The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time

by Judith Shulevitz

  The Alexandrian Barnabas, also writing in the second century, thought that Jewish rituals, including the Sabbath, were simple misinterpretations of God’s intent. The physical commandments, Barnabas maintained, were allegories. The most vivid illustration of Barnabas’s spiritualizing hermeneutics can be seen in his discussion of kashruth. Why, asked Barnabas, did Moses say, “‘Thou shall eat neither swine, nor eagle, nor hawk, nor crow, nor any fish that has no scales on it’”? Barnabas explained: When Moses prohibited eating swine, he really meant to tell the Jews to avoid consorting with people who are swinelike, in that their urge to satisfy their hunger drives out every nobler sentiment. The eagle, the hawk, and the raven are predators; likewise, said Barnabas, one should avoid not the flesh of those birds but the company of men like them, “such people as do not know how to obtain their food by sweat and labor, but, in their disregard for law, plunder other people’s property.” And on Barnabas went, a Christian Aesop, reinterpreting every animal whose flesh is prohibited by Jewish law as a miniature moral fable.

  As for the Sabbath, Barnabas said it should not be seen as the seventh day of the week; rather, it should be seen as the seventh day of Creation, and also as the seventh millennium, that end of time in which God’s son—Jesus, of course—would arrive and destroy a wicked age.

  Why did the Jews fail to understand their own prophet’s metaphors? It was not given to them to understand. As Barnabas put it, the Jews circumcised their bodies, not their ears.

  6.

  IF THE CHRISTIANS OBJECTED to the Sabbath, how did they fix on Sunday? We don’t really know. The New Testament gives no answer. It furnishes no evidence of a regular Sunday gathering other than a handful of references to the day that can be interpreted as indicating that it had been singled out in some fashion—though only if you’re willing to ignore alternate readings that suggest that Sunday was just one day among others. Not until the second century do we find Sunday described as a day when Christians gather to worship. Ignatius, Barnabas, and Justin all allude to it. Justin writes:

  And on the day called Sunday there is a meeting in one place of those who live in cities or the country, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read as long as time permits. When the reader has finished, the president in a discourse urges and invites [us] to the imitation of these noble things. Then we all stand up together and offer prayers. And, as said before, when we have finished the prayer, bread is brought, and wine and water, and the president similarly sends up prayers and thanksgivings to the best of his ability, and the congregation assents, saying the Amen; the distribution, and reception of the consecrated [elements] by each one, takes place and they are sent to the absent by the deacons. Those who prosper, and who so wish, contribute, each one as much as he chooses to. What is collected is deposited with the president, and he takes care of orphans and widows, and those who are in want on account of sickness or any other cause, and those who are in bonds, and the strangers who are sojourners among [us], and, briefly, he is the protector of all those in need. We all hold this common gathering on Sunday, since it is the first day, on which God transforming darkness and matter made the universe, and Jesus Christ our Saviour rose from the dead on the same day. For they crucified him on the day before Saturday, and on the day after Saturday, he appeared to his apostles and disciples and taught them these things which I have passed on to you also for your serious consideration.

  The order of the Sunday service evolved sometime between the ministry of Christ in the early thirties of the first century and the middle of the second, when Justin would have been writing. The Christian world at that point consisted of small groups scattered across Asia Minor and Europe, some buried deep within cities, some little more than house churches, many cut off from the others, and each with its own idiosyncratic syncretism—its mix of Jewishness, paganness, and “Christianness.” Each community’s rituals reflected the backgrounds of its members and the personalities of its founders. Jewish Christians may have gone to synagogues on the Sabbath and worshipped on Sunday, too, while pagan Christians may have stopped observing the Sabbath, or at least stayed away from synagogues, but they may not have singled out Sunday, either.

