Thou Shalt Sabbath
by Ella DeCastro Baron
Vex Caztro, Crownaday #60: Freestyle Sidewalk Ikebana with Lit Matches Crown, digital photograph, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
Thou Shalt Sabbath
Ella DeCastro Baron | Mar 2025 | Issue 43
At Sabbath School, we sing Jesus loves me this I know and I fantasize that I’m there, a stick-figure brown girl, a hyphen in the spectrum of red and yellow, black and white kids on Jesus’ lap as per that idyllic painting on our bedroom wall. Creamy robe and skin, butterscotch hair, sad sky-blue eyes.
The Bible that Mama quotes mostly admonishes us to serve, purify, labor, eke our way to heaven. Gawwd, God. You’re Mean Joe Green. Meek, depraved, unworthy us, pining for your son Jesus’ ivory lap. For the Bible tells me so. My timid heart does not tell me so. Little ones to him belong. My itchy, rashy body does not belong. They are weak but he is strong. I’m curled on the ground, a question mark at Jesus’ legs.
+
My great-grandfather’s generation in the Philippines had the distinct honor [pursed lips] of being the first United States colony. The U.S. freed our people from 333 years under Spain’s empire, swapping out a Catholic noose with a less ornate Protestant choke-hold.
+
The 1970s translation of Sabbath Commandment: turn off all “worldly” noise i.e. no Gilligan’s Island on our rabbit-ear TV, no AM/FM dance parties, no irreversible Barbie haircuts or Spirograph mandalas, no Tinker Toys wobbly windmills. This lasted every week from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, the official day according to ye Olde Testament. Take care not to start late or end early, or woe to ye.
Groan. Here we are again. Fridays at dusk, Mom’s elder sister Auntie Ellen’s fam with four kids drive from San Francisco to Vallejo to help us observe the Sabbath. These colonized religious rituals burden balikbayan boxes—seventy pound homecoming packages—shipped from the Philippines to California. How do six kids refrain from giggling, snacking, fidgeting? How does a kindergartener not be childlike and especially not childish?
We must prepare ourselves in worship to our one, true God.
Forced rest, an oxymoron.
Most Filipinos eat nose to tail, wing to beak animals all the livelong, but Seventh-Day Adventists are fundamentalists bound to eat “whole plant foods eaten whole,” so…root to shoot? After dinners of boiled gulay and garlicky, vinegary, soy-sauced tokwa over rice, we are ushered to cross-leg on brown knotted carpet, around the glass-topped coffee table preserving a hand-carved, mahogany barangay. The wooden Philippine village teems with 3-D thatched stilted huts and small smiley kababayan, neighbors going about their dailies: fishing, planting rice, huddling over baskets, whispering the latest tsismis.
Lights dim while Mama and Auntie Ellen instruct us on the Bible story that week.They read in extra-enunciated English, animating ye and thou and shalt and shalt NOT never-eth for all eterneth-tee. We sing hymns labeled “Negro Spirituals.” Dated: 1600-1800s. Any cousin accompanies on piano (pick a cousin! we all play piano!). We chirp crisply in three-part-harmony, not soulfully like the African American brothers and sisters in Christ at our church. Until the 1980s, we are the only non-Black family at Berean SDA Church till we move to a Filipino-forward chapter a mile away.
Cousin Charlie is the fun-nest second grader on that caca carpet, picking lint and tracing his finger around the cracked desert-like rug patches. We sly-snicker, slouch when the adults’ necks crane, and the side-eye of Sauron is apeepin’.
Too much about these Sabbath Days are more antsy than rest. I regret it mostly ‘cause I can’t enjoy HALF of the measly two days off from school every week. A languishing grief is missing Saturday morning cartoons because we tread lightly on this earth, being, IN the world but not OF it.
I can’t relate to my classmates on Monday morning. Did you see that episode of Superfriends?! Let’s play it at recess! How fun must it be as heathens, so remarkably heavy-footed, IN and OF the world?
Once in a moon, Auntie Ellen brandishes a record of theatrically performed Biblical stories. She and Uncle Kaloy sell children’s Bible storybooks and records, door-to-door, as “literary missionaries.” It sustains their family’s immigrant lives as they root themselves in America.
