The Sabbath World

by Judith Shulevitz

  The most remarkable feature of P’s protoscientific narrative, though, is that it leads us with every weapon at the poet’s disposal—rhythm, repetition, parallelism—toward its conclusion: the seventh and final day. This is no accident. P is working out the details of a monotheistic cosmos, and the Sabbath would seem to be an essential element of it. Behold creation in all its magnificence, P appears to be saying. This can’t be the work of some squabbling, inconsistent, all-too-human gods. It can only be the work of the one God who dwells beyond time and space, light and matter. The Sabbath is that dwelling.

  To grasp where the Sabbath ranks in P’s world, you have to compare the creation of things to the creation of time. As God creates things, he moves from the lowest (the creatures of the sea) to the highest (humans, made in God’s image). As he ekes out the units of time, he also ascends. Each day has more acts of creation than the previous one, and each is deemed to be good, but still, the stakes get higher each time. On day six God creates man and woman, and that, he says, observing his handiwork with satisfaction, is “very good.” At long last, we get to day seven. We reach the end of the week.

  Whereupon God rests. It seems an odd thing to do. As endings go, it’s pretty muffled. One way to interpret it is as a loud silence, a deliberate not-saying of something. That’s how students of comparative religion explain the story. God’s apparent passivity at the very peak of narrative excitement, they say, is covert commentary on a competing epic, the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian myth of Creation. In that saga, after the gods create men, they free themselves for leisure by creating men, turning them into slaves, and putting them to work. Then the gods celebrate. They throw a party. If you were making a Hollywood version of the Enuma Elish, you’d base the party scene on Fellini’s Satyricon; you’d want that Roman orgy feel, with naked servants glueing their eyes to the ground. The God of the Bible, on the other hand, also rests after creating humans, but he doesn’t turn them into slaves. On the contrary, when God gathers his people at Sinai and commands them to rest because he did, too, he will generously share with humanity what theologians call the “divine otiosas,” the godly rest.

  Another way to solve the riddle of the ending is to stay inside the biblical text, rather than search for answers outside it. At the end of Exodus, in a passage also ascribed to P, we find the language used to describe Creation—the same words, in more or less the same order—being used to narrate the construction of God’s Tabernacle in the desert. Moses sees (same word) the work (same word) the people did (same word), and blesses it (just as God blessed man and woman when they were created). A rabbinic midrash, or imaginative meditation, puts it this way:

  The Tabernacle is compared to the whole world, which is called a “tent,” just as the Tabernacle is called a “tent.” How so? It is written, “In the beginning God made” and “He spreads forth the heavens like a curtain”; regarding the Tabernacle it is written, “And you shall make curtains of goatskin for the tent of the Tabernacle.” Regarding the second day of Creation, it is written, “Let there be an expanse … that it may separate …”; regarding the Tabernacle it is written, “So that the curtain shall be for you a separation.” Regarding the third day, “Let the water beneath the heavens be gathered”; and regarding the Tabernacle, “Make a laver of copper and a stand of copper for it, for washing.” Regarding the fourth day, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky”; and regarding the Tabernacle, “You shall make a lamp of pure gold.” Regarding the fifth day, “and birds that fly above the earth”; and regarding the Tabernacle, “The cherubim shall have their wings spread.” On the sixth day man was created; and regarding the Tabernacle, it is written, “You shall bring forward your brother Aaron.” Regarding the seventh day it is written, “The heaven and the earth were completed”; and regarding the Tabernacle, “Thus was completed all the work of the Tabernacle.” … Regarding the seventh day it is written, “God completed”; and regarding the Tabernacle, “On the day that Moses completed.” Regarding the seventh day it is written, “And he sanctified it”; and regarding the Tabernacle, “And he sanctified it.”

  When you imagine P writing about the Tabernacle in the desert, it’s hard to conceive that he would not have been thinking about the Temple in Jerusalem. Ancient Israel, in its priestly days, was a Temple society, organized socially, economically, and theologically as a series of concentric circles radiating outward from the holy of holies in the middle of the Temple sanctuary—an empty, silent space that no one but the high priest had leave to enter, and he only once a year. When P had God withdrawing to the Sabbath, he must have imagined God entering this most sacred of all spaces.

