Six days shall you accomplish your activities and on
the seventh day you shall desist. (Exodus 23:12) The seventh day is Sabbath... you shall
not do any creative work. (Exodus 20:10)
As slaves under Egyptian oppression, the Israelites were
forced to work incessantly with no breaks. Their time was not their own.
A day of rest was a revolutionary concept in the ancient
world with power today to free us from addiction to digital technologies.
The Sabbath was given at Sinai as a gift for all humanity, a
gift particularly valuable to everyone in our fast paced postdigital world.
In our home on the Sabbath, computer, TV, radio, mobile
phones and landlines remain silent.
On day 7, we don't e-mail, don't tweet on Twitter, don’t
write on Facebook walls, don't link on LinkedIn, don't Google, don't blog.
We don't travel the information or asphalt highways.
Pollution from information overload and carbon emissions is stopped cold on day
7.
No banks of TVs, bank ATM's, phone sales, wireless access to
all Israeli citizens for issuing gas masks, nor coffee shop video totems.
Shabbat is Ecology Day, a day we leave the world the way we
got it, a joyous day set aside to take pleasure in divine creation.
Shabbat is also a Non-Art Day on which we stop making all
art – postdigtal, digital, and pre-digital.
All activities inappropriate on Shabbat are derived from the
39 craft categories that went into making the Tabernacle.
Shabbat is a divine design to help make us be more
human. It offers us a quiet pool of time
for enjoying family and friends.
On the eighth day, we can return with renewed energies to
being partners of God in continuing creation.
We can enjoy the technological wonders of our era knowing that we are free to tune out, turn off, and unplug on the next Shabbat
