How two Orthodox rabbis refused to compromise Jewish law and helped reshape American life
For the 250th anniversary of American independence, I wrote this article on a little-known subject: how two rabbis — one Sephardic, one Ashkenazi — in the turbulent years around the turn of the 20th century helped create the weekend, Saturday and Sunday, that we take for granted today.
The article also shows something worth noticing: religious principles that are fixed and non-negotiable are, in the end, the ones that endure. They pass from generation to generation, and they leave their good mark on society and on the world. A great life lesson!
The article was published by Tablet Magazine. Here is the link to the original: The Rabbis Who Gave America the Weekend
This July 4, the United States celebrates 250 years of freedom. Among the most American of those freedoms is the First Amendment right to practice one’s religion as one chooses. We tend to think of that right as a passive protection, a line the state will not cross. But religious freedom in America was rarely that simple. In fact, in two famous and decisive fights, that freedom turned on the effort of two rabbis who, by refusing to give up the Jewish Shabbat, gave America one of its most cherished institutions: the weekend.
To understand how, you have to go back to the start of the 20th century. Back then, Shabbat observance in America was collapsing. The workweek ran six days, Monday through Saturday, and almost no employer — not even many Jewish-owned factories — gave Saturday off. The Jewish immigrant who refused to work on Shabbat was often fired before Monday morning.
Worse still, every state had its blue laws, Christian Sunday-rest legislation that forced most businesses to close on Sunday. The purpose of those laws was openly religious: the marketplace shut down so workers and merchants could attend church on Sunday morning. But for the Shabbat-observant Jew the arithmetic was brutal: he closed his business on Saturday to keep the law of the Torah, and kept it closed on Sunday to keep the law of the government. That meant the stores of observant Jews could open no more than four and a half days a week, while everyone else’s opened six.
There was an obvious way out. In Germany, in the 1840s, the radical reformer Samuel Holdheim moved his congregation’s main services to Sunday. Why insist on Saturday, he argued, if the essential thing was simply a day of spiritual rest? The idea crossed the Atlantic. In 1885, the Reform rabbinical conference in Pittsburgh declared that observance need not be confined to the Seventh Day, and some congregations began holding their services on Sunday morning instead. The arrangement solved the economic problem at once. No fights with employers, no collision with the blue laws, no risk of unemployment.
But the Orthodox rabbinic leaders understood that this accommodation solved the wrong problem. Shabbat was never just a day off. It was the day around which everything else in Jewish life turned. And once Shabbat observance weakened, the festivals it anchors would begin to fade too, and the rhythms of Jewish life would unravel. Gravest of all, the transmission of Judaism from parents to children would be at risk.
And so two rabbis took the other path. They refused to treat Shabbat as negotiable, and they spent the next half century defending it.
Rab Hayim Pereira Mendes (1852-1937) — known in his American life as Henry — was one of the great Sephardic voices of his generation. He was born in Birmingham, England, into a distinguished Sephardic rabbinic family with roots in Jamaica, London, and Amsterdam. He arrived in New York in 1877 to serve as minister and jazan of Congregation Shearith Israel, the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue founded in 1654, the oldest Jewish congregation in North America.
Mendes gave traditional Judaism in America something it badly needed: refined, eloquent English. It was no accident. His maternal grandfather, Rab David Aaron de Sola, jazan of London’s Bevis Marks synagogue, delivered the first English sermon ever heard in that synagogue, in 1831. His father, Rab Abraham Pereira Mendes, was the first Sephardic Jew to publish a volume of sermons in English. Mendes carried that tradition across the Atlantic and rendered a normative, uncompromising Judaism into dignified American English. At a time when many Orthodox rabbis still preached mainly in Yiddish or German, Mendes brought an English voice of traditional Judaism straight into the courts, the legislatures, the universities, and the newspapers, without diluting it.
He was not an isolated case. For Sephardic Jews, the answer to assimilation was never to compromise on principle. It was translation: not only speaking in a familiar language, but adopting everything in the surrounding culture that did not contradict Torah observance, while treating Jewish law as entirely non-negotiable.
That was the world of Maimonides, who wrote his greatest philosophical work in Arabic, the language of his neighbors, and defended Judaism in the very terms his Muslim contemporaries used, without surrendering a single Jewish principle. It was the world of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam and London, who dressed, spoke, and carried themselves like the leading citizens of their cities while remaining wholly faithful to the Torah. And it was Mendes’s world too. When he wrote his most famous book, The Jewish Religion Ethically Presented, he explained every law and every ceremony of Judaism in the language his American readers respected — the language of ethics, character, and reason — and changed nothing in the law itself. Because he came from that Sephardic tradition, he did not believe a Jew had to choose between being fully Jewish and fully at home in America: you could be both. The Torah and Shabbat observance were not negotiable, but the way they were explained was.
