Will the Real Shabbat Please Stand Up?

Let’s start this week’s Table Talk with a trivia-istic question for the table:

What did the Quakers call the names of the week and why?

The answer: “First Day,” “Second Day,” and so on.

But why?

Before we answer, here’s a second question to stump the table:

How do we know Saturday is Shabbat?

To explain the question:

Months have a clear astronomical sign. A new month = a new moon, quite simple.

Similarly, a Jewish year is always going to start on a new moon. By tradition, we start it on the new moon closest to the vernal equinox.

But there is no similar way to determine the start of a week.

Therefore, when Christians moved their Sabbath to Sunday and Muslims moved theirs to Friday, they weren’t breaking any rules.

So when and how did our Jewish week come out Sunday-Saturday?

By the way, of the thousand reasons to go to Israel, one is to experience Yom Rishon – the first day of the week on Sunday.

Sound familiar? That’s what the Quakers did.

The Quakers did so because they didn’t like calling the days by the idolatrous names:

Sunday = Sun’s day
Monday = Moon’s day
Tuesday = Mars’s day
Wednesday = Mercury’s day
Thursday = Jupiter’s day
Friday = Venus’s day
Saturday = Saturn’s day

(They did the same for the names of the months. And so do we – sort of.)

You might say, Well, no one worships those idols anymore, so they’re just names.

I suppose you could ask that at your table, too: Are they just names? Or should a self-respecting monotheist try to avoid honoring them?

Can you think of any place names today that might raise the same objection?

How about Santa Cruz? Sacramento? Corpus-Christi?

In any event we still have a question to answer: How do we know that what we call Shabbat is the true 7th Day?

The answer is actually in this week’s portion (parashah) – the mahn (manna) fell for only six days, and on the sixth day they received a double portion. That was the objective proof and became their rhythm for forty years.

We Jews have had our ups and downs, our expulsions and exiles, but have never stopped celebrating the Seventh Day.

Final question for your table: Does it really matter?

PS — Do you know how many days until Tu B’Shvat and Purim?