The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time

by Judith Shulevitz

  We don’t generally see habits as assets. The word habit usually invokes behaviors that we would rather get rid of. Habits are mindless, obsessive, animal-like. We are creatures of habit; we’d rather be masters of our fate.

  James, however, argued that habit is both necessary and efficient—it reduces unnecessary expenditures of physical and intellectual energy and facilitates higher-level thinking. In The Principles of Psychology, he quotes an eloquent Dr. Carpenter on the subject: “When we are learning to walk, to ride, to swim, skate, fence, write, play, or sing, we interrupt ourselves at every step by unnecessary movements and false notes. When we are proficient, on the contrary, the results not only follow with the very minimum of muscular action requisite to bring them forth, they also follow from a single instantaneous ‘cue.’ The marksman sees the bird, and, before he knows it, he has aimed and shot.” A pilot whose flying skills hadn’t become instinctive would have had less attention to devote to saving his plane when a flock of birds struck his engines. Businesses that don’t standardize their procedures to the point where they become a part of institutional second nature would never be able to coordinate their production processes.

  It is true that habit is unconscious. Brain scans of people acting out of habit show that the mental correlate of the activity bypasses the prefrontal cortex, which houses consciousness as well as explicit memories. Instead, habits light up the subcortical structures of the brain, the cerebellum and the basal ganglia, where we store implicit or subconscious memories. Habits even change the shape of the brain. The biologist Eric R. Kandel reports that, nearly half a century ago, he and other neuroscientists discovered that habituation in animals—conditioning that makes them respond automatically to a stimulus—alters the connections between their synapses.

  Teachers understand the power of habit; that’s why they stress good study habits. Parents and bosses do, too. They also know that the best way to get you to agree to do something is to get you to do it. Since habits defy the belief that our wills should be sovereign, we tell ourselves that we meant to do things that way. Max Weber elevates this psychological trick to a sociological dictum: “The mere fact of regular recurrence of certain events somehow confers on them the dignity of oughtness.”

  Recent experiments by psychologists have demonstrated that we’re likely to categorize something as true simply because we’ve heard it before, rather than because we have good reason to believe it to be true. The psychologist Christian Unkelbach, having conducted one such test, speculates that familiar statements are easier to process, and that we mistake this ease for truth: “Processing fluency,” says Unkelbach, creates a “truth-effect.”

  On the other hand, just because something has a “truth-effect” doesn’t mean that it isn’t true. Familiarity is a likely indicator of truth. A statement may be true in only one way, but it can be wrong in a million different ways. The earth is round, not flat or cylindrical or bolus-shaped. We tend to hear true statements more often than false ones.

  P, the priestly writer of the Bible and the codifier of Sabbath law, also had a deep—you might say neurotheological—grasp of how habits and customs work on the mind. There is a curious moment in Exodus when Moses reads the laws to the Israelites gathered at Mount Sinai and the Israelites respond, Na’aseh v’nishma—“We do and we hear.” The verbs, as commentators have pointed out, are in the wrong order. Shouldn’t the people have heard before they agreed to do? But it is in the doing that we hear what a ritual, or a law, or a custom, has come to tell us, and in the doing that we begin to believe it to be the right thing to do.

  4.

  THE UTILITARIAN ARGUMENT for remembering the Sabbath, then, would be that it reminds us to get in the habit of not working and spending quality time with the people around us. Doing that—and thereby coming to believe that it was the right thing to do—would benefit us, our families, our neighborhoods, and our nation, nurturing all the informal and formal associations that go into the making of our civil society.

  Another argument for remembering the Sabbath is less hygienic; it appeals instead to what Presidents Lincoln and Obama have called the better angels of our nature. This is Wordsworth’s spot in time in which we cultivate our negative capabilities. I should say that this argument is only rarely advanced in the name of the Sabbath. It more often takes the form of a lament for the lost art of leisure, as elevated to its highest form by the ancient Greeks and Romans. In 1948, as Germany grimly set about to rebuild its shattered economy, the German Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper wrote a book on leisure in which he begged his readers not to succumb to the ethos of “total work” and forget the ancient understanding of leisure as the highest good, the point of life, that which makes possible the highest achievements of the human spirit, philosophy and music. “Leisure,” wrote Pieper, “is a form of silence, of that silence which is the prerequisite of the apprehension of reality.” In 1962, the American political philosopher Sebastian de Grazia defended leisure in the name of Aristotle, who thought that a citizen could not be free without leisure and the ability to use it well.

