Shabbat Shalom to Isabel, Shabbat Shalom to Noam, Shabbat Shalom to Everyone, Shabbat Shabbat Shalom

Most of us seem to labor for the sake of things of space. As a result we suffer from a deeply rooted dread of time and stand aghast when compelled to look into its face. Time to us is sarcasm, a slick treacherous monster with a jaw like a furnace incinerating every moment of our lives. Shrinking, therefore, from facing time, we escape for shelter to things of space. The intentions we are unable to carry out we deposit in space; possessions become the symbols of our repressions, jubilees of frustrations. But things of space are not fireproof; they only add fuel to the flames. Is the joy of possession an antidote to the terror of time which grows to he a dread of inevitable death? [...] It is impossible for man to shirk the problem of time. The more we think the more we realize: we cannot conquer time through space. We can only master time in time.
- Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath p6

He who wants to enter the holiness of the day must first lay down the profanity of clattering commerce, of being yoked to toil. He must go away from the screech of dissonant days, from the nervousness and fury of acquisitiveness and the betrayal in embezzling his own life. He must say farewell to manual work and learn to understand that the world has already been created and will survive without the help of man. Six days a week we wrestle with the world, wringing profit from the earth; on the Sabbath we especially care for the seed of eternity planted in the soul. The world has our hands, but our soul belongs to Someone Else. Six days a week we seek to dominate the world, on the seventh day we try to dominate the self.
The Sabbath, p. 13

Rest on Shabbat is the cessation of labor for everyone in one’s orbit. No support staff. That means that for bourgeois people, and certainly for wealthy people, who go through life supported by a service class Shabbat may be, in certain senses, a more difficult day than the other days of the week. Shabbat rest bears little in common with bourgeois senses of leisure.
When I lived in Israel, I frequently found myself caught in the middle of what was to be a sad public argument about Shabbat. So-called religious people would demand that public utilities such as buses and privately owned public accommodations, such as cafes and malls, be closed on Shabbat. Their arguments were fundamentally capitalist: I shouldn’t be made culpable for Shabbat violations by MY tax dollars paying for buses! It disrupts MY Shabbat vibe to have cafes and malls bustling! Their secular interlocutors, so-called progressives, would counter, just as your Shabbat rest is going to synagogue and singing songs, MY Shabbat rest is going to a cafe, to a movie, going shopping! Why should I be unable to rest on Shabbat MY way because of your imposition? Meanwhile, almost no one centered or even named the laborers at the center of the story. [...] When these (almost entirely Ashkenazi) progressives go to the cafe or the mall, who’s serving them? Who’s cooking? Who’s cleaning the floor and taking out the garbage? Mostly much lower-income people, far more likely to be economically persecuted Mizrahim from more traditional backgrounds, or Palestinians for the truly invisibilized jobs.
This Shabbat of leisure for the wealthy to indulge in being pampered by the working class and poor is the exact opposite of the Shabbat commanded in the Torah, which is a day to interrupt socio-economic hierarchy and point toward a repaired world that has erased such subordination. Shabbat as a day of leisure through consumption undermines the Torah’s vision to reset and let the natural order rest, to remind humans that we do not have to be in control all the time. Shabbat as a day of leisure through consumption forgets that we were a structural, inherent service class in Egypt, at the beck and call of our free superiors.
-- Rabbi Aryeh Bernstein, Shabbat: Radical Release from Control