The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time

by Judith Shulevitz

  The biblical Hannah, it occurred to me, was the principle of dignity my Hannah was trying to locate. The Hannah of old had invented not just inward prayer but inwardness itself—the psychological depth that comes from a ragged wound between inside and outside, between soul and body. Her anguished interiority meets with misunderstanding, but she has the resources to explain herself, to transform her outward identity from drunk or madwoman to symbol of piety.

  As we talked about Hannah, my mind wandered to my mother, who, in the years since I had graduated from college and meandered around New York, trying to figure out what to do with myself, had figured out what to do with herself. She had moved to New York to go to graduate school, accompanied by my father, who sold his share in the family business and became a private investor. She had enrolled in a Ph.D. program at the Jewish Theological Seminary; switched to the rabbinical school in 1984, when the Conservative movement agreed to ordain women; and, at long last, making her childish fantasy an implausible reality, been ordained as a rabbi.

  When she told me that she was going to rabbinical school, I had been as supportive as my self-image as a feminist required me to be, but inwardly I was horrified. Who would try to become a leader in a religion that did not consider you leadership material? I imagined my mother barging in where she was not wanted, making a spectacle of herself. Once, I got out of bed in the morning, went into her room, and found her wrapped in tefillin, the leather strips that Jewish men bind to their arms and heads during the morning prayers. I had never seen this done except at camp, and I had certainly never seen a woman do it. I backed out of the room quickly, unseen, as if I had just caught her cross-dressing. I got upset, too, every time I saw her up on the bimah, the platform in front of the congregation, reading To rah or leading prayers. She had had her bat mitzvah only a few years back. What if she made a mistake?

  My mother graduated from rabbinical school in her fifties, and had not been offered a pulpit. The idea of a woman rabbi remained unthinkable to many congregations, and she had not been willing to leave New York to find a synagogue small enough or remote enough to be forced to hire one. Instead, she had become a hospital chaplain. My mother was an impatient woman, and had never had the knack of listening to other people talk about their pain, but she worked diligently at the task, and her supervisor praised her empathy and kindness. I ought to have been proud, but instead I was angry: She had turned into a glorified nurse, rather than a real rabbi! She was living proof that my skepticism about the possibilities for women in Judaism was warranted.

  Nonetheless, I admired her more than I was willing to admit, and was jealous, too. She had graduated, Hannah-like, from silence to speech, which seemed more than I could say for myself. The more I thought about her, the more ashamed of myself I became, until I had to sneak out of the synagogue library and go calm down in the bathroom. When I got home, I decided it was time to quit messing around and call a psychoanalyst.

  5.

  ONE SATURDAY NIGHT in the fall of 1622, give or take a year, an eighteen-year-old student at Cambridge named Thomas Shepard got “dead drunke,” as he later put it, and woke up the next morning in a place that he didn’t recognize. He slunk away to a cornfield to sleep off the hangover. Shepard was in his third year at Emmanuel College and was destined to become one of the most beloved preachers in Puritan New England, as well as a founder of Harvard College. Shepard’s magnum opus was Theses Sabbaticae, one of the great Sabbatarian tracts of the New World and the philosophical cornerstone of the American Sunday. (The Puritans never went so far as to embrace a seventh-day Sabbath.)

  For the moment, however, he was just an undergraduate who kept fast company and liked to argue, he later explained, “about things which now I see I did not know at all but only prated about them.” It’s hard to imagine Thomas Shepard as an overconfident college student, because the literature that he left to posterity exudes self-abasement. His self-recrimination is no less convincing for having been obligatory, the practice of Puritanism having consisted in large part of sharp self-scrutiny in daily diary entries. He went out into the fields, he tells us, “in shame and confusion,” and spent that Sabbath hiding in the corn, “where the Lord, who might justly have cut me off in the midst of my sin, did meet me with much sadness of heart and troubled my soul for this and other my sins.”

