Every week’s human rights day

Article 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a counterpoint to the previous article in the Declaration that recognises the right to work and to do so in fair conditions. After affirming the human right to work, Article 24 reads, “Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.” It is a recognition that human beings are not intended to work incessantly, nor should they need to or be required to.

At its simplest, the practice of Sabbath as the weekly cessation of work described in the Bible counts “among the first laws to protect the rights of labourers”¹—and is a practice that fits with Article 24. But the Bible’s concept of Sabbath was much more than a regular day off. 

In his classic study of Sabbath in the modern world, Abraham Joshua Heschel urged that “there are few ideas in the world of thought which contain so much spiritual power as the idea of the Sabbath”.² Such is the spiritual power of Sabbath that it also has significant social and economic implications. Even if ignored or misunderstood today, Sabbath was a key Jewish contribution to the antecedents of human rights from the ancient world. “No ancient society before the Jews had a day of rest.”³

the seventh day

The practice of Sabbath as described in the Bible—the weekly observance of the seventh day of the week as a day for religious activity, worship, growing relationships and resting from other labours—was a unique innovation among ancient religions and cultures. Not only was it a defining religious habit, in the Bible’s understanding, it was a rhythm embedded—and blessed—in the creation of the world and so understood as part of what it means to be be human.

Remarkably, in the story of Hebrew liberation from slavery, Sabbath was included as one of the Ten Commandments given to them by God (see Exodus 20:8–11) as a foundational ethical imperative and embedded in the legal framework of the fledgling nation (see Exodus 23:12 and Leviticus 25). 

In comparison with many of the religious practices of the ancient and modern world, Sabbath was a practice rooted in equality. Rather than undertaking difficult and expensive pilgrimages to a holy place or being required to make sacrifices only the wealthy could afford, Sabbath as time was available and accessible to all.

Heschel points out that the first holy object in the history of the world was not a mountain or an altar. Referring to the first time the word holy—qadosh—is used in the Hebrew scriptures (see Genesis 2:3), he comments “how extremely significant is the fact that it is applied to time”.⁴ While holy places tend to become contested, conflicted and controlled across religions, cultures and history, Sabbath is a “sanctuary in time . . . a truce in all conflicts, personal and social, peace between man and man, man and nature, peace within man”.⁵ Rightly understood and celebrated, Sabbath is a practice of spiritual and practical equality.

freedom from slavery

More than any other law or regulation, the Sabbath commandment reminded the Hebrew people of their experience of slavery and referenced this as their motivation for fulfilling their duties to those whose rights might otherwise be forgotten: “Remember that you were once slaves in Egypt, but the Lord your God brought you out with his strong hand and powerful arm. That is why the Lord your God has commanded you to rest on the Sabbath day” (Deuteronomy 5:15*).

In contrast with the appeal to rescue from Egyptian slavery, the Bible’s first—and better known—rendering of the Ten Commandments gives this alternative creation rationale for Sabbath as a pre-existing, ongoing and human spiritual practice:

For in six days the Lord made the heavens, the earth, the sea, and everything in them; but on the seventh day he rested. That is why the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and set it apart as holy (Exodus 20:11).

Notably, the Sabbath is the most detailed of the Ten Commandments, not only in its practice and rationale, but also in its application.

freedom from labour

The focus on the benefits of the Sabbath to these outsiders is repeated beyond the Commandments:

You have six days each week for your ordinary work, but on the seventh day you must stop working. This gives your ox and your donkey a chance to rest. It also allows your slaves and the foreigners living among you to be refreshed (Exodus 23:12).

In this formulation, the master was to rest so that the servant and the foreigner would also be allowed to rest. It was a day for their benefit and, in The Lost Meaning of the Seventh Day, theologian Sigve Tonstad argues that this focus was unique among ancient cultures of the world—“no parallels have been found in other cultures”. The Sabbath commandment, he explains,

Prioritises from the bottom up and not from the top looking down, giving first consideration to the weakest and most vulnerable members of society. Those who need rest the most—the slave, the resident alien and the beast of burden—are singled out for special mention. In the rest of the seventh day the underprivileged, even mute animals, find an ally.⁶

freedom from suffering

In this way, Sabbath should never be an isolated spiritual practice. Rather, those who remember and observe Sabbath—as the fourth commandment stated it—will be recalibrated each week into a greater practice of equality and the human rights reflected in it. While the work mandated for the other six days of the work week is important, it is the seventh day that is transformative—and, in turn, must reprioritise and inform the work of the other six days. Borrowing from Jewish thought,

All the days of the week must be spiritually consistent with the seventh day . . . The Sabbath is one day, Shabbesdikeit [the spirit of Sabbath] is what should permeate all our days.⁷ 

Rejected and displaced largely amid anti-Jewish sentiment in the early Christian era, Sabbath is an almost-forgotten spiritual practice in much of the contemporary world, but “the Sabbath is surely one of the simplest and sanest recommendations any god has ever made”.⁸ Embedded in the history and laws of the Hebrew nation, the principles and practice of Sabbath were remarkable spiritual, social and economic innovations in the ancient world, and should be considered among the earliest sources from which the modern understanding of human rights began to flow. It might also be a spiritual practice worth re-considering and re-drawing for the human rest and social recalibration it offers in a frantic, always-connected, unequal and polarised world. In Jewish and biblically Christian faith, “it is eternity within time, the spiritual underground of history”.⁹ 

Tragically, too much of the history of the Jewish people has been instructive in the cause of human rights for the wrong reasons. Indeed it was the aftermath of the Holocaust and its horrors that led to the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.

But in the roots of the Jewish faith tradition—and pre-eminently in the practice of Sabbath, including the practice of those Christians who continue to follow this biblical command—are still to be found meaningful insights into the dignity and worth of human beings and their living together in community for the wellbeing of all people and all nations.

While practising the rights that would be expressed in the Universal Declaration’s Article 24, there is much more about what it means to be human in the practice of Sabbath than a holy day off, as beneficial as that might be.

1. Milton Konvitz, Judaism and Human Rights. 2nd edition, Routledge, 2017.
2. Abraham Joshua Heschel The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man (2005 edition), Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1951, page 101.
3. Thomas Cahill, The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels, Nan A Talese/Anchor Books, 1990.
4. Heschel, ibid.
5. Heschel, ibid.
6. Sigve Tonstad, The Lost Meaning of the Seventh Day, Andrews University Press, 2009.
7. Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (1976 edition), Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1955.
8. Cahill, ibid.
9. Heschel, ibid, 1955.

*Bible quotations are from the New Living Translation.