The Sabbath World

by Judith Shulevitz

  The key fact about the Radical Reformation: Daniel Liechty, Sabbatarianism in the Sixteenth Century (Berrien Springs, Mich.: Andrews University Press, 1993), p. 5.

  “unlearned,” “foolish,” “apes,” and “Judaizers”: Martin Luther, M. Luthers Werke, vol. 50, pp. 312–37.

  “went thrice as far as the Jews”: John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, translated by Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1957), pp. 28–34.

  “Christ did not come”: Liechty, Andreas Fischer and the Sabbatarian Anabaptists, p. 103.

  the influence of Christian Hebraism: Its history and ideas are recounted in Jerome Friedman, The Most Ancient Testimony: Sixteenth-Century Christian-Hebraica in the Age of Renaissance Nostalgia (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1983).

  “Not only Mohammedans and Hebrews”: Ibid., p. 61.

  the Transylvanian Szombatosok: I base my account of the Szombatosok on the following sources: W. Bacher, “The Sabbatarians in Hungary,” Jewish Quarterly Review 2, no. 4 (July 1890): 465–93; Moshe Carmelly-Weinberger, “A Northern Transylvanian Tale: Days When Proselytes Shared Martyrdom of Jews,” Martyrdom and Resistance 16, no. 3 (Jan.-Feb. 1990); Antitrinitarianism in the Second Half of the 16th Century, edited by Róbert Dán and Antal Pirnát (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó; Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1982); Judit Gellérd, “Spiritual Jews of Szekler Jerusalem: A Four-Centuries History of Transylvanian Szekler Sabbatarianism,” unpublished paper, 2000; Liechty, Sabbatarianism in the Sixteenth Century; Kenneth Strand, The Sabbath in Scripture and History (Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1982); Earl Morse Wilbur, A History of Unitarianism in Transylvania, England, and America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1945).

  “the greatest debate in the entire history of Unitarianism”: Wilbur, A History of Unitarianism in Transylvania, England, and America, p. 36.

  “This man”: W. Bacher, “The Sabbatarians in Hungary,” Jewish Quarterly Review 2, no. 4 (July 1890), p. 472.

  “abstain[ed] from blood and pork”: Judit Gellérd, “Spiritual Jews of Szekler Jerusalem: A Four-Centuries History of Transylvanian Szekler Sabbatarianism,” unpublished paper, 2000.

  “The thirty-eight Sabbatarian”: Bacher, “The Sabbatarians in Hungary,” p. 484.

  After four hundred years: Gellérd, “Spiritual Jews of Szekler Jerusalem.”

  “Am not I”: All of the following can be found in the first two chapters of 1 Samuel.

  “You do not know”: Babylonian Talmud, Berachot 31b.

  “How many important laws”: Babylonian Talmud, Berachot 31a.

  “dead drunke”: The following is taken from Thomas Shepard, God’s Plot: The Paradoxes of Puritan Piety. Being the Autobiography and Journal of Thomas Shepard, edited by Michael McGiffert (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1972).

  “a bit of English originality”: M. M. Knappen, Tudor Puritanism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 142.

  “the industrious sort of people”: Christopher Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (Palgrave Macmillan, 1997), p. 107.

  “the mother and breeder”: Christopher Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997), pp. 137 ff.

  “How were men to be reorganized”: Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. 202 ff.

  “Biblical primitivism”: Theodore Dwight Bozeman, To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).

  the Puritan Sabbath was the product: I base my discussion of Puritan Sabbatarian theology on John H. Primus, Holy Time: Moderate Puritanism and the Sabbath (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1989).

  “his primitive and perfect estate”: Thomas Shepard, The Works of Thomas Shepard, vol. 3, Theses Sabbaticae (Ligonier, Penn.: Soli Deo Gloria Publications, 1992), p. 41.

  “to bring ourselves back into that estate”: Nicholas Bownde, The Doctrine of the Sabbath (London: Printed by the Widdow Orwin, for Iohn Porter, and Thomas Man, 1595), p. 19.

