The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time

by Judith Shulevitz

  Rakoff suggests three possible reasons for the law’s reluctance to protect non-work time. One is the imbalance of power between workers and management. Another is the outmoded assumption that workers have someone at home who can take care of such things. Both reasons seem true but remediable. Rakoff’s third explanation lays the blame on a more intractable, because more elusive, condition: “cultural blindness” about time. That is, we have a hard time seeing non-work time as anything but formless leisure, rather than time spent doing things that have to be done if society is to thrive, and done regularly and collectively.

  What might neo-Sabbatarian laws—laws that protect coordinated, rhythmic social time—look like? We have dedicated so few brain cells to the problem during the past half century that it’s hard to envision the exact dimensions of a solution. Who knows what a team of crack labor-policy wonks might come up with? But if we do make the collective decision that this kind of time is worth protecting, two things should become apparent: one, that the market is unlikely to protect it for us, and two, that we have more tools at our disposal than simple legal proscriptions.

  We could start by tackling overwork. We could adopt European Union vacation policies (a minimum of four weeks), shorter workweeks (thirty-five hours, say), paid parental leave, and limits on overtime. We could emulate Germany and the Netherlands and give workers the right to reduce their hours and their pay, unless companies can prove that this would constitute a hardship.

  But while such reforms would help Americans balance work and family life, and might even generate jobs in this age of underemployment, they don’t address the problem of coordinating social time. It would be impossible, and probably undesirable, to forbid people to work at night or on weekends. But we could create a web of incentives and disincentives that might make it easier on those who do, and also remedy the harm done to society. We could tax off-hours labor and use the money to bolster the civic institutions weakened by the diminution of the pool of available volunteers. We could mandate higher pay or graduated bonuses for protracted or irregular schedules that reflect the hidden social and personal costs of staggered hours. We could strengthen a worker’s right to refuse overtime or a job reassignment that entailed working non-standard hours.

  Each of these measures might have negative and unforeseen consequences, and we should instruct our labor-policy wonks to model all possible outcomes. And we should concede that a full day of rest in the global era is probably a fantasy. But Henry Ward Beecher was right: The idea does have uplift. Who thinks in terms of preserving public culture anymore? Everybody talks about popular culture, but pop culture is a creature of segmented markets, not common ones. Sunday once gave Americans an experience that was national in scope, personal in character, and religiously neutral. As soon as religion was disestablished, no one had to go to church—or anywhere else, for that matter.

  As for the common day of rest falling on Sunday, Frankfurter, in McGowan et al. v. Maryland, pointed out that to share a day of rest, you had to pick one, and it might as well be the one that most people already observed. The secular Sunday was implicitly a national holiday. One day a week—it is worth remembering—the country honored life beyond duty and the imperatives of the marketplace. For twenty-four hours, we stayed home and ate huge family dinners, or went to church, or set off on afternoon drives. And we not only did these things with members of our inner circle; we did them with the knowledge that everyone else was doing them, too. That gave us permission not to work, too, along with the rest of the nation. We had fewer choices, but that lack of choice, in retrospect, was liberating, because our inexhaustible options trail behind them the realization that we’re not doing everything we could be doing. We embraced laziness, goofiness, random reading, desultory conversation, neighbors and relatives both pleasant and unpleasant—the kinds of things that knit us together even as they made us more ourselves.

  7.

  THE CONVENTIONS of spiritual autobiography require me to conclude by telling you how I keep the Sabbath now, as opposed to when I began this book. The answer is, I have not changed all that much, and everything has changed for me. I keep the Sabbath, but only halfway—by strict Jewish standards, at least—which sometimes feels fine and sometimes feels shameful but has come to feel inevitable.

  My husband and I work hard at the celebratory aspects of the Sabbath. We spend the week scouring farmers’ markets for fresh fruits and vegetables, and on Friday mornings and afternoons we make an elaborate dinner, and sometimes, if we get home in time, take baths and dress up, and we invite friends over or we go to their homes, and we light the candles, and we bless the children, the wine, the challah, and the washing of our hands. As for the negative proscriptions—the “do nots”—we observe those largely by keeping our electronic devices off, including cell phones. These we use only if we really, really need to. We put our wallets away, with the same resolution about money, which is not to be handled on the Sabbath.

  But we live in New York City, and amid the many temptations it’s easy to confuse need with desire. We no longer drive to synagogue, but sometimes the children’s whining about the thirteen-block walk forces us into a cab, which entails driving and handling money. The period after services poses a problem, and on those winter days when we have failed to wangle an invitation to someone’s home for lunch or lack the energy to put on a spread ourselves, when the seconds tick slowly and the children grow restless, we go to a museum. In that case, we may not have to pay—we can usually go to the ones at which we can flash membership cards—but we’re sure to take our wallets back out when it comes to buying food, drink, maybe even toys. I recently confronted the specter of Saturday-morning soccer practice, and was defeated by it. My son now plays soccer instead of going to synagogue, and my husband goes with him.

