Yesterday was Sunday, and I have been thinking why a person of faith might be a better American this week because of it....


Besides yesterday being Sunday, the day before was Saturday - the Jewish Sabbath. What makes this day special such that those of the Jewish faith are better Americans because of it?

I'm thinking about this because yesterday I went for the first time to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. Sobering is all I can say.

For one, it is reassuring to know that there is a religious group in this country that takes their ancient faith, one that seems to celebrate covenants with the Creator, so seriously. In my mind it follows that this people will, then, be exceptionally vigilant in doing their part to make sure the government of the United States honors its dual religious liberty clause of the First Amendment, "that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...."

This is one reason why those of the Jewish faith are better Americans because of their Sabbath.

Why young people are setting time aside for faith By Adam Greenwald and Geoffrey Nelson-Blake, Published: October 12 For those of us who came of age in the past decade, two forces have us racing to keep up: First, we are immersed in a 24-hour cycle of news and information with a constant flow of tweets and text messages, cellphones clutched tightly in our hands like Linus’s blanket. And second, we’re starting our adult lives in a world without enough decent-paying jobs, where we might become the first generation in memory to have less opportunity than our parents.

So it’s no wonder that many people our age struggle with the depression, anxiety and disconnection that come with living at a breakneck pace. As a 28-year-old Conservative rabbi and a 30-year-old Seventh-day Adventist minister, we’ve found that many are coping, at least in part, by turning to a rather old-fashioned prescription — religion and, in particular, observance of the Sabbath.

That may sound surprising. After all, sociologists and pollsters often find that, compared with previous generations, young people today are turning away from religious observance. Just this past week, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life reported that rates of religious affiliation in the United States are falling; among those of us under 30, nearly one-third answer “none” when asked about our religion.

As a Seventh-day Adventist and a Jew, we find that the Sabbath brings spiritual discipline to our lives. Each week is punctuated by a day of conscious abstaining from the distracting, the noisy and the ordinary. Instead, we carve out time to focus on family, community, relaxation and reflection. For at least one-seventh of our lives, we put away our wallets, park our cars, shut down our digital devices and try our best to live like we already have everything we need to be happy and fulfilled.

An insistence on creating sacred time and space is one of the key components of nearly all faiths. Traditional Jews and many Christian denominations observe one day a week of sanctified rest. Muslims around the world pause five times a day to bow in prayer. Many religions derived from Eastern traditions include a daily meditative practice. While many Americans feel distant from religion, establishing fixed times for personal renewal has universal appeal.

In spiritual communities across the country — from Jewish worship groups such as Washington’s DC Minyan and Los Angeles’s IKAR to churches too numerous to count — young people come together each week to collectively “power down” from the busy world. The ancient act of gathering in a house of worship on the Sabbath now carries a distinctly countercultural tone: It’s a declaration of independence from the iPhone, a defiant assertion that an e-mail can be left unanswered for a day without causing disaster, a formal protest against the social media machine. It’s a quiet revolution but one of enormous power.

As the executive director of the nation’s largest program for those who want to convert to Judaism, one of us deals daily with individuals and couples, most in their 20s and 30s, who are actively choosing to join a religious community or recommit themselves to living a Jewish life. In countless conversations, nearly every one of the new Jews says that the yearning for a ritual break in life’s commotion is one of the main reasons they’ve decided to convert. Perhaps that is what Ahad Ha-Am, a 20th-century Jewish philosopher, meant when he wrote: “More than the Jews have kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath has kept the Jews.”

One woman in her early 30s, who formally converted to Judaism this past week, wrote in a conversion essay: “On Shabbat we are encouraged to live it up, to surround ourselves with friends and family, laugh, tell stories and go to bed knowing that we have a whole morning and afternoon ahead of us to spend however we like. We sing, raise a glass and toast life, then go make crazy, passionate love to our partner. I beg my not-quite-convinced friends to tell me which life, secular or religious, sounds more restrictive?”

