The Sabbath World

by Judith Shulevitz

  On Friday nights, when I lived in the suburbs, I had at least one glass of wine before putting my two children in the car and driving to services. If you looked at the synagogue I was driving to, a tiny congregation in a big dilapidated house in a relatively Christian town, you would wonder why a woman would jeopardize her children’s lives to get there. The sanctuary was dark and homely. The wool on its kitschy Israeli wall hangings had begun to ball up. The services were sparsely attended by suburbanites in sweatpants or jeans. The tunes were tuneless—more like chanting—though hypnotic over time. If you could read the liturgy in Hebrew, its outrageous grandeur would make you forget the irritation you might naturally feel at being forced to read poetry before dinner at the end of a hard week. But if you couldn’t you were stuck reading translations that flattened magnificence into an institutionalized vision of exaltation.

  But I liked standing in a room singing with a group of people I may not always have considered intimate friends but was glad to see once a week. Many of them seemed slightly drunk themselves, or maybe they were just getting ready to be. They swept my children up into bear hugs. They made room for us in the back. The children dashed out into the hall as soon as I let them, so that they could run up and down it with their playmates. The adults clapped and swayed awkwardly, with middle-aged bodies no longer adept at spontaneous movement.

  Some would call this community. I like the anthropologist Victor Turner’s word, “communitas.” He was talking about the kind of group life that emerges at the edges of society, not in the middle of it, where people search for something—meaning, solace, truths—that the larger society doesn’t seem to offer. Communitas describes a gathering that may be a little offbeat, a little decrepit, rather hard to see the point of if you’re peering in from outside. Communitas is what happened in the services in private homes that early Christians attended, where they broke the bread and drank the wine and spun out in ever more mythologized detail the stories that would eventually become the Gospels. Communitas, in its common focus on an ideal or a dream, is non-hierarchical and anti-institutional and intoxicating and intimate and also strangely, frighteningly impersonal. Under the spell of a charismatic tyrant, a Mao or a Stalin, communitas can yield the lawless ethos of a mob. Martin Buber meant communitas when he wrote: “Community is the being no longer side by side (and, one might add, above and below) but with one another of a multitude of persons. And this multitude, though it moves toward one goal, yet experiences everywhere a turning to, a dynamic facing of, the others, a flowing from I to Thou.” Communitas is the beginning of a shadow of a very old idea of the Sabbath.

  PART TWO

  GROUP DYNAMICS

  1.

  IF WE ARE TO FEEL OUR WAY INTO THE PSYCHES OF THE MEN AND women who held the Sabbath so dear that they made it the Fourth Commandment—placing it above the injunction against murder—we have to start with the sensation of heat: scorching, air-conditioner-less, soul-withering heat. It is the hot part of the summer in a small city in a tiny desert nation in the 586th year before the advent of the Christian era. The Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar has been cannibalizing an empire from the aging parts of previous ones in Assyria and Egypt. Eleven years earlier, he had punished a rebellious king of the state of Judah by laying siege to its capital, Jerusalem, and exiling said king, along with several thousand of the nation’s leading citizens and craftsmen. A Babylonian puppet had been put on the throne, but the puppet had rebelled as well, and now Nebuchadnezzar’s army was once again at the walls of the city. The Babylonian soldiers had built siege towers and mounds and hunkered down. They had let neither water nor food into the city, and no one was allowed to leave. The corpses of the parched and the starved lay scattered in the streets, and no one still alive had the wherewithal to fight off the men in glinting helmets who were about to pour in through the breaches they had just made in the walls.

