For instance, do you turn off your computer, your iPad, your smart phone, and all of your other electronic communications devices before Shabbat candlelighting and keep them off until after Havdalah the next evening?
I may be asking a lot of people, including myself. After all, most of us, including our Messianic Jewish brothers and sisters drive to shul and perform other acts that would be considered "breaking the Shabbat" in an Orthodox context. While "keeping the commandments" usually requires building up set of habits and behavioral patterns over the span of years or even decades, as human beings, we usually reach a "comfort zone" of Shabbat activities and then stay there. In other words, we don't try to get closer to the goals we originally set for ourselves when we first made a commitment to a Sabbath's rest.
I bring all this up because I received a prompt from the Sabbath Manifesto site announcing that the Shabbat starting at sundown on March 4, 2011 is the National Day of Unplugging.
Think of it as a challenge to help improve your Sabbath rest. Could you completely unplug from all of your electronic communication devices for over 24 hours? Could you sign out of your email, stop tweeting and Facebooking, turn off your cell, and log off your computer?
Are you getting the shakes? No Internet or electronic communications for approximately 25 hours. That's harder for some people than not eating for the same amount of time (remember Yom Kippur?).
The idea isn't to deprive you in any way, but to help you reclaim your lives and insert more friend and family face-to-face interactions. This allows you more time to "smell the roses", so to speak, to study the Word of God, to fellowship with like minded people of the faith, to do all of the things the Shabbat was designed for. This isn't restriction; it's freedom from a sort of tyranny what we allow to control us the other six days of the week.
If you keep the Sabbath but would like to keep it better, there's hope. If you are a Jew, a Christian, or anyone who'd like to live without phone calls, texting, tweeting, IMing, and emailing for just one day, in order to experience what the rest of your life is like, take the National Day of Unplugging 2011 challenge. If you keep the Shabbat, but not this deeply, you could experience greater rewards of rest and peace. If you don't typically take a rest day from your electronics, give it a try. You may find a freedom you never knew existed.
On the seventh day God finished the work that He had been doing, and He ceased on the seventh day from all the work that He had done. And God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy, because on it God ceased from all the work of creation that He had done. -Genesis 2:2-3
The road is long and often, we travel in the dark.