Similarly, as a Seventh-day Adventist minister, one of us knows that among the greatest appeals of that faith community is its serious observance of the Sabbath. For Seventh-day Adventists, the Sabbath is at the center of religious life. Potlucks and outdoor activities often follow Saturday morning worship services. In addition to abstaining from work and shopping, for 24 hours Adventists focus on community and rest. In our overloaded society, it cannot be a coincidence that Seventh-day Adventism is the nation’s fastest-growing Christian denomination. Adventists have found wholeness and holiness by closely adhering to a seventh-day Sabbath. It’s this weekly time together, set apart from the hurry of the week, that deepens their relationships, strengthens the fabric of their community and helps restore hope and joy to their lives.

We’ve also witnessed a more subtle embrace of Sabbath values — such as slowing down and eschewing technology — in secular culture. For example, the movement toward “slow food” and community gardens directly clashes with and helps free us from our addiction to fast food and our YouTube-driven attention spans. Recently, in America’s traffic capital, Los Angeles, more than 100,000 pedestrians, cyclists and skateboarders filled empty downtown streets for CicLAvia, a celebration of all things human-powered.

And last spring, a National Day of Unplugging sponsored by Reboot, a nontraditional group of Jewish thought leaders, inspired a range of figures such as Jimmy Fallon and the wife of a former British prime minister to pledge to spend a day consciously avoiding technology and commerce — and instead refocusing on life’s simpler joys.

In place of anxiety about the scarcity of time, energy and resources, and instead of judging our personal connections by counting our Twitter followers or Facebook friends, faith gives us space to spend time with community members and loved ones. In place of the constant barrage of information and responsibilities, the Sabbath gives us room to breathe.

While the statistics paint a picture of waning affiliation and spiritual apathy, our view from the front lines is different. As leaders working with young people from many faiths, we are witnessing the beginnings of a religious renaissance through an embrace of the Sabbath. And for a stressed-out, anxious generation seeking strength and solace, it’s just in time.

agreenwald@ajula.edu

geoff@sfop.org

Adam Greenwald, a Conservative rabbi, is the executive director of the Miller Introduction to Judaism Program at American Jewish University. Geoffrey Nelson-Blake, a pastor in the Seventh-day Adventist Church, is a community organizer with the San Francisco Organizing Project.

London Olympics: Spirit of ‘Chariots of Fire’ echoes among hosts of 2012 Games By Mike Wise, Published: July 26 “Let us now praise famous men and our fathers that begat us. All these men were honored in their time and were a glory of their days.”

— Opening Scene from “Chariots of Fire”

LONDON — Three weeks before the Olympic Games began, the Best Picture of 1981 was re-released here. Crowds of Londoners filled theaters as the lads in white churned the beach in St. Andrews again, a Vangelis synthesizer pulsing through their legs.

With Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps now in town, less than a day away from the Opening Ceremonies, really, who pays to see a three-decade-old movie set in 1924 Paris?

Or the companion “Chariots of Fire” stage play now showing at the Gielgud Theater in London, where Eric Liddell, the Scottish Christian, and Harold Abrahams, the English Jew, run under the same Union Jack once more?

“I’m not exactly sure all the reasons people are still interested in my father and men like him,” said Patricia Liddell Russell, 77, from her home in Ontario, Canada. The eldest daughter of Liddell added, “But I’d like to think it’s because they see principles in him they wish they had in themselves.”

Sue Pottle, the daughter of Abrahams, in a phone interview from North Wales, said, “Their world is gone but something about what they represented remains, doesn’t it now?”

All of Britain is teeming for the Opening Ceremonies Friday night, a grand gala said to feature David Beckham, Harry Potter, Mary Poppins, James Bond, Sir Paul McCartney and every other real or imagined prominent soul in British pop culture. Beneath the excited wait, though, there is this get-on-with-it-already attitude among the Brits.

Londoners don’t need Jacques Rogge and his IOC VIPs puffing their chests out and clogging traffic to give them their sense of history; that’s the Queen’s job. They aren’t gullible, either, when it comes to these Games’ most inspiring human-interest stories — because long ago they had the original.