  It is considered credulous to take biblical poetry as literal truth, but when it comes to the siege of Jerusalem there are several accounts written early enough after the city’s sacking and the destruction of its Temple to offer eyewitness testimony. The book of Lamentations, in particular, brings a specificity to its itemization of horror that gives it the force of documentary. “The emotion seems too raw for a poem,” the poet and Bible translator Stephen Mitchell has said of Lamentations. “The reality is too raw.” Skeptical archaeologists have not yet managed to contradict the biblical account of famine. On the contrary, some fecal remains found in a toilet in use at the time support its historical accuracy, revealing a diet light on nutrients and heavy on roadside weeds and the kinds of parasites that enter the stomach through rotting meat. Lamentations fills in the details. “The tongue of the suckling [child] cleaves to its palate for thirst,” the poet writes. (Because they convey the graphic concreteness of Lamentations with particular faithfulness, the translations given from that book come from the Jewish Publication Society edition of the Hebrew Bible. All other biblical citations in the book come from the King James Version, by far the greater work of literature.) “Those who feasted on dainties lie famished in the streets; those who were reared in purple have embraced refuse heaps.” (The King James Bible translates this, more bluntly, as “lie in dunghills.”) “Alas, women eat their own fruit, their new-born babes!”

  On the day that the Babylonians breached the wall, say the authors of the biblical histories known as First and Second Kings, they established a base at one of Jerusalem’s main gates but didn’t enter the palace. That night, Judah’s king, Zedekiah, and his soldiers and family sneaked out of the city through the palace garden and fled toward the Jordan. “But the Babylonian troops pursued the king,” we read in Second Kings, “and they overtook him in the steppes of Jericho as his entire force left him and scattered. They captured the king and brought him before the king of Babylon at Riblah; and they put him on trial.” Nebuchadnezzar had his officials kill Zedekiah’s sons in front of him, put his eyes out, chain him up, and take him to Babylon.

  The prophet Jeremiah adds that the king of Babylon “slew all the nobles of Judah,” too. Then Nebuchadnezzar’s troops set fire to Jerusalem, tore down its walls, and sacked the Temple, carrying off anything made of bronze, silver, or gold. They killed everyone who got in their way, rounded up the survivors, and marched them into exile, though not before singling out several top officials and sixty commoners for execution. Only the “poorest in the land” were allowed to remain, to be “vinedressers and field hands.”

  The Babylonian exile may be the most bitterly objected-to population transfer in all Western literature. Several of the later books in the Hebrew Bible dwell upon it with obsessive anguish, interpreting it self-laceratingly as God’s punishment of an insubordinate people. Many books—such as Exodus, with its tales of enslavement, and Deuteronomy, with its concern for the well-being of servants—have been interpreted as allegories of the experience, quasi-historical novels making an unbearable present palatable by setting it in the past. In every case in which the exile is discussed directly, rather than obliquely, the language is as skinless as meat. What does it mean to be starved, dehydrated, conquered, and deported? It is, say the poets, like being gang-raped: “The foe has laid hands on everything dear to her” (“her” is Jerusalem); “she has seen her Sanctuary invaded by nations.” It is like being forced into prostitution, then made to walk down a public thoroughfare in whore’s clothing: “All who admired her despise her, for they have seen her disgraced; and she can only sigh and shrink back. Her uncleanness clings to her skirts.” It is like having one’s father bash one’s head against the pavement: “He”—meaning God—“has broken my teeth on gravel, has ground me into the dust.”

  It was out of this abasement that Judaism as we know it was born, and along with it the Sabbath.

  2.

  THIS IS NOT TO SAY that the religion of the Bible, including the Sabbath, hadn’t existed before the exile. Clearly, it had, for hundreds of years. By the time the Babylonians carried off
the Israelite priests, the form of worship they helped their people conduct was well established, though its origins and its earliest history remain mysterious.

  The Sabbath was at least as old as the cult itself, if not older, although, again, no one knows how old old is, and whether the Sabbath was kept in a strict fashion or not, or exactly what keeping it would have entailed. Resting on the seventh day may initially have been no more than an accidentally savvy social arrangement—the wise management of land and human resources in an early, fragile agricultural society—and only later acquired theological connotations. (Two Sabbath-like land- and debt-management customs codified in the Bible—the sabbatical year and the jubilee year—suggest this origin. The sabbatical occurs every seventh year. During that year, farmers must leave their land fallow and all outstanding debts between Israelites must be canceled. The jubilee occurs every fifty years, on the year following seven sabbaticals. During a jubilee year, the laws of the sabbatical must be observed, but two more rules apply as well: All hereditary land must revert to its original owners or their heirs, and all Hebrew slaves, who were likely to have sold themselves into slavery to pay off their debts, must be freed.) Or the Sabbath may have expressed a taboo, a fear of arousing the wrath of an irascible god. The Sabbath may have been one of Israel’s festivals, a day of joyous feasting much like the day of the new moon. (Some have theorized that it was once the day of the full moon.) It may have been part of the popular religion, observed mainly through sacrifices in family compounds. Or it may have been a priestly matter involving formal Temple sacrifices. It’s even possible that the ancient Sabbath looked a lot more like the modern one than we have any right to expect. Already in the eighth century B.C.E.—two centuries before the exile—a prophet, Amos, sounds remarkably like a modern clergyman when he chides his people for tolerating merchants who are too greedy to wait for the end of the Sabbath to start selling their wares.

