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“A time to catch our breath” by Rabbi Joshua Heschel

Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism and falsehood. The liturgical movement must become a revolutionary movement, seeking to overthrow the forces that continue to destroy, the promise, the hope, the vision.
Rabbi Abraham  Joshua Heschel

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel ("praying with his feet"), second from right.
First row, from far left: John Lewis, an unidentified nun, Ralph Abernathy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Bunche, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Fred Shuttlesworth.
Second row: Visible behind (and between) Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ralph Bunche is Rabbi Maurice Davis.

 

Tonight is a time to catch our breath.

Whatever we have been doing, making, working, creating.

Tonight we pause to catch our breath.

 

No matter how necessary our work, how important to the world, how urgent that we continue it.

No matter how joyful our work, how fully and profoundly human.

No matter how flawed our work, how urgent that we set it right.

No matter how hard we have worked to gather our modest fame, our honorable livelihood, our reasonable
power.

Tonight we pause to catch our breath.

Tonight we pause to share whatever we have gathered.


To set apart one day a week for freedom.

A day on which we would not use the instruments which have been so easily turned into weapons for destruction.

A day for being with ourselves.

A day for detachment from the vulgar, of independence from external obligations.

A day on which we use no money.

A day of armistice in the economic struggle with our fellow men & women and the forces of nature.


Is there any institution that holds out a greater hope for our progress than the Sabbath?

Abraham Joshua Heschel