JANUARY 25 • 2024 | 43
J
N

T

he first translation of the
Torah into another lan-
guage — Greek — took
place in around the second cen-
tury BCE, in Egypt during the
reign of Ptolemy II. It is known
as the Septuagint, in Hebrew
HaShivim, because it was done
by a team of 70 scholars. The
Talmud, however,
says that at various
points the Sages at
work on the proj-
ect deliberately
mistranslated cer-
tain texts because
they believed that
a literal translation
would simply be unintelligible to
a Greek readership. One of these
texts was the phrase, “On the
seventh day God finished all the
work He had made.
” Instead, the
translators wrote, “On the sixth
day God finished.
”
What was it that they thought
the Greeks would not under-
stand? How did the idea that
God made the universe in six
days make more sense than that
He did so in seven? It seems puz-
zling, yet the answer is simple.
The Greeks could not under-
stand the seventh day, Shabbat,

as itself part of the work of
Creation. What is creative about
resting? What do we achieve
by not making, not working, not
inventing? The idea seems to
make no sense at all.
Indeed, we have the inde-
pendent testimony of the Greek
writers of that period, that one
of the things they ridiculed in
Judaism was Shabbat. One day
in seven Jews do not work, they
said, because they are lazy. The
idea that the day itself might
have independent value was
apparently beyond their compre-
hension. Oddly enough, within
a very short period of time the
empire of Alexander the Great
began to crumble, just as had the
earlier city state of Athens that
gave rise to some of the greatest
thinkers and writers in history.
Civilizations, like individuals,
can suffer from burnout. It’s what
happens when you don’t have
a day of rest written into your
schedule. As Ahad HaAm said:
“More than the Jewish people
has kept Shabbat, Shabbat has
kept the Jewish people.
”
Rest one day in seven and you
won’t burn out.
Shabbat, which we encoun-

ter for the first time in this
week’s parshah, is one of the
greatest institutions the world
has ever known. It changed the
way the world thought about
time. Prior to Judaism, people
measured time either by the
sun — the solar calendar of 365
days aligning us with the seasons
— or by the moon, that is, by
months (“month” comes from
the word “moon”) of roughly 30
days. The idea of the seven-day
week — which has no counter-
part in nature — was born in the
Torah and spread throughout the
world via Christianity and Islam,
both of which borrowed it from
Judaism, marking the difference
simply by having it on a different
day. We have years because of
the sun, months because of the
moon, and weeks because of the
Jews.

SHABBAT = FREEDOM
What Shabbat gave — and
still gives — is the unique
opportunity to create space
within our lives, and within
society as a whole, in which
we are truly free. Free from the
pressures of work; free from the
demands of ruthless employers;

free from the siren calls of a
consumer society urging us to
spend our way to happiness; free
to be ourselves in the company
of those we love.
Somehow this one day
has renewed its meaning in
generation after generation,
despite the most profound
economic and industrial change.
In Moses’ day it meant freedom
from slavery to Pharaoh. In the
19th and early 20th century, it
meant freedom from sweatshop
working conditions of long
hours for little pay. In ours, it
means freedom from emails,
smartphones and the demands of
24/7 availability.
What our parshah tells us
is that Shabbat was among the
first commands the Israelites
received on leaving Egypt.
Having complained about the
lack of food, God told them that
He would send them manna
from heaven, but they were not
to gather it on the seventh day.
Instead, a double portion would
fall on the sixth. That is why to
this day we have two challot on
Shabbat, in memory of that time.
Not only was Shabbat
culturally unprecedented,
conceptually, it was so as well.
Throughout history people have
dreamed of an ideal world. We
call such visions utopias, from
the Greek ou meaning “no”
and topos meaning “place.
” They
are called that because no such
dream has ever come true, except
in one instance, namely Shabbat.
Shabbat is “utopia now,
” because
on it we create, for 25 hours a
week, a world in which there are
no hierarchies, no employers and
employees, no buyers and sellers,
no inequalities of wealth or
power, no production, no traffic,
no din of the factory or clamor
of the marketplace.
It is “the still point of the
turning world,
” a pause between
symphonic movements, a break
between the chapters of our
days, an equivalent in time of

continued on page 44

Rabbi Lord
Jonathan
Sacks

SPIRIT
A WORD OF TORAH

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