The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time

by Judith Shulevitz

  Raised by well-intentioned Jews, taken to synagogue on Sabbaths and holidays, given a bat mitzvah, currently residing in New York, the most Jewish city outside Israel, by what excess of self-pity could I possibly claim affinity with Jews like that? By what enemy had I been captured? By the enemy, I thought, that is myself. By my disdainful teenage self, which sneered at the cheap brutalist architecture of the suburban synagogue that we joined when we left San Juan for Miami, as well as at the windowless sanctuary filled with old women in hats. By my willful, authority-baiting self, which smoked dope behind my after-school Hebrew school, before and after class. By my cynical self, which scoffed at my parents’ Holocaust obsession and the endless pictures of dead Jews in their library. By my lit-crit self, which read the world against itself. By my grandiose, ambitious, jealous self. By every self that I had been and seemed destined to become. I wanted to be reborn, fresh and pure. I wanted to be led back to the paths of righteousness. I wanted to bring the sacrifice prescribed by the rabbis as penance for my obliviousness to the Sabbath. And, I thought, the best thing about me, really the only good thing about me, is that, when I was a child, I read for the sheer joy of losing myself in books, not so that I would know things or become the sort of person who had read this or that. I thought that I might be able to read the Torah that way.

  Reading the way a child reads, it has since dawned on me, has always been part of the conversion experience. Saint Augustine, as he lay weeping on the ground, struggling to be saved, unwilling to be saved, wretched at the thought of his wretchedness, “the frivolity of frivolous aims, the futility of futile pursuits,” imagined that he heard a child’s voice nearby—“perhaps a boy or a girl, I do not know.” The voice sang a ditty, over and over: “Pick it up and read, pick it up and read.” So he did. He picked it up and read the first passage his eyes lit upon in the book that he had brought with him out to the garden, which contained the epistles of Paul: Not in dissipation and drunkenness, nor in debauchery and lewdness, nor in arguing and jealousy; but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh or the gratification of your desires. And he read no further, for “the light of certainty” flooded his heart, and “all dark shades of doubt fled away.”

  Where does the text get its power to redeem? Augustine doesn’t say; rather, he deftly sets us up for this passage, so that we see its immediate relevance for the dissipated, lustful man he represents himself as being. The Kabbalists had an answer, though. The Torah, they thought, is not just a message left by the divine author. It is not the mere traces of Revelation. Nor are its words the mere instruments of God’s will. The Torah is the actual emanation of God, Revelation itself, the will of God incarnate. To put it philosophically, the Torah has an ontological reality. It has Being—the ultimate being.

  And Being, as any philosophy major knows, has Presence. And so reading becomes a way of being in the presence of—of being intimate with—God. From this point of view, it doesn’t matter what the words say, which is why the Kabbalists felt free to break words down into letters, then transpose the letters into wildly nonbiblical and non-Talmudic myths, involving a God who withdraws into himself and primordial universes that shatter and heavenly spheres that function as God’s avatars. Reading is how you overcome your loneliness and grow close to God. Interpreting and acting on your words come later. The Sabbath is what gives you time to read the Book, and what you read in the Book is that you must keep the Sabbath. Each provides the necessary technology for the movement of return.

  PART SIX

  SCENES OF INSTRUCTION

  1.

  I HAD ALWAYS BEEN A GOOD STUDENT, BUT A STUPID ONE AT THE SAME time. I mastered material, but never actually learned anything. I was too busy displaying academic excellence. The history I would remember, the novels that would remain real to me, the languages I learned to the point where I could wrap my tongue around their strange diphthongs, I grappled with by myself, alone in a room. Only then could I read with a concentration that resembled pleasure, freed from the anxiety aroused by a group and a person with authority to grade me.

  The first time I was invited to study with the Park Slope congregation on a Saturday afternoon, I felt a paper-sharp slice of shame. Me, a serious student of literary theory, reduced to a synagogue adult-education class! But I knew that I would go, and I did. The study session did not reassure me. Armed with a photocopy of a short piece of Talmud, we plunged right in.

