If you cannot keep the Sabbath, you cannot save a life.
This is Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s bold implication in his little-known essay “Pikuach Neshama.” He says there that the millions who died in Nazi gas chambers are witnesses to the fact that “as long as people do not accept the commandment, ‘Remember the Sabbath to keep it holy,’ the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ will likewise fail to be operative in life.”
This should not shock Christians, since Jesus says something related when he declares that “for the sake of humans was the Sabbath created.”
But what is the connection, after all? Christians find it all too easy to ignore the Sabbath, wondering whether it is now satisfied by churchgoing, works of mercy, or lives that strive for holiness around the clock. How could keeping the Sabbath possibly have any connection to saving lives — or, more starkly, the command not to murder?
For Heschel, as throughout the Bible, the Sabbath points to a refusal to live as though work exhausts value. All people — whatever relation they have to property and the means of production — must rest every seventh day. Even land and animals are included in this pattern, signaling that “the earth is the Lord’s,” and not merely a resource to be exploited. The Sabbath denounces the idea that value can be measured by utility. God’s creation, with the human as its chief representative, is sacred.
To practice the Sabbath while reflecting on its meaning necessarily disciplines a people toward the virtues of gentleness and patience, along with a liberality that comes from trust in God. While I do not say that the Sabbath commandment is reducible to these virtues (let’s not instrumentalize the Sabbath after all, and jettison whatever seems “extra”), the true spirit of the Sabbath must shape in us a gentle disposition toward others on every day.
The Sabbath teaches us reverence on many levels, toward many classes of persons. Heschel thought specifically of the Jewish people in Europe; in the spirit of his other work, we can include any group that gets labeled foreign, inconvenient, troublesome, subhuman, unclean, or out-of-place. The decision to rid the world of a person can only be made by someone who has failed to learn the sacredness of those who baffle a human scheme. It is the logical outcome of any mindset in which people’s lives are justified by how well they serve “my” purposes, or the public utility.
As Jesus pointed out, we do not actually have to carry out a murder to have desecrated a person’s life in our hearts. If we have not learned the sacredness of the other to God — that another’s worth is beyond the reach of my reckoning — we may limit their worth in one fell judgment, or even wish them gone.
But it is not only others whom we can reject in this way. We can also reject ourselves, whether in a final act or through chronic “disagreement with our own existence.” This is how Josef Pieper defines the vice of acedia (often translated “sloth”): “that the human being had given up on the very responsibility that comes with his dignity: that he does not want to be what God wants him to be, and that means that he does not want to be what he really, and in the ultimate sense, is.” In light of this, it will not be surprising that Thomas Aquinas found acedia a violation of the command, not to work diligently in God’s service, but to keep the Sabbath by resting in God.
I’m reminded of John Henry Newman, who reflected:
I am created to do something or to be something for which no one else is created … Therefore I will trust Him. Whatever, wherever I am, I can never be thrown away. If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him; in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him. If I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him …. He does nothing in vain …. He knows what He is about.
Through deeply resting in God’s determination of value, Newman is assured of the worth of his own life.
The value of a human life beyond its “usefulness” is often championed in discussions of contemporary ethical questions — especially those that affect the very young, the very old, and those with profound disabilities. While I will not add to these conversations here, it is appropriate to bring the commandment of the Sabbath to bear on these issues. While I worked on my first research project on the Sabbath — reflecting on what it had to say about devoting resources to art — I happened to read The Shaming of the Strong by my professor Sarah Williams, in which she narrates her experience of carrying a child to term whom she knew would not survive birth. Studying the Sabbath while reading this story was, for me, a discipleship in the heart of a God whose cherished creation includes more than those whom our societies give public value.
The lessons of the Sabbath do not end with the bioethical questions of life and death, however. They extend, on a much more ordinary level, to the people in my life whom I don’t know what to “do with” or “make of.” How interesting that even these phrases that express understanding and relatability still imply a degree of utility, as if persons can only find a place in my web of connections if I can “do” or “make something” of them.
But sometimes I encounter someone whom I do not comprehend — whom I cannot categorize, whose behavior or communication leaves me fumbling, who confounds expectation. When I have these experiences with someone, will I shake off the awkwardness, think “never mind” about the person, and curate my life to avoid the person in the future? (This is the most common response, for instance, to neurodivergence.) Or will I stop to regard this person, practice the patience to receive this person as a gift, and stand in awe of how God’s character is abundant? Will I be expanded through openness to mystery?
Finally, Sabbath-keeping invites sensitivity to the interior world, both in ourselves and in others. If we are commanded, for a time, to cease performing, producing, achieving, and competing, we now have a space in our lives — and in our communities — to honor our subtler parts. This becomes a fertile space for the free play of intuition and imagination, of grief and love. By contrast, when we feel under threat — or when we must justify our lives through market competition — we bury our soft underbellies below hard shells or spiny quills.
I can understand the desire to use snowflakes as an insult; it’s truly a problem if we can never face criticism or competition without melting. But I suspect this word usually carries more with it than a reasonable encouragement to grow through a challenge. Doesn’t it also speak for the elements of our culture that support a sink-or-swim social ethic? That judge merit by one’s ability to survive and dominate, regardless of the ruthlessness it takes? That prefer to subject every domain of life to the laws of the market? These beliefs are fundamentally opposed to the Sabbath, because they insist that there is no domain outside of competitive striving, no dignity apart from strength, no time for childlike delight. No need to stop and say, “It is he who has made us, and not we ourselves.”
If I cannot make space for the parts of myself that are mysterious, complicated, or even weak, how can I make space for them in others? If I can’t cherish the “useless” parts of a person, how can I value entire lives that will never “amount to much”? If I prefer to ignore and avoid a person around whom I feel awkward, would I really object when millions of them disappear? If I cannot honor Sabbath rest, how can I save human lives?
Abigail Woolley Cutter, Ph.D., is assistant professor of theology at King University in Bristol, Tennessee. She enjoys the music and many trails of Appalachia with her husband and two young children.
