In the ancient Judaic religion— as in the modern state of Israel— the Sabbath lasted from sunset on Friday until sunset on Saturday. (Among Christians the Sabbath lasts from midnight to midnight on Sunday, to celebrate the Resurrection.)

God-fearing Jews could do no work on the Sabbath. Bread could not be baked; fields were left untilled; olive trees unpruned and unharvested; even beards could not be trimmed. It was a day of utter and complete rest, except for the study of the sacred texts: an image in little of the day on which the Lord rested after his acts of Creation.

It was a crime punishable by death to do even a stroke of work on the Sabbath. However, this gave rise to certain moral dilemmas. If someone fell ill on the Sabbath, for instance, or a woman went into labour, were you justified in sending for the healer? Was the physician right to treat the sick man, or the midwife to assist at the delivery? Not to do so might result in one death, or two. If a donkey strayed from its pasture and fell into a ditch, was it lawful to drag it out? To leave it there might cause the loss of a family’s livelihood.

The more fundamentalist of the rabbis held that God’s Law as given to Moses (Exodus 20:10, 35:2-3, Leviticus 23:3, Deuteronomy 5:14 in the Old Testament) was to be literally followed. If a man should sicken on the Sabbath, why, so much the worse for him. He was obviously reaping the fruits of his sins, or Adam’s. The compassionate lawmakers were in a minority. After all, there were no texts they could quote.

It was Rabbi Hillel of blessed memory who finally won the day for the humanists. Jesus (I’m almost sure) only paraphrases him in Mark 2:27: “The Sabbath was made for man; not man for the Sabbath.” That is to say, the Law was laid down to help humans fashion a justly functioning society for themselves. It was not an irrational formula that people were bound to follow under any and all circumstances.

Bridging the issue
Let us thus come by way of Sinai and Galilee to Rama’s bridge. Inane statements about whether Rama existed or not have nothing to do with a matter of faith. (It is still moot whether there lived a historical personage identical with the Jesus of the New Testament. If there did, he was in his early teens when Hillel died, and the great rabbi’s compassionate judgements certainly influenced him.)

It is also beside the point that NASA’s and other satellites have detected the work of no human agency in the so-called bridge. There may have been natural shoals there, which were added to by the simple expedient of tossing in boulders and gravel.

As a matter of fact, there still are natural shoals extant. It is nowhere recorded that Rama’s engineers threw out piers or suspended cables.

However, if Rama lived, and if he did have a bridge made across the sea to Lanka, it was not to serve as a monument. It was for a purpose: It was for his armies to cross and engage the enemy in battle.
The bridge was made for man, not man for the bridge. Does it serve a purpose now? No one walks across it to Sri Lanka any more. I have heard it said that it served as a breakwater against which the 2004 tsunami spent much of its force before it hit the Tamil Nadu coast. Perhaps it did. As the debate over the nuclear deal with the USA has shown, enough expertise can be mustered by either side in any political debate.

Yet, if our merchant and military naval vessels can save precious time and fuel by cutting through the Palk Strait instead of rounding Sri Lanka, surely we can ask ourselves if Rama would have approved. His presumed bridge was built as a military operation. It served instead of a flotilla of vessels, which his infantry would have found hard to manage.

I understand that the Sethusamudram canal will not involve the destruction of the entire so-called bridge. Dredging the shoals for a few hundred metres’ length, to a depth of a few tens of metres, should surely not offend the tactician in Rama?

These are strange times. National policy seems to be decided by the picking of lots. While thousands die of malaria and tuberculosis and a bizarre hellbroth of viral fevers, our Union Health Minister’s one-point agenda is to ban smoking on screen. We say our economy is doing well because our stock market— in essence, a borrowing from the future— is booming, while farmers continue to kill themselves by the dozen.

And nationwide talent contests— sponsored by mobile phone companies— declare winners by counting the number of SMSs received. In keeping with current democratic fashions, are we now to decide the fate of the Sethusamudram project by means of an SMS poll? Democracy must not be left to demagogues.

Political parties, and factions, and factions of parties, which insist upon India asserting itself as a sovereign power are doing their best to undermine efforts in that direction. China is well on its way to ringing the Indian Ocean with naval bases; it’s time the Indian navy showed its might, the jingoists cry. But oh dear me, no, not at the cost of injuring Rama’s bridge, which serves no real purpose. This is especially ironic when you consider that these gentlemen have, in the recent past, not been averse to destroying other and better-documented monuments.

Lord of the Sabbath
When Jesus— if he did exist— led his hungry disciples through a field one Sabbath, they began to husk and eat the heavy ears of grain. Accused of profaning the day of rest, Jesus replied, “I say to you that in this place there is One greater than the temple…. For the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath” (Matthew 12). Now “Son of Man” is an ambiguous phrase. It could refer to the Messiah; or it could mean just any mere bridge-building mortal like you or me.

Tyagaraja sang, “Vandanamu Raghunandana/ Bhakta chandana/ Sethu bandhana/ Rama… Salutations to you, Rama, delight of Raghu’s race; who gladden your bhaktas; who built the bridge….” Rama gladdened his devotees by building the bridge and accomplishing his task of winning the war. What further purpose does the professed bridge serve today, except as an example to us, who should be building bridges between ourselves instead of barriers?

The Sabbath is a useful tool, but it must not be regarded as more than a tool. A divine tool if you will, one that leads humanity to a well-ordered and righteous society— but all the same, a tool fashioned for our use.
We do not profane a holy day by performing useful and necessary work: We sanctify it.