The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time

by Judith Shulevitz

  To my mother

  There was some puzzling, tormenting residue of the Sunday world within her, some persistent Sunday self, which insisted upon a relationship with the now shed-away vision world. How could one keep up a relationship with that which one denied?

  D. H. LAWRENCE, The Rainbow

  Whether I see it scattered down among tangled woods, or beaming broad across the fields, or hemmed in between brick buildings, or tracing out the figure of the casement on my chamber floor, still I recognize the Sabbath sunshine.—And ever let me recognize it! Some illusions, and this among them, are the shadows of great truths.

  NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, Sunday at Home

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  THE VIEW FROM AFAR

  PART ONE

  TIME SICKNESS

  PART TWO

  GROUP DYNAMICS

  PART THREE

  THE SCANDAL OF THE HOLY

  PART FOUR

  THE FLIGHT FROM TIME

  PART FIVE

  PEOPLE OF THE BOOK

  PART SIX

  SCENES OF INSTRUCTION

  PART SEVEN

  REMEMBERING THE SABBATH

  NOTES

  Reader’s Guide

  INTRODUCTION

  THE VIEW FROM AFAR

  1.

  AT SOME POINT WE ALL LOOK FOR A SABBATH, WHETHER OR NOT THAT’S what we call it. Organized religion need not be involved. As a child upset about having been moved from a house with a garden in a suburb of Detroit to a cramped apartment in downtown San Juan, Puerto Rico, I curled up in the space between a file cabinet and a freezer early on Saturday mornings. Not the freezer on top of the refrigerator in our kitchen but the full-size appliance my mother had put in a corner of our small sunroom. She had bought it to store the kosher meat she got flown in from the mainland every few months—there were no kosher butchers in San Juan. The Sabbath not being a day for taking meat out of the freezer, I didn’t have to worry about my mother coming in. Nestled among thick electrical cords, I hugged my legs, rested my head and ribs against the metal side, and let the vibrations lull me into a prayerful self-pity. This was my Sabbath, hidden inside hers.

  My mother went to the synagogue later that day, taking us children with her. The Conservative synagogue in San Juan, unlike the thriving Reform one across the street, seemed reserved for the aged and infirm—refugees from Batista’s Cuba, some of them also refugees from what people were just starting to call the Holocaust. These old men and occasional women smelled funny, and sang funny, too. My siblings and I referred to one of them as “the foghorn.” The building, a ruined mansion starting to crumble, smelled of wood rot. It had termites. The specks of wood they had chewed and shat out would fall from the tops of the prayer books in a fine spray of golden dust when you pulled them off their shelves.

  Almost nothing is as hard to empathize with as the words and things that other people find comforting, especially when they seek that comfort in squalid surroundings. Seen from the outside, the quest for religious solace looks preposterous. Søren Kierkegaard said that religion has a truth so purely interior that it approaches madness. The encounter with the holy has been described as a flash of hidden knowledge, a suspicion, an awe, an elation, a dread, a mystery, a mysterium tremendum. Whatever it is, it requires a courage that is as much social as spiritual. The state associated with holiness “is perfectly sui generis and irreducible to any other,” the theologian Rudolf Otto wrote in The Idea of the Holy. Insofar as it is untranslatable, the holy, not to mention the search for it, has the powerful potential to be lonely.

  Why associate the Sabbath with solitude? By common consensus, the day is all about getting connected. It’s the ancient equivalent of social-networking software. With its laws proscribing work and mandating social encounters—meals, gatherings, study sessions—the Sabbath blocks out time for shedding one’s professional or workaday identity and weaving the bonds of a collective identity. All this is true. Yet at the core of the Sabbath lies an unassuageable longing. The Sabbath grasps after something that is out of reach. Qadosh, the Hebrew word for “holy,” comes from a root that means “apart, separate, withdrawn.” In Judaism, that which is holy is that which has been fenced off. The Sabbath rituals create this boundary, and the boundary creates the experience of otherness that we call the holy. But the inverse of this process is a yearning for an impossible ideal, a utopia that is by definition unattainable. The Law, the legal theorist Robert Cover says, is a bridge between our imperfect world and the vision of its perfection. Religious laws and rituals remind us that we live in exile, not in perfect harmony, neither with one another nor with God. Had my mother come upon me, she would have seen a troubled child in a dusty corner, not a girl using a freezer full of steak as her personal altar to the Midwest. When I entered that synagogue, I had no idea what my mother saw in it.

