We managed to elude the hurricane and get a wonderful weekend at the beach. It rained for 5 minutes on the way to the beach Friday and for 5 minutes on the way back home Monday. It never rained a drop while we were there. The weather was perfect and it was a very relaxing weekend.

I managed to finish a great book called “The Sabbath” by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. I have a new respect for Jewish culture and the entire concept of the Sabbath. I’ve always viewed the day through Christian eyes which understands the need to take a day a week to publicly worship God, but the original idea had little to do with worship/admiration of God and more to do with modeling the vision of God for enjoying the world and the type of community we should aspire to. The Sabbath and its rituals and rules is not a burden or chore, it was originally a type of workers rights, a break from labor, a celebration of life, and a model for the type of community we might find in eternity with God. It is fitting that I read this book over Labor Day weekend. For me, this weekend was a sort of Sabbath in the original sense. I needed it and I felt much like a weary Israelite fleeing the Pharaoh and finding rest in the Promised Land developing a community built around the concepts of freedom, forgiveness of debt and justice. This book and my restful weekend gave me a new perspective about how to relate to the Creator.

I’ve written here before that I really think we have misinterpreted God’s heart when we waste so much time trying to worship him as if we could impress whatever created us. For Rabbi Heschel, the Sabbath is about a space in time not about a physical place or an event. It is a foreshadowing of eternity when labor, toil, and injustice will no longer rule our lives.

As Christians, our Jewish heritage has a great deal of joy to offer our communities if we can ever look past the guilt we inherited from our catholic ancestors and the anger of protest we inherited from our protestant reformers and the competitive obsession with being the "only" way that has been engrained in our modern flavors of Christianity. I’ve not practiced Buddhist philosophy long enough to take reincarnation literally, but if I did, I’d like to think I was Jewish in a former life. At a minimum, I can relate to the threads of Jewish spiritual DNA that makes up my post-modern Christian faith.