  I feel guilty about not building better fences around the day, but apparently not guilty enough. Partly, it’s because each step up in observance paralyzes me with indecision. Why follow this rule and not that one? Where to begin? But also, I think, it’s because my religious commitments remain too abstract to overcome the inconvenience of making them. Probably the only way for me to trick myself into being shomer Shabbat would be to restrict myself to circles where such behavior is the norm, not subject to constant question.

  Anyway, I still like the idea of the fully observed Sabbath more than I like observing it. I like the idea of being commanded, too, in the same ambivalent way, because I believe that I am. Being commanded strikes me as a succinct way of saying “being born into the world.” Being commanded means that customs come upon us from the outside, like the language that we learn from our parents, and from the inside, like the still small voice of conscience. What others call God, I call ritual.

  I like to think that I share this view with Kafka. At least that’s how I read his famous parable of the leopards:

  Leopards break into the temple and drink the sacrificial chalices dry; this occurs repeatedly, again and again: finally it can be reckoned on beforehand and becomes a part of the ceremony.

  In one run-on sentence Kafka provides a history of ritual, a definition of God, and a theory of habit. Ritual tames the trauma caused by the leopards—the random violence of life—by incorporating them into a routine. Religion is the sum of such routines. God is what we make of the leopards. After all, the wine in the sacrificial chalices had been set aside for God. If leopards drink the wine again and again, and if that action has become central to a ritual script, then according to that script leopards play the part of God. And if they do that, why then, soon enough, we’re bound to perceive them as God, or as gods. And very good gods they make, too: terrifying, beautiful, unpredictable, susceptible to domestication.

  God, then, is the ungovernable reality commemorated by ritual. Ritual reflects the highly contingent anthropological, geographical, agricultural, and historical facts that conditioned our neural pathways and tribal behaviors and the forms and customs that became religion, and that even now determi
ne through force of repetition the way things ought to be. Or maybe I’ve just naïvely inflated a random evolutionary outcome—the human predisposition to incarnate memory in custom, and those customs themselves—into an overblown fantasy called God. God, then, is my parents, and my parents’ parents, and all those who came before. God is the ancestors, which is probably how our ancestors saw the matter.

  Not long ago, my six-year-old son, Moses, a boy with many reservations about his Jewish-day-school education, informed me, with genuine sorrow, that he didn’t believe in God. “Sometimes,” he said, “I think God is a story someone made up a long time ago and told to his children, and his children told it to his children, and so on, until we all got into the habit of thinking it was true.” Though sometimes, he added, he thinks that he’s wrong, and that God will punish him harshly for daring to think such things.

  I realized with chagrin that I am one of Moses’ children, in all the senses of that phrase. I tell the story of God to my children so that they will tell it to their children. I keep the Sabbath more or less the way my parents kept it, and chances are that my children will keep it more or less the same way. Actually, I suspect that my Moses will not keep it at all, but that, too, is a part of his heritage, a way for him to stay loyal to me. Will the ancestors take revenge on him, as he fears they will? Probably. They did on me. I grapple with them every Saturday.

  Freud also thought ritual—which he equated with obsessive-compulsiveness and neurosis—was the revenge of the dead. In Totem and Taboo, he gave his Oedipal history of religion: It came into being when a group of brothers killed their father, who had denied them access to women. Instantly, they felt remorse. Their guilt required expiation, so they invented ritual as a form of self-punishment. They also ate the father, an event that becomes the basis for religious festivals, and everything else besides. The totem meal, Freud wrote, was “a repetition and a commemoration of this memorable and criminal deed,” as well as “the beginning of so many things—of social organization, of moral restrictions and of religion.”

  The autobiographical moment for which this fantasy is said to have been a screen can be found in The Interpretation of Dreams. Here Freud tells a tale that is usually characterized as one of his earliest encounters with anti-Semitism and, therefore, a primal scene that explains his defensively dismissive attitude toward religion. Curiously, it’s also a tale of the Sabbath. When Freud was ten or twelve years old, he went on a walk with his father, Jakob Freud—perhaps a Sabbath walk, since Jakob was known to take them—during which Jakob told a story that was meant to explain to Sigmund that life had improved a great deal for Jews over the course of Jakob’s lifetime. The events described in Jakob’s story, in any case, definitely take place on a Sabbath walk:

  “When I was a young man,” said Jakob Freud, “I went for a walk one Saturday in the streets of your birthplace; I was well dressed, and had a new fur cap on my head. A Christian came up to me and with a single blow knocked off my cap into the mud and shouted: ‘Jew! get off the pavement!’”

  “And what did you do?” asked young Sigmund.

  “I went into the roadway and picked up my cap,” Jakob quietly replied.

