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Answer:
The Sabbath/Shabbat/Shabbos/Shabbath is the seventh day of the week.
It begins around sunset Friday night and ends around nightfall
Saturday night. In some Western languages the word for "Saturday"
means "The Sabbath", such as "el Sa'bado" in Spanish.
The Sabbath commemorates G-d's refraining from continuing creation on
account of the world being "complete." We emulate this by refraining
from various categories of "creative work," such as starting a fire,
building items, and ploughing fields, and lots of smaller-scale
activities related to these. However, Sabbath meals are festive and
song-filled, Torah learning is encouraged, and married couples are
encouraged to reconsummate their union. The idea is to refrain from
weekday activity in order to devote the day to sacred matters.
The laws of Shabbat are extremely complicated, and the various
movements differ considerably concerning which activities are
permissible and which activities are encouraged. A popular thumbnail
sketch is The Sabbath by Dayan I. Grunfeld.
The Jewish Sabbath is on Saturday because of the passage in Torah
(Bereishis [Genesis] 2:1-3) that describes how G-d rested on the
seventh day and how we are commanded to similarly rest (see Sh'mot
[Exodus] 16:28-30, 23:12, 31:12-17, and others).
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Last Update March 27 2014 @ 02:11 PM
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