Summary: Parashat Be Shallah. Can t Touch This: Muktzeh and the Essence of Shabbat

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1 Summary: Parashat Be Shallah והכינו את אשר יביאו Can t Touch This: Muktzeh and the Essence of Shabbat If you want to really get to the bottom of any area of Jewish law and practice, your best bet is often to ask a child. Unspoiled by the conceptual creativity of the beit midrash and more in touch with the basic experiential categories of life, children preserve for us the enduringly simple aspects of religious observance. This is particularly true in the area of Shabbat. Adults especially those with extensive rabbinic education quite naturally and instinctively consider the fundamental category of Shabbat to be melakhah the forbidden physically creative and economically productive activity that the Torah repeatedly forbids on this sacred day. The intricacies of defining what counts as a melakhah or not dominate rabbinic discourse. Was the action intentional? For a creative purpose? Done for its normal function? Performed in the normal way? All of these questions dissect the action in question and distinguish core violations of Shabbat from more peripheral activities that, even if to be avoided, are of much lesser concern. Ask a child, however, and you will find a Shabbat that focuses not on actions, but on objects. In the observant Jewish world, children will not talk that much about melakhah, but they will go on at length about which items are muktzeh cast out, forbidden to be handled, much less used. Rabbinic texts are full of prohibitions on moving all sorts of objects on Shabbat and Yom Tov, from rocks and sticks to most tools. These object based movement restrictions often occupy a central space in a child s experience of Shabbat. A Shabbat observant child sees a pen and thinks, I can t touch that it is muktzeh. You will even often find children who say that actions like writing themselves are forbidden, because they are muktzeh, even though this object based terminology seems totally inappropriate for restrictions on action! By contrast, the average adult thinks, Writing is a melakhah, a pen is used for melakhah, therefore the rabbis forbade us from even moving a pen to distance us from this problematic action. To the average Jewish adult, an inordinate focus on objects seems, well, childish. Prohibitions on moving objects on Shabbat are understood by most adults to be fences around the real prohibition of melakhah. Sure, children may focus on the object oriented restrictions 1

2 known as muktzeh, but that is only because they are not yet sophisticated enough to understand the complexities of action and the nuances of intention and context. Muktzeh, for adults, is the handmaiden of melakhah. But what if the children have it right? What if melakhah is actually the handmaiden of muktzeh? What if it is equally valid and perhaps even more compelling to see the core message of Shabbat as focusing on withdrawal from the material world? What if the ultimate goal of Shabbat is to get human beings to leave the world as it is, with melakhah being the most flagrant but not the most elemental violation of that commitment? This week, I want to argue for this alternative narrative, one in which the object based restrictions known today as muktzeh are core, rather than peripheral. I will here focus on how this concern arises from the Torah and close with some thoughts for today. For an analysis of many Rabbinic texts on the issue, and the transformation from a Second Temple object oriented frame to a late Antiquity action oriented frame, through the lens of the Rabbinic texts, see the longer essay. The Torah focuses in many places on the ban on melakhah on Shabbat, but we would do כי ששת ימים עשה יקוק את 20:11 : well to remember the rationale given for this ban in Shemot For /השמים in six days God made the heaven, the ואת הארץ את הים ואת כל אשר בם וינח ביום השביעי earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day The requirement to desist from melakhah is bound up with God s cessation of the same after six days of creation. It is surely possible to read this as a command to emulate God s behavior on the seventh day, namely a behavior of stoppage. But it is equally possible that the verse here is calling on us to inhabit God s state of being on the seventh day, which was one of withdrawal from the material world, one where everything was מאד very /טוב good and complete. Just as God created the world in six days and then did nothing to it on the seventh day, so too the Jew seeking to emulate God would avoid interacting with the raw objects of the world, like sticks, rocks, even food and water, that were not designated for human use in advance. And one might certainly avoid using or handling any tools, blatant signs of human efforts to control and shape the physical world. In fact, the Israelites, before they ever receive a clear command to desist from melakhah on Shabbat, receive a more basic instruction in this week s parashah : Get everything ready before Shabbat. This instruction comes in the context of the narrative of the manna that fell from the 2