  No text is less reader-friendly than the Talmud. Even the pages look like fortresses, with blocks of text nestled inside blocks of commentary ringed by more blocks of commentary. At the center of certain pages lies the first word of the passage under discussion, set apart by an ornate fence. The Talmud is Law, but to read it as law is a mistake. Although it furnishes later rabbis with the raw material of legal rulings, it is not a law book. It offers no general principles, is not thematically organized, and makes no effort to sum things up. You analyze all the exceptions to a rule, for instance, before you find anything that articulates that rule, or you are forced to deduce the main principle from its exceptions.

  Nor is the Talmud theology. Judaism lacks doctrinal discourse in the Christian mode, and Jews didn’t start writing expository prose until rather late in their history, when they began trying to fit into Christian society. Rather, Judaism embeds its values deep within unexpected places: in rituals, in legends, in arcane legal and ethical discussions. When you first encounter what passes for law and theology in the Talmud, it’s likely to strike you as scattershot and shockingly concrete (the anti-Semitic terms are nitpicky and hairsplitting). The rabbis fretted about matters of the utmost apparent triviality. The Sabbath tractate is consumed by the proper time for getting a haircut on Friday afternoon, the carrying of quantities of liquid that you could hold in your cheek on the Sabbath, how to deal with emissions of gonorrheal pus on the Sabbath. One result of this weird mode of transmission is that it’s left up to the Jew to derive the principles of a Jewish life for him—or herself. (The Jewish philosopher Max Kadushin says that Judaism doesn’t have ideas per se; it has “value-concepts,” which are by definition non-definable, because they are embodied in actions or statements about actions.)

  What the Talmud does is ask questions. It’s an exercise in the confection of bizarre hypotheticals that probe the scope and limitations of every legal or ethical proposition. Why this and not that? If this is true, how do we know that it’s true? Is it true in this case, in that one, in both, in neither? If you approach the Talmud expecting something like, say, the United States civil code, you will be lost. The Talmud is more like the minutes of legal-study sessions, except that the hundreds of scholars involved in these sessions were enrolled in a seminar that went on for more than a millennium, raising every conceivable aspect of life and ritual, in a free-form, associative order.

  There’s something wonderfully literary about all this. You rarely find in the Talmud a statement that has not been placed (with historical accuracy or not) in some ancient rabbi’s mouth. And every so often you find parables—midrashim—like little jewels in the text. None is longer than a line or two and all are delivered with brusque non-explanatoriness, as if the rabbis had channeled Franz Kafka or Jorge Luis Borges (which they did if you believe, as Borges did, that every moment in history is pregnant with all those that follow it). Insofar as midrashim may be adduced to illustrate some legal principle, more often than not they contradict whatever law seems to be laid down. Professors in graduate history programs preach against the dangers of presentism, the habit of seeing the past through the lens of the present. There is no need to worry about that with the Talmud. It is the ultimate Brechtian instrument of alienation. You couldn’t assimilate it to anything you knew if you wanted to. This is one way in which reading the Talmud is a spiritual discipline. It tests your ability to survive complete disorientation.

  The first passage that we studied happened to be the first passage of the Talmud itself. “From when should we fulfill the
obligation to recite the Shema in the evenings?” asks the Mishnah, the oldest layer of the text, which was compiled in the early third century. “From the time that the priests came in to eat their portion.” Why start with the Shema? Why ask about the time? When did the priests eat their portion? Why were we talking about priests, anyway, when the rabbis did not codify law until after Temple worship had become a thing of the past? We asked these questions. Our rabbi told us to wait.

  There would be no answers—not to the questions being asked, anyway. The Gemara, the next layer of commentary, seemed to acknowledge our confusion when it asked, “To what is this rabbi referring … and why does he teach the law regarding the evening first?” But all hope of clarification vanished with the next line: “Let him teach the law of the morning first!” This would not do. I wanted preambles, introductory lectures, supplementary readings. All we were doing was translating and being baffled by what we found. On the other hand, I didn’t want to stop. As we homed in on the absurdly concrete points of dispute, we were drawn into a peculiar intimacy. It was as if we had entered a seminar room that had been cryogenically frozen millennia ago, its questions and answers still hanging in the air. Nothing could be mistaken for conclusive. Everything that had been argued could be defrosted and argued again. The room we studied in had a dusty, living-room feel; light sank in from the windows, and swept slowly across the dark wooden floor. We felt no pressure to hurry and finish as the Sabbath afternoons crawled on.

