The Sabbath World

by Judith Shulevitz

  Theresa was sure to cry:

  “That’s not a Sunday song, our Ursula.”

  “You don’t know,” replied Ursula, superior. Nevertheless, she wavered. And her song faded down before she came to the end.

  Because, though she did not know it, her Sunday was very precious to her. She found herself in a strange, undefined place, where her spirit could wander in dreams, unassailed.

  4.

  THIS IS WHAT I WAS LOOKING FOR, this “strange, undefined place” in the bosom of a joyful family wherein my spirit could safely wander, but since I had not read Lawrence, I could not describe this place or spot in time and had no idea how to find it. One Shabbat, I found myself sitting in the sun at the edge of a grassy courtyard inside a low brick mid-century apartment complex, watching toddlers toddle and their parents toddle with them. A couple from my synagogue, both classical musicians, were explaining the impossibility, for them, of keeping the Sabbath, given their performance schedules. Behind me, in a ground-floor apartment, members of the synagogue were eating a potluck Shabbat lunch. There was something magical about this courtyard, I thought. We had had Sabbath picnics in the park before, but they had never felt so idyllic. The seclusion of the space, the golden shimmer of the sun against the brown brick, gave it the aura of sanctuary.

  I was also conscious of being bored. The wife was describing in obsessive detail the logistical difficulties of her life—of juggling motherhood, career, and Judaism. Not having entered the ranks of parents, I didn’t actually care. I began to wonder whether by joining the shul I had prematurely entered a sort of spiritual suburb. The synagogue’s membership consisted primarily of youngish couples. There was a subgroup of lesbians, some of them in their twenties, and another subgroup of female refugees from Orthodox Judaism, several of whom came from Brooklyn neighborhoods to the east and south of us. The two groups overlapped but were not identical. I belonged to neither of them. I found myself longing for lower Manhattan, the sharp if uncertain fashions of insecure people, the spontaneous parties, the round-robins of relationships from which people my age extract a “crowd.” Suddenly, my return to Judaism struck me as an apprenticeship in being middle-aged.

  I am always astonished, in retrospect, at how quickly the world collaborates with you once you have determined to run away from yourself. A few weeks after that moment, I met a man fifteen years older than me. He lived on the Upper West Side. He was an atheist, a comedy writer, a divorcé, a cynic. He had been middle-aged—by which he meant married—and didn’t want to be again. His ex-wife was a writer, too, a well-known feminist, and together they had read, and talked about, and worked through the object lessons provided by writers I had encountered only as subject matter for term papers—Samuel Johnson, Mary Wollstonecraft, Antonio Gramsci. My new boyfriend was a man of the world. His jokes were allusive. He knew many people in the television industry personally. Being with someone so much older made me feel young again. He was funny and mean. He made me unhappy, and he made me laugh. He was elaborately patient with my newfound Judaism, by which I understood that he found it ridiculous, so that pretty soon I did, too. I stopped going to synagogue and moved to the Upper West Side.

  5.

  IT WAS FOUR YEARS before I began going to synagogue again on Saturdays, and when I did it was because I married (someone else) and moved to the suburbs, but, also, and more important, because I found another teacher. He was utterly different from my first teacher. Rabbi Paul (I’ll call him) was a brilliant and widely disliked man. He had bold features and close-cropped curly black hair. He was Byronic in appearance and fearsome in his love of Jewish law, even though he had been a professor of philosophy before he became a pulpit rabbi, and did so largely because he had failed to get tenure.

  Now that I spend so much time reading theology, people often ask me if I want to be a rabbi. I shudder at the thought. I can’t imagine a more terrifying job. My answer is, go and read a very early novella by George Eliot called The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton (1857). The Reverend Amos Barton is a very good man but a very bad minister. His oratory resembles the bleatings of “a Belgian railway-horn.” His predecessor in the parish generated “a certain amount of religious excitement,” but now that feeling has died down. It is when he must preach to a gathering of poor folk that his deep pedestrianness shines through. Trained at Oxford, tenaciously pedantic, he simply can’t think from the pauper’s point of view. He can only deliver a dry sermon irrelevant to their lives. He knows full well that his congregants hold him in low esteem and probably contempt.