  What did she see in it? I’ve never asked her, because she couldn’t have told me what I wanted to know. How do you single out precisely which aspect of the Sabbath mitigates your particular loneliness? The setting, the rites, the prayer book—the Sabbath dramaturgy mixes them all up. Each element of the Jewish Sabbath bears traces of every period in which Jews kept it, which is every period in Jewish history. At any given moment, several different movies about the Sabbath will be playing simultaneously inside the head of the Sabbath observer. “Holy days, rituals, liturgies—all are like musical notations which, in themselves, cannot convey the nuances and textures of live performance,” the historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi writes.

  You might as well ask, What did God see on his Sabbath? There is an answer to that, believe it or not. It’s angels, created by God so that his Sabbaths wouldn’t be lonely, as they were before he gave the Sabbath to the Jews so that they would keep it with him. These angels are stock figures in the vast body of legends that has grown up around the Sabbath. They can be found in a retelling of the story of Creation in the book of Jubilees, written two hundred years before Christ was born, and in a hymnal found among the Dead Sea Scrolls called “Songs for the Sabbath Sacrifice,” compiled a century later by the Essenes, a desert sect awaiting the end of the world. In the songs, the angels collect themselves on the Sabbath into a heavenly choir. When worshippers joined their voices to those of the angels, the two choruses formed a sort of otherworldly conference call, connecting the earthly and the divine.

  In the centuries that followed, the rabbinic sages—teachers and consolers of a people nearly exterminated, then enslaved and scattered, after Judea’s revolt against Roman rule in the second century C.E.—concocted myths about the Sabbath in which the Sabbath figured as their saving angel, their rescue from God’s abandonment.

  The Sabbath, said the rabbis, is a bride given by God to her groom, the people of Israel. Once a week, they go forth in wedding clothes to marry her.

  The Sabbath, said the rabbis, is a gift from God’s treasury. Once a week, his people receive it and are enriched.

  The Sabbath, said the rabbis, is the Temple in time rather than space. Once a week, every Jew becomes a priest and enters it.

  The Sabbath, said the rabbis, is the Chosen Day, just as the children of Israel are the Chosen People.

  My favorite story makes the Sabbath a place in space rather than a point in time. “How do you know that Saturday is the Sabbath?” a Roman governor named Tinius Rufus is said to have asked the great sage Akiva in the second century. “Because of the river Sambatyon,” Rabbi Akiva says. For it “carries stones the whole week but allows them to rest on the Sabbath,” by which Akiva meant that six days a week the current of the Sam
batyon is so strong that it pushes boulders along, but on the seventh it stops flowing entirely.

  Akiva was not making this up, exactly. Other ancient writers—Greek as well as Jewish, Pliny the Elder and Josephus among them—also spoke of this magical river, though they put it in different places: Persia, Lebanon, Ethiopia. Six centuries later, Eldad the Danite, a dark-skinned Jew, appeared out of nowhere in a town called Kairouan in North Africa (now Tunisia), claiming to have been shipwrecked and captured by cannibals, and told a tale of the Sambatyon. Delivered in a Hebrew peppered with Arabisms, Eldad’s stories had such a powerful effect on his audience that the elders of the town grew alarmed and wrote to the exilarch in Babylon, a princely figure who ruled over all Jews living in exile, asking for advice. The exilarch wrote back to the Jews of Kairouan saying that Eldad may have been telling the truth, since there were enough references to the ten lost tribes and the Sambatyon in rabbinic texts to back him up.