  It was an innovation of the ancient rabbis to place the obligation to study above any other commandment. An early Mishnah outlines mitzvoth rewarded both in this world and in the next—charity, care of one’s parents—then declares that studying, talmud Torah, equals them all. The religious Jew is to study Torah for the sake of studying Torah, Torah lishmah. The ingenuity of the edict, I realized, was that it relieved you of the obligation to be qualified. You studied because you had to study, and those who taught had to take you as a student, and it didn’t matter whether you were an idiot or a savant. This is not to say that brilliance doesn’t matter in the Jewish world—nobody swoons over genius as deliriously as a Jew—but, at the same time, being unbrilliant was no excuse. Everyone had to study, and any day was a good day to start.

  Indeed, the rabbis loved to tell tales of scholarly giants who never opened a book until well into middle age. One day, I found myself sitting cross-legged on the floor at another Saturday-afternoon study session. It was a seudah shlishit, the “third meal” of the Sabbath, a light dinner meant to compensate for the feast of Saturday lunch. We sat in a circle in the rabbi’s garden apartment in the North Slope. I sipped a glass of scotch. The rabbi, a strangely Victorian figure with a long red beard, came from Scotland, and loved to press single malts on his congregants. He was a young, shy man with a soft, singsongy voice. When he taught, his voice went up at the end of sentences, as if he wondered whether you had followed his meaning.

  By then I had a crush on him and was jealous of any attention he paid to anyone else. I hogged the conversation, which was about a midrash. Its subject was Rabbi Akiva, who, the story goes, worked as a shepherd and liked to express an elaborate disdain for scholars. Then—at the age of forty—he was taken up by the daughter of a wealthy man who married him against the wishes of her father, but only on the condition that he go to a yeshiva and study. The father cut her off; she had to sell her hair to pay Akiva’s way through school. Twenty-four years later, Akiva had become the greatest rabbi of his generation.

  I was starting to know better by now, but old habits persisted. I had quibbles to offer, exegetical subtleties to point out. The argumentative techniques of the ancient rabbis remained as obscure to me as hieroglyphics, but I felt as though deep in my body I already knew what they had to say. I wanted to communicate this sensation of déjà vu, but I didn’t know how. Instead, I raised my hand a lot. After a while, the rabbi began to ignore me with a gentle, congenial indifference. After a while longer, he refused to turn his head in my direction.

  Some time after it finally occurred to me to put my hand back down, I closed my eyes and drifted into a daydream. I saw the group of us deep in a forest, floating in a boat on the surface of a lake that was small but deep. The rabbi cast down a bucket and brought up water full of weird plants and fish. He reached in and drew out, one by one, a plant, a fish, a stone. He showed them to us and told us about them. Their forms were not the least bit recognizable, and suddenly we understood that we had reentered an earlier period of evolution, a lost order of time. We were his followers; he was our leader—he might have been Jesus, or Akiva, or any other charismatic master. The Talmud was not a text, I thought. It was an umbilical cord. It linked us to a primordial scene of instruction.

  This was surely no more than the self-protective tuning-out of a person who knows she has embarrassed herself, but I was also realizing something. The Talmud was not a text in the formal sense in which I had previously understood the word. The Talmud was an organism, circulating blood between the present and the deepest past. It was the word received at Sinai—the Oral Torah, it is called, to distinguish it from Scripture, the Written Torah—carried forward in the flesh. “Moses received [Oral] Torah from Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, and Joshua to the elders, and the elders to the prophets, and the prophets transmitted it to the men of the Great Assembly” is the opening verse of Pirkei Avot, the “Ethics of the Fathers.” Body carried the Oral Torah to body. It was no accident that the norms of Torah study involve physical proximity. Students study in pairs, in a hevruta; discipleship—shimmush—to a sage amounts not to apprenticeship but to a total recasting of the disciple in the mold of the mentor.