  Shepard was born in 1605 in Towcester, a small town in the English Midlands. He was the son of a grocer’s apprentice and a grocer’s daughter. His mother died when he was four. His father remarried, but his new wife disliked Thomas and turned his father against him. Soon afterward, he was sent to a school run by a “curst and cruel” headmaster, who made him wish that he could keep “hogs or beasts rather than go to school and learn.” His father died when he was ten, and his stepmother refused to spend the £,100 allotted to her for his education. Eventually he was rescued by an elder brother and a friendly local preacher and became a passionate scholar. But he never quite managed to convince himself that he hadn’t somehow brought his unhappy childhood on himself, perhaps, he conjectured, by his own irremediable “childishness.” He considered it his mission in life always to keep before his mind his own “vileness.”

  At the age of eighteen, though Shepard didn’t know it yet, he was embarking on his conversion. This, another Puritan rite of passage, nonetheless had in his hands the ring of genuine anguish. The hurdle to be overcome was a deep ambivalence toward all things religious. “I questioned whether there were a God,” he wrote, “whether Christ was the Messiah, whether the Scriptures were God’s word or no. I felt all manner of temptations to all kinds of religions.” Was his faith just a product of his education? Had he been raised Catholic, would he have thought that popery was the truth? And if that were true, did it not mean that his faith could just as easily be false as true?

  What rescued him from his apostasy and brought him to redemption? Shepard never comes out and says so, but the close reader of his autobiography would have to say that it was the Sabbath. It was on Sundays that, inspired by the kindly preacher, he began to educate himself by taking notes on the sermons. Ignorant and undisciplined, he wasn’t able to take the notes at first, but then he prayed, and lo and behold, the following Sunday he succeeded. After years of godless scholarship at Cambridge, he began to go on Sunday to hear the sermons of the master of Emmanuel, which allowed him to experience the terror of God’s wrath. The drinking binge occurred on a Saturday night, and he came to on a Sunday. That was when a fearful intuition of God’s presence began “to break in like floods of fire into my soul,” he wrote, until he had “some strong temptations to run my head against walls and brain and kill myself.”

  Finally, “on a Sabbath day at evening,” it occurred to him to “do as Christ”; that is, when Christ was in agony, he fell to his knees and prayed. Whereupon God filled him with his spirit, allowing him to grasp the depths of his unworthiness. Years later, in the Theses Sabbaticae, Shepard wrote that “religion is just as the Sabbath is, and decays and grows as the Sabbath is esteemed: the immediate honor and worship of God … is nursed and suckled in the bosom of the Sabbath.”

  A decade after Shepard’s conversion, the Anglican archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, began to persecute Puritan ministers for nonconformity. Laud, embittered by the harsh Puritan critique of his Church of England and weary of fending off accusations that Anglicans were depraved because they allowed dancing and gaming on Sunday afternoons, decided to remove Puritans from English churches. Shepard was among the many whom he called to his chambers and forbade to practice as a minister. Shepard spent four years preaching on the sly, chased around England by Laud’s officers, and finally set out for New England. He and his wife and son had sailed only a few miles when they were driven back to shore by a sudden storm. True to the pattern, they nearly foundered on rocks on a Saturday and were rescued on a Sunday. Shepard felt that they had disembarked prematurely. They should have stayed on board and sung their grateful Sabbath hymns.

  6. />
  THE PURITAN SUNDAY, the historian M. M. Knappen wrote, represents “a bit of English originality.” That’s a wry way of describing an institution that defies comprehension by anyone not a Puritan. To the modern mind, the desire to strip the day of all lightheartedness and pleasure—of piping and minstrelsy, wakes and feasts, plays and the frequenting of alehouses, to name a few of the Sunday activities targeted by Puritan legislators in the seventeenth century—can be explained only as the war of a joyless bourgeoisie against a subversively festive peasantry.

