September 11. All anyone has to do is say that one simple date and everyone knows what is meant: a day that, like Pearl Harbor Day, will live in infamy. Over the months that have passed since that terrorist attack all of us have thought about what is really important in our lives and what our priorities ought to be. In that same spirit I have chosen to use this year's High Holyday sermons to re-examine some of the most important concepts of Judaism. This is a year in which we all need to go "Back to Basics.

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For a long time I just didn't get it. Why did I have to duck down and hide if we happened to pass the Rabbi on Shabbos morning while we were driving home from shul and he was walking? I wasn't the one who was driving; my mother was. Why did I have to pretend to be invisible?

When I got older I understood. I understood that even though my mother was sometimes willing to drive to services on Saturday morning because we lived over a mile away, it was an uneasy compromise. We always parked a few blocks from the shul and walked the rest of the way, along with a good proportion of the other congregants who were doing the same thing.

I was being taught that adults sometimes had to make such compromises. My own father could rarely get to Shabbos morning services because he had to work on Saturdays. I was being taught in the purity of childhood to observe the purity of the Shabbat, not letting the Rabbi see when I was part of the compromises adults were involved in. I guess it worked, since I'm standing here as your Rabbi telling you these stories.

Keeping the seventh day as the Sabbath is one of the most distinguishing features of Judaism throughout the ages. "More than Israel has kept the Sabbath," quotes our prayerbook, "the Sabbath has kept Israel." Shabbat is our most important, and certainly our most frequent, holy day.

With our normal two day weekends and periodic four day ones, it is hard for us to imagine what it was like when there were no weekends at all, no days off except for an occasional festival day and the king's birthday. In the world of our ancestors everyone except the nobility worked from first light in the early morning until it was too dark to see in the evening, all day, everyday of their relatively short lives.

These societies weren't composed only of backward peasants, either. Ancient Egypt and ancient Assyria were technologically advanced nations, seats of high art and culture, creators of prodigious feats of engineering like the pyramids and the ziggurats. These were empires that spanned vast distances and ruled over much of the world's population.

Along came our ancestors, who were peasants, itinerant shepherds and farmers, tinsmiths, hired laborers, and said to the high and mighty nations around them: "Our God says that one day in every seven all must rest, man, woman, child, slave and free, those who are just passing through, the strangers, the home born, even the animals. All must rest. All must keep Shabbat." You can imagine how thrilled the rulers were to be told to relinquish one-seventh of the labor of their slaves and peasants, and to be told this by people who were unsophisticated peasants themselves.

Yet this is apparently what happened, so suddenly and so mysteriously, that to this day we don't really know where the idea of the Shabbat came from. We're not even certain what the Hebrew word signifies. There is scholarly speculation that the Shabbat might be related to the lunar worship of the ancient pagan Semites, the four times in the twenty-eight day lunar cycle on which the Assyrians thought the moon stood still and work and other activities were severely restricted. Or it might be somehow connected to the ancient Babylonian "evil days" that occurred at roughly seven day intervals. No one knows.

What are we supposed to do on the Sabbath? Most of us are more familiar with what we are not to supposed to do: work. In the words of the Ten Commandments:

You have six days to labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath of the Eternal your God; that day you shall do no work at all - neither you, your son, your daughter, nor your slave, your slave girl, nor your ox, your ass, nor any of your cattle, or the alien within your gates ...[Deut. 5:13-14.]

But what constitutes work? Why is walking to shul on a Saturday morning up a steep hill in 95 degree heat allowed, but driving that same distance in an air-conditioned car is prohibited as work? Because our sages noticed that in the Torah's description of the movable sanctuary the Israelites made for worship in the wilderness, the story is suddenly interrupted with an injunction to observe the Sabbath. The proximity of these two texts, the Rabbis reasoned, meant that Sabbath observance involved not doing whatever our ancestors were doing to build the tabernacle. These activities became the "Fathers of Work," Avot Melacha, in Hebrew, the major categories. They include:

Sowing, plowing, reaping, gathering, thrashing, winnowing, cleansing, grinding, sifting, kneading, baking, shearing, bleaching, beating, dyeing, spinning, looming, making thrum threads, weaving, splitting thread, tying, untying, sewing, tearing, hunting, Shabbat slaughtering, skinning, salting, tanning, scraping hides, cutting, writing, erasing, building, pulling down, kindling fire, extinguishing fire, hammering, carrying from one premises to another. [Mishnah Shabbat 7:2]

Each of these, in turn, has an indeterminate number of derivative sub-categories, "Toldot" or "Offspring of Work." If you want to know, for example, whether you can use your computer to burn a CD on Shabbat, you trace it first to one of the sub-categories and ultimately back to one of the "parent" categories. So, walking certain distances, no matter how hot the temperature or steep the incline, is not considered work, but kindling the fires of an internal combustion engine, is.

