Why Can't We Petition God on Sabbath?
On Acceptance
It is customary on Sabbath morning to recite a prayer asking God to heal those who are ill. The prayer is commonly known as “The Misheberach.”
Yet the leader makes sure to say that the request is not really a request:
“Although today is a day to refrain from healing, we yet hope that healing is at hand…”
Why all the back-bending? Asking for something, but then insisting you aren’t asking, you’re just…hoping?
This, to my knowledge, is the classic solution:
On Sabbath, the world is, as it were, perfect. Or at least, we are meant to experience it as such. To ask for things, particularly things that imply the world is radically unwell is to step out of Sabbath-mode into quotidian mode. At the same time, to not name the pain people are bringing with them from the week into Sabbath is to create a split sense of self. We need a prayer that isn’t a prayer for healing to help people name the paradoxical simultaneity of need and abundance, wanting and plenitude.
I have a less primary and more playful “explanation”:
One of the laws of the Sabbath is the prohibition on carrying objects from one domain to another. To change something’s context is to change its substance. To ask something of God on Sabbath is, as it were, to ask God to come down to earth. But in so doing, God would have to carry from one place to another. This would be work. Work is metaphor (carrying-across) and metaphor is work.
The perfection of the Sabbath means at least one of these three things:
1) Divine absence is OK. The world is (sort of) “perfect” even when it feels like it isn’t.
2) If God wants to be with us on Sabbath, as it were, we must plan for it, and invite God to sleep over on earth, coming to us the day before Sabbath. The drama of divine arrival occurs before Sabbath. Great moments require some preparation and hustle.
3) If you are an immanentist or pantheist the above makes little sense. God doesn’t travel on Shabbat, because God is ubiquitous. Fine. But heaven and earth, transcendence and immanence remain distinct domains. It takes work for the distant aspect of God to become less distant, and if Shabbat is a day of refraining from work, we should accept the position of God as it is. We should accept our faith as it is, broken or not, deep or not, absent or not. Said most radically, if there is a God, and if the Sabbath is an expression of divine creation, the nonbeliever is commanded (on Sabbath) to accept his or her nonbelief as perfect.
In case you missed it, here’s a new poem of mine.
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