Keeping Shabbat and Outright Embezzlement (Parshat Vayakhel)

Parshat Vayakhel picks up on themes that have already been introduced and developed in previous parshiot, specifically the precise dimensions and the esthetic and iconographic character of the various components of the Mishkan structure and its furnishings.

Seemingly out of the blue, and with no apparent connection to the bulk of the Parsha, Vayakhel opens with a reprise of the fourth commandment;

שֵׁשֶׁת יָמִים, תֵּעָשֶׂה מְלָאכָה, וּבַיּוֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִי יִהְיֶה לָכֶם
קֹדֶשׁ שַׁבַּת שַׁבָּתוֹן, לַיהוָה
Six days shall work be done but on the seventh day you shall have kadosh, a day of complete rest to the Lord (Shemot/Exodus 35:2).

I have already belabored the point elsewhere and often, but it is worth mentioning yet again:

Observance of Shabbat has two mandatory and interconnected components. The first is to labor for six days. The second is to desist from labor on the seventh.

Interestingly, the Torah does not seem concerned that Jews might desist from income-producing labor during the six weekdays. Rather, the Torah doesn’t fully trust us to actually take a day off on the seventh. One would imagine that had God offered a day off to the Italians or English or Russians they would have jumped at the opportunity. (The French would have asked for two days off). But the Jews?  No, we Jews had to be threatened with death by stoning if  we do not rest on Shabbat.  Apparently, there has always been something compulsively productive about our people, a commercial restlessness that renders us incapable of taking a break unless we’re forced to do so.

Yet, while there has always been a need to compel many of us to take off on Shabbat, nowadays we also have an opposite phenomenon, i.e. Jewish men who desist from productive labor during all seven days. They eschew all work, preferring instead to spend the six weekdays conjuring (among other things) new ways to turn the restorative observance of our Shabbat into a Sisyphean challenge of halachic one-upmanship. They obsess over endless new discoveries of “shalt nots” that can turn a day of rest into a suffocating effort to avoid any nouvelle halakhic faux pas.

In the Torah, someone who labors on Shabbat is subject to the death penalty. However, merely desisting from labor does not make one “shomer Shabbos”, it only means they avoid execution.

Reaping the rewards for keeping Shabbat requires one to work during the weekdays. This includes both the heavenly reward for obeying Torah and the earthly reward of enjoying the restorative pleasure of taking a break from our labors.

Labor is an essential component of shmirat Shabbat. After all, one who keeps Shabbat all week is not making the actual Sabbath into “kodesh”, i.e. separate and distinct from the rest of the week. In all likelihood, when such a person makes kiddush on Friday evening it is a ברכה לבטלה (a wasted blessing), having been made over a non-occurrence.

In Israel we are experiencing a phenomenon that is historically unprecedented. There are today hundreds of thousands of men who do not labor at all from Sunday through Friday.  Hence, their Shabbat is conceptually meaningless as there is no juxtaposition to the weekdays.  Perhaps this explains why cigarette smoking remains so endemic among such people, as the act of lighting a cigarette is considered labor. By desisting from Marlboros for 26 hours they are, at least technically, validating their day of rest. And where would halakha be without “technically”? (And even this may not obtain, as there is one major rabbinic tradition which holds  that fire on Shabbat is a lesser transgression, one that merits only lashes not stoning.)

Now, if such men were shirking work on their own dime, their lack of full Shabbat observance would be an עבירה שבין אדם למקום a sin only against God.  But as we all know, עבירה גוררת עבירה, transgression leads to transgression; so now we enter the territory of עבירה שבין אדם לחברו a crime against one’s fellow man. Hence a direct connection between not working and grand larceny. Such people end up embezzling the public, using the same catapilpulations they deploy to discover how not to open a container of orange juice or a can of tuna fish on Shabbat, to rationalizing their relentless picking of the taxpayer’s pocket.

כל המשים על לבו שיעסוק בתורה ולא יעשה מלאכה ויתפרנס מן הצדקה הרי זה חלל את השם ובזה את התורה וכבה מאור הדת וגרם רעה לעצמו ונטל חייו מן העולם הבא …  וכל תורה שאין עמה מלאכה סופה בטילה וגוררת עון. וסוף אדם זה שיהא מלסטם את הבריות

“Anyone who sets his heart on engaging in Torah and not to do work, and to live off charity, then behold he has profaned God’s name, disgraced the Torah, extinguished the light of religion, caused harm to himself and removed his life from the world to come  . . .  And all Torah that is not accompanied by work is ultimately worthless and drags one to sin. Ultimately such a man will embezzle the public.”

רמב״ם הלכות תלמוד תורה פרק ג הלכה י
Maimonides, Hilkhot Talmud Torah Chapter 3 Halakha 10

Rambam was prescient, even prophetic. He foresaw an era like ours when the abuse of Torah would be deployed to render tens of thousands of families chronically dependent on people they disrespect, not to mention shirk any responsibility for even their own defense, let alone defending the very society on which they are utterly dependent for life support.