  But all of these are speculations, because the prehistory of the Sabbath is just that: that which occurred before the histories were written. There is little physical evidence for the Sabbath outside the Bible. Nor can we compare it with similar institutions in the cultures that surrounded the spit of land that became the twin states of Israel and Judah, because, oddly enough, the Sabbath appears to have been the invention of the inhabitants of those two tiny nations. Many scholars have tried to link the Hebrew Sabbath to some analogous non-Hebrew practice, but their theories have turned out to be implausible or unprovable. There is some charm to the theory that the weekly day of non-work, whose most stringent prohibition forbade the lighting of fires, derived from the fire taboo of a tribe called the Kenites, said to have been blacksmiths and worshippers of Saturn. This hypothesis “is both ingenious and fragile,” as one scholar writes, because we have almost no information about the Kenites, other than that they lived in the Sinai; we don’t know “whether they really were blacksmiths, or whether they knew of the week, or whether they venerated Saturn.”

  The evocative similarity of the Hebrew word Shabbat to an ancient Akkadian word, shappatu, the day of the full moon, an auspicious day “when the gods’ heart was appeased,” has tantalized many and probably has some relevance, but no one can quite say how much. So does the likeness of the Hebrew Sabbath to the Babylonian ume lemnuti, evil or inauspicious days, which fell on the seventh, fourteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-eighth day of the month (and possibly also the nineteenth), and on which, according to the ancient texts, “the shepherd of the peoples [that is, the king] must not eat cooked meat or baked bread, must not change his clothes or put on clean clothes, must not offer sacrifice, must not go out in his chariot or exercise his sovereign power. The priest must not deliver oracles, and the physician must not touch the sick. It is an unsuitable day for any kind of action.”

  Suggestive as they may be, the ume lemnuti fall short of Sabbaths in many ways. For one thing, the Hebrew Sabbath required the participation of all the people, not just the king. Moreover, the Sabbath, which comes every seventh day regardless of the length of the month, was not grounded in the lunar calendar. It was severed from the phases of the moon, if it had ever been yoked to them.

  This lack of clear answers leaves us dissatisfied. When we go hunting for origins, we want objects, documents, dates, stones with worn inscriptions. We want to conjure up the archaeological dig in which proof of the Sabbath would have been waved triumphantly aloft. But the Sabbath is a ritual, not an artifact. It is not an object built in space; it is a performance enacted in time. What we do know is that it was during the Israelites’ sojourn in Mesopotamia and in the decades after, when a Persian king named Cyrus conquered the Babylonians and, incredibly, sent the exiles back to rebuild their land, that the Israelites began to collect their folktales and their legal and theological traditions and weave them into a book: the Hebrew Bible.

  If we want to look to the Bible to understand how our ancestors felt about the Sabbath, we have to remember that while the Bible teaches us our history, it is not history in any sense that we’ve ever been taught. Nor is it literature, exactly. It’s both and neither, a strange amalgam of prose and poetry, containing scene after scene of some of the most profound drama conceived by the cosmological imagination. Does the Bible tell of things as they were, elevating actual occurrences to a mythological plane? Or does it consist of brilliant imaginings, taut parables craftily distressed by some unknown genius to exhibit the grit and anguish of history? Is there a meaningful difference? “For a people in ancient times these were legitimate and sometimes inevitable modes of historical perception and interpretation,” Yerushalmi writes. Émile Durkheim invented the sociology of religion in the early part of the twentieth century by making the still controversial claim that religions “are grounded in and express the real,” by which he meant the reality of a collective or social experience. But, he added, “although religious thought is something other than a system of fictions, the realities to which it corresponds can gain religious expression only if imagination transfigures them.”