  More recently, David Levy, a professor at the Information School at the University of Washington, has updated both the utilitarian and the humanistic arguments for the networked age by calling for a new “informational environmentalism.” Just as we fight to save marsh lands and old-growth forests from development and pollution, he says, so we need to fight to save ourselves from the “pollutants” of communications overload: the overabundance of information that turns us into triagers and managers, rather than readers; the proliferation of bad or useless or ersatz information; the forces that push us to process information quickly rather than thoughtfully. If we don’t fend off those pollutants, he cautions, we risk becoming cut off from the world, rather than more connected; less able to make wise decisions, rather than better informed; and, in the end, less human. “Much as the modern-day environmental movement has worked to cultivate and preserve certain natural habitats, such as wetlands and old-growth forests, for the health of the planet, so too should we now begin to cultivate and preserve human habitats for the sake of our own well-being,” Levy writes.

  How would we go about this? Levy models his answer, he says, on the environmentalist movement. Just as environmentalists no longer try to shut down factories or get rid of cities, information environmentalists should not try to slow down the pace of life or limit the information revolution. Instead, he says, “we will need to cultivate unhurried activities and quiet places, sanctuaries in time and space for reflection and contemplation.” Which sanctuary in time does he have in mind? The Sabbath, of course. “I by no means want to argue for the broad-scale adoption of traditional Sabbath practices … by the larger population,” he says. What does he want to argue for? He is loath to say: “I could speak to the ways I myself am experimenting with such ideas at home and in the workplace, but effective change will most importantly come through collective reflection, experimentation, and action: local communities creating sanctuaries that fit their particular circumstances.”

  5.

  SO WHAT IF, having remembered the Sabbath, we did want to bring it back? What aspect would we find desirable? How would we go about doing something so eccentric and retrograde?

  We have, it seems to me, two options. We could bring it back individually or we could bring it back collectively. Cultivating a Sabbath habit one person at a time has an obvious appeal. Every good Jewish missionary—that is, a person whose job is to lure Jews back into the fold—knows that it is best to start one’s evangelizing by preaching the virtues of Shabbat. Chabad houses, run by a Hasidic group from Brooklyn known as the Lubavitchers, send forth battalions of young black-hatted Jews to invite college students and lonely Jewish travelers to celebrate Shabbat in Lubavitch homes around the world. At the Orthodox synagogue that I sometimes visit with my husband on Friday nights, men vie with one another to invite us to their homes, where their wives have cooked elaborate meals. Reform and Conservative c
ongregations launch campaigns to increase Saturday attendance that have names like “Celebrate Shabbat” or “Shabbat Club.”

  Classical Jewish theology presents the Sabbath as a communal good, rather than an individual one, but communitarianism can be a hard sell in a land of rugged individuals. When the anthropologist Riv-Ellen Prell studied some of these synagogue programs, she found that congregants responded most enthusiastically to pitches that emphasized personal well-being. Celebrating Shabbat met their need for “relaxation and self-reflection … family … a break from busyness, technology, consumerism, and modernity.”

  Christian Sabbatarianism has also begun to make a comeback, stressing the psychological benefits to the individual rather than the rightness of obeying God. A strictly unscientific survey on Amazon.com turned up more than twenty guides to bringing the Sabbath back into your life, all published in the past decade. To the degree that Christianity enters into the discussion at all, it is seen as a tool of self-improvement. And a secular Sabbath has emerged that is largely a way of curing an addiction to technology. Adherents to what’s called a “technology Sabbath”—naturally, they stay in touch via the Internet—speak of themselves in language that evokes Alcoholics Anonymous testimonials: “I love technology. I’m not a Luddite. But I realized it was a problem when I would sit down to check my e-mail and it was almost like I would wake up six hours later and find I was watching videos of puppies on YouTube,” Ariel Meadow Stallings, a blogger from Seattle, told the Reuters news agency in April 2008. “I’d try and think what I had been doing for the past two hours and I had no idea. I associate that kind of time loss with blackouts when you’re drunk.”

