The Sabbath World

by Judith Shulevitz

  Chronobiology may be on the verge of proving that the week exists in nature, but for the moment the seven-day cycle remains a social unit of time—in a way, the very first. The week was the first temporal division not tethered to the sun or the moon. It was the first calendrical algorithm, rolling forward into the future according to its own logic and with no regard for the rotations of the astral bodies. “So long as man marked his life only by the cycles of nature,” the historian Daniel Boorstin wrote, “he remained a prisoner of nature. If he was to go his own way and fill his world with human novelties, he would have to make his own measures of time.”

  If the week is a socially constructed measure of time, then when people get sick every Sunday their illness is probably not a biological disorder. It’s a reaction to Sunday itself. But what about the day provokes this reaction? “Sunday is the holiday of present-day civilized humanity,” Ferenczi explained. What made Sunday civilized, he declared, was that it was bacchanalian. To illustrate this paradox, Ferenczi imagined a Sunday that a person might spend with friends and family. (You have to remember how literary and whimsical psychoanalysts allowed themselves to be in those days.) His illustrative fantasy is very fin de siècle, very late Austro-Hungarian empire. It involves a picnic in the mountains, where “everything is permissible.” Adults disport themselves like children. The children get wild and spiral out of control. But not every adult will enjoy his “holiday wantonness.” Hilarity, in the Sunday neurotic, prompts self-loathing, not release. He clamps down on himself, and his urges spill out as symptoms. During the other days of the week, a busy schedule and strict codes of behavior keep dark feelings in check. On Sunday, when time loses its structure and conventions relax, they emerge.

  Aha! I thought. So the goyim twist their freedom into a curse, too! But then I read on, and noticed something strange. Aside from this one made-up Sunday, Ferenczi bases his diagnosis entirely on a single example set not on Sunday but on Friday night: a Jewish patient who remembered that, as a little boy, he vomited every Sabbath eve. His family blamed the fish they usually had for dinner, but Ferenczi had another theory. “It is known that for religious Jews on Friday night, it is not just eating fish that is obligatory; so is marital love,” he wrote. He was alluding to a rabbinic recommendation that couples have sex on the Sabbath. What really disturbed his patient, Ferenczi said, was that as a boy he had overheard his parents acting on that suggestion and made himself sick to quash the thought that his beloved mother could do that with his father.

  When I first read Ferenczi’s Oedipal explanation, it struck me as crude, even ludicrous. How could the depth and complexity of the boy’s Friday-night experience be reduced to a groan overheard by chance? But, given how prescient Ferenczi is in other respects, I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. I also decided to look into how he came to write that essay.

  Most of what is known about Ferenczi comes from two decades’ worth of letters to and from Freud. From them we learn that although Ferenczi, like Freud, was the kind of assimilated Jew whose idea of Sabbath rest meant Sunday sociability, he would have been perfectly well aware of the difference between Saturday and Sunday. Ferenczi grew up in a Jewish community in Miskolcz, a town in Hungary, where his mother probably lit Sabbath candles on Friday night. Both of Ferenczi’s parents came from Poland, a country whose pious Jews made Hungary’s less strict Jewish community look practically Christian. His mother was the president of a local organization of Jewish women and probably observant. His father, an ardent Hungarian nationalist and pamphleteer who changed his name from Fraenkel, probably wasn’t.

  By the time Ferenczi got to Budapest, at the turn of the twentieth century, it had grown into a gleaming metropolis on whose elegant boulevards promenaded writers, artists, and intellectuals, whose ranks soon included Ferenczi himself. They considered their city a Central European Paris where Sundays were for wrapping your arm around a lover’s waist and strolling through a park; drinking and listening to bands in one of Budapest’s big, gilded cafés; gathering with your family for a rich, desultory Sunday dinner; fleeing the heat with a trip to the nearby mountains. It was not a day of solemn prayer. Ferenczi saw patients on Saturdays. On Sundays, he usually took the train to Vienna to talk things over with Freud. He would not have wanted his diagnosis to reek of a parochial Jewishness. He wanted it to express the human condition. So maybe when he turned this Saturday neurosis into a Sunday one, he was, like the early Christian thinkers, universalizing. This is not to say that Ferenczi was anti-Jewish. On the contrary, he was a Jewish chauvinist, often bragging about the accomplishments of fellow members of the tribe. But he recoiled from everything having to do with Jewish ritual. So did Freud.

  It’s hard to remember now, but a century ago psychoanalysts like Freud and Ferenczi were going to rid the world of superstition and replace it with a fearless science of the self. They were going to forge the personality the sociologist Philip Rieff would later call “psychological man,” the self-scrutinizing figure whose quest for individual self-improvement banished the more community-minded soul of previous eras. Psychological men and women had liberated their “I”s. They had no time for the “we” cultivated by believers. Religion was a sickness, and Freud had come to cure it.