  “would say, they had seen”: All the quotes in this paragraph from Samuel Clarke, General Martyrologie (Glasgow: J. Galbraith, 1770), quoted in William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957), p. 62.

  “Psalm-singing replaced ballads”: David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 10 ff.

  “state and royal majesty”: Ibid.

  “buying, selling, soweing”: Ibid., pp. 257–58.

  “Sweet to the Pilgrims”: Alice Morse Earle, The Sabbath in Puritan New England (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1891), pp. 257–58.

  On Saturday night: Ibid., pp. 19–116.

  The first Puritan colony: Most of the following can be found in Winston U. Solberg, Redeem the Time: The Puritan Sabbath in Early America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), pp. 167–96.

  “Children, servants, strangers”: Shepard, Theses Sabbaticae, p. 263.

  “And if superiors in families”: Ibid.

  “to be forever banished”: Shepard, Theses Sabbaticae, p. 261.

  “It would be no exaggeration”: Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (New York: Schocken Books, 1996), p. 139.

  Consider the Sabbath: Elliot K. Ginsburg, The Sabbath in the Classical Kabbalah (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), pp. 217 ff.

  “the other, holy spirit”: Ibid., p. 131.

  “Three things were said”: Moe’ed Katan, 18a.

  Isaac Luria, the great Kabbalist: Lawrence Fine, Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos: Isaac Luria and His Kabbalistic Fellowship (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 161–62.

  And they had sex: Ibid., pp. 248–58.

  “If the whole universe”: Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1946), pp. 29–30.

  Saint Augustine, as he lay weeping on the ground: Saint Augustine, The Confessions, translated by Maria Boulding (New York: Vintage, 1998), p. 168.

  PART SIX SCENES OF INSTRUCTION

  “MOSES RECEIVED”: Pirkei Avot, 1:1.

  “Rabbi Akiva said”: Babylonian Talmud, Berachot 62a. 162 “Rabbi Kahana once went”: Ibid.

  They kept their eyes fixed: Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House in the Big Woods (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), pp. 88–90.

  “maddening church bells”: Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit (London: J. M. Dent, 1899), pp. 39–43.

  “never was late at Sabbath school”: Mark Twain, The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain (New York: Doubleday, 1985), pp. 67–70.

  English and American Sabbath sentiment: The discussion of nineteenth-century Sabbatarianism is drawn from Alexis McCrossen, Holy Day, Holiday: The American Sunday (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002); and John Wigley, The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Sunday (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1980).

  “my mother confined me”: James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL. D. (London: G. Cowie, 1824), p. 56.

  “Gaming-Tables, Night-Houses, Bawdy Houses”: Thomas Legg, “Low-Life, or One Half of the World Knows Not How the Other Half Lives. Being a critical account of what is transacted by people of almost all religions, nations, circumstances, and sizes of understanding, between Saturday-night and Monday-morning” (London: Printed for the author, 1755?).

  “The protest was unprecedented”: Richard R. John, “Taking Sabbatarianism Seriously: The Postal System, the Sabbath, and the Transformation of American Political Culture,” Journal of the Early Republic 1, no. 4 (Winter 1990): 517–67.

  “a significant impact”: Thomas Laqueur, Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools and Working Class Culture, 1780–1850 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 123. 170 “religious terrorism”: W.E.H. Lecky, History of England in the Eighteenth Centur
y, vol. 2 (1891), p. 585.

  “the neglect of moral discipline”: E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966), p. 361.

  “I … said that I had”: Anne Stott, Hannah More: The First Victorian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 108 ff.

  “I got a washing”: Charles Shaw, When I Was a Child, by an Old Potter (London: Methuen, 1903), pp. 7–8.

  “two different worlds”: Ibid., p. 35.

  “Let our Sunday schools”: Laqueur, Religion and Respectability, pp. 154 ff.

  “Here and there”: Charles Dickens, Sunday, Under Three Heads (London: J. W. Jarvis & Son, 1836), pp. 3–4.