  Rabbi Paul’s unpopularity derived mainly from his uncompromising rigor in matters of ritual, but it also had a lot to do with his pastoral manner, or, rather, his unpastoral manner. He did not give sermons on Saturday mornings. He led graduate seminars. He would elicit opinions from members of his congregation about whatever portion of the Torah they were reading that week, and then, like the Socratic master he was trained to be, he’d derive from our innocent observations the deepest principles of religious thought. His speciality was the phenomenology of religion—the philosophical study of religion as experience, rather than as a set of claims that can be proved to be true or false. He adored Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but he told us to read Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who was less difficult and more Jewish. (The book he had us begin with was The Sabbath.)

  Rabbi Paul’s rhetorical style bored some and piqued others. I loved it. But this wasn’t what got his congregants most riled up. Their complaint had to do with the way he reacted when someone gave an answer that he didn’t like. Puritan preachers may have thundered, but clergymen today do not. Theological mandates no longer dictate the laws of the land. Religion, in our liberal pluralistic society, competes humbly with other lifestyle choices. Today, it is incumbent upon a minister to boost the members of his or her church, not to humiliate them. He or she stresses a God of self-actualization, not a God who shames and judges.

  Rabbi Paul, however, shamed and judged. Not so much our moral failings as our intellectual ones. We gave dumb answers to his questions. We couldn’t see where he was trying to go. We lacked original religious minds. To some congregant’s halting guess about what gem the rabbi wished him to unearth in a dusty verse, he’d reply, “No! Next?” Had we not read the Torah portion? Had we not seen that the dying Abraham makes the eldest servant of his house put his hand under Abraham’s thigh and swear to him that he will not let Isaac Abraham’s son, choose a wife from among the Canaanites? Had we not asked ourselves what “under his thigh” meant, exactly? It meant the genitals, of course. Put your hand on my penis: Didn’t that strike us as an odd form for a vow to take?

  Well, yes, it did. But it was the standard form for vows in the ancient world. But what did it mean? What did it mean? Had we never asked ourselves why there are so many rules about sexuality in the Torah? Were our forefathers nothing more than unenlightened prudes? Had they simply never considered the advantages of sexual liberation? It seemed to Rabbi Paul that they had, and had rejected it. Consider the content of the vow the servant is asked to make: He is to swear that he will choose the right wife for Abraham’s son. She is not to be Canaanite, which is to say, licentious. She is to be from Abraham’s family, which is to say, decent. It seemed to Rabbi Paul that our forefathers did not fail to appreciate the terrible, necessary power of sexuality. Consider the almost baroque suspense that dominates several chapters in Genesis, as Sarah and Abraham wait impatiently into their nineties before God grants them a son. Think of what God said to Abraham: “And I will make thy seed as the dust of the earth: so that if a man can number the dust of the earth, then shall thy seed also be numbered.”

  From that penis springs the fulfillment of God’s promise. Sex drives the biblical narrative. That is why Abraham makes his servant place his hand on his penis to swear. Sex bears the word and the power of God himself. And for that reason it is to be understood as the most sacred of human activities. It is not enough for Abraham’s son to ejaculate, to c
opulate, to reproduce. He must do so in the right way. He must circumcise the organ. He must marry a woman who can live up to the promise. And so, likewise, we must learn to respect the awesome significance of the sexual act by following the strictures and rituals the Torah gives us to sacralize it, or at least by meditating upon their meaning. That goes not just for circumcision, which, of course, has made itself palatable to the modern mind by passing for hygiene, but also for the more troubling edicts, such as the rules about when a wife is impure to her husband.

  I remember noting, at the time, that Rabbi Paul gave us an out. We could meditate on the laws. We didn’t always have to follow them. I didn’t entirely agree with him about that. It struck me as arbitrary. How do you decide which laws to follow and which ones to meditate on? Nor did he, who was so strict about some things and not so strict about others, always agree with himself. He manifested all the contradictoriness of the American Conservative movement, to which he tenaciously adhered; the effort to juggle modernity and the ancient mechanisms of rabbinic law produced many contortions, such as permission to drive a car on the Sabbath. Rabbi Paul was always able to cite some well-thought-through Conservative ruling to justify some apparent Conservative oxymoron, and, of course, I was not qualified to judge the merits of those. But his apparent contradictoriness made me love him with a protective tenderness that was all the more fierce and tender because he had made himself so offensive to everyone else.