My “favorite” terrifying Sabbath is when we convince our parents to let us hear the record of Moses being found in a floating basket by Pharaoh's daughter, then growing up as Pharaoh’s bromance! Moses eventually realizes he has to tell Pharaoh to, “Let my people goooo” as the representative Israelite.
Pharaoh says, hell naw brah. Who is the Lord, that I should obey his voice to let Israel go? I know not the Lord, neither will I let Israel go. I want to keep all your people because empire requires slave labor and I’m certainly not gonna build my own pyramids.
So. Moses, hesitant, unleashes plagues—God’s order and design—onto all of Egypt. After each, Moses does a temp check. But everytime, the heart of Pharaoh was hardened, neither would he let the children of Israel go. Moses keeps going. Ten plagues! Each one worse than the last!
Sitting on that rug, our round, brown faces eyeball the electric blue-covered picture book with appropriate for children text as we listen, absorbing each curse.
WATER TURNING TO BLOOD! FROGS! LICE! FLIES! LIVESTOCK PESTILENCE!
BOILS! HAIL! LOCUSTS! DARKNESS! DEATH OF FIRSTBORN!
The record is all kinds of melodrama for our Mamas. Overacting voices and exaggerated sound effects, some orchestral emphasis at the right pauses. Croaks and ribbets. Buzzabuzz and slap-swatty hands.
Men and women squeal, “Look at my skin! The boils!”
Pitter patters of drops crescendo to pounding hail? Water? Or frogs?
A kid gasps, “Father! Look at this cute grasshopper—oh wait those are LOCUSTS and they are hella! Swarming! Fuuu—I mean AHHHH!!” Voices trail, presumably as families flee towards shelter.
“Why is it so dark in here?!”
A great pause as the needle scratches the record ‘round. The sound of the Angel of Death, a slow-n-low cello superimposes “oh nooo,” and we kids squeal, shudder, O-mouthed. The scariest best part: we feel a whoosh of poisoned, wonky wind, fingering its way between the coffee table’s mahogany muscled legs to our knockin’ knees and trembling torsos.
We suck our breaths as the voices echo, wail in what Uncle pronounces, “weeping and gnashing of teeth.” The firstborn throughout the land, d.e.d. Every single eldest child and animal. Kaput.
EXCEPT! No one dies in any houses with smeared lamb’s blood on the door frame. Somehow the Israelites got the DM, or FAX, or papyrus memo.
Our family—and this is key because somehow our vegetarian household woulda had a lamb shank in the fridge—is among the saved, too. Not because Moses and his people are Filipinos. The Philippine archipelago, 7,600+ islands in Southeast Asia, is a lot more than a stone’s throw from Egypt.
Uncle Kaloy baritones the good news of the Bible. “We inherit this legacy because we are God’s chosen through Jesus Christ, and these are the people of his lineage.”
“Hallelujah, amen!” swoon Mama and Auntie as they open the hymnal to harmonize a fam’ favorite, “Sweet, Sweet Spirit.” One of them beckons us to bow heads, clasp hands. Let us quiet and further prepare our hearts.
I glance at Charlie. I don’t get it, not really. I need reassurance that my stomach ache and short breaths will not betray me. His wavy, coarse, black-haired head bounces with a reassuring yup, one eyebrow dipping in a wink. Feeling anything is good. Even if we’re petrified. Icky-longing is better than no longing.
Grin to grin, exhale relief, oh thank gawd.
Whenever we doubt our holy-enoughness from Sundays through Fridays, each time this record plays again in the Sabbath rotation, we believe we could be saved one more time, from alladem plagues portending The End.
+
Our family outgrew that house and those record-scratchin’ children’s books. Yet my brain replayed a grooved, etched copy, a B-side secret soundtrack as I morphed into a Frozen Chosen adult, heaped with fraught religious balikbayan baggage. I left religion at home for college, tried to stamp a Freshman fifteen-day notice to evict it from my body AKA temple. By then, I was properly shackled and shamed, to work harder to earn that peaceful Pause.
I resisted and resented Sabbath until at thirty, I married a Jewish man, and we started practicing Shabbat instead of Sabbath.
I knew next to nothing about Jewish culture except for the Plagues story and one co-worker’s racist joke I didn’t get. Hey, maybe my husband is a descendant of Moses? It helped me blend our growing multicultural family to know that my “Old Testament” is very overlappy with the Torah, including the Ten Commandments and mandated rest.