  One student of Sunday, Willy Rordorf, thinks that the earliest Christians in Jerusalem began the tradition of gathering on Sunday in honor of Christ’s Resurrection, which happened on the first day of the week. Another scholar of Sunday, Samuele Bacchiocchi, argues that the shift from Saturday to Sunday happened a century later, in Rome, where Gentiles predominated, and where Jews had become a vilified enemy after the Jewish Revolt against Roman rule, quashed in 132 C.E. Bacchiocchi (a Seventh-Day Adventist, which means that he objects to the switch from Saturday to Sunday) points out that around the time Justin was writing, a new custom arose in Christian Rome: the Saturday fast. Nothing could be less like a Jewish Sabbath celebration than a fast, so, Bacchiocchi reasons, the fast must have been intended to heighten the contrast between Jews and Christians and to make Sunday look more appealing.

  One thing we do know is what Sunday was not. It was not a day of rest. The realities of everyday existence precluded taking the day off. For one thing, the early Christians did not come from the upper classes, at least not at first, and slaves and common people worked on Sunday. For another thing, the much-persecuted Christians were afraid to expose themselves by conspicuously not working when everyone else did.

  Early in the second century, Pliny the Younger, the governor of a region in Anatolia (now Turkey), wrote a letter to the Roman emperor Trajan asking him what he should do about people who had been denounced as Christians. So far, he explained, he had interrogated each of them several times, and executed only those who refused to renounce their faith. But even that approach, tolerant as it was, made him queasy, because, he said, some of them had been guilty of little more than meeting before dawn on a “fixed day”—the assumption of many scholars is that the day was Sunday—where they would sing responsively a hymn to Christ “as if to a god,” then “bind themselves by oath, not for any criminal purpose, but to abstain from theft, robbery, and adultery, to commit no breach of trust and not to deny a deposit when called upon to restore it.” After that, they’d leave and assemble again later to eat—“food of an ordinary, harmless kind,” Pliny added, as if to assure Trajan that the Christians were not eating the human flesh they were sometimes accused of sacrificing. And they had stopped holding even those meetings, Pliny said, “since my edict, issued on your instructions, which banned all political societies.” (Worried that his prisoners may have lied to him, Pliny went on to clarify, he had tortured two female slaves known to their comrades as “deaconesses,” but had not extracted from them any contradicting evidence.)

  By the fourth century, however, everything had changed. In 321, the Roman emperor Constantine, the most important Christian convert in history, banned official business and manufacturing on Sunday; the day was clearly already holy to Christians throughout his empire. (Constantine exempted farmers, who urgently needed to bring their crops in, a move that shows how far Christianity had come from Judaism; Jewish Sabbath law specifically targets most forms of agricultural labor.) A decade earlier, on the eve of the battle in which he would conquer Rome and secure the title of emperor, Constantine granted his Christian soldiers Sunday leave so that they could worship in church, and required his pagan soldiers to recite a prayer on Sunday in which they praised the Supreme Deity without being forced to name him.

  Constantine’s knack for blending Christian faith and pagan syncretism was one of his great weapons as emperor. He became the first Christian ruler of Rome by sussing out points of convergence between paganism and Christianity. He took every opportunity to remind Romans that monotheism was not foreign to them, since they had already embraced monotheism—solar monotheism, the cult of Sol Invictus, the invincible sun. This deity, imported from the East in the middle of the third century and merged with the Greek figures Apollo and Helios, had become the chi
ef object of the imperial religion. Before his conversion, Constantine had taken Sol Invictus as his divine patron; years after his conversion, his mints still struck coins featuring Sol Invictus as his patron. Constantine must have found it a most fortuitous coincidence that the Christians had settled on Sunday as the day of their Lord, since it was also the day set aside for worshipping the sun.

  7.

  IN ANTIOCH, a big, multicultural city in northern Syria, an up-and-coming preacher named John was also enraged by Sabbatizing. John would later come to be known as Chrysostom, or “golden mouthed,” for the force of his oratory, and his attacks on the Sabbath would stick.

  In a book titled John Chrysostom and the Jews, the historian Robert Wilken vividly reconstructs the scene. The year is 386 C.E. It is six decades since Constantine the Great converted to Christianity and declared Sunday a day of rest. Six years earlier, in 380 C.E., the Roman Empire declared Christianity its official religion. Christian Europe is in its infancy but has definitely been born.