  On the far side of the Sambatyon, said Eldad, live the sons of Moses, carried there by God when the Jews were marched away from Israel as slaves to the Babylonians in the sixth century B.C.E. Protected by God’s cloud and by the sea, unable to cross their Sabbath-keeping river (since it’s fordable only on the Sabbath and they, of course, keep the Sabbath, too), the sons of Moses dwell in perfect isolation and holiness. They occupy mansions and castles miraculously free of flies, lice, scorpions, and other swarming creatures deemed unclean by the Bible. They raise sheep, oxen, and chickens that give birth twice a year; tend to gardens of olives, pomegranates, figs, and melons that bear fruit just as often; speak Hebrew; take ritual baths; never swear; live to the age of a hundred or a hundred and twenty; and do all their own chores, “for they have no manservants or maidservants, and they are all equal.”

  Tinius Rufus didn’t ask Rabbi Akiva where this phantasmagorical Sabbatical river had its source. But Akiva might have had an answer. The rabbis tell us that it flows from a spring in Paradise. That is the detail that breaks my heart. For, unlike the bride of the Sabbath and the gift of the Sabbath, the river of the Sabbath lies forever hidden from view, offering ordinary humans neither the longed-for transport nor relief. That the Sambatyon partakes of earthly geography suggests that God is present in his creation, but that the river has its source in Paradise hints darkly that he can never be reached.

  In any event, Akiva did not convert Tinius Rufus to Judaism (though some rabbinic legends have him converting Tinius Rufus’s wife). This interfaith dialogue with Akiva took place—was imagined as taking place—because Akiva had been arrested for participating in a revolt against the Romans and defying a ban against the study of Torah. He was sentenced to death. Stories have him reciting the Shema (“Hear, O Israel the Lord our God, the Lord is one”) while Roman soldiers tore lumps of flesh from his body with iron combs.

  2.

  A DECADE AGO, I began to take a passionate interest in the Sabbath, the ancient weekly day of rest. I told myself that this was purely a matter of intellectual curiosity, but it wasn’t. My feelings were murkier than that. I was ravenous for something, though I didn’t know what. I tried to get my hands on everything having to do with the Sabbath. Tales of good Sabbaths and of bad Sabbaths. Angry screeds against the dour Sabbath (“Sunday comes, and brings with it a day of general gloom and austerity. The man who has been toiling hard all the week, has been looking towards the Sabbath, not as to a day of rest from labour, and healthy recreation, but as one of grievous tyranny and grinding oppression”—Charles Dickens) and fulsome praise for its blessings (“In the Universe of Shabbat, a person finds everything new, different, more elevated and exalted”—Dov Peretz Elkins).

  Mine was not exactly a socially productive obsession. Saying that I’d been reading up on the Sabbath was a good way to cut a vigorous conversation short. Occasionally, some kind soul would agree to chat briefly about the great modern work on the subject, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Sabbath, a retelling of Hasidic legend that has become a popular primer for people taking their first steps back to Judaism. This is a beautiful book, but many of the others I could have talked about were not. The more I read about the Sabbath, though, the more I was struck by the power of the idea. It seemed to me that I could justify my interest in utilitarian terms. I could explain to my skeptical friends that a structured period of non-productivity could be very useful for an overscheduled society.

  Soon after that, I came across another beautiful book. It was called The Seven Day Circle, by Eviatar Zerubavel, an American sociologist. Zerubavel grew up in Israel, a country where religious holidays are enforced with a strictness unusual in highly modernized societies. His immersion in the religious calendar had helped him to invent a whole new field, the sociology of time. Reading this book, I learned that the seven-day week was a by-product of the Jewish Sabbath. (The Israeli poet Chaim Nachman Bialik called the day “the most brilliant creation of the Hebrew spirit.”) More important, I discovered that time has an architecture, and that that architecture has the power to affect us as deeply as the architecture of space does. Heschel wrote charming fables that revealed a world of legend inside the Sabbath. Zerubavel wrote dry social theory that made me grasp that even something as basic as the week has a history and an intoxicating power—the power to seem so natural that we don’t realize how carefully constructed it has been. It made me eager to understand the shape of my week—where it came from, what it meant, what values it incarnated.

