You refrain from melachah to free your mind from the mental work of getting things done. Now, Judaism is not a religion that disdains getting things done. Judaism delights in both the pleasures of the body (the five senses, sex, and drink) and the pleasures of the world (clothes and homes and convivial conversation). From the sixth day of Creation, humans have had orders in hand to be fruitful and multiply.
To do that, they had to enter enthusiastically into the world, not flee from it. Moreover, the Creation story makes no meaningful distinction between the artificial and the natural worlds, between civilization and biology. Humans were told to use the materials God gave them—the plants and the animals—to make themselves a home. By which we understand not just a house but a context, a culture, a way of constructing buildings and wearing clothes and cooking feasts and telling stories and making music and generally making something out of life.
So why stop building the world one day out of seven? The rabbis’ answer—at least as Hirsch interpreted it—is, so that we don’t forget that we, too, are creatures of God, and start imagining ourselves as masters of Creation. That resort to the deity, however, shouldn’t impress us, since it doesn’t explain why we’re not supposed to see ourselves that way. What about imitatio Dei? What kind of God objects to competition from his creations? Shouldn’t a father long for his children to outstrip him?
To come up with an answer less foreign to the secular mind, it helps to make use of categories dreamed up by a secular philosopher—by, as it happens, a secular German Jew, writing more than a century after Hirsch. In her masterwork, The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt offers another way of thinking about the rules against work on the Sabbath, although, being a determinedly godless Jew, she wasn’t thinking about the Sabbath when she did. Arendt’s aim was to explain what it means to be human. To that end, she posits the three “fundamental human activities”: labor, work, and action. These, she says, “correspond to the basic conditions under which life on earth has been given to man.”
Labor, says Arendt, is the struggle to subsist. It responds to the demands of biological life. “Labor assures not only individual survival, but the life of the species,” she wrote. Tethered as it is to need, labor feels like enslavement, and indeed, throughout history, has been done by those who had no choice in the matter—slaves, women, the economically deprived. “Work” involves making things—tables, buildings, operas—that outlast the cyclical rhythms of labor. Work entails intention, design, and craftsmanship. Unlike labor, which is never done, work has a beginning and an end. Work, said Arendt, endures. It bestows “permanence and durability upon the futility of mortal life and the fleeting character of human time.” Arendt’s third activity, “action,” is the vaguest of her categories. It seems to involve the public domain—speaking, legislating, governing, and founding and preserving political institutions. Arendt rated action the highest of the three activities, because it brings to the fore our uniquely human qualities. It uncovers in us potential we didn’t even know we had. In so doing it “creates,” she said, “the condition for remembrance, that is, for history.”
Arendt’s definition of action may have been fuzzy, but her bisection of labor and work was inspired. She came up with the idea, one suspects, to counter the influence of Marxism, since Marx glorified labor as the source of all value. Arendt felt that neither labor nor work deserved such honor. (Strictly speaking, Marx meant economic, not social, value, but Arendt is not wrong to imply that in reality Marxists esteemed labor and laborers above just about everything else.) Laboring, we restrict ourselves to our animal state. Working, we reduce the world to raw material. And if we take the work experience as the model for life itself, as economically minded thinkers have done since the advent of the industrial age, then we start to calculate all creation in terms of usefulness. Homo faber—Arendt’s term for man the fabricator—thinks, she says, in terms of ends and means, of “in order to” rather than “for the sake of.” In this way, he deprives himself of the capacity to see things as they are, for the sake of themselves.
But why should we need to see things as they are? And haven’t we learned by now that it’s impossible? But Arendt wasn’t just talking about objectivity, which she defined philosophically as the thingness of things. She was talking about the ability to perceive in ourselves our human condition—the fact that we were born into this world and are destined to die. The human condition is the experience of being conditioned by the world. Our lives take their shape by virtue of being a part of the earth and all that abides in it—the earth being, according to Arendt, “the very quintessence of the human condition.” And yet the earth is what humanity seems most eager to escape, whether by rocket ship or the Internet. Having built the world by subjecting it to his will, homo faber now stands at risk of making it disappear. One of these days, his mastery of all will mean that he is confronted by nothing. And that will be a lonely day indeed.
The rabbis would not have approved of Arendt’s mid-twentieth-century existentialist angst, nor would they have shared her Greco-Roman fetish for the agora, the marketplace of ideas or action. But their understanding of melachah dovetails with her definition of work. You might even say that the Sabbath laws were designed to show Jews that they were creatures of the earth, embedded in the time and place in which they were put by God (the rabbis’ term) or the accident of birth (Arendt’s term). Follow the rules and you’ll see how well they produce this insight. Every other day of the week, you can extend your reach and enhance your control until you might as well be a cyborg—half man, half machine. On the Sabbath, the proscription of melachah strips you of those powers. You must respect the luminosity and aurality and architecture of the world that has been given.
6.
IF ALL THIS tempts you to develop a glorified view of the Sabbath, however, you need only read more history to remember that Sabbath holiness can be destructive as well as life-affirming. You can read about how the Sabbath became the object of a suicide cult.
