Have the rabbis ruined Shabbat?

Journalist, and Old Carmelli, Matthew Engel thinks so. In a BBC Radio 4 talk this week (which if you missed, you can catch again at the uncivil hour of 5.45 am on Sunday or at your leisure online), he put the case for a more secular kind of Sabbath.

“The Sabbath is a wonderful institution but has become discredited because rabbis and Protestant ministers subverted it with a string of thou-shalt-nots, instead of a day for rest and enjoyment,” he told me. “It needs to be celebrated, not to be bogged down in arguments about light switches and pushchairs.  I have created my own Shabbos with my own — very unrabbinical — rules.”