The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time

by Judith Shulevitz

  I had always associated being religious with all sorts of unfortunate character traits. Being really religious, I mean. Because in my family we did not think of ourselves as religious. We kept the Sabbath by lighting candles and having dinner on Friday night. We kept kosher, sort of, at least in the house, by not mixing milk and meat and eating only kosher-slaughtered meat, though we didn’t keep two sets of dishes, the way Orthodox Jews do, and all of us except my mother ate whatever we liked in restaurants or at other people’s houses, although she sometimes muttered things about having failed as a parent when we ordered pork or shrimp. We did what our parents did and they did what their parents did, largely in defiance of their parents, with their old-world styles of observance. Apart from my mother, there was no one around to care whether it was done in the prescribed manner—and even she didn’t care enough to stop us from breaking the rules.

  Religiosity, to us, was obsessive-compulsive, masochistic, intellectually narrow, irrational, tribalistic, antimodern. Living the religious life, especially the Jewish religious life, means making a commitment to live by rules that are neither logical nor natural. Why should we only eat animals that chew their cud and have cloven hooves? Why are we forbidden to wear clothes that mix wool and flax? You have to take these rules on faith, and derive their legitimacy from tradition. To become religious is to brave a leap into the absurd. Kierkegaard understood that to be a terrible leap. You have to bow to that which is commanded. You have to give up your ability to control your world. It’s a form of self-sacrifice. Kierkegaard compares it to Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac.

  Kierkegaard couldn’t make the leap. He could describe the movements of faith, he said, but he couldn’t perform them. They were, he said, like hanging by the waist from a belt attached to the ceiling and making the gestures people make when they’re swimming. He could tell us what the gestures of faith were, but if he were thrown into the waters of belief he would not be able to swim the way one who had faith would swim—whatever way that might be. (Kierkegaard isn’t very good at describing it.) But he did admire the faithful.

  The problem was—Kierkegaard went on—that he had never met a man of true faith. To uncover the meaning of the religious experience, therefore, he has to make such a man up. He imagines he meets a man whom he recognizes instantly as “a knight of faith.” To his amazement, this man betrays absolutely no connection to a higher order of things. His façade has no “crack from which the infinite peeped out.” He looks like a member of the petite bourgeoisie. He looks, in fact, like a tax collector. And one way in which he expresses his petite bourgeoisie-ness is by keeping the Sabbath: “He takes a holiday on Sundays. He goes to church.” He sings the psalms lustily, but offers up no other sign of exceptionality. In the afternoon he takes a walk in the woods, delighting in everything he sees. On the way home, he thinks about his wife and the “special warm little dish” she will have prepared for him. He engages in various other small pleasures and has minor social interactions, including an exchange that might drum up some real-estate business. In the evening, he smokes his pipe: “To see him you would swear it was the cheesemonger opposite vegetating in the dusk.” And yet, Kierkegaard continued, “and yet—yes, it could drive me to fury, out of envy if for no other reason—and yet this man has made and is at every moment making the movement of infinity.”

  Kierkegaard did not home in on his stolid burgher’s Sabbath by accident. There is no better point of entry to the religious experience than the Sabbath, for all its apparent ordinariness. Because of its ordinariness. The extraordinariness of the Sabbath lies in its being commonplace. We who look at religion from the outside think of transcendence as something that occurs at special moments, in concentrated bursts of illumination, but people raised in homes where religious ritual occurs over breakfast and at dinner and in school and throughout weekends know that revelation commingles promiscuously with routine. If ritual is art, then it is stretched over the frame of habit.

  This is particularly true of the Judaism reinvented by the rabbinic sages, whose masterwork, the Talmud, an enormous anthology of all their legal and theological debates, transformed a temple-based religion suited to a pastoral and agricultural people into a ritual-based religion suited to an urban and far-flung one. In their Judaism, just about every activity in the day has its own blessing, and many of them follow in a carefully choreographed sequence. There are blessings for waking up, for washing the hands, for eating bread or water, for going to the bathroom. In a study of the rabbinic mind, the philosopher Max Kadushin called holiness a “normal mysticism.” It isn’t “necessarily associated with the unusual and the awesome,” he wrote. “On the contrary, it may be centered on personal conduct and be associated with the ordinary and familiar.” The rabbis demystified holiness; they democratized it, making it less a function of spiritual genius than of personal self-discipline.

