Growing up, I was taught that Shabbat, the day of rest, is “a taste of the world to come”––“a palace in time” where we can imagine life as it should be. But in Israel-Palestine, sirens announced Shabbat like an echo of an incoming emergency, twenty-four hours in which essential public services shut down and time slowed without consent. Whilst spending my summer in Jerusalem through the Religion, Conflict and Peace Initiative, the question of whether to celebrate Shabbat as an anti-Zionist Jew pressed on me like a heartbeat growing louder.
One of the spiritual crises I experienced this summer was whether to observe this tradition intrinsic to Jewish life and practice, because Shabbat was used as a tool of the state to assert authority over Palestinian movement and livelihood. The irony did not escape me. I was in Jerusalem, a place deeply significant historically and spiritually to my people, among others, and yet the morality of observing Shabbat was up for debate. In the U.S, Shabbat was an act of resistance to capitalism. Shabbat was a defiant stance against assimilation into white Protestant Christian hegemony. Shabbat was a fight against productivity culture, to overcommitment, and to anxiety about not doing enough, not being enough. To rest for twenty-four hours was to leave space for dreaming, to honor my ancestors, and to expand my awareness of the world I take for granted.
In Israel-Palestine, I wondered if boycotting Shabbat was another form of resistance. Israel told me: you are a Jew, and so your legacy, entitlement and power are here. You can own Jewish practice at the expense of other people. You are entitled to Shabbat in this land. To abstain from Shabbat, then, felt like a stubborn rebellion against the doctrine of the state. Israel tried to convince me to engage Jewishly in order to feed its agenda of suppression, control and colonial power. I refuse to give into the kind of Jew Israel wanted me to be.
But was giving up Shabbat the right way to resist Zionist hegemony? As I worked through my complicated feelings, I also knew that engaging with Shabbat practice could be a tool of deep resistance to Zionism. I did not want to give into a conception of Judaism that weaponized religious and spiritual practice as a manifestation of state control. If the state owns the spiritual realms of my life, where can I find freedom, rest, and joy? I realized that, despite the dominance Zionism tried to exercise over me physically and psychologically, it could and would not penetrate the spiritual expanse of my Judaism and my relationship with G!d.
Ultimately, I did decide to celebrate Shabbat––I set it aside as a period of time where I did not work. I bought produce from Palestinian vendors in the Old City and cooked dinner with these local harvests for my friends. I tried to replenish our sense of connectivity and joy after our energy was drained from the internships we did––be they researching Israeli military trade deals, confronting issues in bilingual Hebrew-Arabic education, or dealing with distributing vital resources in Gaza. On Shabbat, we went on day trips to Jericho and Ramallah, watched the sunset fading slowly over the West Bank and drank local beer. By spending Shabbat as a time to invest in one another, we created a space in which we discovered the divine in our friendships; sanctified the Sabbath through relationship. We created a palace in time where love and connection laid the foundation, where trust built the walls, and where we could look out the window and see Palestine decolonized, a taste of the world to come.