  Which makes the ending suitably grand. God enters his palace and ascends his throne. The medieval Jewish liturgists adored this image; they called the Sabbath God’s coronation. The ancient rabbis dwelled just as lovingly on the echoes between the Temple and the Sabbath, though they expressed their critical insight in a typically oblique fashion. They said that the thirty-nine main categories of work forbidden on the Sabbath—known as melachah—derived from the thirty-nine kinds of work done to build the Tabernacle in the desert, labor that was also called melachah.

  Ironically, the thirty-nine categories of melachah don’t have much to do with the kinds of work needed to build God a home in the desert. It’s likely that the prohibitions evolved over centuries as a kind of rough compilation of categories of work performed in everyday life in an agricultural society. (The thirty-nine categories are plowing, sowing, reaping, binding sheaves, threshing, winnowing, selecting or sorting, sifting, grinding, kneading, cooking, shearing animals, washing or bleaching or wringing a wet garment, carding, dyeing, spinning, chainstitching, setting up the warp or drawing it through the heddles, weaving of any kind, unravelling, tying a knot, untying a knot, sewing, ripping, catching game, slaughtering, flaying an animal, tanning, scraping the skin or smoothing, marking it up, cutting, writing, erasing, building, demolishing, kindling, extinguishing, beating with a hammer, which is interpreted as striking the last blow or applying the finishing touch to something, and carrying from the public to the private domain, or vice versa.) Only retrospectively would these categories of work have been applied to the Tabernacle by the rabbis.

  Nonetheless, the association between melachah and Tabernacle makes poetic sense. By stopping work on the Tabernacle, we imitate God when he stopped working on the world. We, too, enter into the Temple. This image allows the rabbis, in the centuries after the Romans burned and looted the Jewish people’s most sacred space, to erect the Sabbath in its place. It is another of the ironies of the rabbinic Sabbath that it replaced a structure with a holy hole in its middle, for the holiness of the Sabbath lies in its being a not-doing in a not-place.

  4.

  BUT THE BIBLE HAS NOT FINISHED telling us about the holiness of the Sabbath. There is a hole in the hole, a mystery inside the mystery, a holy of holies.

  You’d think that, by the end of the story of Creation, we would be done. God made the universe in six days and took his place at its center on the seventh. If ever there were an image of plenitude, this would be it. Time and space have been spun into separate webs and brought back together in a seamless totality. God has exercised his creative power to its fullest. And yet, at this very moment, the story takes a twist. There is apparently one more thing for God to do. God does not stop working entirely on the seventh day. First he finishes the work that he has been doing. Then he stops doing the work that he has been doing (the Bible’s repetition, not mine) in order to bless and sanctify the seventh day.

  “His work!” the rabbis cried in alarm. What work? Didn’t God finish Creation on the sixth day? What remained for him to finish on the seventh? How can P, that inveterate divider, that adamant classifier, allow work to run over from the mundane days to the holy one, contaminating and confusing the categories of sacred and profane, rest and work?

  In the midrash that raises this question, the rabbis phrase their question rabbinicall
y, which is to say, as a matter of legal concern: How could God have violated his own Sabbath by completing his work on that day? Rabbi Ishmael ben Jose declares, “It is like a man striking the hammer on the anvil, raising it by day and bringing it down by nightfall”—that is, after the start of the Sabbath, at which point, according to the rabbis, you may not put the finishing stroke on a piece of work (the thirty-eighth melachah) even if that means you have to stand there for twenty-five hours with your arm sticking up. Rabbi Simon ben Yochai shrugs the contradiction away. God’s ways are God’s ways, he says. Man can’t be expected to have as keen a sense of time as God and has to stop work early to avoid violating the Sabbath. But God gets to enter the Sabbath by a hairbreadth if he wants to.