  That was the Marxist historian Christopher Hill’s take on English Sabbatarianism, anyway. To understand the Puritan approach to the Sabbath, he thought, you had to know that Protestants throughout Europe strove to do away with the more than one hundred saints’ days observed by the Catholic Church every year. The Puritans also banished Christmas and Easter. Among other things, Hill said, these holidays interrupted what were felt to be the proper rhythms of labor. As England industrialized, regular work habits and synchronized schedules became the keys to success. Popery, Slingsby Bethel wrote in 1668, drove “the industrious sort of people” into hiding. The Sabbath, on the other hand, came around predictably. Moreover, the Fourth Commandment explicitly states that on six days of the week you shall work. The Puritans were committed to rooting out idleness, “the mother and breeder of vagabonds,” in the words of one Robert Hitchcock.

  The Sabbath also gave these proto-workaholics a way to escape their own hypertrophied work ethic. Sunday Sabbatarianism could be seen as an early form of labor consciousness. The Industrial Revolution was in its infancy, but the old guilds were dying, and in many new industries there were no guilds at all. Competition was cutthroat. The small producer or businessman felt driven to work long hours, seven days a week, and to make his apprentices and journeymen do so as well. The only way to protect the “industrious sort” from themselves, Hill wrote, was to prohibit Sunday work and travel, and to enforce this prohibition strictly. Who had the authority to enact and enforce such prohibitions? Not private citizens and not guilds, but churchwardens backed by local magistrates.

  Another explanation for the Puritan Sabbath is social-psychological. In his Revolution of the Saints (1965), the political philosopher Michael Walzer explains the Puritan fanaticism for order as not just a political response—the answer to industrialism—but a gut feeling of insecurity. England in the seventeenth century was a country racked by change. The population exploded at the very moment when the countryside became unlivable for many, owing to something called “enclosure”—the fencing off of communal lands into private plots, most of them owned by manorial lords. Beggars took to the roads and jammed the cities. Thomas Hobbes wrote menacingly of “masterless men.” The cities’ suburbs and outparishes housed the displaced throngs. The old Church had collapsed, as well as the guilds, and with them many of the civic institutions that linked people to one another. “How were men to be reorganized, bound together in social groups, united for cooperative activity and emotional sustenance?” Walzer asks. “Deprived of village solidarity, disoriented in the great crowds, many men must have found solace in Puritan faith.” The Puritan answer to social disorder was the congregation, or the “good company,” a community in which godliness and orderliness were the rule. When did that congregation unite into a community? When it gathered on Sunday, of course.

  But another way to think about the Puritan Sunday is that it served as a doorway into something the Puritans held dearer than just about anything else: the Bible, the revelation of the Word and Will of God. Puritanism can be seen as a glorious, centuries-long exercise in biblical reenactment. Imagine the Civil War reenactments that occasion such religious adherence in our time, and then imagine them as an actual religious movement. Puritanism, in historian Theodore Dwight Bozeman’s memorable formulation, was a form of “Biblical primitivism.”

  That is, admittedly, putting matters a little starkly. For one thing, the Puritan Sabbath was the product of a very complex and contemporary evolutionary process, not a simple reconstruction of the biblical Sabbath. Insofar as the Puritan Sabbath had been shaped by English Sabbatarianism, it was not even, strictly speaking, Puritan. What we think of as the English Sabbath antedated by decades the advent of what we call Puritanism. (Puritans did not call themselves by that name; they were called that by those who objected to their efforts to “purify” the Church of England.) In the seventeenth century, however, during the Puritan ascendancy in England and among the Puritan Separatists who moved to America, Sabbatarianism attained a degree of importance never seen before or after in Christian history.

  John Hooper, a bishop of England and Worcester under King Edward VI who had lived in exile in Protestant Zurich during the reign of Henry VIII and was martyred under the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary, fleshed out the rudiments of the theology of the English Sabbath in 1558.

  There are four main points of English Sabbatarian theology. First, the Sabbath was to be kept on Sunday, not on Saturday—though it was stressed that the day had been transferred from Saturday to Sunday by biblical authority, not at the whim of the Church. According to Hooper, when Paul called for Christians to give alms to the poor on Sunday in First Corinthians, he made Sunday the Sabbath. (Saturday Sabbatarianism does make the occasional appearance in Puritan thought, but these inklings were dismissed as Judaizing and yielded churches only in the seventeenth century, with the advent of the Seventh-Day Men and the Baptist movement.)