I learned to enjoy braiding challah dough (hip hop CHALLAH at ya girl! Never gets old). I conjure themed meals to please many palates. Toddlers to octogenarians read: soft food, please. Foodie, exvangelical, Jew-ish, Christian-ish, refugee, atheist, chillactivist, queer, “plus ones” around our rummage sale table. My first newlywed meal: Eastern European stuffed cabbage to please mother-in-law (effort grade: A. Taste grade proportional to day-long labor: C, will not make again).
Our Shabbat times are welcoming, wayfinding, and wonderfully weird. As they should be. Below the worn table’s symphony of clinking, buzzing, humming, there may always be that 1970s coffee table and carpet, capturing a desert landscape of colonized converts. Hear us trying failing trying again to obey commandments, to be saved from our sins. Hear that little girl with her favorite cuz, giggling, surveying the 40+ years ahead of wandering and wondering if and how to earn real shalom, real rest.
“Six days shalt (SHALT) thou labor and do all thine (THINE!) work…thine, thine maidservant, and thine manservant, and thine oxen in the field…but on the seventh day…” STOP! Collaborate and Listen! Ye are to REST. Or woe to ye.
Also, BTW, while you’re here (trappeth on the carpeth) lest you forget some of mine other fave commandments that will bind you:
Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain, gahtdammit!
Yea though your friends watch Saturday morning cartoons, mouth-shoveling bowls of Frosted Flakes (we’ll get to sins of indulgence next Sabbath), thou shalt not covet their delight on Mondays at school, role playing Wonder Woman and sleuthing Scooby Dooby Doo.
Thou shalt have no other gods before me, especially do not ogle Shaun Cassidy (who cares if he reminds you of my son Jesus in feathered bangs and terry cloth short shorts). Mosdef do not give it all up to your college BF before marriage.
Thou shalt not worship graven images aka statues aka like your Papa’s religion. Catholics are not real Christians (CHALLAH!) hate to break it to 8 out of every 10 Filipinos.
Thou shalt not steal. Er, when you get arrested for shoplifting nail polish at seventeen, thou shalt laminate that shame to your high school diploma.
At Berkeley, thou wilt join weekly Bible studies till nine pm, then mini-skirt to the bars to hook up with many of my FOINE creations.
Thou shalt not commit adultery or lie even though thou’st mom will (twofer). In that case, leave her guilt to me. Thou shalt do well to saveth money for a decade of therapy when your mom’s affair is revealeth to all.
Above all, never ever forget I am the Only, One True. Adonai, Yahweh, El Shaddai, Mr. Clean, Queen Bey, Jolly Green Giant, (just the) voice of Morgan Freeman, Father God. I’m your Daddy.
God spake all these words, in essence declaring and decreeing, HOW GREAT I ART and thou lowly lows shalt shapeshifteth yourselfeth to the Nth degree until thou art not yourself-eth but a coconut—brown on the outside, white inside, slick with cold-pressed coconut oil—who thinks, acts, speaks, and performs better “American” than Filipino.
Long liveth the Empire Kingdom.
+
“And all the people saw the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking: and when the people saw it, they removed, and stood afar off.”
— Exodus 20, the Bible, King James Version
Ella deCastro Baron (she/siya/we) is a 2nd gen Filipina American raised on Coastal Miwok lands (Vallejo, California). She teaches Composition, Literature, and Creative Writing. Her books are, Subo and Baon: A Memoir in Bites, and Itchy Brown Girl Seeks Employment. A woman of color who lives with chronic dis-ease, Ella honors sensations, dreams, story, dance, and decolonial truth-telling so we can ‘re-member our long body.’ She conspires with art-ivists to produce kapwa (deep interconnection) gatherings that stir love and justice via writing, art, joy, grief-tending, movement, food (yes!) and community. Her favorite pronoun, now more than ever, is We.
Vex Kaztro, aka Aglibut Bagaoisan, is an artist/writer of mixed pilipinx ancestry. Their work plays with the threads of trauma that erupt from queer neurodivergent identities living in the cozy liminal spaces of a cracked and unreliable memory. They studied filmmaking at City College of San Francisco and San Francisco State University.