Any American with a multicultural upbringing will recognize the outlines of the story, told every year at Hanukkah. In 167 B.C.E., Antiochus IV, a Syrian-born but Greek-educated king whose empire included Judea, decided to force the Jews to become more like the Greeks. This king called himself Antiochus Epiphanes (Antiochus the Manifest, meaning that he represented a divine emanation), but he was known to the people as Antiochus Epimanes (Antiochus the Mad). He was the first to introduce religious persecution to the region. Previous rulers had treated their subjects as sources of tax revenue; they had used force to extract their tributes, but they had not required conversion. Antiochus IV, however, had lived in Rome, and had seen Rome impose the Roman civic religion on its citizens. He had watched the Roman senators quash the local Dionysian bacchanalian cults, with their drunkenness and their fertility rites, and persecute the Epicurian philosophers, who preached a hedonistic doctrine that filled the young with subversive ideas. Antiochus regarded Judaism as an unholy combination of both cult and philosophy. Like members of a cult, Jews met at night, took loyalty oaths (the Shema, which pledged allegiance to the one God), and initiated new members through circumcision; like philosophers, they taught repugnant ideas out of books.
And so, the two books of Maccabees recount, Antiochus decided to “Hellenize” the Jews. He looted the Temple and garrisoned soldiers in Jerusalem. He put an idolatrous statue in the Temple (no one knows what it was; the books describe it only as “an abomination of desolation”), erected his own altars, and ordered the Jews to start sacrificing pigs on them. He forbade them to circumcise their sons or keep the Sabbath. “And whosoever would not do according to the commandment of the king,” First Maccabees relates, “he should die.” Women who had their babies circumcised in secret were killed, and the babies were hung from their necks. Their husbands were killed as well, and so were the men who performed the circumcisions. Anyone who refused to eat non-kosher food was killed.
Many of Jerusalem’s urbane, partially Hellenized J
ews did as Antiochus ordered, but the Jews of the countryside did not. Instead, they rebelled. Their leader was a priest named Mattathias, in a village called Modein. First Mattathias ran a spear through a Jew who agreed to sacrifice a pig on one of Antiochus’s altars, then he said, “Whoever is zealous of the law, and maintaineth the covenant, let him follow me!” Mattathias had many sons, and they followed him into the desert. One of them was named Judah Maccabeus, and the rebels became known as the Maccabees. They took to the mountains and, improbably, drove the king and his soldiers out of the land.
Before that moment, however, retold every Hanukkah, came another that is decidedly not celebrated today. A large band of soldiers came down from Jerusalem to where a group of Jews identified only as the Pious Ones had shut themselves up in caves. (The word for Pious Ones is Asidoi, which is Greek for Hasidim.) When the Sabbath came, the soldiers lined up in front of the caves in battle formation and shouted, “Come forth, and do according to the commandment of the king, and ye shall live!” The Asidoi shouted back, “We will not come forth, neither will we do the king’s commandment, to profane the Sabbath day!”
When the soldiers advanced, the Jews made no effort to block the entrances to the caves. Instead, they said to one another, “Let us all die in our innocence: heaven and earth shall testify for us, that ye put us to death wrongfully.” The tale ends like this: “So they rose up against them in battle on the Sabbath, and they slew them, with their wives and children, and their cattle, to the number of a thousand people.”
When Mattathias learned of the massacre, he quickly changed the laws of the Sabbath to permit self-defense, a rule that stands today, even in the strictest Jewish circles. The rule is called pikuach nefesh, or “saving a life.” The Sabbath laws must be flouted if keeping them puts a life or the well-being of the community in danger—a principle that, for instance, allowed Senator Joseph Lieberman, a Sabbath-observant Orthodox Jew, to run for president of the United States. As he pointed out, he would have no qualms about violating Sabbath restrictions to respond to an attack or anything else that threatened the nation.
The story of the Maccabees and pikuach nefesh is sometimes told to show that the Jews understood full well that, as Christ put it, “the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” The truth, however, is that the Maccabees’ reform was controversial at the time and remained unpopular for centuries. Some Pietists were so furious at Mattathias that they refused to fight for Judea’s independence and went on to oppose his sons’ rule, which lasted for eighty years and became known as the Hasmonean dynasty. The second book of Maccabees, for instance, written decades after the first book by someone who was clearly hostile to the Hasmoneans, offers a version of the war that leaves Mattathias out, as well as his modification of Sabbath law. The second book makes the Asidoi’s Sabbath martyrdom seem laudable rather than tragic, for it offers a way to atone for Israel’s sins, thereby hastening its redemption.
Indeed, the second book of Maccabees wallows in martyrdom. It speaks admiringly of women who, having circumcised their sons in violation of the law, are made to march around the city while nursing their children and are then forced to throw them over the city walls. The book tells the tale of a mother who urges her sons to refuse to eat pork. The king, enraged, mutilates them one by one. First their tongues and extremities are cut off; then they’re burned alive. The mother exhorts each of them in turn, “Regard not your selves for God’s sake.” You understand people best by the literature they write, and in the second book of Maccabees the Jews invented a genre that would come to dominate Jewish, then Christian, literature: the martyrology.