  How did this work? By means of an almost unthinkable intimacy. How intimate was this intimacy? Go and learn, as the Talmud says. “Rabbi Akiva said: ‘Once I went into an outhouse with Rabbi Joshua, and I learned from him three things. I learned that you don’t sit east and west but north and south; I learned that you defecate not standing but sitting; and I learned that it is proper to wipe with the left hand and not with the right.’ Ben Azzai said to him, ‘How did you dare take such liberties with your master?’ He replied, ‘It was a matter of Torah, and I was required to learn.’”

  Even defecating in the company of your teacher didn’t go far enough. The Talmud describes this scene of ultimate education: “Rabbi Kahana once went and hid under Rab’s bed. He heard him chatting [with his wife] and joking and doing everything he was supposed to do. Kahana said to Rab: ‘You’d think your mouth never sipped this dish before!’ Rab said to him: ‘Kahana, what are you doing here? Get out! This is rude!’ Kahana replied: ‘It is a matter of Torah, and I want to learn.’”

  Every level of the Talmud affirms the necessity of staying securely attached to your teachers—and I mean “attached” as in attachment theory, “attached” as infants are to their mothers. When I reread that first passage of Talmud, I concluded that the rabbis of the Gemara cared much less about parsing the Law than about making sure that the chain of oral transmission had not been broken. They asked not what but who. Who stated a certain dictum first? Who might have contradicted him? How do we decide who’s right? Do their opinions have biblical warrant; that is, can they be defended by verses in Scripture, which, of course, would take them back to Moses? Those sages whose opinions are being quoted—how long ago did they live? Which generation of sages did they belong to? The first? Then their views have great weight. The fifth or sixth? Proportionally less weight. The fewer years that have lapsed between a rabbinic master and Moses, the more likely it is that he can be counted on to have known what he was talking about.

  The Talmud, in other words, is like a giant game of Telephone. That umbilical cord does double duty as a telephone cord. When we study the Talmud, even when we don’t understand what we’re reading, we listen in on the crackles and the static and the distant heartbeats of something garbled and important that goes by the name of Revelation.

  2.

  AMONG ALL
THE OTHER THINGS that it is, the Sabbath is a scene of instruction. In Josephus’s histories and in the Gospels, we already find tales of scribes reading the To rah aloud to Jews in synagogues on Saturdays. But that’s just the most obvious way in which the Sabbath educates. The Sabbath is not just a purveyor of books (or the Book), though it’s that, too. It’s an all-encompassing educational technology, involving the body, the mind, and the soul. A religion, like any cultural artifact that is not genetically predetermined, needs a way to pass its beliefs and practices from one generation to the next. The Sabbath—daylong, regular, putting entire families in physical contact with figures of authority who can both speak about and personally embody the religious way of life—is that kind of mechanism. In fact, it may be the most effective machine for the reproduction of values anyone has ever come up with.

  For it is a process of total immersion. The Sabbath addresses itself to the whole student, imparting not just knowledge or information but also moral edification, behavioral example, ritual training, and religio-political consciousness. By keeping the Sabbath, or so it supposedly went in the olden days, we learned what to do and what not to do, how to carry ourselves, and how to relate to parents or authority figures, and from all these intangible lessons we could deduce notions of holiness or at least the good. The Puritan Sabbath, for instance, properly attended to, studious and decorous, was an exercise in self-control, and it was meant to effect a “reformation of manners” throughout seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England and America. Rid the lands of sports, plays, alehouses, drunken revelries, and maypole dancing on the Sabbath, they thought; replace them with soberness, churchgoing, sermons, Bible study, self-scrutiny, time discipline, and acts of charity; and you’d soon find yourself in the holiest (and, as Max Weber would point out in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the wealthiest) of nations, surrounded by the most dignified and reverential of fellow citizens.