  In its celebration of self-discipline, secular Sabbatarianism has a surface resemblance to the Orthodox and Puritan Sabbaths, but it has a deeper affinity to other, recent movements in which Americans take themselves off the grid: the voluntary simplicity movement, the green or sustainability movement, the frugality movement. There are rules to these movements, and you are urged to keep them; the voluntary simplicity movement, for instance, discourages eating out and eating high on the food chain (meat) and unnecessary consumption. But in the end you are accountable to no one but yourself. You have the good of society in mind but all you can expect to change is your own behavior, and maybe that of a few people around you.

  The philosopher Michel Foucault had a name for such personal quests for transformation: He called them techniques of the self. He did not mean to be derogatory. In the third volume of The History of Sexuality: The Care of the Self, Foucault locates the origins of the technique of the self in the writings of the ancients—Seneca and Marcus Aurelius and Plutarch and Epictetus. These philosophers sought, among other things, to achieve sexual moderation in cultures rife with promiscuity. They shared “a mistrust of the pleasures, an emphasis on the consequences of their abuse for the body and the soul, a valorization of marriage and marital obligations, a disaffection with regard to the spiritual meanings imputed to the love of boys,” Foucault wrote. This was not a puritanical backlash, exactly; it was more like applied philosophy. Plato, too, stressed “taking care of oneself.” In the Socratic dialogues with the young future statesman and general Alcibiades—who apparently had a wild streak—Socrates scolds him for wanting to take charge of Athens when he has not learned to govern himself. He had yet to learn, said Socrates, the techne tou biou, “the art of existence.”

  An appealing feature of the technique of the self is that it is voluntary. There is no talk of legislating morality. Nor is the regimen meant for everybody. On the contrary, being able to stick to the rules is what distinguished the adept from the throng. This austere self-discipline became the basis, in part, of Christian monasticism; it seeped into rabbinic thought. The Greeks and the Romans attained transcendence through determined moderation; monks, saints, and mystics by giving up the pleasures of the flesh; and the great rabbinic sages by performing heroic feats of Torah study and demonstrating piety above and beyond the Law.

  Today’s neo-Sabbatarians, in other words, are the latest in a long line of philosophical and spiritual élites. They give things up in a spirit of protest or in an effort to bring holiness into their lives. But their reforms play out in very limited spheres, often on the margins of society. People suffering from time deprivation or information overload may not be addicted or driven or out of touch with the higher purpose of life. They may be tied to their meetings and computers against their will—by the need to hold on to a job. Individualized Sabbatarianism may change life for the lucky few, but it won’t help the many.

  6.

  THE OTHER WAY to bring back the Sabbath would be to re-regulate, collectively, the use of our time. Do I mean mean bringing back blue laws? These happen to be underrated, in my opinion. However complicated, unsystematic, and occasionally unjust they may have been, they did succeed in staving off the encroachments of the market and the specter of 24/7 labor—Stalin’s continuous workweek—for quite a long time.

  But restricting Sunday commerce makes no sense anymore. For one thing, it places the burden on the people who can least afford to carry it—the women, usually, who are already juggling children, households, and full-time jobs. For another, it’s nonsensical to proscribe activities, such as the purchase of alcohol, that nobody frowns on anymore, especially if everything else is for sale. In any case, it is no longer possible to draw a “reasonable line of demarcation” between shopping and recreation, since shopping has evolved into a kind of entertainment and entertainment has largely devolved into a series of long-form commercials for worldwide celebrity brands.

  The emphasis on commerce seems misplaced, anyway. The Fourth Commandment doesn’t explicitly forbid us to shop. It tells us not to work, and not to force others to work. Now, no modern society, no matter how Sabbatarian—Israel is a good example—can avoid putting some people to work on the Sabbath. Any high-functioning state needs uninterrupted access to hospitals, drugstores, the military, food, water, transportation, and other basic services; indeed, Israel makes all those things available to its citizens on Saturday. Any society with a large secular population will also require a full panoply of recreational and self-care options on its days off, including, I would argue, retail shopping. Israel has plenty of that, too, although owing to inconsistent enforcement of its Sabbath laws it is not entirely clear how much Saturday commerce and labor is legal and how much simply flouts the laws.