You were supposed to die for the Sabbath, even if people rarely did. The Jewish historian Josephus praised Jews who sacrificed themselves to preserve the principles of the day, even though he later saved his own skin by decamping to the enemy during Rome’s war against Palestine. Josephus was aware of the Maccabean revision of the law, but he chose to revert to the older version. The Maccabees had been willing to ambush their enemies on the Sabbath, taking advantage of their mistaken belief that Jews wouldn’t fight. Josephus held that while Jews may respond to an attack on the Sabbath, they may not start one. Dying for the holiday may seem ridiculous to the uninitiated, he wrote, but “will appear to such as consider it without prejudice a great thing.” Men who prefer “the observation of their laws, and their religion toward God, before the preservation of themselves and their country” deserve “a great many encomiums.”
What do you have to believe about the Sabbath to be willing to die for it? Considering it a preferable form of social organization clearly won’t suffice. Even perceiving it as a gift from God wouldn’t seem to be enough, since life—creation—is also God’s gift, so that when you die for the Sabbath you are simply trading one gift for another. Some historians of the Maccabean period interpret the Asidoi’s religious intransigence as a form of class warfare. The country Jews resented the city Jews because the city Jews had access to élite Hellenistic institutions, such as gymnasiums and schools. So the country Jews took a radical stand against the city Jews, denouncing them as impious and unclean and becoming fanatical themselves. This explanation has a certain contemporary appeal. When you look at the events of our age, you can see how class resentment might merge with theology to form a glorified ideology of suicide.
But it also seems clear that these pious Jews brought a new intensity to the idea of the Sabbath itself. The seventh day was holy not just because God chose to rest on it; it was holy because it affirmed the divine order. It promised those who kept it that there was order rather than chaos. The future of the world depended on getting that order right.
Like Hamlet, the Asidoi felt that they lived in a time that was out of joint. It was during this era that the Jews invented another genre: the apocalyptic. In books such as Daniel and Enoch, also written in the time of Antiochus Epiphanes, angels revealed themselves in dreams and told tales of bloody wars of redemption. When would God make the time right again? Soon, the angels said. Daniel had a vision of a beast with teeth made of iron, nails of brass, and ten horns on his head. This image represented an evil kingdom out of which a king would arise who would “speak great words against the most High, and … think to change times and laws.” Opposing them would be righteous men, and wise teachers, who would die by the sword. But the end of time would come, and then—in the very first reference we have to resurrection and judgment—“many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.”
It is thought that Daniel’s “wise teachers”—whether historical personages or poetic longings—inspired the Asidoi to go down into the caves and die on the Sabbath. If the Asidoi read Daniel literally, which they probably did, they believed that if they died while keeping the Sabbath, the end of time would come and they would rise again.
Even if their faith was less scripturalist than that, they felt that to keep the Sabbath was to assert that time had a beginning, a middle, and an end. Along with the apocalyptic, the ancient Israelites also invented the idea of a history moving toward a divine end—toward the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth. “They had learned from the Bible,” Yosef Yerushalmi writes, “that the true pulse of history often beat beneath its manifest surfaces.” But you couldn’t keep believing in God’s time if you didn’t remind yourself of it every week. If you forgot that time has a pattern, you might forget that history has one, too, and you would despair in the face of conquest, massacre, destruction; you’d start to doubt that the Babylonians, or the Assyrians, or the Romans were instruments of God’s wrath; you’d start thinking that your suffering had no meaning.
It is no coincidence that many apocalyptic ways of dating the moment of redemption have a cosmic week—a seven—in them somewhere. Seven was a number pregnant with God’s presence. A few centuries later, the Jewish philosopher Philo would argue that seven is the most perfect number, not just in God’s mind but in
nature as well. In the apocalyptic numerology, God would reappear and set the world to rights in seven ages, or in seventy weeks, or in seven thousand years. In keeping the Sabbath no matter what, you signaled your willingness to wait for that moment.
7.
A DECADE AFTER I went to summer camp, I went to college. I should say, I went to Yale. It’s important to say that not only because I still have to fight a bad habit many Yalies fall into, which is to mumble the name, or to say, with supremely false modesty, “in New Haven,” when asked where they go or went to school. It’s also important because only at Yale in the 1980s could I have become a member of a new religion. The church of my sect was a modest colonial rectangle on a quiet patch of grass in the shadow of the neo-Gothic Old Campus. This was the comparative-literature department. Its charismatic leader was another proud murmurer, a Belgian with an old-world gentleness and remoteness of manner. This was Paul de Man.
I came to comparative literature from classics, where I had no business being, not having studied Latin and Greek in high school. After semesters and summers of trying to keep pace with boarding-school graduates who sang out their Latin and Greek like dons-in-training, and slogging through pages of Virgil and Homer each night when just to parse a line could take me an hour, I was relieved to take a literary-theory class in which intellectual success was measured out in brilliant or at least clever acts of mind, not philological mastery, and social success in degrees of sartorial and intellectual sophistication, and every paper seemed like a gleeful attack on exactly the sort of grim, grinding, grammatical puzzles I’d been struggling to solve for two years.
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