  The priests who wrote the Bible did so for many reasons, but one of the most important was to preserve and revive a way of life and a worldview that, for all they knew, was about to disappear from the earth. And so it is as a response to exile that we must seek the meanings of the day itself.

  3.

  IF I WERE FORCED to single out one thing that is truly exceptional about the Sabbath, it would have to be its efficacy. The Sabbath does something, and what it does is remarkable. People who study the ways in which cultures evolve might say that the Sabbath gives societies a competitive advantage. It promotes social solidarity.

  Imagine that there was a job called “social architect,” and you had it. Your job description would be dreaming up the perfect society, drafting the blueprint for it, overseeing its construction from scratch. (In real life, of course, this job is relatively rare, and to the degree that it exists it’s generally unpopular. The past century has provided ample evidence that social engineering, at least on a large scale, tends to end in tragedy or atrocity.) Casting around for existing social institutions to model your new society on, you’d happen upon the Sabbath. If a strong and powerfully interconnected communal life was high on your priority list, you’d quickly realize that you had stumbled on a very good way to achieve it, because the Sabbath can easily be reconfigured as a four-step program for forging community spirit.

  In the first step, you’d write laws to limit work time. That would make room for other kinds of time—rest time, recreational time, family time, time for friends and guests, and, of course, time for God. In the second step, you’d designate one particular day as everybody’s day off. That would coordinate schedules, so that people across a wide range of occupations and social spheres would all have to stop working at the same time and be forced to turn toward one another, individually and in groups. The third step would be to ordain that the day off be taken every single week, rather than now and again, so that not working at that time would
become a regular habit. Once the weekly rhythm of work and rest had become ingrained, it would set your community apart; it would establish clear boundaries between your society and all others, and boundaries, as everyone knows, are wonderful tools for ensuring the cohesiveness of a group. And fourth, you’d make the day festive, filled with song, wine, food, and pretty clothes. People would come to look forward to the day as a treat, rather than experiencing its restrictions as a burden.

  Laws that limit time, coordinate schedules, force people to make a habit of getting together at a prescribed time—all this strikes us as un-American. Besides, life today forbids it. Our wealth as a nation depends on a delicately interlaced network of flexible schedules, our ability to differentiate among kinds of labor and perform them in the proper sequence. Who would want to do without the industries that manufacture products sporadically and in a rush, whenever there’s a demand for them? What about factories whose equipment is so expensive they must operate 24/7? Or the artists and loners who thrive on their weird schedules, and need restaurants and bars with matching weird schedules, and who generate the new ideas that push us forward into the future?

  In a study of the American laws that govern time, the Harvard law professor Todd D. Rakoff asks us to imagine a world divided between two completely opposed kinds of regimes, a “freedom of time regime” and a “constructed time regime.” In the freedom-of-time regime, people dispose of their time as they see fit, and the law does nothing more than lay down and enforce the conditions under which individuals and institutions get to swap time for money. I may work for you for as many hours a week as you’ll pay me for, and at whatever times we both agree on, and only if one of us breaks his side of the bargain does anyone go to court. In the constructed-time regime, the law designates a certain period of time as social time, or at least mandates that some amount of time may not be work time. Rakoff’s prime example of constructed-time lawmaking is, in fact, the Sabbath, as exemplified by America’s now mostly defunct blue, or Sunday-closing, laws: “six-sevenths commercial time and one-seventh noncommercial (family, religious, or social) time.” (The Fair Labor Standards Act reflects a more minimalist constructed-time ideology, since it mandates overtime when a wage earner works more than forty hours. Under the FLSA, I’m required to work for you for only, say, forty hours a week, unless you pay me a whole lot more. With blue laws, you couldn’t pay me to work on Sunday, even if we both wanted me to.)