The Sabbath

. “The highest goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information but to face sacred moments.” “We must not forget that it is not a thing that lends significance to a moment; it is a moment that lends significance to things.” Abraham Joshua Heschel’s THE SABBATH is a book which faces down our frantic and acquisitive society not with anger or condemnation but with wisdom, healing and solution. In its hundred pages’ consideration and description of the Jewish tradition of the Holy Day, Heschel achieves a Blakean passion, breaking past error and petrification to the life-giving essential, with a more-than-Blakean clarity. It is so moving a book that it’s almost possible not to notice that it is also a very great work of literary art; its aphoristic style is balanced with a brevity and plainness, a blending of the high and the humane, that is entirely apt to its subject. This is a book you should buy and keep, as it is a book you should buy and give.