To the eyes of outsiders, Jewish observance of the Sabbath can seem like a dreary set of restrictions, a set of laws that don’t bear any good news. According to those who live each week shaped by Shabbat, however, it is a practice that powerfully alters their relationships to nature, work, God and others. Shabbat is not just law and liturgy; it is also a shared way of life, a set of activities that become second nature, a round of custom and prayer that the youngest child or the oldest invalid can enter, a piece of time that opens space for God. Over and over Jewish authors say of Shabbat what those who enter deeply into other religious practices also say: to experience its goodness, you must enter its activities. To find Sabbath peace, you must keep the Sabbath holy. "The real and the spiritual are one, like body and soul in a living person," writes Heschel. "It is for the law to clear the path; it is for the soul to sense the spirit."

Christians are fortunate when Jewish friends invite us to come to a meal on a Friday evening, to keep Sabbath with them. On our own, however, Christians cannot keep Sabbath as Jews do. We know God most fully not through the perpetual covenant God made with the Israelites at Sinai but through Jesus Christ. Yet we also honor the Mosaic commandments, and we stand in spiritual and historical kinship with the Jewish people, of whom Jesus was one. In an authentically Christian form of Sabbath keeping, we may affirm the grateful relationship to the Creator that Jews celebrate each Sabbath, and we may share the joyful liberation from drudgery first experienced by the slaves who left Egypt. But we add to these celebrations our weekly festival for the source of our greatest joy: Christ’s victory over the powers of death. For Christians, this victory makes of each weekly day of rest and worship a celebration of Easter.