My celebration of Shabbat, the traditional Jewish Sabbath, is a rather sedate, internal affair: long Friday night dinners with friends and family, leading worship at my synagogue on Saturday, and catching up on reading or a nap before Sabbath’s end on Saturday night. The religious restrictions of the day that define Shabbat require me to refrain from electronics, driving, using money and traveling beyond my immediate neighborhood. The point of Shabbat is to create what the great teacher, Rabbi Abraham Heschel, referred to as an island in time: a retreat from the relentless pace of the weekday to focus for 25 hours on the blessing of simply being. Thus, I generally avoid rallies, protests, cultural and entertainment events, even if technically they wouldn’t violate religious rules, because their energy and intensity are often not in the quiet spirit of the holy day.
When I learned that the recent No Kings protest in Albany was taking place on a Saturday, I felt conflicted. My ability to observe Shabbat and Judaism overall in peace, without fear of persecution, is the result of America’s long experiment with religious freedom and a durable, if imperfect, democracy. I wondered if I might think of attending Kings Day as a modern example of Jewish religion’s directive that we violate Shabbat for the sake of saving a life: as my tradition teaches, in a dire emergency you must violate one Sabbath so you can live to observe many others. In this case, I wouldn’t be breaking any Sabbath laws, considering that the protest on Western Avenue was an easy, unburdened walk from my house, after worship. Yet with the life of American democracy potentially at risk, did I really plan on not violating at least the spirit of the Sabbath, while holding fast to its laws? Violate, as it were, this one aspect of the Sabbath, so we could all continue living in a free country and my community could observe many more Sabbaths.
After brief consideration, I decided that the stakes were too high and the spiritual costs were too low for me not to attend No Kings. I ambled up to Western Avenue in my part of Albany, where my neighbors had been lining the street for an hour. Part protest and part party, No Kings was about the liveliest gathering I’ve ever seen in my city, perhaps outdone only by the Tulip Festival and a Springsteen concert at the MVP Arena. At the corner of Western and normally boring Brevator Street, a large crowd had gathered, cheering, singing and shouting to the rhythms of a makeshift band of drums. Cars and trucks, driven mostly by sympathizers, passed by slowly, honking their horns in assent; pedestrians on both sides of the avenue waved signs, banners, and placards with some uproariously funny and clever slogans. Walking a mere few blocks from my cross street, I connected with friends, members of my synagogue, and so many neighbors whom I have never met. I felt somewhat out of place but very much at home, as I mingled with them. How sad that, in 31 years of residing in Albany, I still knew so few people; how wonderful that, for a few moments on that warm autumn Saturday, we were all of one mind.
This way of observing the Sabbath was strange to me. The holy day is structured to encourage us to retreat from the world, however temporarily, not march into it. Still, because of the grave message of No Kings Day combined with its joyousness, I was happy to be there, making it part of my Shabbat experience and observance. All week long, I work within an intense yet narrow congregational setting whose own pace can also feel relentless: meetings to attend, sermons and articles to write, programs to run, and pastoral emergencies to take care of, often on the shortest notice and under the greatest pressure. On the avenue that afternoon, I enjoyed just being: with friends and neighbors, fellow residents and citizens, people who shared my concerns and hopes for America, while also having some fun in the public space.
And there was another reason I was happy to be there. Underlying the Sabbath is a core value of Judaism: God alone is the Creator of the world and even God took a day off from the work of creation to appreciate what God had made, including us. We humans are God’s very powerful co-creators, but we aren’t God’s equals. For all our creative power and perceived dominance, we are ultimately creatures made by God. Shabbat reminds us that in the human realm, no one, regardless of his or her power, has the right to do whatever that person wants. This is because there are no kings, there is only God, the One ruling us all.
Dan Ornstein is the rabbi of Congregation Ohav Shalom and a writer living in Albany, NY. Check out his writings at danornstein.com
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