  Second, the Fourth Commandment is moral, therefore still binding; its only ceremonial aspect is the injunction to keep the Sabbath on the seventh day, a time that was deemed more suitable to Israelites than to Puritans. The word moral may be too mild to convey the enormity of the goodness that the Sabbatarians ascribed to the Sabbath. For the Puritans in particular, the morality of the Sabbath lay in its being rooted in the nature of things, part of the law that God embedded in the universe at Creation. One theologian, Richard Greenham, went so far as to claim that the Fourth Commandment was the only one given to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. In Theses Sabbaticae, Shepard explained that God’s “moral law,” the Ten Commandments, was written first upon the heart of man in “his primitive and perfect estate.” After mankind’s fall, however, God had it written down in stone.

  Third, the Sabbath is a social and personal discipline. It is a means—for the Puritans, the chief means—of sustaining the order and holiness of a sanctified life. The Puritan Sabbath included a vigorous menu of spiritual exercises. It entailed extensive preparation beforehand; the good Christian was to quit work at midday on Saturday to get himself and his family and his servants ready for the Sabbath, and to predispose their hearts for grace. This labor included, among other things, conducting a tally of sins committed during the week, and repenting for them. The day itself involved public worship, reflection and study, and acts of mercy or charity toward the poor. The goal of all these Sabbath activities was to achieve a prelapsarian purity, “to bring ourselves back into that estate, from whence we are fallen, and as it were to recover our first footing,” wrote Nicholas Bownde in The Doctrine of the Sabbath (1595).

  Fourth, however, and most important for a Puritan, the Sabbath was the only day on which ordinary people could fully bask in the glory of the Word. For at the heart of the Puritan quest for grace lay a search for the Word, uncorrupted and unmediated and free of High Anglican rhetorical flourishes, and Sunday was the day of the Word’s dominion. It was preached in sermons—Puritanism’s highest literary form—sung in psalms, read in Scripture, meditated upon in private, and discussed in public in appropriately godly conversations.

  Though the Word was to be kept plain, its dissemination did not lack for theatricality. Puritan preachers roamed the English countryside, teaching the Bible to anyone who would listen and cultivating an aura of rustic simplicity. According to the historian William Haller, who draws his observations from the work of the seventeenth-century Puritan biographer Samuel Clarke, anyone who met the ministe
r John Carter and his wife, for instance, “would say, they had seen Adam and Eve, or some of the old Patriarchs.” Haller continues, evocatively: “They lived and dressed as plain as Jacob and Sarah, and had only utensils of wood, earth, pewter, and brass, no plate. The wooden salt-dish had grown black with age and use. The ‘house was a little Church.’ Thrice a day the scriptures were read and the children and servants catechized and instructed. All comers were welcome. There was always a ‘wholesome, full, and liberal diet … and all fared alike: He and his wife did never think that his children and servants and poor folk did eat enough.’” It was a merry saying among the godly that “if they would be a Cow or a Horse or a Hog or a Dog, they would choose Master Carter for their master.”

  Puritanism was as much a style as a theology, and it is in its style that we can discern its leveling nostalgia, its urge to wipe away the distortions of human history. The Puritans would have said they were fleeing the present time of weakness for a Great or Strong Time. David D. Hall, a cultural historian, calls the Puritan style “the new protestant vernacular.” He describes the fashions in vogue among the settlers of New England: “Psalm-singing replaced ballads. Ritual was reorganized around the celebration of the Sabbath and of fast days. No town in New England had a maypole; no group celebrated Christmas or St. Valentine’s day, or staged a prelenten carnival. New England almanacs used numbers for each month instead of names deemed ‘pagan.’” When parents named their children, they chose biblical names: John, Joseph, Samuel, James, and Timothy for boys and Mary, Elizabeth, Sarah, Hannah, Abigail, Rebecca, and Ruth for girls.