Sabbath, for the person who cooks it
By Lorna Beckwith, Editor · · 2 min read
Sabbath, as I was taught it, is a day on which no work is done, and the definition was delivered to me by a woman who had been up since five to get a ham in.
I do not think she saw the contradiction, and I am not sure it was one, in her view. The ham was not work. The ham was Sunday. Work was what my father did at the plant, and he did not do it on Sunday, and that was the commandment kept.
But somebody cooked the ham. Somebody set the table and cleared it and washed the good plates by hand because they could not go in the machine, and that somebody did not, as far as I could tell, rest at any point between the alarm and the eleven o'clock news, and if you had suggested to her that this was a problem she would have been offended, because the day was hers, in a sense, and she would not have given it up.
I raise it only because I have become her. I cook the Sunday meal now and I notice, around three in the afternoon, when the men are asleep in chairs, that the day of rest has arrived for everyone but me, and I notice that I would not trade it, and I notice that both of those things are true, and I do not know what to do with that except to say it out loud once, here, and then go start the coffee.