The Free Press: Make the Sabbath Great Again, by Max Raskin (NYU):

As America celebrates its 250th birthday, the monuments in Washington, D.C., will feature prominently—so much so that it’s easy to forget that the country’s legacy is not made of marble. The Founders erected monuments of ideas, and none is so central to our republican government as the idea of civic virtue grounded in religious belief and community. Few religious practices are more deeply enshrined in our founding heritage than the Sabbath: the weekly refuge from ambition, appetite, and noise. …

 President Trump paid homage to this heritage when he included in his Jewish American Heritage Month proclamation a call for American Jews to “observe a national Sabbath” from May 15 to 16 to coincide with religious celebrations around the nation’s 250th birthday. This is an invitation worth taking seriously.

For much of the 20th century, a powerful school of thought treated the Founders as though they intended religion and state to be hermetically sealed spheres set apart by Thomas Jefferson’s “wall of separation.” That view captured part of the American story, but not the whole of it. The Founders prohibited religious tests and the federal establishment of religion, but also opened public proceedings with prayer, appointed chaplains, and came from states with laws that protected the Christian Sabbath. Their aim was not to rid public life of religion, but to prevent the state from coercing conscience.

The distinction here matters. President Trump has not proposed a Sabbath law. He has done something more modest and more American: He used the power of persuasion to invite his countrymen to set aside sacred time in accordance with their own beliefs.

The analogy is not to blue laws enforced by police power, but to George Washington’s Thanksgiving Proclamation, which called on all Americans to set aside a day of “public thanksgiving and prayer.” While Jefferson was opposed to issuing one as president, he did so as governor of Virginia in 1779. From the beginning the disagreement was how, not whether, religious language should appear in public life.

At the time of the founding, laws prohibiting certain activities on the Christian Sabbath were prevalent. There was no outrage or widespread attempt to declare them unconstitutional. The same Virginia which had the Statute for Religious Freedom also enacted the Bill for Punishing Disturbers of Religious Worship and Sabbath Breakers. Jefferson signed it without noting any constitutional qualms. This did not make Virginia a theocracy—it was a state committed to religious liberty, opposed to religious coercion, and reverential to the blessings and moral demands of the Creator.

American Jews understood these tensions from the first days of the Republic. Jonas Phillips—a Revolutionary War veteran and founder of Philadelphia’s Congregation Mikveh Israel—famously wrote to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 asking them to ban religious tests for public office. In 1793, Phillips was called to testify in Philadelphia court on the Jewish Sabbath—he refused, was fined, and appealed. Although the matter ended when the fine was waived before a court could hear the case, it remains a revealing early test of American religious liberty.

“It is telling that observance of the Sabbath was the issue in the first known case about religious liberty in the new republic,” says Stanford Law professor Michael McConnell. “Some modern people may regard Sabbath observance as a minor thing, but this case underscores the importance of the Sabbath in legal history.” …

President Trump’s proclamation gets the point. He could have chosen any Jewish practice—keeping kosher or putting up a mezuzah—but he chose Shabbat. He understood the famous line that “more than the Jewish people kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath kept the Jewish people.”

Washington Post Op-Ed: I’ve Kept Shabbat for 32 years. Trump Is Onto Something., by Daniella Greenbaum Davis:

President Donald Trump did something extraordinary last week: He called on the nation as a whole to observe a Shabbat. From sundown on Friday, May 15, to nightfall on Saturday, May 16, friends, families and communities of all backgrounds are invited to come together in rest and reflection. He dubbed the event Shabbat 250, as part of the celebration of America’s 250th anniversary and in recognition of Jewish contributions to American life since the nation’s founding.

I have been keeping Shabbat for 32 years — more than 1,600 Saturdays, putting aside all forms of work, mechanical devices and electronics. As the youngest child in my family, it was the one time of the week when I could count on my siblings actually being there: Scrabble games, long talks, good food, real bonding. A weekly visit to grandparents and, while they were living, great-grandparents. Today, as a working mother of two, I find that Shabbat is the one time a week I have no temptation to check my phone or feel beholden to the rest of the world. The only people requiring my attention are the ones I’m physically with.

Shabbat is a Jewish tradition. But the case for a weekly day of rest, taking a formal break from worldly concerns, is universal. …

[T]hink about boarding a plane and discovering there’s no WiFi: At first it might seem like an inconvenience, but then comes the gift of a few hours with nowhere to be and nothing to check.

That’s the beauty of Shabbat. It’s a weekly commitment you cannot reschedule. Sundown, and shutdown, come whether the week is finished or not, whether those emails have been answered or not. In my house, there are hints all day of its arrival. Soup simmers in the pot, the smell of challah wafts through the house, and the dining room table is set with china. And then at some point: The switch is flipped. Shabbat has started. Everything else fades away.

The ancient rabbis thought carefully about what rest actually meant. Shabbat isn’t simply about putting down tools or closing the laptop. The Talmud describes a concept called techum — a boundary beyond which Jews are not permitted to walk on Shabbat. You are, literally, not supposed to leave your city. The idea isn’t confinement. It’s the opposite: a weekly insistence that you turn inward. Toward your home, your table, your family, your community and, if you’re religious, your God. The wellness industry is now selling this back to the world at luxury retreat prices. The rabbis figured it out 2,000 years ago.

You don’t need to be Jewish to benefit from their wisdom. You don’t need to be religious or observe anything in particular. What you need is a fixed, recurring commitment to put the devices down as an individual, as a couple, as a family — not because someone took them away, but because you’ve agreed that, during this window, this is what we do.

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