The Ten Commandments—or The Decalogue—are the foundation of Jewish and Christian ethical belief and behaviour. It is perhaps unsurprising, given their supremacy, that they appear more than once within the Hebrew Bible. They are first delivered by God to Moses verbally in Exodus 20, where what we know as the Fourth Commandment is stated:

Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labour, and do all your work; but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; in it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your manservant, or your maidservant, or your cattle, or the sojourner within your gates; for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and hallowed it. (Exodus 20:8–11).

The Sabbath day mirrors God’s own day of rest after the six days of creation. In this way, ‘the Sabbath was built into creation itself’ (Stein 2005: 478), and it is, therefore, sacrosanct. This Commandment is so fundamental that it explicitly states that no person—irrespective of their station in life—is exempt from remembering the Sabbath and abstaining from work. Even livestock cannot be put to work on this holy day. The same Commandment is echoed in Deuteronomy, where Moses tells the Israelites: ‘Observe the sabbath day, to keep it holy, as the Lord your God commanded you’ (5:12).

The distinction between the mandates to ‘remember’ and to ‘observe’ the Sabbath has been the subject of much biblical commentary. According to Rashi, an eleventh-century French rabbi and perhaps the best-known medieval commentator on the Hebrew Bible, ‘Both of them (zachor and shamor) were spoken in one utterance and as one word and were heard in one hearing’ (Borovitz n.d.). The double instruction within the single Commandment is emblematized in the lighting of two Shabbat candles on Friday evenings. 

Exodus 31 introduces a further level of complexity when it states of the Sabbath: ‘every one who profanes it shall be put to death; whoever does any work on it, that soul shall be cut off from among his people … whoever does any work on the sabbath day shall be put to death’ (vv.14–15). Unlike Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5, in Exodus 31 there are punitive consequences for failing to keep the Sabbath.

The context of this passage is noteworthy, for the Israelites are about to receive The Ten Commandments on the tablets given to Moses by God. They are building the Tabernacle, the moveable sanctuary God directed Moses to construct for the Israelites to use as a place of worship as they wandered through the desert; a place where God could commune with His people. Upon threat of ostracization and even death, this sacred work is meant to cease in order to honour Shabbat. Holy time supersedes holy space. As twentieth-century theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote: ‘Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space: on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to the holiness in time’ (Stein 2005: 503).

The three paintings that comprise this exhibition are twentieth-century interpretations of the millennia-old Jewish tradition of observing Shabbat—the Sabbath—in accordance with the dictate conveyed in Exodus 31:12–17. Rather than focussing on the punitive nature of verses 14–15, the selected paintings highlight the holy decree to remember and observe the Sabbath. As Rabbi Amy Perlin has written:

[I]t is not until Exodus 31 that we get the full reason for keeping the Sabbath. It is not the punishment of death in 31:14 for profaning the Sabbath, or being excommunicated from the Jewish people for working on the Sabbath.… God tells us that Shabbat is a SIGN … that God consecrated us; that God made us holy. (Perlin n.d.)

These artworks are a visual representation of the progression of time through this sacred day—from Erev Shabbat on Friday evening, to Shabbat afternoon on Saturday, to Havdalah on Saturday evening. The context-specific, human-centric works of Isidor Kaufmann and Alfred Wolmark are complemented by Yosl Bergner’s seemingly acontextual depiction of a single ritual object.

Viewed collectively, these works represent the essential elements of remembering and observing Shabbat, and they amplify the perennial importance of honouring sacred time.

References

Borovitz, Jeremy. 2024. ‘Observe versus Remember’, www.sefaria.org [accessed 24 February 2024]

Perlin, Amy. ‘V’Shamru: Mo’ed and Meaning, Parashat Emor’, https://www.tbs-online.org [accessed 28 February 2024]

Stein, David E.S. (ed.). 2005. The Torah: A Modern Commentary, Revised Edition (New York: URJ Press)