  The young Freud was dismayed: “This struck me as unheroic conduct on the part of the big, strong man who was holding the little boy by the hand.” Whenever he thought about the incident, he substituted for the disturbing image of his submissive father another that he liked better: a scene in which the Carthaginian general Hannibal’s father “made his boy swear before the household altar to take vengeance on the Romans.”

  Some background is required to understand all this. Jakob Freud was raised in a Hasidic family and well trained in Jewish literature and ritual; indeed, there is evidence that he homeschooled Sigmund until he was seven and taught him Hebrew, Torah, and Talmud, even though Freud sometimes denied having had enough Jewish education to distinguish Yiddish from Hebrew. Given Jakob’s upbringing, it seems distinctly possible that the hat that was knocked off his head was a shtreimel, a round, flat ring of fur worn by Hasidic men on the Sabbath and on Jewish holidays. The shtreimel, if that’s what Jakob Freud was wearing, was a flagrant display of ritual headgear; and if that is not what he was wearing, Jakob was still obviously dressed up for the Sabbath, a fact that would not have escaped his son.

  This story, then, gives us another way to imagine the relationship between ritual and trauma, especially as Freud saw it. Ritual is not only an expiation for, or a defense against, trauma, as per Totem and Taboo. Ritual itself traumatizes. The singular Jewishness of Jakob Freud’s Sabbath hat singled him out for violence. On six days he passed as a regular German (the incident took place in Freiburg, a town in what is now the Czech Republic, which is where the Freud family lived before they moved to Vienna); on the seventh day he was a Jew, and assaulted as such. What the story comes to teach us is that if ritual is born of trauma the aversion to ritual is also born of trauma—the trauma of ritual. Keeping the Sabbath as our forefathers did strait-jackets us in an identity that we did not choose and for which we may not want to take the consequences. It goes against our yearning for a world of infinite possibility. It exposes us to violence, ridicule, prejudice, ostracism.

  On the other hand, we are often as irrationally opposed to ritual as ritual is irrational in its demands upon us. Freud’s marriage to his much-beloved Martha, who had been raised in a deeply observant Jewish home, nearly failed to take place because he refused to participate in a Jewish ceremony. Shortly thereafter, he forbade Martha to light the Sabbath candles, a bit of marital high-handedness that she remained bitter about throughout their otherwise apparently happy marriage. (She began lighting candles again after he died.)

  Rituals are not just idealized visions of how things can be. They are also artifacts of history. Why choose Sunday as the American day of rest? Because that is what it has always been, and tradition has its virtues. Or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe what the choice of Sunday commemorates is the rage and insecurity at the heart of Christianity about Jews and their Sabbath, feelings that had homicidal and even genocidal consequences. Maybe we ought not to honor so ignoble a history. Or maybe it is more honest to let Sunday continue to remind us of its problematic origins. The philosopher Jürgen Habermas once argued that one of the advantages of secular societies is that they substitute rational discourse or speech for the manipulatively symbolic communications of ritual. If you can discuss the way things should be, rather than simply enact your vision of them or let them impose their history on you, you have a hope of arriving at a reasoned, reflective consensus about the good life. Should we rest on Sunday or Saturday, or any day in seven? Let us hold a conference on the subject.

  The problem with Habermas’s Platonic reasonableness is that it would banish the poets, along with their poetry. The Sabbath may have defensible social value, in that it offers excellent ideas about time and society, but it also bears testimony to that which can’t be defended, only re-experienced: men and women mute with the disjunctions of exile and the awkwardness of living in a time that does not feel like theirs and mournful with the wish to find a home, if not in space, then in time. And because the Sabbath, Sunday as well as Saturday, is a day those men and women kept, and not a conversation they had, the men and women who came after them remembered it. And when they, too, felt discomfited by their world, they were able to do something about that feeling and assuage their pain a bit. Or maybe they didn’t do what they had been taught to do, because it no longer gave them comfort, but not doing while feeling uncomfortable about it is also a way of remembering.

  So why remember the Sabbath? Because the Sabbath comes to us out of the past—out of the bodies of our mothers and fathers, out of the churches on our streets, out of our own dreams—to train us to pay attention to it. And why do we need to be trained? Consider the mystery surrounding God’s first Sabbath. Why did God stop, anyway? In the eighteenth century, Rabbi Elijah of Vilna (the Vilna Gaon) ventured this explanation: God stopped to sho
w us that what we create becomes meaningful only once we stop creating it and start remembering why it was worth creating in the first place. Or—if this is the thought to which our critical impulses lead us—why it wasn’t worth creating, why it isn’t up to snuff and should be created anew. After all, God, contemplating his first Creation, decided to destroy it in a flood. We could let the world wind us up and set us to working, like dolls that go until they fall over because they have no way of stopping. But that would make us less than human. We have to remember to stop because we have to stop to remember.