping a Sabbath day both spiritually profound and politically radical. To reclaim time is to be rich. To reclaim a full day every week is to be among the 1 percent. Sabbath practice is also one of the most unambiguously articulated of all the commandments in the Hebrew Bible (even making the top ten!), and yet very few of the “people of the book” actually keep a Sabbath…Marx wails a prophetic lament on behalf of his society. He holds up a mirror, showing how human time — human life — is broken down, appropriated, and devoured by the “boundless thirst” of capitalism. He describes the “despotic bell” of the workplace that wrenches people (mere “personifications of labor time”) from their homes. In capitalism, free time is a waste or, at best, the necessary evil of preparation for more productivity. Marx describes how technology, rather than freeing us from labor, creates an increasingly frenetic pace of work — the need to milk more and more value from a human hour to “close the pores” of time…The Sabbath is a reclaiming of time for God and for our inner baby. It is a reestablishment of a primordial birthright. At its best, the Sabbath allows the spiritual hippie child in us to come out and play. It’s a taste of an infinite present. We get to light candles, linger over meals with loved ones, take aimless walks through the town, run yelling on a beach, roll in the grass, read Rumi and Thomas Merton and Torah, sing our hearts out on our front stoops, get sticky from eating ripe peaches, dance at worship services, pray, daydream, talk, make love, sleep. Pleasure. Community. Love. We get to luxuriate in life’s fountain of blessings…The goal of a Sabbath practice is not to patch us up and send us back out to the violent secular world, but to represent in the now what redemption looks like, what justice looks like, what a compassionate social order looks like. It is to reconstruct the rest of time from the viewpoint of the Sabbath as unjust and untenable. Granted, the Sabbath traditions of some religious communities merely reinscribe the oppressions and exploitations of the secular world — excluding women, for example, from the domestic-duties hiatus that men enjoy. But a truly egalitarian Sabbath that lifts up a holy vision of the world to come performs deeply political work: it builds an “outside” to the current world. The self that emerges from such a Sabbath and reenters the week is a changed self — a newly radicalized self who can no longer tolerate injustice…So when the Sabbath comes along and insists that in fact it is immutable and all else is negotiable, the world is turned upside down. It is the non-negotiability of the Sabbath that gives it its terrifying power. Exceptions are made only for emergencies threatening life or health. Everything else — everything else! — comes to a screeching halt at sundown. The secular understanding of what’s “reasonable” and “normal” gets trumped by a commitment to an alternative vision. A check may be left half written, a shopping trip abandoned with an empty cart, the writing of a paper stopped mid-sentence. This is where the personal gets political: the engines of our social and political systems are fueled by the faith that our daily work and consumer practices are immutable, inevitable, and somehow natural. By injecting doubt into that faith, Sabbath practice disrupts the dominant logic of American culture. Each person who keeps a Sabbath plays a part in exposing the underlying ideology of the status quo — the religion of materialism, self advancement, and the pursuit of individual happiness. For, in Heschel’s words, “a thought has blown the marketplace away.” As sweet and gentle as the Sabbath may be, its arrival collides violently with the secular world. It forces us to choose every week: will I surrender to a deeper principle of joy and meaning or will I embezzle time from God? It forces us to confront the fundamental question: to what or to whom do I ultimately belong? To my possessions? To my boss? To my insecurities fueled by the media? To my fears about the future? To my boundless thirst for more? To whom or to what?..The tension between the call of work and the call of the Sabbath becomes merely weight added to my spiritual barbells — another opportunity to destabilize my ordinary world and lift up my deepest truths. This is why Sabbath observance is a spiritual practice: it takes discipline, ironically, to enter into an undisciplined, formless time. It takes discipline to reimagine our world. It takes courage to assert and reassert our freedom. It takes a true leap of faith. It is no coincidence that the Sabbath was invented/received by a people who understood themselves to have once been slaves. The genius of their insight was that sometimes the most politically radical use of time is not to use it efficiently, but rather to squander it. To spend it lavishly. To while it away — as if the present moment were an eternity, as if the present moment were all that existed, as if we had all the time in the world. This insight became enshrined in Torah, and henceforth the Israelites made perennial commitments to a liberating Power even greater than the Pharaoh. Imagine if we made commitments to a liberating Power greater than the Pharaohs of our day. Imagine if we reaffirmed those commitments every week with a community dedicated to reclaiming the wealth of time and the promise of justice for ourselves and for all the creatures of the earth. Imagine if we whiled away twenty-five hours a week just lounging together on life’s playground.