  When Ferenczi blurred Saturday into Sunday, he may also have been worrying about anti-Semitism, which he and Freud feared would damn their new science to oblivion. In November 1917, less than six months before he sent Freud a finished draft of “Sunday Neurotics,” Ferenczi dropped him a note announcing with relief that he was finally starting to see non-Jewish patients. He and Freud would both have interpreted this as a sign that psychoanalysis was becoming respectable in Hungary. On the other hand, this wouldn’t have left Ferenczi time to psychoanalyze many Christians before sending his article to Freud. So where did he get his material? From Jewish patients, of course, and, I can’t help suspecting, from himself. Like all the early analysts, Ferenczi was given to autobiographical reflection, and considered himself as good a subject of clinical study as anyone else.

  Actually, I don’t think it matters much whether he was talking about himself or someone else. Ferenczi’s patients, it turns out, were a lot like him. They belonged to the first generation of Hungarian Jews to be admitted to Hungarian schools and universities—luckily for them, at a moment when these institutions happened to be unusually good—and granted free access to the professions. Historians refer to them as Hungary’s golden generation. Some of them transcended the confines of Hungarian (one of the world’s most difficult languages, and little read outside the country) and achieved world renown; among them were the composer Béla Bartók, the playwright Ferenc Molnár, the journalists Theodor Herzl and Arthur Koestler, the sociologist Karl Mannheim, the literary critic and philosopher Georg Lukács, and Ferenczi himself. The parents and grandparents of this generation had made their way to Budapest from poorer and more pious regions. They had kept their accents and many of their customs, even when they joined reformist synagogues that made rituals optional. (Through out the nineteenth century, Hungary had a large, dynamic reform movement, called Neolog Judaism, that had much in common with the Reform Judaism prevalent in America at the same time.)

  The poets, painters, and thinkers among them, critical of capitalism and the damage wrought on the countryside by industrialization, wrote and painted nostalgic visions of the villages of their (or their parents’) childhood, but they had no desire to follow the religion practiced in them. They disliked the authoritarianism of faith; they cherished the newfound freedom of reason. The sight of black-hatted Eastern Jews, or Ostjuden, made these children particularly nervous. “My father, who otherwise never went to temple and certainly never prayed, once a year took me to some secret ceremony,” reads one anxious passage in the memoir of the poet Béla Balázs, Ferenczi’s contemporary. Balázs was talking about Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. “There were only men there whom I did not know and with whom my parents did not socialize. W
ith white sheets on their shoulders, they wailed and beat their breasts. But what was really frightening for me was that my father too donned such a white sheet, which was edged with black stripes, and dressed like them, he joined and entered this alien and secret alliance.”

  So maybe it’s not enough to say that Ferenczi’s patient associated fish with his parents having sex or that he had an existential dread of being off the workaday calendar—though those things seem plausible, too. Given how a young Jew of his time would have felt about the Sabbath, you can’t help but suspect that the boy would have had to fight his way to his family’s Friday-night dinner table through a storm of emotions: the disgust felt when your parents practice rites you deem primitive; the guilt inspired by such disgust; the alienation you feel when you don’t know whether to be loyal to your family or to the outside world. No wonder he threw up. No wonder he found himself on Ferenczi’s couch. The question is why Ferenczi, who must have had firsthand experience with the same internal Kulturkampf, never entertains the possibility that the Sabbath itself (rather than Sabbath-related sexual activities) could have been the source of the boy’s distress—or at least Ferenczi never utters the thought. But maybe the mental picture of a Sabbath table made Ferenczi a little queasy himself.

  5.

  IT WASN’T JUST THE TIMES that changed in the shift from Ferenczi’s parents’ generation to his, or from my grandparents’ to mine. Time changed, too. We tend to forget that time itself has a history. Consider that only thirty-five years before Ferenczi’s essay, twenty-five nations in Europe and the Americas began the process of unifying all the local times around the globe into a single mesh of standard public time, dissecting the world into twenty-four time zones, with Greenwich, England, as the zero meridian. Not coincidentally, at the same point in history artists and writers were beginning to chronicle the rise of the diametrically opposite kind of time: idiosyncratic private time. Psychological man defined himself in opposition to the clock. In The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1918, the cultural historian Stephen Kern proves this point by riffling through the works of the great turn-of-the-century chroniclers of consciousness: the philosopher Henri Bergson, the psychologist William James, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, and, of course, Freud. Kafka wrote: “It’s impossible to sleep, impossible to wake, impossible to bear life or, more precisely, the successiveness of life. The clocks don’t agree. The inner one rushes along in a devilish or demonic—in any case, inhuman—way while the outer one goes, falteringly, its accustomed pace.” Freud, ever the encyclopedist, saw that private time could sometimes be swift, sometimes be slow. Dreams turned the plodding sequences of waking life into rapid-fire montage, but the unconscious could move with glacial indifference to ordinary standards of time.

  Taken together as a dialectical unit, however, private and public time were eclipsing an older kind of time: religious time. Ferenczi may have elevated the Christian calendar, with its Sundays, to the public standard of all civilization, but by the early twentieth century factories and department stores were no longer uniformly closing on Sundays, and Christians were beginning to grasp what it meant to worship as a minority (and were beginning to complain about it). Public time was time calibrated to the needs of transportation and production networks. Private time was equally desacralized and irreligious. Sacred calendars were—and are—sternly communitarian. Religious time does not strive to satisfy individual needs. It makes its own inexorable demands, flowing from prayer service to prayer service, from festival to festival.