3 sky in the desert, and is highly suggestive of an imperative to enter into a bubble once a week where one has everything one needs in advance. God tells Moshe that food will rain down from the sky and that the people should gather a daily portion each morning. On the sixth day, however, they are to את אשר יביאו prepare /והכינו that which they bring in, gathering a double portion for that day and the following. Moshe said to them: This is what God said: Tomorrow is a stoppage, it is the holy Shabbat for the Lord. That which you plan to bake, bake, that which you plan to cook, cook and leave the remainder over to guard until the morning. Why couldn t the manna be gathered on Shabbat morning? It is, after all, food, and there would seem to be no real impediment to handling and consuming it on Shabbat itself. The focus here on preparation /הכנה seems to be key: If the goal of Shabbat is to experience an already completed world, then we cannot have a system where one s key sustenance will only materialize halfway through the day. Moshe emphasizes that all baking and cooking of the manna must take place before Shabbat, but there has not yet been any articulation of a ban on melakhah by this point in the Torah. Instead, his directive seems more focused on having everything ready in advance. It is this state of affairs, more than a set of behaviors, that will establish Shabbat as truly holy, the sense that as the day enters, I have everything I need, just exactly as I need it. The fact that these interpretations were open and live in the Second Temple period can be proven from a variety of texts from that period, many of which have extraordinarily strict rules around handling natural objects and food items that were not prepared prior to Shabbat. This is the Judaism that H azal inherited: A culture that understood what we call muktzeh as a central component of what Shabbat meant. Early Rabbinic sources share this frame, by and large. But as I document in the longer essay, by the end of the Rabbinic period and until today, such restrictions had been largely subsumed under concerns about forbidden actions. Muktzeh becomes a penumbra of melakhah. But what if the children are right? What can we learn from this once central area of Shabbat law for today s world? I think understanding and appreciating this unique area of halakhah will become increasingly critical in the years ahead. Year by year, more and more of our melakhah is becoming automated. Lights are being put on sensors in public buildings. Appliances are programmed in advance to do all sorts of tasks. What happens if our world is 3

4 automated to the extent that we rarely if ever do melakhah during the week anymore because robots and computers do it for us? How will we ensure Shabbat feels distinct? Will our embrace of the melakhah paradigm leave us with no tools to grapple with this reality? Do we think that God and the Torah would be fine with a world in which automated melakhah runs 24/7, and we can blissfully benefit from all of this creativity and productivity even on Shabbat itself? How will such a world maintain the spiritual core of Shabbat as a day when we subdue ourselves in order to appreciate the created world as it is? Here is where I think the concept of muktzeh has a central role to play, both in helping us make decisions, and in inculcating values and sensitivities that will preserve the Torah s vision of Shabbat. Whereas melakhah beckons us to ask, What am I allowed or not allowed to do?, muktzeh asks: Are you content and at peace with the material world as it existed for you when Shabbat began? The most powerful description I have encountered of what this feels like is found in the writings of R. Yosef Tzvi Dünner, chief Rabbi of Amsterdam at the turn of the 20 th century and prolific commentator on the Talmud. In his introduction to Tractate Beitzah, he tries to give his reader a sense of muktzeh s antiquity and unbridled power. He offers the following image, which is extremely instructive: Entering Shabbat is like entering God s house, into which one only brings that which one needs in order to live on Shabbat. All other tools and signs of endless consumption must be left out in the hallway of the six days of creation; on the seventh day, we emulate God s own act of withdrawal and sense of completion on that first Shabbat of creation. Shabbat comes as the antidote to the poisonous need to control and monetize everything in the physical world. Muktzeh is one of our most powerful tools for ensuring we are in this state. When we cultivate an instinctive allergy to picking up tools except when they are necessary, when we view items we have not prepared or domesticated as off limits, when we virtually treat money as a contaminant, we deeply instill a sense of humility and limitation. When we have prepared well, this can generate deep contentment. And even when we have not prepared well, the feeling of denial and limitation that this can produce will also shape our character in profound ways. This shift in thinking can also help us in other areas of technological innovation. For example, how should we think differently about lights that are attached to motion sensors? There is a strong temptation to consider these lights from the perspective of a melakhah paradigm. The argument will then be over whether bodily movements, such as walking, should 4

5 be considered enough of an activity to warrant, maximally, forbidding walking in front of such sensors, or, minimally, not to set up one s home with such an electronic system. My own feeling is that the case is fairly solid for thinking about walking as fundamentally inactive and I cannot instinctively get worked up about the melakhah aspect of this question. To me, the real question is around : preparation /הכנה Does living in a world with lights on sensors feel like a world that is in a state of stasis and completion on Shabbat, or like one in which a constant dynamism shatters the intended experience of a completed world at rest? My own instincts are to permit: Lights fundamentally define the background of the space, and one does not directly interact with their output in any physical way. They mirror times of day and night that are naturally dynamic in any event, and they involve not so much dynamism as a binary toggling between on and off. The requirement to have the system on and operational prior to Shabbat feels sufficient to me to keep the experience of a fully prepared world in place. But I could understand the objection to this approach very well if articulated from the perspective of muktzeh rather than melakhah. I can imagine a person decidedly refusing to install such sensors in their home because of the ever changing environment it would create in the home because of the fundamentally dynamic state of the sensors based on not entirely predetermined human motion throughout the space. And I myself would strongly endorse similar hesitations about other sensor driven results that introduced more dramatically new elements into the ambient environment. It feels hard to me to permit a coffee grinder and brewer that automatically engages on Shabbat morning when the first person walks into the kitchen, without completely eviscerating the notion of a holy space that has been completed and prepared in advance. I invite us to reclaim this category of Jewish law and practice as central to our thinking about Shabbat. On Friday afternoon, let us enter into the sacred space of Shabbat with everything we need in advance, and thereby appreciate the wonders of God s world. We can along the way heal our souls from our unceasing desire to consume and profit, turning instead to the beauty of living with what we already have. 5