  If you view the stuff of everyday life as the raw material of Judaism, and its rules as a framing device, then you will grasp something essential about the Sabbath: It is meant to turn the ordinary into the singular. A weekly house scrubbing, when done on Friday, becomes a way of making one’s home ready for God. A dinner party for family and neighbors attains the status of a royal banquet, welcoming home the Sabbath queen. To the mundane satisfaction that comes from cultivating good habits—cleanliness, organization, family togetherness—is added the sublime sense of rightness that comes from following God’s commandments.

  Keeping the Sabbath, I felt, would be good for me. It would force me to grow up and take my place among the generations. It would charge my domestic middle-aged life with drama and significance, whereas now it felt drained and resigned. But in order for this to happen I would have to stop feeling so ambivalent about the day.

  3.

  BUT WAS IT JUST ME who was uncomfortable with the Sabbath? Or is it intrinsically discomfiting in some way?

  Whenever I ask myself this question, I come back to Kierkegaard’s tax collector. It’s funny how he pops up just as Kierkegaard is worrying about the impossibility of attaining the faith of Abraham, a figure of indescribable heroism and fathomless trust, who was asked to destroy all that was good, all that he had waited for and loved, and yet somehow never doubted his God. That the only character Kierkegaard can conjure up for his latter-day “knight of faith” is a “philistine” (as the philosopher calls him) suggests that the man is not so much a beau ideal as a product of Kierkegaard’s irrepressible irony (even though Kierkegaard regarded irony as an attribute of lower natures). The tax collector’s “movement of infinity” turns out to be a movement of finite this-worldiness and external ceremonial. The tax collector is supposed to embody Abraham—he’s the modern Abraham—but turns out to be his opposite.

  And then two more thoughts occur to me. First, when Kierkegaard chose Abraham to exemplify the paradox of faith he was making use of a very old Christian interpretation of the patriarch, according to which Abraham incarnated the higher spirituality that the Jews lost when they bound themselves to the Torah, with its physical fetishes and weird commandments. Abraham proved that faith was greater than law, for he left his home and his religion and nearly sacrificed his son Isaac, all without the crutch of ritual. Abraham prefigured Christ, who died so that those who came after him could live by faith, not by law. Abraham, by this reading, was the father of the Christians, not of the Jews, who had repudiated him.

  And, second, I am struck by the fact that Kierkegaard made his “knight of faith” a tax collector. To compare the accursed tax collector to the blessed Abraham is—given the long association of Jews with the handling of money, not to mention tax collection—to make him the Jew, rather than Abraham, the father of Christians. It is to imbue his carnal Sabbath with the gross corporality that befouls the body of the stereotypical Jew. The incredulity in Kierkegaard’s voice is that this improbably, laughably Jewy character should be the “knight of faith.”

  You can always count on Franz Kafka to get the joke, and t
o push it one step further. In a letter to his best friend, Max Brod, Kafka complained of Fear and Trembling—which he loved—that Kierkegaard is blind to Abraham “the ordinary man,” the Abraham who did have elements of the philistine in him. Kierkegaard, instead, gives us “this monstrous Abraham in the clouds.” Kafka had another Abraham to propose, a comical Abraham, who is, in fact, exactly as picayune and rule-bound as the “knight of faith,” except that he’s also neurotic, overeager, Woody Allenesque. He just can’t stop getting ready for the big day, his sacrifice of Isaac. This is an Abraham, Kafka wrote elsewhere, who “would be ready to fulfill the demand of the sacrifice immediately, with the promptness of a waiter, but who could not bring off the sacrifice, because he can’t get away from the house, he is indispensable, the household needs him, there is always something more to put in order, the house is not ready.” This Abraham is like a Jew obsessively getting ready for the Sabbath, a Jew bogged down in the physical details of spiritual preparation.

