The Sabbath World

by Judith Shulevitz

  In 1906, an Episcopalian minister in Boston claimed, portentously, that Sunday had given the American character its “moral earnestness … that utters itself in every grand institution of freedom” and allowed “eighty million persons, the refugees of every land” to unite into a single people. In 1961, the Supreme Court justices Earl Warren and Felix Frankfurter issued separate but concurring opinions in defense of Sunday-closing (or blue) laws in a case called McGowan et al. v. Maryland, which wrote into legal history the bond between the Sabbath and civic consciousness. It’s unsettling to remember how recently Americans couldn’t work or shop on Sunday, except when medically necessary or when certain services or stores were deemed essential to fun on days off. What was wrong with letting people shop? Frankfurter glossed over the obvious point that it forced everyone in the retail sector to work and emphasized instead something less tangible: the bustling, humming feel of a street open for business, which, he said, had the power to destroy “a cultural asset of importance: a release from the daily grind, a preserve of mental peace, an opportunity for self-disposition.” Warren and Frankfurter maintained that the Protestant Sunday had evolved into a secular day of recuperation, a public good that promoted the health of the American people and the orderliness of its society. Therefore, they ruled, blue laws did not violate the First Amendment’s stricture against the establishment of religion.

  6.

  NEARLY FIFTY YEARS AFTER the Judahites were carried off to Babylon, Cyrus, the warrior king of the Persians, entered the city and took its puppet king prisoner. The Judahites hailed him as a savior. “He is my shepherd,” Isaiah has God say of Cyrus. Cyrus sent the Judahites home to reestablish their government and rebuild their Temple. The Bible claims that Yahweh inspired Cyrus’s generosity. Cyrus would have credited the principles of sound imperial administration. A shrewd and effective tyrant, he understood that he could ensure peace and stability in his kingdom by giving his subjects some control over their own destinies, but he handpicked their leaders to make sure that they were loyal to him.

  The return took more than a century. The Judahites came in a trickle, then in waves. Their leaders were bookish, messianic, intense. Many of them hoped to restore the monarchy under Davidic rule. Rebuilding God’s house did not just mean rebuilding his Temple and protecting it with walls. It also meant disentangling his people from the seductive embrace of non-Judahites. The efforts of these determined favorites of the Persian kings enraged the locals, many of whom had mixed happily with their polytheistic neighbors and even married some of them. The Judahites who had stayed behind had their own ideas of what it meant to be a Jew in a post-Temple world, and many of them harassed their new leaders. It should be noted that, right around this time, the returning Judahites begin to refer to themselves as “Jews,” or “yehudin” in Aramaic—that is, residents of the colony the Persians called Yehud (Judah, in Persian).

  Archaeologists disagree about exactly how many people really left Judah during the exile, how many remained, how many returned, and how returnees treated those who had been left behind. Most archaeologists doubt that the land ever lay as empty or ruined as the Bible makes it sound. But you don’t need archaeology to see that, as a class, the “assembly of the exile” had little respect for the Jews who had remained in Yehud, and that these leaders devoted themselves to creating a special group of insiders free of all foreign influence and syncretism, and ensuring its dominance.

  The Sabbath played a crucial role in this effort. The Sabbath was the great obsession of Nehemiah, a cupbearer and eunuch of the Persian king Artaxerxes sent to rebuild and govern Jerusalem in 445 B.c.E., and for Ezra, a priest and scribe sent by Artaxerxes to investigate the state of religious life in Yehud. (Ezra is the first person we know ever to stand up before a congregation—gathered, in this case, in front of Jerusalem’s water gate—and read the Torah aloud.) Nehemiah and Ezra wanted to revive the cultic calendar, and started by enforcing Sabbath laws, which had largely been forgotten. “In those days,” Nehemiah writes, “saw I in Judah some treading on wine presses on the sabbath, and bringing in sheaves and lading asses; as also wine, grapes, and figs, and all manner of burdens, which they brought into Jerusalem on the sabbath day…. There dwelt men of Tyre also therein which brought fish, and all manner of ware, and sold on the sabbath unto the children of Judah, and in Jerusalem.” Horrified, Nehemiah complained to the city fathers, “What evil thing is this that ye do, and profane the sabbath day? Did not your fathers thus, and did not our God bring all this evil upon us, and upon this city?”