  For men and women—or boys and girls—as determinedly forward-looking as Ferenczi and his patients were, religious time must have seemed vertiginously de trop. Think of sacred holidays as wells; they tunnel down through temporal strata and allow the past to bubble into the present through the liquid medium of myth. Keeping the Sabbath means sliding the cover off that hole on a weekly basis. It is easy to imagine a turn-of-the-century youth peering into the mise en abyme of time past that is the Sabbath and feeling sort of sick.

  6.

  IN FERENCZI’S DAY, it was communitarian time that seemed on the verge of disappearing. Now family time does, too. Not long ago, the sociologist Arlie Hochschild studied life at Amerco, an unusually worker-friendly Fortune 500 company. In her 1997 book The Time Bind, she reported that workers had grown so entranced with life in their workplace that they’d started avoiding their less well-tended-to personal lives. To maximize the time spent in the office or on take-home work, they applied managerial principles of efficiency to their homes and their children. The faster the Amerco employee got through the dishes, the sooner she could get back to work.

  Today, work has grown even more portable, so that the work addict need never turn off her mobile communications device as she interacts with her family. This image of the workaholic may be a caricature, but caricatures only exaggerate the satirizable features of everyday life. And if there’s one thing we know about everyday life, it’s that we don’t have enough time to finish our work and get our chores done and be with family and friends.

  We don’t actually work more than we used to, but we think we do. In 1991, the economist Juliet Schor advanced the now conventional thesis that global competition forced Americans to toil longer and rest less. She based this on rough estimates that people gave during interviews with U.S. census takers over three decades. Meanwhile, two sociologists, John P. Robinson and Geoffrey Godbey, were asking people to fill out time diaries noting exactly how much time they spent on each activity of the day right after they’d done it. They concluded that Americans work less than they did in the 1960s. How do you reconcile what people said with what their time diaries showed? You acknowledge that Americans feel more pressed for time, whether they’re working harder or not.

  Many theories have been advanced to explain the perception that we’re overtaxed. Some cite evidence that it’s mainly highly educated white-collar workers who put in those legendary fifty-, sixty-, seventy-hour weeks, even as blue-collar or service workers struggle to cobble together enough work to live on. Others interpret our feeling of being overwhelmed as a function of the fact that, even though as employees we work no more than we used to, as family members more of us are saddled with more of the burdens of domestic life. The women who used to stay home and take care of everything now leave their houses for offices, so that chores must be more evenly distributed throughout the family. People have that nagging sense of never having finished with the housework, even though if you added up all the hours we collectively devote to housework, you’d find that the number is smaller than it was thirty years ago (down from slightly more than twenty-seven hours a week to twenty-four).

  Time has become more fragmented. More Americans work during the off-hours than they did half a century ago, the heyday of the nine-to-five, Monday-through-Friday workweek. According to the sociologist Harriet B. Presser, as of 2003, two-fifths of American workers were working non-standard hours—“in the evening, at night, on a rotating shift, or during the weekend”—and she wasn’t counting those who bring their work home and do it on their off-hours, or who are self-employed. Some people have enviable flexibility. They’ve won flextime from their bosses, hold non-traditional jobs, or are self-employed. Others have no choice but to work late shifts at companies that measure time by overseas clocks, or else they’ve found employment in the service sector, to which the bulk of American jobs have shifted. There they wait on everybody else in the evenings and on weekends.

  Shift work, it is now clear, disrupts circadian rhythms, fosters insomnia, and induces inattentiveness, memory loss, and depression, especially when the shifts are irregular. This is because different parts of the body’s ecosystem—temperature, hormones, the heart, the digestive system—adjust to disrupted sleep schedules at different rates, causing parts of the body to be at war with others. Flextime workers don’t have the same physical problems, but their irregular work hours nonetheless upset their psychological equilibrium. With a moment snatched h
ere and there, it’s hard to achieve that feeling of being in the swing of something, the self-forgetfulness that psychologists call flow. Moreover, when friends and family no longer follow the same schedule they’re less likely to get together. According to Presser, couples who have children and work separate shifts are more likely to get divorced than those who don’t—as much as six times as likely when it’s the husband who works the late-night shift, or on a rotating schedule, and three times as likely when it’s the wife.

  But we tend not to see these problems as the result of living in a temporally discombobulated society. We blame ourselves. We say that we’re too busy to do everything we want to do and see the people we want to see, and isn’t that a shame. Besides, even if we aren’t working more than we used to, we don’t get as much done during our non-work hours as we wish we did. The time-diary studies suggest that we feel as if we’re falling short because we devote just under half of our free time to media: at the time of the study, mostly television; to a lesser degree newspapers, radio, and books; and now, one assumes, iPhones, computer games, and the Web. And though we squander more hours on television and computers, we ask more of ourselves in the hours remaining. We try to train ourselves to use our free time more efficiently: to master more kinds of time-saving technology; to become more proficient skiers or chess players or home decorators; to maximize face time with our loved ones; to live up to ecological mandates for a more handcrafted domestic life.