  Everyone knows that Christians, early and late, have had mixed feelings about Jews. It is less well known that they have had mixed feelings about the Sabbath. More than mixed feelings, they had questions: Would Christ have wanted them to keep it? If so, how strictly? Did they really have to worry about the innumerable rules? Or was the Sabbath just too Jewish, a discardable artifact of Jewish “chosenness,” antithetical to the spirit of the new universal religion? There are many complex explanations for their uncertainty, but there is also a simple explanation. The simple one takes us back to the interpreters and followers of the apostle Paul, who said that Christ had superseded the “ceremonial,” or purely physical, external aspects of the Law, making it permissible for Christians to keep only its “moral” or spiritual components. (What Paul himself said is harder to suss out.) The one Old Testament ceremony that resisted supersession, however, was the Sabbath. For even though in the Gospels Christ objected to its over-punctilious observance—“The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath,” he told the Pharisees who scowled at his disciples’ Sabbath violations—he appears, on the whole, to have kept it. Moreover, the Sabbath was the only ritual law among the Ten Commandments, which Christians have held to be universal or natural laws—that is, a kind of innate morality implanted by God in the human soul. But the Old Testament called the Sabbath a sign of the covenant between God and the Jews. It was particular to them, not to mention peculiar, and not easily alchemized into something universal. And yet there it was, number four on the list.

  At this point I’d better step back and try to define the Sabbath. As I’m using the term, it’s the day in the week on which Jews and Christians (at least those who accept the Sabbath) are commanded not to work. It is the execution of a set of ritual proscriptions and prescriptions, the proscriptions largely having to do with work and the prescriptions largely having to do with making the day worshipful and festive. It is derived from the Fourth Commandment: “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates.”

  By this definition, I should add, the holy day called Al-Jumuah, which Muslims celebrate on Friday, cannot be considered a Sabbath, though it is sometimes said to be the Muslim Sabbath. The scholarly footnotes in my Koran insist firmly on this point. Al-Jumuah is not a day of non-work, nor is it necessarily a time for socializing inside or outside the mosque. It is an hour or so of prayer, accompanied by a weekly sermon. Shortly before noon, Muslim store owners shutter their stores and workers leave their offices and places of employment for the service—in New York City, taxicabs line the streets outside mosques—but on the whole they return to work a few hours later. One Muslim teaching reads: “When the time for Jumu’ah prayer comes, close your business and answer the summons loyally and earnestly, meet earnestly, pray, consult, and learn by social contact: when the meeting is over, scatter and go about your business.”

  I should also add that the image we hold in our heads of the Jewish Sabbath isn’t wholly based on the Fourth Commandment, either. The Sabbath of candlelighting and dinners and not driving and not turning lights on and off was shaped more by rabbinic law than by the Torah. This Sabbath may have been practiced in Christ’s time, but it was codified in the Talmud in the centuries following his crucifixion. This law identifies thirty-nine main categories of work that may not be done from the moment the Sabbath begins until it ends, unless the life of an individual or the welfare of a community is at stake. There are countless subcategories of the categories, and innumerable permutations of those. Shabbat, the Talmudic tractate, or book about the Sabbath, is the longest of all the tractates in the Talmud, and there’s another tractate devoted entirely to the law of Sabbath boundaries, called Eruvin. “There are one hundred and fifty-seven two-sided pages in tractate Sabbath, and one hundred and five in Eruvin,” the Israeli poet Bialik complained, notwithstanding his admiration for the Sabbath. “For the most part they consist of discussions and decisions on the minutiae of the thirty-nine kinds of work and their branches…. What weariness of flesh! What waste of good wits on every trifling point!”