  And so, Nehemiah tells us, he brought in his henchmen to block merchants from entering Jerusalem’s gates. “And it came to pass, that when the gates of Jerusalem began to be dark before the sabbath, I commanded that the gates should be shut, and charged that they should not be opened till after the sabbath: and some of my servants set I at the gates, that there should be no burden brought in on the sabbath day.”

  To understand how unneighborly it was for Nehemiah to shut the city gates, you have to know something about the city gate in the biblical world. It was much more than just a gate for going through or keeping out. “It was also the ‘center’ (even though at one side) of the city’s social, economic, and judicial affairs,” one historian writes. The city gate and the street behind it functioned as the speaker’s corner, the town hall, the law court, and the marketplace, all at the same time. That Nehemiah (or whoever wrote his book) understood the Sabbath as a way to winnow his people from the neighbors becomes clear when you read the story immediately following it—in it, he yells at the intermarried Jews and plucks their beards to prevent future intermarriage. After that dramatic illustration of his dislike of outsiders, Nehemiah brings his story to a close. His second-to-last verse goes like this: “Thus cleansed I them from all strangers.”

  7.

  NEHEMIAH’S SHUTTING of the gates made the Sabbath a geographical construct as well as a temporal one. The Sabbath, a day set apart, became a city enclosed, and a nation withdrawn into itself. Nearly a millennium later, the rabbis of the Talmud turned the Sabbath into a more modern space, a place both enclosed and open. They developed a body of laws whereby, by following certain prescribed procedures, a community could construct a boundary marking off a Jewish neighborhood for the duration of the Sabbath. In lieu of a gate, the laws called for a wall, but not the impermeable kind of wall that surrounded Jerusalem. This was not a wall of brick or clay or stone. This was to be a notional wall—a wall concept, you might say, a boundary marked by thin wires strung from pole to pole high above the head. This wall-like entity they called an eruv, which in Hebrew means “mixing” or “commingling,” since an eruv brings together entities otherwise kept apart on the Sabbath. (Technically, the word refers to many acts that “mix” or “commingle” the forbidden with the permissible, not just this particular symbolic wall.)

  The Bible wished upon its readers a very localized, confining Sabbath. Biblical law forbids Jews to walk very far or carry anything on the Sabbath from one domain to another. They are not to carry from the private domain, or home, to the public domain, or street, or the other way around, or between two private domains, and so on. The rabbinic eruv sweeps away these restrictions by bundling together assorted city spaces—apartment buildings and alleyways, courtyards and front yards—and recategorizing them, within limits, as one large private domain. (Busy public thoroughfares don’t qualify.) The eruv advanced the legal fiction that all the Jews in a neighborhood live in one big heimishe Jewish household.

  The potential for claustrophobic self-sequestration contained within this idea is, of course, enormous, and was often realized during the course of Jewish history, but its usefulness should also be pointed out. With an eruv in place, traditional Jews stroll through the streets on the Sabbath with a commanding ease, as if moving from room to room. Women carry their babies and push strollers; men carry their books and prayer shawls; guests carry wine to their hosts. At a more abstract level, an eruv delineates
the contours of a Jewish space, which adds value beyond the value added when real-estate prices soar within the footprint of the eruv. If you read Eruvin, the tractate that deals with the laws of the eruv, you will discover that the rabbis belonged to, and wrote about, highly mixed societies. In their neighborhoods, Jews and non-Jews lived next to and on top of one another. Different kinds of Jews—rabbinic, non-rabbinic, Torah-reading, non-Torah-reading—also mingled. With the eruv, the rabbis uncovered a way to pry unity out of diversity. One set of eruv laws requires beneficiaries of an eruv to make a collective donation of bread, and imposes penalties on neighbors who are too stingy or forgetful to do so. As it was with collecting manna, so it is with building the eruv: You have to learn the lesson of cooperation. Another set of laws ponders the mystery of how to involve the non-Jewish neighbor in the peculiar act of making an eruv. The discussion concludes with the opinion that you probably can’t, and that you should probably retreat to a mostly Jewish neighborhood. The eruv, in other words, is a segregator and identity-enhancer and nation-builder. Its quasi-fictional walls were the stage upon which the Jews imagined their way into the idea of community.