  Chrysostom, however, doesn’t realize this. Christianity, to him, looks fragile, riven with squabbling and heresies and beset by enemies. In his youth, he lived through the brief reign of an anti-Christian emperor named Julian, who wrote a dyspeptic tract called “Against the Galileans.” Chrysostom has no way of knowing whether this latest uptick in Christian-Roman relations will last. Paganism still shapes the public life of the Greek-speaking city. Its paintings, decorative mosaics, architecture, literature, and festivals all honor the glorious deeds of the Greek gods, not the redemptive powers of Jesus Christ. Antioch’s ancient Jewish community also thrives. Though an anti-Jewish tone has crept into the language of Roman legislators whenever they address the rights of Jews in a Christian empire, few Jewish rights have actually been taken away, aside from the right to proselytize or to punish Jews who convert to Christianity.

  In fact, the strength of Antioch’s Jews alarms Chrysostom, since he finds himself competing with them for bodies in his church. The power of the Jews to lure away his congregants crests in the autumn, with the arrival of the Jewish High Holidays, when Jews prepare special foods, spruce up their homes, fast in repentance, build huts for Succoth, and dance in the public square—and many of their Christian neighbors abandon their churches to join them. “Many who belong to us and say that they believe in our teaching, attend their festivals, and even share in their celebrations and join in their fasts,” Chrysostom thunders from the pulpit. “Many among us keep the Sabbath,” he complains.

  To keep Judaizers out of synagogue on Saturdays and Jewish holidays, Chrysostom employs some of the most violently anti-Jewish language used up to that point in Christian literature. His diatribes are a common form of preachment known as Adversus Judaeos, the sermon against the Jews, but Chrysostom embroiders his text with flowers of classical rhetoric, which teaches the art of slander as enthusiastically as the art of praise. Chrysostom’s later readers will not recognize his strong words as typical Greco-Roman insults; his phrases will be taken literally, becoming a template for the anti-Jewish slanders that will follow in the centuries to come. Jews, he says, are dogs, gluttons, drunks, demons, thieves, cheaters, and child-murderers. They are wolves slavering over a soon-to-be-slaughtered Christian flock. Christians must do everything they can to keep them away: “Since today the Jews, more troublesome than any wolves, are about to encircle our sheep, it is necessary to arm ourselves for battle.”

  Wilken teases out a profile of the Judaizers who bother Chrysostom so much. They are neither recent converts from Judaism to Christianity nor old-time Jewish Christians. Rather, they are Christians from Chrysostom’s own congregation who are drawn to Judaism by the very logic that drew them or their parents or grandparents to Christianity. Since God gave the Good Book to the Jews, and since they read it in Greek rather than in Hebrew, Jews must be closer to the truth than Christians. The Judaizers also admire piety. Chrysostom himself has to admit that the Jews care more about the Sabbath than his own flock does about Sunday:

  You Christians should be ashamed and embarrassed at the Jews who observe the Sabbath with such devotion and refrain from all commerce beginning with the evening of the Sabbath. When they see the sun hurrying to set in the west on Friday they call a halt to their business affairs and interrupt their selling. If a customer haggles with them over a purchase in the late afternoon, and offers a price after evening has come, the Jews refuse the offer because they are unwilling to accept any money.

  The Judaizers see no reason not to go to synagogue on Saturday as well as church on Sunday. After all, Jesus kept the Sabbath and Passover. But Chrysostom knows that, inevitably, a Jewish festival will conflict with a Christian one, and that the ensuing squabbles will tear his church apart. If they keep the “fixed days” and “fixed times,” Chrysostom tells his congregation, the Judaizers will “divide the assembly in two.”

  PART FIVE

  PEOPLE OF THE BOOK

  1.