  I took, I have to admit, a rather adolescent pleasure in playing the rabbi’s defender during the many synagogue social events at which his flaws were anatomized and deplored. But I genuinely loved the man. I loved his arrogance, his abruptness, his bullheadedness. His difficultness embodied, for me, the difficultness of religion itself. If he was hapless, religion was hapless. At least he wasn’t a smooth talker effacing its unpleasantnesses with a free application of smarm, which had previously been my idea of what religious professionals do.

  I loved him because he showed me how to love Jewish law. I knew (though I often pretended to myself that I didn’t know) that I would never be born again as an Orthodox Jew. I would never, for example, observe the laws of niddah, which determine at which point in a woman’s menstrual cycle she may have sex with her husband. Nor would I be able to uproot myself and join the kind of community that would make it possible for me to follow every jot and tittle of Sabbath law. But I could also refuse to reject such laws as merely antiquated. I could allow myself to love them. I could hold them in my mind as if they were poems to live by. For though I knew that blood is life, when it pours out of my body, I could remember the laws of niddah and know that blood is also death, which is why one is supposed to purify oneself after menstruation. I could remember that menstruation is also a tragedy, albeit on a very small scale—the disappearance of a possible life, the evanescence of an angelic ghost—and soon to be overturned by the joyous comedy of ovulation. I didn’t want a baby when I first had this thought. But niddah is what first made me grasp the enormity of the fact that I could have one. And as with niddah, so with the Sabbath. I need not be a Sabbatarian to be a Sabbatarian. I could grasp, even celebrate, the urgent necessity of a day of rest without cutting myself off from the busy, convenient, 24/7 world that I knew and loved.

  Or could I?

  PART SEVEN

  REMEMBERING THE SABBATH

  1.

  CAN WE DO NOTHING MORE THAN TURN THE SABBATH OVER IN OUR minds, the way we would a poem, and extract from it anything worth having?

  The answer is obvious: obviously yes, and obviously no. Of course the Sabbath is worth mulling over—everything is—and of course you can’t derive much lasting benefit from a regularly observed period of rest if you don’t observe it regularly. Even if you do nothing but remember the Sabbath, though, you press your nose up against a different order of time, and that has its uses. For one thing, it will make you appreciate the near-impossibility of bringing it back. We have changed too much to contemplate its return, at least in its old form, even though the bulk of that change has happened in a short span of time.

  As recently as at the beginning of the past century—to revert to that great lurch toward modernity—Sunday mornings in the United States were still filled “with Sunday school [and] church,” as the American historian Alexis McCrossen writes, as well as “excursions, picnics, movies, and trolley rides.” In 1908, G. Stanley Hall, the psychologist and, most famously, the Clark University president who invited Sigmund Freud to visit America, eulogized Sunday’s domestic charms: “freedom from all slavery to the clock, better and more leisurely toilets and meals, the hush of noise on the deserted street, the greatly intensified charm of the sky, sunshine, trees, fields, pleasant morning anticipations for the day, more zest for reading and perhaps study, converse with friends, calls, visits, correspondence, as well as rest pure and simple, for body and mind.”

  Hall’s lovely essay, however, laid bare the contradiction that doomed his high-minded Sabbatarianism. Hall, a churchgoing Protestant and a man of practical bent, begged Americans to adopt “the scientific Sunday”—the psychologically and physically hygienic day that Dickens pressed for, a day of exercise, highbrow entertainment, and family “walks and talks and nature lessons.” Innocent and appealing as this “scientific” Sunday sounds, it spelled the end of the Sabbatarian Sunday.