  A rabbi named Genibah offers a more satisfying explanation. The verb “finish” and the noun “work,” he says, are there to teach us that Sabbath rest is not just a nothing, a not-doing, but a something that requires creating. “This may be compared,” Genibah continues, “to a king who made a bridal chamber, which he plastered, painted, and adorned. Now what did the bridal chamber lack? A bride to enter it. Similarly, what did the world lack? The Sabbath.” Another rabbinical aphorism: God’s creating the world is like a king who made a ring. What did it lack? A signet, or, one might say, a signature. (There is a shrewd truth to his insight: Creation myths in every other religion also account for the earth, the sky, plants, animals, and humans, but only the Jewish God created the Sabbath. It’s his signature.) What unique entity was created through God’s act of rest? Rest itself: “tranquility, ease, peace, and quiet.”

  Nonetheless, the rabbis don’t solve the mystery of what, precisely, God is up to on the seventh day. They can’t. It’s an opacity in an otherwise transparent story. God turns his back on us and occupies himself with something that’s even more important to him than we are. We are not privy to the details.

  To understand the implications of God’s choosing to absorb himself in the otherness of the Sabbath, we have to turn to the second story of Creation, which comes next. You know how it goes. God forms Adam out of dust, breathes into his nostrils, plants a garden for him, puts the tree of knowledge of good and evil right in the middle, and forbids man to eat from it. Afraid that Adam might get lonely, God makes the animals. When that fails to yield companionship, he takes Adam’s rib and fashions woman. Adam and Eve live together in perfect happiness, naked and unashamed, until the moment, which one imagines occurring on a long, lazy, slightly boring afternoon, with a primordially brilliant sun dancing on the leaves of the tree and the river that goes out from Eden gulping musically over the rocks, when the snake sidles up to Eve and asks, So you don’t get to eat any of the fruit on these trees?

  Eve shakes her head to correct him and says, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden. But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, ‘Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.’” That last bit—about God saying not to touch it—isn’t true, but so eager to be informative is Eve that she embellishes the facts of the case.

  Before you know it, Eve and Adam have eaten the fruit, realized that they were naked, flushed with embarrassment, and sewed themselves clothes out of fig leaves that look a lot like aprons. At which point God can be heard walking in the garden. It must be evening by now, because he is walking “in the cool of the day.” Adam and Eve hide. God calls out to Adam, “Where art thou?”

  Adam stutters, with the stupidity of a man caught red-handed, that’s he’s hiding because he doesn’t want to be caught naked.

  God asks, “Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?”

  Adam blames Eve.

  God asks Eve, “What is this that thou has done?”

  Eve blames the snake.

  It doesn’t occur to her to ask the question that seems obvious today: Where were you, God, that you need to ask such questions? Where were you when we innocents stumbled, as innocents will?

  The usual explanation for God’s apparently having been absent during Adam and Eve’s fall from grace is that he wasn’t. He asks Adam his whereabouts, but “the question is rhetorical,” the philologist E. A. Speiser says in the Anchor Bible. Rashi works even harder to clear God’s name. “God knew where Adam was!” Rashi declares. God asked Adam the question “only to engage in conversation with him, so that he not be too bewildered to repent.”

  The assumption behind Speiser’s and Rashi’s assertions is that God is omniscient and omnipotent, all-seeing and all-knowing. In forbidding Adam and Eve to eat from the tree, God gave humankind free will, for he gave them the means to transgress against him. They chose to transgress. Now, according to the theologians, God must play his parental role. He punishes Adam and Eve by expelling them from Eden, thereby teaching them right from wrong. But what if we declined to read theologically and simply read for plain sense? What if God weren’t just pretending not to know for instructional purposes? What if he really didn’t know? Then we’d have to ask, Where had he been all this time?

  That is where P comes back in, at least insofar as he is also R, the Redactor. For in putting the two stories of Creation next to each other, by encouraging us to read the second as a fleshing out of the first—Creation as seen from a human perspective—P suggests an answer: God withdrew to take a nap. It is, after all, some time after the creation of man, which, by one accounting, might make it the seventh day.