His Ashkenazi partner in this fight was Rab Bernard Drachman (1861-1945). He was born in New York City, the son of immigrant parents from Galicia and Bavaria, and graduated from Columbia College in 1882. A Reform congregation funded his studies in Germany, expecting him to come back a Reform rabbi. Instead, after encountering the piety and intellectual seriousness of Eastern European Orthodoxy, he returned to the United States a committed Orthodox Jew, to the shock of those who had sponsored him.
Drachman was the first American-born Orthodox rabbi to preach in English in the country. For more than 50 years he led Congregation Zichron Ephraim, on East 67th Street, and later the Park East Synagogue. Together, Mendes and Drachman showed that traditional Judaism was not a relic of the Old World, but could be made American without surrendering its principles.
Both men built institutions. In 1898, Mendes founded the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America — today’s Orthodox Union — and was its first president. Drachman was the second, from 1908 to 1920. Mendes led the Jewish Sabbath Observance Society, and Drachman the Jewish Sabbath Alliance of America, a group devoted to helping Jews keep Shabbat without suffering untenable consequences.
Their work was often unglamorous and intensely personal. Mendes kept an office beside Shearith Israel open from morning to night. Day after day, Shabbat-observant Jews arrived who had lost their jobs for refusing to work on Saturday. Again and again, Mendes personally helped them find new work. He traveled repeatedly to Albany to testify against the Sunday-closing laws, fought to have Jewish students excused from exams set on Jewish holidays, and petitioned the government to grant Jewish soldiers leave on Yom Tov. Drachman installed his own brother Gustave, a lawyer, as the Sabbath Alliance’s full-time counsel, defending Jewish shopkeepers prosecuted under the Sunday-closing laws for decades.
For years they pressed their case, without success, through the legislatures, the courts, and direct appeals to employers. Christian Sabbatarian organizations like the Lord’s Day Alliance defeated Jewish requests for exemption again and again, while non-Jewish merchants argued that letting Jews close on Saturday instead of Sunday gave them an unfair commercial advantage.
After decades of failing to convince Americans to honor the Jewish Shabbat, Drachman proposed something bold. Instead of forcing every citizen into the same religious calendar, why not create two days of rest? Let Jews keep Saturday and Christians Sunday, and let America be encouraged to adopt a shorter workweek.
In 1915, Drachman took that argument straight into hostile territory when he traveled to the Lord’s Day Congress in Oakland, California, a national gathering of the same Christian Sabbatarians who had opposed Jewish requests for so long. Standing before men who had rejected his appeals again and again, Drachman spoke respectfully but without apology. The Jewish Shabbat, he reminded them, was in the Ten Commandments. It was not negotiable. But if each religious community could preserve its own sacred day with dignity, while workers gained more time for family and rest, American society itself would benefit.
Unlike the month and the year, the seven-day week has no basis in astronomy or nature. The unbroken cycle of six days of work followed by a sacred seventh entered world civilization through the Hebrew Bible itself. Two Orthodox rabbis were now asking the most powerful industrial nation on earth to reorganize modern labor around that ancient biblical rhythm.
It is true that the Orthodox rabbis did not establish the five-day workweek alone: labor unions, industrial reformers, and new theories of productivity all contributed to its rise. But they helped build the moral and political case years before it became common practice, and they did so precisely because they had refused to let Jewish distinctiveness dissolve into the surrounding culture.
Drachman could make that argument in Oakland precisely because he had not moved Shabbat to Sunday. It was the insistence on Saturday — the very thing that made observant Jews inconvenient to the existing system — that in time became part of a broader rethinking of work, rest, and religious freedom in America.
The idea spread slowly at first, then with remarkable speed. Starting in 1919, the Sabbath Alliance joined forces with Jewish-led labor unions. In 1920, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America endorsed the five-day workweek. In 1924, a convention of Orthodox rabbis from New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut formally endorsed the two-day weekend; that same year, 50,000 garment workers went on strike in support of it. Two years later the number doubled: 100,000 garment workers in New York and Philadelphia. By 1927, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics declared the five-day week practically standard in the clothing industry, and from there it spread across the American economy.
Mendes witnessed that transformation before he died in 1937. Drachman lived until 1945, long enough to see Shabbat observed again on the Seventh Day by thousands of American Jews, for the first time in nearly a century.
Today, as America marks its milestone birthday, the weekend has become so ordinary that almost no one asks where it came from. The answer, in part, is two Orthodox rabbis who refused to move Shabbat to Sunday. What they were doing, without quite knowing it, was the unfinished work of American religious freedom. They did not set out to give America the weekend. They simply would not give up Shabbat. And precisely because they would not bend, America ended up adapting to their principles.
