The Rabbinic Shabbat is “not comprised of positive ritualized actions”

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The Rabbinic Shabbat, as found in the Mishnah and in the Bavli is not enacted by framing rituals. It is not comprised of positive ritualized actions. Rather, it is a landscape created by interlocking prohibitions upon which any and all activity (which is not prohibited), conventionally defined as sacred, profane or neutral is Shabbat activity. The “ritual” of Shabbat, is the quotidian on the background of the Shabbat landscape.

Aryeh Cohen, “The Gender of Shabbat”, in Introduction to Seder Qodashim: A Feminist Commentary on the Babylonian Talmud V, ed. Tal Ilan, Monika Brockhaus, Tanja Hidde (Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 121.

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