  I remember the exact moment when I realized that I wanted to write a book on this unwieldy subject. I was closing a gate behind me. The gate led to the backyard of a lovely little Tudor-style cottage that belonged to the man who would become my husband. The inside of this house, with its sloped ceilings and plain furniture, put me in mind of an English country church. Heschel calls the Sabbath a cathedral in time. My future husband’s house was a parsonage in the suburbs. We had just driven up from somewhere and I had been trying to explain to him what the Sabbath was, and why it mattered to Jews, and how it had once mattered terribly to Christians, too—particularly American Christians, and most particularly the American Puritans who founded this nation. They had such a deep hunger for the Sabbath—for the right kind of Sabbath—that they left England, whose Sabbaths they considered corrupt and lax, and sailed to America, in order to keep the kind of disciplined, godly Sabbaths they believed would transform their earthly existence into a New Jerusalem.

  My future husband was a man with an impressive background in American history, but he didn’t know about the role the Sabbath had played in it. He belonged to a synagogue, but he had never thought of the Sabbath as anything but an antiquated practice reserved for those with a masochistic taste for censorious laws. His face lit up, as it always does when he is given a fresh idea to mull over, and suddenly I saw what he saw: a largely forgotten aspect of the history of Western civilization and a non-academic way to explore an arcane but fascinating subject—that is to say, the social morality of time.

  The social morality of time! I said. What a great phrase! No one thinks of time as a moral entity. We think of it as a mathematically neutral one. But what was the labor movement’s fight for shorter days and workweeks about, if not the social morality of time? And how about the way we’re always recalibrating our feelings for our friends, or our sense of how they feel about us, with the neurotic precision of a Larry David, based on how many minutes they’ve kept us waiting? If other people’s use of our time isn’t the object of infinitesimal ethical calculation, I don’t know what is.

  But that’s not all the Sabbath is, I added. At this point he was opening the door to his house, which we knew, without ever having talked about it, I would soon be moving into. The Sabbath, I said, is not only an idea. It is also something you keep. With other people. You can’t just extract lessons from it. Me, I want to keep it and teach my children to keep it. But at the same time, since I grew up watching a religious mother and a skeptical father play tug-of-war over our upbringing in a home in which th
e Sabbath was largely the occasion for unspoken recriminations about how we were being raised, I’m afraid that if I impose the Sabbath on my children they will resent me as much as I resented my parents. They will suss out signs of my ambivalence and use them as proof of my inconsistency and hypocrisy, as I did in my time. I like the idea of keeping the Sabbath, but at the thought of actually doing it, of passing an entire day following strange rules while refraining from customary recreations, I am knocked flat by a wave of anticipated boredom.

  My soon-to-be fiancé looked baffled and a little worried: What was he getting himself into?

  Religion is made up of rites and customs, I explained, or would have explained, had I thought of it at the time. These rites and customs get handed down like pieces of antique furniture, the names of their makers lost, their sentimental value forgotten along with the ancestors who treasured them. To dig up the meaning of this inheritance, to honor those ancestors and put myself in some sort of relation to them—that is what I want to do.

  But to do that you have to give up so much! To do it right, at least as I construed “right” at the time. To submit to the rituals of the Sabbath and let them take you where they will, which is a place far beyond what Heschel called, with some irritation, “religious behaviorism” and “the sociological fallacy.” By that, he meant the purely external understanding of religion as a set of behaviors and traditions worth preserving: religion construed as a social asset. To be transformed by a religious experience, rather than merely to appreciate it, to drop an anchor into the depths of the past and keep your life from drifting away, you have to be willing, I thought, to give yourself over to a different way of living, one that seems antiquated and foreign and extinguishing unless you’re already immersed in it. You had to become that dreadful thing, a religious person.