The Sabbath

Since its original publication in 1951, Abraham Joshua Heschel's classic of Jewish spirituality has been read by thousands of people seeking meaning in modern life. Heschel, one of the most widely respected and loved religious leaders of the twentieth century, introduced, in this brief yet profound meditation of the meaning of the Seventh Day, the enormously influential idea of an "architecture of holiness" that appears not in space but in time. Judaism, he argues, is a religion of time, finding meaning not in space and the material things that fill it but in time and the eternity that imbues it, so that "the Sabbaths are our great cathedrals."