  How can Jews bear to obey all these laws? Well, why does any society adhere to its customs? These rituals make sense to Jews because being members of their community means being committed to making sense of them. The Law—Torah—is the language Jews use to speak to one another. It is their way of discussing the mandated acts, inherited traditions, and interpersonal obligations that make up any discernibly discrete cultural group. It is a Jew’s commitment to the ongoing process of Law, of studying and interpreting and reinterpreting—and following—the laws, that brings out the aspect of the Law that is world-creating, rather than soul-stifling. Besides, the Law is said to make God’s will manifest, and following it is not thought to be a burden (though it may be experienced as such) but the chance to make God’s transcendental goodness a reality on earth.

  By the time the rabbis began writing their books on the Jewish Sabbath, however, Christians had on the whole (though not entirely) cut themselves off from Jewish communities. Many Christians had never had any contact with Jews to begin with. The Jewish Sabbath had stopped making sense to them, and had stopped being made sense of by them. Paul had already told Gentile converts that Moses’ Law was a dead weight on them, a yoke to be cast off. The theological principle of supersession expressed a sociological fact. The Christians had moved on. Yet they still lugged the Sabbath around with them.

  I first grasped what it must have felt like to have to carry the Sabbath around like a suitcase full of stuff you don’t need anymore but are unable to drop into a dumpster while I was having a small fit of petulance about having to get up from my desk and go to see my psychoanalyst. Now, like, say, rabbinic Judaism during the time of medieval Christendom, psychoanalysis is considered an anachronism. Who has the time or the money to undergo analysis anymore? Who believes in its efficacy? Well, I do, or at least I have a superstitious inability to stop seeing my analyst. But when I do so I often find myself mumbling grumpily to myself about her and all her rules. As I boarded my train, glancing anxiously at my watch, it occurred me that the psychoanalytic session, with its rules and rhythm and punctuality, is a modern Sabbath.

  The psychoanalytic session, like the Sabbath, takes you out of mundane time and forces you into what might be called sacred time—the timeless time of the unconscious, with its yawning infantile unboundedness, its shattered sequentiality. It may not be pleasant, it may not be convenient, you may not want to go, but you do. On time. And the fixed time limits also keep you from losing yourself in that disorienting, disorganizing flux. When your fifty minutes are up, you return to the mercilessness of the regular week. But your fifty minutes will come around again, just as mercilessly, and you must present yourself on time or give an account of yourself.

 
; The Sabbath is an organizing principle. It is a socially reinforced temporal structure. Either you want to be organized in this way or you don’t, or, if you’re like me, you do and you don’t. But if you’re like me you can’t quite forget what it feels like to have a Sabbath. You can tell when it’s missing, even if you don’t necessarily miss it.

  4.

  AMERICANS, ONCE THE MOST Sabbatarian people on earth, are now the most ambivalent on the subject. On the one hand, we miss the Sabbath. When we pine for escape from the rat race; when we check into spas, yoga centers, encounter weekends, spiritual retreats; when we fret about the disappearance of a more old-fashioned time, with its former, generally agreed-upon rhythms of labor and repose; when we deplore the increase in time devoted to consumption; when we complain about the commercialization of leisure, which turns fun into work and requires military-scale budgeting and logistics and interactions with service personnel—whenever we worry about these things, we are remembering the Sabbath, its power to protect us from the clamor of our own desires. But when, say, we return from a trip to some less developed country and feel a sense of relief that our twenty-four-hour economy allows us to work, shop, dine, and be entertained when we want to, not according to some imposed schedule, at that point, too, we are remembering the Sabbath. We are remembering how claustrophobic its rigid temporal boundaries used to make us feel.

  This book is about my ambivalence toward the Sabbath, which I diagnose as partly the secular American’s ambivalence toward the Sabbath and partly an ambivalence peculiarly my own. It is my theory that these ambivalences can be traced in some way to the Christian ambivalence toward the Sabbath, which can be traced in some way to a deeper ambivalence toward the idea of living a life in thrall to law and tradition, which can be traced in some way to an even deeper ambivalence toward ritual, which can be traced in some way to the most profound possible qualms about holiness, an uncanny, spectral quality that forces itself upon us from its perch in the past. All these in some ways should tip you off that this book is more associative than analytical and more anecdotal than historical (though there is analysis and history in it).