  Before we can understand why, though, we have to remember the kind of Sabbath Hall was reacting to. In 1908, strict Sunday-closing laws remained in force in seventeen states and in Indian territory. They banned amusements, fishing, and hunting, as well as selling and working. Hall’s own Sunday had a milder rigor to it, but a rigor nonetheless. In his home state of Massachusetts, he had the right to buy a Sunday paper, that amalgam of news and gossip and fashion advice that Sabbatarian ministers still railed against. He could smoke a pipe; Massachusetts did not forbid the sale of tobacco. By comparison, many of the western states, which passed their Sunday-closing laws just as the old-time behavioral codes had begun to lose their force, were far more permissive. In Wyoming, as Hall points out, he could send a telegraph, repair farm equipment, smelt metal and glass, and buy ice cream, milk, fresh meat, and bread. In New Mexico, he could conduct business as usual on Sunday; only the kinds of work and amusements that might disturb congregations and families were prohibited.

  Hall applauded this latter sort of active and permissive Sabbath, as long as it preserved a Christian decorum. Let “mild drinks” be served, so that “gross intoxication” would not be sought. Let there be innocent entertainments at which the sexes could commingle, so that vice would not be indulged in. Let children out of doors to play sports and games, and let adults play their sports and games, too. America had to make Sunday a day of leisure, Hall argued, if it was to have a Sunday at all.

  Not that such changes weren’t already under way. In the previous half century, museums, libraries, and world’s fairs had all begun opening on Sundays, along with movie theaters and baseball stadiums. And those places were where the contradictions between the “scientific” and the “Sabbatarian” Sunday became unavoidable. The problem with substituting cultural consumption and active leisure for rest is that one person’s recreation is another person’s work. If museums, libraries, and baseball stadiums are to stay open, then security guards and librarians have to work, and baseball players have to play.

  Legislators tried to keep pace with changing mores by expanding the scope of “works of necessity and charity”; that is, the work required for the maintenance of expected standards of living and the enjoyment of leisure. Utilities were to keep providing power and water on Sundays; deliverymen were to keep depositing ice and milk at front doors. Presses kept printing, operators kept connecting telephone calls, radio and television stations kept broadcasting. Amusement parks, national parks, opera houses, restaurants, cigar stores, train stations, and airports kept serving up all the other goods and services required by their customers and patrons.

  What destroyed the reign of
blue laws, though, wasn’t just that everyone went to work on Sunday—the Sunday service sector remained relatively small in proportion to the rest of the economy—but also that the definition of “necessity and charity” broadened until the line it drew between life and work began to seem laughable. The distinctions between permissible and non-permissible Sunday commerce had always varied from state to state and county to county, but the laws had evinced a rough consensus of what was proper on Sunday and what wasn’t. By the middle of the twentieth century, though, you could dine at a restaurant in one city but not in another. Even if you stayed within city lines, you could buy an item in one neighborhood but not in another, or you could buy this item at a store but not that one at the same store. Tackle shops and beach burger shacks stayed open; downtown department stores didn’t. You could buy film from a photo shop on the boardwalk, but not the camera needed to use it.

  Sunday-closing laws came under attack in the courts for failing to pass what is called a “rational basis test.” They discriminated so unpredictably among activities, varied so widely from one region to another, and were enforced so randomly that they violated the due-process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees equal protection to all citizens. The other criticism that emerged was that Sunday-closing laws violated the First Amendment, which forbids the establishment of a particular religion and endorses freedom of religious practice. Religious minorities, such as Seventh-Day Adventists and Orthodox Jews, began to file lawsuits objecting to having to close their stores for two days of the week, Saturday and Sunday. In response to those challenges, several states began to make exceptions for Saturday Sabbath-keepers.

  The Supreme Court’s decision in McGowan et al. v. Maryland (1961) upheld Sunday-closing laws on the grounds that the government’s interest in the well-being of the majority of its citizens overrode whatever burdens Sunday laws imposed on the minority. Justice Felix Frankfurter, recognizing that to the unsympathetic eye the laws looked like what one skeptic later called a “gallimaufry,” or potpourri, insisted that they were not irrational. It was possible to draw a “reasonable line of demarcation” between those activities that “add enjoyment” to Sunday and those that needlessly deprive employees of their day.