Most of us have always known the Shabbat as a day of don'ts. It became a day governed by Blue Laws, aptly named for the sad and somber pall they cast on every seventh day. Sabbath prohibitions on Sunday, the Sabbath day picked by the Gentile world in part to differentiate itself from Judaism, became particularly onerous, especially in Puritan America:

...two lovers, John Lewis and Sarah Chapman, were tried for sitting together on the Lord's day under an apple tree. A soldier wet a piece of an old hat to put in his shoe to protect his foot. He was fined forty shillings for doing this heavy work. In 1656 Captain Kemble of Boston was put in public stocks for two hours for his "lewd and unseemly behavior," which consisted of kissing his wife in public on the Sabbath on the doorstep of his house after his return from a three-year voyage. When another man who had fallen into some water absented himself from church to dry his only suit of clothes, he was found guilty and publicly whipped. [Mrs. Alice Morse Earle, The Sabbath In Puritan New England, as quoted in "The Blue Laws of New England," Liberty, Jan/Feb. 1963, pp. 18-19.]

Lest you think we Jews are in any way immune from this silliness, about four years ago a leading Israeli newspaper had an article reporting that - and please excuse the indelicacy of the example -

A leading ultra-Orthodox rabbi in Israel... ruled that it is permitted to pick your nose on the Jewish Sabbath, his aide said Sunday.

Rabbi Ovadia Yosef delivered the ruling Saturday night in a sermon relayed by satellite to his followers in Israel and abroad. [January 26,1998.]

You are well aware, I'm sure, that some very creative problem-solving arose in order to make the Sabbath a bit more tolerable. A lovely tale from Jewish folklore tells of the ingenuity of one young man:

Late one Friday night in the shtetl, Froyim passed his grandparents' place. He was surprised to see it brightly lit and the elderly couple still awake, clearly visible through the kitchen window. He went in. "Why aren't you asleep?" he asked. "It's past midnight." The grandparents looked dejected. "We can't go to sleep because of the candles. If we let them burn themselves out the house may catch fire, and we can't snuff them out because it's the holy Sabbath. There isn't even a peasant around to blow them out."

Froyim thought for a moment and then, standing directly in front of one of the candles, asked, "Tell me, Grandpa, when is Purim?" Moving to the other candle he continued, "And when is Pesach?" With both candles extinguished he turned to his grandparents and announced, "Now you can go to bed. Thank God none of us had to violate the Sabbath!" [Nathan Ausubel, A Treasury of Jewish Folklore, pp. 303-41]

Though we laugh, we should also appreciate the mindset that created the Sabbath restrictions. When the idea of rest for anyone other than the nobility began, there was such resistance that our people had to promote it with the utmost seriousness. A story in the Torah about a man who worked on the Sabbath and was executed for doing so is an example not of a factual event, but of a cautionary tale to try and counter the tremendous pressure the common folk were under to ignore the Sabbath. [Numbers 15:32-36]

If that is all the Shabbat is, a dour day of prohibitions and restrictions, it's no wonder so many of us are so far removed from its observance. There are, though, I assure you, other alternatives. I want to suggest to you that for us, focusing on Shabbat as a time of celebration is far more important, and far more viable, than focusing on it as a day of prohibition.

One such aspect of celebration we're all well acquainted with: the Oneg Shabbat. To us it means the coffee, cake, and other assorted goodies that are served after Friday night services. This is, by the way, a rather modern and particularly American custom. It so happens that the retired Rabbi of the first congregation I served almost thirty years ago in Columbus, Ohio, Dr. Jerome Folkman, was among the creators of the custom of the late Friday evening service followed by the now famous and highly caloric Oneg Shabbat.

A far older, and even more enticing way of celebrating Shabbat is the ruling by the Talmudic Rabbis that it was a special mitzvah, one in which we are all encouraged to participate, to make love on Friday night. Far less compelling, but still interesting ways of adding to our Shabbat celebration throughout the ages included special meals, clothing, foods like challah, candles, wine, reading, napping, even playing chess with pieces crafted of silver especially in honor of the Shabbat.

In our literature and our prayerbook, Shabbat is referred to as a bride, as a queen, as a day of delight and rejoicing. It is an island of sanity in a weekday world of chaos. The flames of the two candles that we light, for instance, represent the human soul. It is as if during the workday week our souls, our humanity, gets a bit bruised, a bit dim. We re-light them each Shabbat, re-kindle our souls, let the full glory of our humanity shine forth. The two candles are separate on Friday night, and the havdallah candle, the candle lit to mark the end of Shabbat, is made of intertwined candles and wicks. That is our goal: to overcome our separation from ourselves and those we love and thus begin the next week whole and refreshed.

What often stops us from experiencing the joys of Shabbat is, I think, its length. In a crushing work week of fourteen and sixteen hour days of hard physical labor, a full day of rest was a longed-for blessing. But we live differently, and many now find observing Shabbat every minute of a whole day more of a burden than a release. One of the professors I studied with in Rabbinical school had a wonderful suggestion to resolve this problem. He suggested something he called "Sabbath moments." He taught that during the twenty-four hours, give or take, that make up the Shabbat, we should look for special moments when the spirit of Shabbat Shalom, Sabbath Peace, are especially present. For some it will be when the candles are lit. For some it may include attending Friday evening or Saturday morning services. Sabbath moments might include time spent with family, reading, relaxing, re-creating ourselves after the hustle and bustle of the work week. Given the way we all live, perhaps a full day of rest every week is not all that possible. But we all can find room for moments of Sabbath peace…

The Shabbat is one of the basics, and one of the constants, of Jewish life. It is a gift we Jews have given to the rest of the world. Isn't it time we gave this gift to ourselves as well?