Two weeks ago, Sir Roger Bannister, cane in hand at 83, returned to the track where he broke the four-minute barrier for the mile in 1954, the year he became Sports Illustrated’s inaugural “Sportsman of the Year.”

“No longer conscious of my movement, I discovered a new unity with nature,” Bannister said of his historic run. “I had found a new source of power and beauty, a source I never dreamt existed.”

Here, in their great champions, human majesty lives on.

Did we mention who the timekeeper was for Bannister that day? Abrahams. He later gave Bannister his Omega stopwatch that timed his 3:59.4. (“Of course,” Sue Pottle says, chuckling, “I believe that’s after my father had bought another.”)

On the baton passing went in the U.K. Sebastian Coe, among the world’s greatest middle-distance runners in the 1970s and 1980s along with rivals Steve Ovett and Steve Cram, remembered Abrahams “actually handing me an award at an athletics event one year. It’s something I often look back to because he was an extraordinary figure in our sport.”

Now the head of the London Olympic Organizing Committee, he’s simply known as “Seb Coe.”

“I think ‘Chariots of Fire’ was one of those films that really did broaden people’s understanding of our own Olympic history,” he said when we spoke a few months ago. “It showed who we were and why.”

They don’t merely embrace sporting history in London; they hold it up as the seminal example of what competition was, what it could be again if the money and the corruption would just go away.

A missionary in China like his parents, Liddell famously declined to run in the 100 meters in Paris on a Sunday, his Sabbath. He died of a brain tumor, at just 43, in a prisoner of war camp in 1945.

“When people heard he wouldn’t run on a Sunday, they immediately began to think of my father as rigid, stiff and moralistic,” Russell said. “He was not that at all. He simply wasn’t about to change that rule for himself, is all.”

In an interview with London’s Guardian newspaper this week, Abdul Karim Aziz, Afghanistan’s top track official, acknowledged that “most of the runners [on his team] don’t even have standard [running] shoes, just ones they buy from the bazaar.”

“I was thinking as I read that story that we have a host nation with everything,” said Pottle, whose father died in 1978, three years before “Chariots of Fire” was released. “Then other nations, our more deprived colleagues, can’t afford training shoes? We have a responsibility to provide for them, don’t we?”

The more the Games evolve, the more the contradictions grow. The IOC pines for the purity of sport, but there are so many tripwires now in an Olympics that includes a Kabul miler without proper training and equipment as well as LeBron James and the Team USA multimillionaire basketball players.

In a speech honoring Liddell at Edinburgh University in May, Lord David Puttnam, the producer of “Chariots of Fire,” said, “I’ve long believed there should be a fourth [place] in every victory ceremony reserved for athletes in each discipline who have exceeded their previous personal bests by the greatest margin.

“I believe they should have their own medal. And the really intelligent way to begin to unhook ourselves from our present, rather juvenile conception of success would be for an official medal table to be created that illustrates which country is delivering the best performance, in terms of the percentage of their competitors who are in turn achieving their individual personal bests. Because that’s the country that’s truly succeeding.”

He added, that “better should not be confused with bigger or grander.”

Bannister became a renowned neurologist and a Master at Oxford University. Though he never won an Olympic medal, he is regarded as a national treasure, still very much the persevering young man who spent 10 years devoted to eclipsing the four-minute barrier.

“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up,” he once said. “It knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a lion or a gazelle — when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.”

Pottle can see how stodgy it all sounds — reminiscing over men long dead and gone, trotting 83-year-olds out for torch-lighting ceremonies, dwelling on a different time with different ideals.

“Oh, I suppose it’s all mollycoddle — a time long gone that no one can identify with today,” she said. “My father’s idol was Jesse Owens. He was the most fantastic athlete he’d ever seen. And Jesse once said he had hoped he could win so he could make a few pennies like Johnny Weissmuller. In that way, it’s good men can earn a living with their talent now.”

Neither daughter of the Paris gold medalists said they would attend the London Games. For one, they haven’t been invited as guests. And besides, the daughter of 100-meter Olympic champion Harold Abrahams said, “I’m not paying hundreds of pounds to see a race that lasts nine seconds.”



For Mike Wise’s previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/wise.