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Lauren Winner is on a wonderful spiritual journey and is kind enough to write about it for others to go along for the ride. In Girl Meets God she navigated readers through her sojourn from Judaism to Christianity. And in her newest book, Mudhouse Sabbath, she discusses the Jewish traditions she misses.

What have you found useful as you start re-thinking the Sabbath as a Christian?

I've reflected on what I understand is the two over-arching themes of Sabbath law in Judaism. One of those is the general command not to work on the Sabbath, and the other is the general command to be joyful. So I tried to reflect, in both my family and community, on ways that I could undertake both of those two over-arching principles.

One way is that I've stopped shopping. That was something I only discerned to be not very in keeping with the spirit of the Sabbath and resting, not interfering with creation. One of the other things I have found helpful is that I try not to check my email or use my cell phone on the Sabbath, which sounds like a small thing. But those are implements that connect us to our work and they put me in this state of very low-grade, constant tension that someone is trying to get a hold of me. So I simply try not to check email or use my cell phone on Sabbath.

Now obviously, there are exceptions to all of these rules. My mother was quite ill last fall, and if there was a Sunday and she needed me to go to the grocery store and purchase some Ensure for her, obviously I'm not going to respond to that by saying, "I'm sorry, it's the Sabbath."

You refer to eating kosher as eating attentively. Talk a bit about what you're finding is helpful, as a Christian, as you think about the idea of kosher eating.

One of the things I realized was missing from my spiritual life was that as a Jew who observed the rather rigorous Jewish dietary laws, I had to pay attention all the time to what I was eating, who was preparing my food, how it was getting to my table. And after I stopped keeping kosher I was much more likely to order take-out, to kind of eat standing up over the sink, to drive-thru McDonald's. I began to realize that I was unthinkingly using food as a fuel. I wasn't offering any gratitude to the Creator who had provided it for me.

You say, "Churches don't grieve well often because of a lack of ritual. And if there's a place where there is a discipline to mourning, it's in Judaism, which marks the days." Talk about how Judaism "marks the days" as part of the mourning process.

The first period that is demarcated in the Jewish community would be the seven days, or the week after someone dies. That is a time when the mourner is not expected to do anything else but be grief stricken. People come to your home and provide all of your meals. The second period is the period of the following month, which is a time when the mourner gradually edges back into his or her normal day-to-day rhythms, but there are still actually a lot of restrictions on what the mourner can do. And then the rest of the year of mourning is recognized, the mourner is required to say a prayer every day, and it is a prayer that can only be said with a quorum of ten other Jews gathered for prayer. But it doesn't say anything about mourning. It is entirely a prayer that praises God. It begins, "Magnified and sanctified may his great name be," and goes on from there as a hymn of praise.

I think all of us who have mourned know that sometimes we don't feel like praising God in the middle of our grief. So the Jewish mourner is required to do it even though he may not feel like it and to do it in his community even though he may feel like staying in bed. I think what is so insightful about the Jewish tradition of mourning is the recognition that mourning takes a long time.

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January (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48