What Is Shabbat? The Jewish Day of Rest Explained

The Hebrew Bible opens with God creating the world in six days and resting on the seventh, and the fourth of the Ten Commandments tells the Israelites to remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy, doing no work, along with their children, servants, animals and any foreigner among them. The Book of Deuteronomy gives the commandment a second reason: you were slaves in Egypt, so rest, and let those who work for you rest too. Creation and freedom, the two justifications, are both recalled in the blessings of the day.

The seven-day week itself, with a fixed day of rest unrelated to the moon or the seasons, spread from Judaism to Christianity and Islam and from them to the world. It is one of the few structures of modern life whose origin is a religious text.

Preparation fills Friday. The house is cleaned, the meals are cooked in advance, and a few minutes before sunset the woman of the house, traditionally, lights two candles and says a blessing, and the day has begun. In synagogue a short service welcomes the Sabbath with a sixteenth-century hymn that greets it as a bride. At home the family gathers at the table, the parents bless the children, and the meal opens with kiddush, a blessing over wine that sanctifies the day, and a blessing over two loaves of plaited bread, the challah, recalling the double portion of manna the Israelites gathered before each Sabbath in the desert.

The Friday night meal is the centre of Jewish family life, the point in the week when everyone is present and nobody is looking at a screen, and its songs and conversation often run for hours.

The Bible forbids work but does not define it, and the rabbis of the Talmud derived a definition from the kinds of labour used to build the sanctuary in the desert: thirty-nine categories, including sowing, baking, weaving, writing, building and kindling a fire. The list is the basis of everything that follows. Cooking is kindling and baking; driving is kindling; switching on a light or a phone is treated by most Orthodox authorities as kindling too; carrying anything outside the home is transport, except within an area enclosed by a symbolic boundary called an eruv.

The point is not that these activities are bad but that they are creative work on the world, and the day exists to stop doing that. Food cooked before Shabbat can be kept warm on a covered flame; lights can be set on timers; walking is fine; reading, talking, singing, sleeping and eating are the day's business. Reform and many Conservative Jews keep the day differently, treating the prohibitions as guidance about the spirit of rest rather than as binding law, so that driving to synagogue or using electricity may be allowed.

Saturday morning brings the week's main synagogue service, with the reading of a portion of the Torah on a fixed annual cycle, followed by a second festive meal. The afternoon is for rest, study, walks and visiting; a third, lighter meal is eaten towards evening. The day ends when three stars can be seen, with a short ceremony called havdalah, meaning separation: a blessing over wine, over spices whose scent consoles for the departing day, and over a braided candle, whose flame is the first fire kindled in the new week.

Because the day runs from sunset, and sunset moves with the seasons, Shabbat's start time moves through the year, from late afternoon in December to after nine at night in a northern June. Communities publish the exact candle-lighting time each week. The structure of the day:

• •Friday before sunset: candles lit, the day begins
• •Friday evening: synagogue, then the main meal with kiddush and challah
• •Saturday morning: the Torah reading and the second meal
• •Saturday afternoon: rest, study, the third meal
• •Saturday nightfall: havdalah, and the week resumes

The philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel called Shabbat a palace in time, and the phrase captures how the tradition understands it. Other religions sanctify places; Judaism, a religion that spent most of its history without a land or a temple, sanctified a day, which could be kept in Babylon, Spain, Poland or New York and could not be conquered. A saying attributed to the writer Ahad Ha'am holds that more than the Jews have kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath has kept the Jews.

Its secular descendants are everywhere. The weekend, the idea that workers are entitled to rest, and the modern digital detox all borrow from a day that made resting a duty rather than a luxury three thousand years ago.

However strict the laws of Shabbat are, Jewish law holds that saving a life overrides them. The principle, called pikuach nefesh, means that a doctor must treat a seriously ill patient, an ambulance must be called and driven, and a woman in labour must be taken to hospital, all without hesitation. The Talmud supports it with the verse saying a person shall live by the commandments, reading it to mean that they should not die by them, and with the reasoning that breaking one Sabbath so that someone may keep many Sabbaths is worth it.

Observant communities have also found practical ways to keep the rules in a world full of electricity. Some buildings in Israel and elsewhere have Shabbat lifts that stop at every floor automatically, so nobody needs to press a button, and many ovens and fridges now come with a Sabbath mode that keeps food warm and stops the light from switching on when the door opens. The aim is not to find loopholes for their own sake but to let the day's meals, visits and rest carry on without breaking the rules.

Cooking is forbidden on Shabbat, yet a hot meal is treated as part of honouring the day, and Jewish communities everywhere solved the problem in the same way. A dish is assembled on Friday, brought to the boil before sunset and left on a low, steady heat overnight, so that it finishes itself by Saturday lunch. In eastern Europe this was cholent, a dense stew of beans, barley, potatoes and fatty meat; in Sephardi communities around the Mediterranean and North Africa it was hamin or dafina, often with whole eggs in their shells that turn brown and creamy after hours of slow heat.

Hot Saturday food also carried a message. From the early Middle Ages the Karaites, a Jewish movement that rejected the rabbis' oral tradition, read the verse forbidding anyone to kindle a fire in their homes on the Sabbath as meaning that no fire could burn at all, so they spent the day in darkness and ate cold food. Rabbinic authorities taught that a fire lit before Shabbat may be left burning, and eating a hot meal on Saturday came to serve as a visible sign of loyalty to their interpretation. A pot of cholent is, among other things, a small piece of religious history.

The early Christians, most of them Jews at first, kept the Sabbath and also met on the first day of the week, the day on which the Gospels place the resurrection. As the church became mostly gentile, Sunday gradually took over as the Christian day of worship, and in 321 the Roman emperor Constantine made it a legal day of rest for courts and town workers, though farmers could carry on. Later Protestant movements, especially in Scotland and among the English Puritans, applied the strict language of the Sabbath to Sunday, closing shops and banning games. A few churches, such as the Seventh-day Adventists, went back to keeping Saturday itself.

Islam took a different path. Friday is the day of the main congregational prayer at midday, but the Quran tells believers to leave their trading for the prayer and afterwards to disperse and seek their livelihood again, so Friday was not originally a day of rest in the Jewish sense. Many Muslim-majority countries nevertheless made Friday part of their weekend, and some have since moved to a Saturday and Sunday weekend to line up with global markets. Comparing the three shows what is distinctive about Shabbat: a full day of rest defined by detailed law, rather than a day of worship with rest attached to it.

Shabbat is the Jewish day of rest from Friday sunset to Saturday nightfall, commanded in the Bible in memory of creation and of freedom from slavery, marked by candles, wine, bread, prayer and three meals, and defined by stopping the thirty-nine categories of creative work. The tradition treats it not as a restriction but as a sanctuary in time that has held the people together wherever they lived.