“Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour
and do all thy work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath unto the Lord thy
God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy
daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy
stranger that is within thy gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven
and earth, the sea, and all that is therein, and rested the seventh
day; wherefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day, and hallowed it.”
The Sabbath day, that is, the day of rest, is to be kept holy. In two
ways it should differ from other days; it is to be a day of rest and
also a holy day. We keep it as a day of rest by not doing on it any
kind of work; we keep it as a holy day by devoting the greater part of
it, since we are free from our ordinary occupation, to prayer and to
reading the Bible.
We are thankful to God for having commanded us to keep the Sabbath, and
give expression to our feeling of gratitude in our prayers, especially
at the beginning and the end of the Sabbath; thus, on Friday evening,
before the meal, we praise God for sanctifying the Sabbath by a prayer
called Kiddush, “sanctification,” and on Sabbath evening, after the
close of the Sabbath, we recite the Habhdalah, in which God is praised
for the distinction made between Sabbath and the six week-days.
The Israelites were told to remember the Sabbath day; that is, the
well-known day of rest, the same day which was instituted as a day of
rest in connection with the manna. On five days they collected one omer
of the manna, on the sixth day two omers for each person; on the
seventh day no manna was collected nor was any found, and the
Israelites were commanded to bake and to cook on the sixth day not only
for the sixth day, but also for the seventh, on which day baking and
cooking was not to be done. This same seventh day we are told in the
fourth commandment to remember to keep holy, that we should not forget
it, or choose another day instead of it. It is the same seventh day on
which God rested after the six days of the Creation, and which “he
blessed and sanctified.”
It is to be a day of rest not only for ourselves; we must not have work
done for us by our children, or by our servants, or by strangers; even
our cattle must rest. After six days of work we enjoy the blessing of
one day’s rest, and are rendered more fit to work another six days. The
harder we work on six days, the more welcome is the rest of the seventh
day to us. When Moses repeated the commandments, he laid special stress
on the rest of the servants, reminding the Israelites that they
themselves had once been slaves, and must therefore recognise the
necessity of granting a day of rest to their servants.
It is not to be a day of mere idleness. Complete idleness leads to evil
thoughts and evil deeds. Whilst our body rests our mind should be
occupied with holy thoughts; we should commune with God, reflect on His
works, learn from them the power, wisdom, and goodness of God, study
the Word of God, listen to the instruction of our teachers and
preachers, and altogether try to raise ourselves into a loftier sphere.
On the day of rest we reflect on the works of God, on the work of
Creation which He completed in six days, and thus by keeping the
Sabbath we testify to our belief in God as the Creator of the Universe.
On this account it is that the Creation is referred to in this
commandment as the reason why rest was enjoined for the seventh day.
“For in six days,” &c.
“Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day;” the rest on the seventh
day is a blessing to those who have worked hard during the preceding
six days; it is a blessing to those who spend the Sabbath in a proper
manner. “And he hallowed it” by giving man an opportunity to sanctify
himself by more frequent communion with the Most Holy.