Radical Act Against Total Work by William R Black
“…Indeed, what makes [the Sabbath] so obsolete and impractical is precisely what makes it so dangerous. When taken seriously, the Sabbath has the power to restructure not only the calendar but also the entire political economy. In place of an economy built upon the profit motive – the ever-present need for more, in fact the need for there to never be enough – the Sabbath puts forward an economy built upon the belief that there is enough. But few who observe the Sabbath are willing to consider its full implications, and therefore few who do not observe it have reason to find any value in it…The Sabbath’s radicalism should be no surprise given the fact that it originated among a community of former slaves. The 10 commandments constituted a manifesto against the regime that they had recently escaped, and rebellion against that regime was at the heart of their god’s identity…The fourth commandment presents a god who, rather than demanding ever more work, insists on rest. The weekly Sabbath placed a hard limit on how much work could be done and suggested that this was perfectly all right; enough work was done in the other six days. And whereas the pharaoh relaxed while his people toiled, Yahweh insisted that the people rest as Yahweh rested…The Sabbath, as described in Exodus and other passages in the Torah, had a democratising effect. Yahweh’s example – not forcing others to labour while Yahweh rested – was one anybody in power was to imitate. It was not enough for you to rest; your children, slaves, livestock and even the ‘aliens’ in your towns were to rest as well. The Sabbath wasn’t just a time for personal reflection and rejuvenation. It wasn’t self-care. It was for everyone.As the Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann points out in his book Sabbath as Resistance (2014), a pharaonic economy driven by anxiety begets violence, dishonesty, jealousy, theft, the commodification of sex and familial alienation. None of these had a place in the Torahic economy, which was driven not by anxiety but by wholeness, enoughness. In such a society, there was no need to murder, covet, lie, commit adultery or dishonour one’s parents. The Sabbath’s centrality to the Torahic economy was made clearer in other laws building upon the fourth commandment. Every seventh year, the Israelites were to let their fields ‘rest and lie fallow, so that the poor of your people may eat; and what they leave the wild animals may eat’. And every 50th year, they were to not only let their fields lie fallow, but forgive all debts; all slaves were to be freed and returned to their families, and all land returned to its original inhabitants. This was a far cry from the pharaonic regime where surplus grain was hoarded and parsed out to the poor only in exchange for work and loyalty. There were no strings attached; the goal wasn’t accumulating power but reconciling the community…In our neo-pharaonic economy, we are worth no more than the labour we can perform, and the value of our labour is being ever devalued. We can never work enough. A profit-driven capitalist society depends on the anxious striving for more, and it would break down if there were ever enough. The Sabbath has no place in such a society and indeed upends its most basic tenets. In a Sabbatarian economy, the right to rest – the right to do nothing of value to capital – is as holy as the right to work…It is time for us, whatever our religious beliefs, to see the Sabbatarian laws of old not as backward and pharisaical, but rather as the liberatory statements they were meant to be. It is time to ask what our society would look like if it made room for a new Sabbath – or, to put it a different way, what our society would need to look like for the Sabbath to be possible.
Shabbat as Protest BY RABBI W. GUNTHER PLAUT
If Shabbat is to have significance, it must confront one of modern civilization’s greatest curses: its internal and external unrest. This unrest arises from the twin facts that the life we lead is frequently without goals and that we are involved in competition without end…I view Shabbat as potentially an enormous relief from and protest against the basic causes of unrest. Once a week it provides us with an opportunity to address ourselves to the meaning of human existence rather than the struggle for survival; to persons rather than things; to Creation and our part in it; to society and its needs; to ourselves as individuals and yet as social beings. This has been called “the inner source of leisure,” the setting of goals that are both realistic and within one’s reach, yet also beyond one’s self…Endless competition is a specific form of restlessness. Shabbat can be a surcease from and a protest against all forms of competition even when they come in attractive packages marked “self-advancement” or “self-improvement.” Shabbat in this sense may be viewed as a “useless” day. Our ancestors had a keen understanding of the fact that sleep on Shabbat was a form of coming closer to God. We must once again understand that doing nothing, being silent and open to the world, letting things happen inside, can be as important as, and sometimes more important than what we commonly call useful…Shabbat gives us a quantity of free time and thereby a quality potential of freedom-time, when a person can search for the self and in some area do for self and others what in the work-a-day one cannot. It has been said that there are four states of human consciousness: imaginative, active, reflexive, and contemplative. The two middle states (activity and reflexive response) characterize our automated society; the other two (imagination and contemplation) are the redeeming features which make life livable. These are the qualities to which Shabbat addresses itself, for imagination is a form of freedom and contemplation is rest from unrest.
Why Shabbat Matters by Dennis Prager
First, it uniquely elevated the human being. For nearly all of human history, life consisted overwhelmingly of work. In effect, humans were beasts of burden. This commandment changed all that by insisting that people cease working one day out of seven.
no matter how materially poor we may be, at least on the Sabbath Day, we are not just material beings. We are elevated. Recall that the commandment tells us to keep the day holy, not merely not to work. It is enough for animals not to work; we are to make the day holy. No matter what our circumstances, we must remind ourselves at least one day a week that we are sacred beings; we have a soul to feed, not just a body.
more than any other commandment, the Fourth Commandment reminds people that they are meant to be free. As the second version of the Commandment, the one summarized by Moses in the Book of Deuteronomy, states, “Remember that you were slaves in Egypt.” In other words, remember that slaves cannot have a Sabbath; only free men and women can. In light of this, in the Biblical view, unless it is necessary for survival, people who choose to work seven days a week are essentially slaves – slaves to work or perhaps to money, but slaves nonetheless. The millionaire who works seven days a week is simply a rich slave.
while the Bible could not universally abolish slavery, the Sabbath commandment greatly humanized that terrible institution and ultimately helped make slavery impossible. Prior to the Ten Commandments, by definition a slave owner was under no obligation to allow a slave to ever rest, let alone to rest one day every week. Yet that is exactly what the Fourth Commandment commanded. Even a slave has fundamental human rights, one of them being a Sabbath day of rest. Therefore a slave is a human being, too.
the Sabbath almost singlehandedly creates and strengthens family ties and friendships. When a person takes off from work one day every week, that day almost inevitably becomes a day spent with other people — namely, family and/or friends. It has similar positive effects on marriages. Ask anyone married to a workaholic how good it would be for his or her marriage if the workaholic would not work for a day each week, and you can appreciate the power of the Sabbath Day.
the Sabbath commandment granted animals dignity. Even one’s animals had to rest one day a week. It is, to the best of our knowledge, the first national law in history on behalf of animals. And its benefits to animals surely went beyond a mandatory day of rest for them. People who felt divinely obligated to give their animals a day of rest were much less likely to treat their animals cruelly any day of the week.
Discover more from SHFTNG PRDGMZ
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