  Nor does the Fourth Commandment tell us not to work too hard, or too long. Indeed, as the Puritans stressed, we’re supposed to work the other six days. The Fourth Commandment tells us to remember to (1) stop working, (2) stop working at the same time, and (3) stop working at regular intervals. The implication is that a society has a right, and perhaps an obligation, to marshal its temporal resources for the benefit of the greatest number, even at the risk of harming the few.

  The United States, in the twenty-first century, happens to be particularly oblivious to this particular Bible lesson. We have remarkably few laws governing the use and abuse of workers’ time. Two out of three countries in the world have laws that dictate the maximum number of hours employees can be expected to work (usually between forty-eight and sixty hours a week). The United States is not among them. Employees in most countries are entitled to rest breaks, but American employees are not. America has fewer public holidays than most industrialized nations. American workers have no legal right to take a vacation; vacation policy is determined by the employer. Most European countries require employers to give workers three to six weeks of paid vacation.

  America does, of course, have the Fair Labor Standards Act. Adopted at the height of the Great Depression, the FLSA was passed less to protect workers than to fix a broken economy: It was meant to redistribute employment from the few who had it and who worked long hours (the average workweek was forty-eight hours), to include the many who were out of a job. The history of the FLSA, it should be said, tells a cautionary tale about the unintended consequences of reg
ulating time, for it appears to have fostered the current climate of overwork. In the 1950s, the era of the organization man, working overtime at time and a half became a way to climb from the lower-middle class to the middle-middle class, as well as the obligatory proof of one’s seriousness about one’s job. Because the FLSA exempted executive, administrative, and professional employees (in addition to farmworkers, whose work was assumed to require long hours), it wound up contributing to “the time divide”—the gap in American society between high-earning salaried élites who either drive themselves or are pressured into working much longer than forty hours, and, on the other hand, low-earning workers whose hours are deliberately kept below forty hours a week. Some of these workers may put in more than forty hours, but only by combining part-time jobs. As a result, they don’t get overtime—or health benefits, either.

  In any case, a lot has changed since the FLSA was passed. For one thing, in 1938 it was assumed that the forty hours of the workweek would be allocated in even chunks across five days (Monday through Friday). That assumption can no longer be made. Another assumption underlying the forty-hour week is that it represented forty hours of paid work per household, with the same amount of time or more being devoted, usually by a wife, to all the essential unpaid duties. The rise of dual-earning couples, with the increase in single-parent families, means that each household has less time to devote to those activities. The loss of non-work time in these families has made it harder for them to cope with the needs of family members on different schedules, such as schoolchildren and elderly parents; that is why workers are asking for, and receiving, flextime.

  This steady stream of small adjustments to the common work schedule is another way in which we are edging closer to Pieper’s specter of “total work.” When American courts and labor arbitrators hear “disputes at the boundaries of time,” as the law professor Todd Rakoff calls them—that is, tugs-of-war between workers and management over the proper use of workers’ time—their decisions tend to favor companies over individuals, the time of the organizations over the time of families. For instance, a worker who refuses to work overtime has very little legal protection against being fired or disciplined for doing so; the right to refuse overtime is negotiated contract by contract, usually by unions, except in the case of government workers, who enjoy the protections of civil-service law. When an employee is fired or disciplined for refusing to work overtime because he or she needed to pick up a child from school or day care—a situation that generates its fair share of labor disputes—judges and arbitrators have generally held that the worker was required to make a “reasonable” effort to come up with some other arrangement before saying no. One such decision featured a carpenter who walked out on a job where he was working overtime because he had to pick up his two young children from a day-care center that was about to close. The arbitrator ruled that he should have left the children at the day-care center. He didn’t need to leave just then, because he knew that the day-care center would have taken care of the children for an extra fee.