  I should note that the rabbis don’t entertain such a blasphemous sequence of events. According to their reconciliation of the two stories, Adam and Eve were created and expelled on the same day: “They had enjoyed the splendors of creation but a brief span of time—but a few hours,” as the midrash compiler Louis Ginzberg puts it. In the first hour of the sixth day, God conceived the idea of creating man. In the second hour, he took counsel with the angels. In the third, he gathered the dust for the body of man. In the fourth, he formed Adam. In the fifth, he clothed him with skin. In the sixth, the soulless shape was complete, so that it could stand upright. In the seventh, a soul was breathed into it; in the eighth, man was led into Paradise. And so on until the twelfth hour, when he was cast out of Paradise. The flaw in this reckoning, though, is that it doesn’t give Adam time to fall asleep so that God can remove his rib and make Eve—indeed, it doesn’t account for Eve at all. So in my midrash I say that it is the day of God’s Sabbath, and he’s having a shabbas shluf—a “Sabbath sleep.” While he does that, the snake emerges. The air in the garden grows chilly. The story unfolds.

  Whether the expulsion came before or after the first Sabbath, it was not a joyous day. It was, for Adam and Eve, God the Father’s first show of indifference. Remembering the Sabbath and keeping it holy, for God, means abandoning his children to their own impulses. God’s rest is man’s fall.

  5.

  CAN WE DEFEND SABBATH HOLINESS by saying that it has social utility? The ancient rabbis would have disliked the question, since they didn’t see the world in utilitarian terms, and they also didn’t engage in open apologetics. But modern rabbis have been willing to be more explicit. Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, the founder, in mid-nineteenth-century Germany, of what we now call Orthodox Judaism, glossed the Sabbath as a proto-environmentalist institution: “What was there to safeguard the world against man?” The answer is the Sabbath, because it checks his will to master the world. Man “can fashion all things in his environment to his purpose—the earth for his habitation and source of sustenance; plant and animal for food and clothing. He can transform everything into an instrument of human service,” Hirsch wrote. “He is allowed to rule over the world for six days with God’s will. On the seventh day, however, he is forbidden by divine behest to fashion anything for his own purpose. In this way he acknowledges that he has no rights of ownership or authority over the world.” The timing of this cautionary thought is suggestive. Hirsch wrote it down three decades before Karl Marx published Das Kapi
tal. Both men lived at the height of the industrial age, when many feared the tyranny of automation and production schedules—the ideology called “productivism.” What melachah (“mindful work”) prohibited, said Hirsch, was purposiveness. It is a curious feature of the rules about melachah that they do not enjoin tasks that most of us would call work, or they offer loopholes that seem to circumvent their spirit. You can throw a BarcaLounger across a room if you’ve got the muscles to do it. You may do all kinds of things that are otherwise forbidden, such as opening a carton of milk, if you do them in an apparently counterproductive manner, such as cutting off the top of the milk carton so you can’t close it again. If melachah requires “the execution of an intelligent purpose,” then it isn’t just physical exertion, since you can strain yourself silly without intending anything intelligent or purposive by your effort.

  Likewise, you can’t call an act melachah if it is done unconsciously or unintentionally. Since melachah has to make something, destructive acts don’t count as melachah, either. The rabbis saw as clearly as Durkheim did that it is people who create the distinction between the holy and the unholy. Melachah is an act of mind as well as the work of the body. There is no such thing as an intrinsically prohibited form of Sabbath work. Every act is categorized according to the intention behind it. If something is torn down so that something else can be built in its place, that’s melachah, but if it is torn down out of sheer destructiveness, it’s not. If a woman puts out a fire to save a bit of wood, that’s melachah, but if she just wanted to put out the fire it’s not. You may not pluck flowers that you might put into water, or harvest grindable grains of wheat, but feel free to pull dandelions or random leaves of grass out of the ground and toss them aside, as long as you do so thoughtlessly. (It should be noted that the rabbis qualify each of these principles with countless exceptions, prohibiting many acts that they might otherwise have permitted, on the theory that committing these acts might lead to transgression. For instance, you should be able to put out a fire as long as you don’t mean to derive any positive benefit from doing so. However, the rabbis state that you must not extinguish a fire at all.)