  8.

  SOMETIME IN THE MID-1970S, my mother, certain that our Puerto Rican sojourn had weakened, if not destroyed, her children’s sense of Jewishness, began looking for a Jewish summer camp to send me to. She wound up choosing the same summer camp that she had gone to in the 1940s, an archetypal scattering of cabins, rec halls, and playing fields in rural New Hampshire. This was the institution in which my mother, a public-school student, had acquired her religious Zionism. I did not appear likely to follow her example. I was a girl growing up in the honky-tonk part of an American colony, used to spending my spare time sneaking into hotels to swim in warm, clear, forbidden pools. And suddenly I was forced to take swimming lessons in an ice-cold dark-brown body of water that the instructors called a lake, though it was clearly no more than a pond. My friends at home were the transient children of businessmen briefly stationed on the island, some American, some European. We had mastered the tone of world-weariness meant to let people know that we were well traveled, if a bit neglected. My fellow campers, on the other hand, were earnest students at Jewish day schools from the decorous middle-class suburbs of Boston. I had to play games I’d never heard of, like tetherball, and pretend to know something about the TV shows that were constantly alluded to, even though Puerto Rican television, at least then, broadcast only a handful of American programs, all a year or so late and dubbed into Spanish.

  I could fake acquaintance with American pop culture, but I couldn’t fake being Jewish. My after-school Hebrew school left me with hardly any knowledge of the language, whereas my peers could read the Bible in the original. Nor did I know what to do when we gathered to pray first thing in the morning. I was particularly confused by one move, a series of steps ending in some bows that were required at the beginning and end of the standing silent prayer called the Amidah. I usually tried to imitate the person praying in front of me, which made everyone behind me snicker.

  The camp had been founded in the 1940s, along with dozens of others like it and scores of Jewish schools, in response to rising anti-Semitism in Europe as well as in America. Once America entered World War II, echoes of the Nazi attack on Jews began to be audible at home. Charles Lindbergh, the pilot and hero and right-wing isolationist, blamed the Jews for pushing America into war; radio talk-show hosts such as Father Charles Coughlin claimed that the Jews started the war to profit from it. Zionism went from being the cause of a small clique of radical intellectuals to being hugely popular among American Jews. And Judaism as a religious practice, which had lost a great many adherents to the jazzy freedoms of secular Americanness, began to gather followers back unto itself. American Jews, the theologian and sociologist Mordecai Kaplan declared, were returning to Judaism “like prodigal sons.”

  Parents began to fret about teaching their children how to be Jews. Jewish schools were an obvious answer. Jewish summer camps were a non-obvious one. We can all imagine why a school would appeal to a parent who wants to teach her child some specific body of knowledge, or inculcate a particular set of values, but what made camps so attractive requires a little more teasing out.

  It is no coincidence that in the 1940s experimental social psychology, whose practitioners invent dramatic and intense situations to study how groups affect individuals and vice versa, began to take an interest in camps. Nor should it be a surprise that American social psychology entered its heyday when refugees from Nazism began to arrive. The social experiment that was Nazism, the astounding transformation of ordinary Germans from enlightened-sounding democrats to regimented bystanders to mass murder, made it clear to everyone who had lived through it that there was such a thing as a group psyche, that it could turn individual psyches inside out, and that it could be manipulated. (And then, of course, there were those other camps.) Kurt Lewin, who did more than anyone else to convince psychologists that they ought to be studying the workings of power within and among groups rather than limiting themselves to individuals—he invented the term group dynamics—fled Germany in 1933, when Hitler came to power.