  I DIDN’T KNOW HOW TO PRAY. I STILL DON’T. THE TUNES, POURED INTO me as a child and dammed up through adulthood, spilled out with the tears, but the words had no meaning. If they possessed some sort of magic, I had no idea what it was. The prayer book, which must have had something in it to appeal to so many generations of Jews, had been turned by its translators into a gibber-jabber of exalted terms: rock, redeemer, raiments, majesty.

  I also resisted the imperative to worship. Worship whom? Worship what? Wasn’t that just mumbling and shuckling in the dark? The oppressiveness of the exercise was embodied in a phrase uttered just before an important prayer: “Open my mouth so that I may utter your praise.” Really? I was to ask God to move my lips so that I could utter words that would gratify his ego? The sentence implied a closed robotic loop: I’d switch on God, and he’d operate my mouth by remote control.

  What I liked was to walk to synagogue. In Park Slope, the route was a straight shot down Eighth Avenue. Nearly every house on the street was at least a century old, and all of them, if you looked at them long enough, seemed to stagger backward into history. They were drunk with weird period ornamentation. There was the Montauk Club, a Venetian palace ringed by terra-cotta heads of American Indians. There was the Adams House, half church, half castle, with heavy red Romanesque arches and a fairy-tale tower, built for the entrepreneur who invented both Chiclets and vending machines. There was Temple Beth Elohim, a 1920s synagogue with a surprisingly discreet presence on the street, given that its entrance, atop a sweeping staircase, featured Corinthian columns and grandiosely arched stained-glass windows, and behind those lay a pentagonal edifice meant to symbolize the five books of the Pentateuch.

  At my synagogue, which lurked behind its dingy walls like an Eastern European shtiebel, I waited for the moment when they unrolled the Torah and chanted the sacred history, the chanters swaying over the pulpit like reeds in the wind. The light in which the patriarchs and matriarchs lived seemed brighter and cleaner—closer to Creation—than the brownish city light in which I moved. In it, contours sharpened; depths deepened. The men and women of the Bible were also spiritual superheroes, yet in their domestic lives they were mean-spirited, violent, pettily jealous. They spoke directly to God and dared to negotiate with him. Abraham bargained. Hagar begged. Rebecca complained. Moses placated. But they also coveted, lied, stole, murdered, raped. Jacob cheated Esau. Laban cheated Jacob. Jacob cheated him back. Jacob’s sons murdered the inhabitants of a town who had agreed to convert to their faith, then sold their brother into slavery. Joseph, as a child, was an insufferable braggart.

  But if the biblical personality possessed vitality rather than uplift, the biblical concept of time had a more palliative effect. Abraham was seventy-five when he left his home to follow God’s call, and one hundred when Isaac was born. Isaac was forty when he married Rebecca. Jacob worked unhappily for his brother-in-law for fourteen years. Women endured years without children, or hope of any. The success or failure of a biblical life was a thing to be determined in the epic mode, in
the fullness of time between creation and redemption, not in an impatient New York season.

  Enthralled as I was by the reading of the Torah, I was even more entranced by the ritual for taking it out of its cabinet, known, in a high archaism, as the Ark, after the box in which the Israelites carried it for forty years in the desert. It had been years since I went regularly to synagogue, and I had become enough of a stranger to see how odd this ritual was. You didn’t just take out the Torah. You lifted it in your arms, cradled it, carried it around the room, kissed it, laid it down gently on the lectern, and blessed it over and over before you read it—chanted it, actually. Then you did the whole thing all over again before you put it away. This was idolatry of the highest order. The Torah might as well have been an infant Jesus, and we who carried it a procession of Madonnas. This wasn’t just a religion of the Book. It was a fetish of it.

  2.

  WHENEVER PEOPLE BEGIN READING the Book, they start keeping the Sabbath. And when they keep the Sabbath they read the Book. It is no accident that religions centered on the Word of God and the texts in which it is written have set aside a day for absorbing them. If there hadn’t been a Fourth Commandment, the people of the Book would have had to invent one. The ties that bind the Sabbath to the Book are also a closed loop. Driving it is the conviction—still held today, though as a highbrow rather than a devotional belief—that reading is a sacred act.