  Muzafer Sherif was born in Turkey and studied at Harvard, but returned to teach in Turkey. Before he got there, though, he attended lectures at the University of Berlin, where Hitler was in his political ascendancy. Sherif wrote extensively about the dangers of Nazism, and when his books were published in Turkey, technically a neutral country for most of the war, he was thrown into jail. Influential friends from Harvard got him out, and by 1944 he was teaching at Yale.

  Lewin’s preoccupation was socialization—how individuals reconcile themselves to the mores of the group. His best-known study was of a boys’ club, in which he showed how different styles of leadership—autocratic, democratic, laissez-faire—can reliably produce entirely different kinds of groups. Lewin saw that the value of camps for indoctrination lay in their isolation, in their being cultural islands, which allowed them to create alternate societies without interference from the dominant society. Isolation helped minimize resistance to new and different ideas.

  Sherif was curious, among other things, about how groups develop norms; that is, values and standards of behavior, as well as a sense of who’s in and who’s out. He answered these questions by staging experiments in actual summer camps. In 1954, Sherif and his wife led one of the most famous experiments in social psychology, the Robbers’ Cave experiment, named after the state park in Oklahoma that surrounded the two-hundred-acre Boy Scouts of America camp the Sherifs borrowed for their “summer camp.” Anyone who has lived through a summer camp “color war” will recognize the Robbers’ Cave experiment as an only slightly exaggerated version of the same thing. It involved two busloads of twelve-year-olds, all well-adjusted boys from similar backgrounds: lower middle class, white, Protestant. Over the course of three weeks, the boys were made to form groups to which they became passionately attached, developing distinctive rituals and coming up with emblems, such as flags and ways of tying knots. Then they were incited to compete, which they did with ferocity and personal bitterness. And, in the end, they were led to make up. This last part took a long time and happened only after they were made to work toward common goals of great importance to all of them (restoring the camp’s water supply, raising enough money to rent a movie).

  The Sherifs may have intended to make a point about how we learn to love, hate, and get along, but they also provided robust evidence that the summer camp—a wholly controlled environment in which adolescents dwell far from parents, classmates, and the media for weeks, even months—is a remarkably efficient instrument of psychological manipulation. One of the most interesting features of the Robbers’ Cave experiment has been pointed out by two contemporary social psychologists: The campers “perceived the environment as natural and had no awareness of the study or the staff’s manipulations.” The setting may have been artificial, but the participants experienced it as real; in social
-psychological terms, it had high “experimental realism.”

  I have always wondered why summer camps aren’t viewed with greater suspicion. Even plain-vanilla secular summer camps have their ideological agendas. As Abigail Van Slyck points out in her history of American summer camps, A Manufactured Wilderness, from the beginning camps were designed to fight back against the moral and physical degradations of city life. Camping has always been about counterprogramming to correct for some unsalutary influence.

  Unlike the Sherifs’ campers, I made my counterprogrammers work hard. I skulked around the bunk, complaining to anyone who would listen about being forced to participate. I was particularly scornful of the thrice-weekly Hebrew classes, where my ignorance was publicly exposed, and team sports, where I was every team’s last pick. I was horrified when I learned that on Friday afternoons we marched down to the showers in our robes and towels and scrubbed ourselves especially clean, then dressed up in blouses and skirts for Friday-night dinner. This was regimentation of the most odious kind. Plus, the girls in my bunk fought one another for access to our few electrical outlets and comparatively scarce mirrors. They wanted to blow-dry their hair into just the right kind of flip and apply the modicum of makeup they were allowed to wear. Then they’d try on one another’s skirts, swapping them in a round-robin so that they could appear to have new outfits each week, rather than just the one or two they’d brought from home. Hypocrisy! I thought. Didn’t these Jews know that excessive self-regard is a sin?