  “Some keep the Sabbath”: Emily Dickinson, Poems: Including Variant Readings Critically Compared with All Known Manuscripts, edited by Thomas Herbert Johnson (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1955), p. 254.

  “Childhood is unknown”: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education, translated by Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), p. 33.

  In the fifth of his Reveries: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les confessions de J. J. Rousseau, suives Des reveries du promeneur solitaire, vol. 2 (Geneva: N.p., 1783), pp. 285–303.

  “slackening my thoughts by choice”: All quotes from The Prelude come from William Wordsworth, The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind, edited by Ernest de Sélincourt, revised by Helen Darbishire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959).

  “mazy as a river”: Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1964), p. 208.

  “the deep-rooted folk memory”: Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, p. 357.

  “the cocks and hens”: All quotes from Adam Bede come from George Eliot, Adam Bede (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1860), pp. 157–75.

  “all the poetry in which”: George Eliot to Sara Sophia Hennell, June 4, 1848, in The George Eliot Letters, vol. 1, 1836–1851, edited by Gordon S. Haight (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1954), pp. 263–64.

  “the old duality of life”: All quotes from The Rainbow come from D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (New York: B. W. Heubsch, 1921), chaps. 10 and 11.

  “And I will make thy seed”: Genesis 13:16.

  PART SEVEN REMEMBERING THE SABBATH

  “with Sunday school”: Alexis McCrossen, Holy Day, Holiday: The American Sunday (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 138.

  “freedom from all slavery”: G. Stanley Hall, “Sunday Observance,” Pedagogical Seminary 15 (1908): 221.

  “reasonable line of demarcation”: McGowan et al. v. Maryland, 366 U.S. 420 (1961).

  The first five-day workweek: McCrossen, Holy Day, p. 150.

  One legal scholar: Lesley Lawrence-Hammer, “Red, White, but Mostly Blue: The Validity of Modern Sunday Closing Laws Under the Establishment Clause,” Vanderbilt Law Review 60, no. 1273 (May 2007).

  “The mobile telephone relaxes”: Richard Ling, The Mobile Connection: The Cell Phone’s Impact on Society (San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann, 2004), p. 74.

  “Face-to-face social interaction”: Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 78.

  “The Soviet authorities”: Eviatar Zerubavel, The Seven Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 35–43.

  “the enormous flywheel”: William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (New York: Henry Holt, 1890), p. 121.

  “When we are learning”: Ibid., pp. 112–13.

  The biologist Eric R. Kandel: Kandel, In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.)

  “The mere fact”: Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, translated by Ephraim Fischoff and others (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 326.

  “Processing fluency”: Christian Unkelbach, “Reversing the Truth Effect: Learning the Interpretation of Processing Fluency in Judgments of Truth,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 33, no. 1 (2007): 219–30.

  “We do and we hear”: Exodus 24:7.

  “Leisure is a form of silence”: Josef Pieper, quoted in Al Gini, The Importance of Being Lazy: In Praise of Play, Leisure, and Vacations (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 35–36.

  In 1962: Sebastian de Grazia, Of Time, Work, and Leisure (New York: Twentieth-Century Fund, 1962).

  “Much as the modern-day”: David M. Levy, “More, Faster, Better: Governance in an Age of Overload, Busyness, and Speed,” in First Monday, special issue, no. 7 “Command Lines: The Emergence of Governance in Global Cyberspace,” 2006), http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/

  article/view/1618/1533.

  “relaxation and self-reflection”: Jack Wertheimer, ed., Jews in the Center: Conservative Synagogues and Their Members (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000), p. 314.

  “I love technology”: Jill Serjeant, “Taking a Sabbatical from the Internet: Tech Geeks Vow to Wrestle Back Control of Their Lives if Only for a Day,” The Toronto Star, May 22, 2008.

  “a mistrust of the pleasures”: Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: The Care of the Self, translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 39. Much of the following comes from this volume, particularly pp. 37–71.

  Two out of three countries: Stephen Sweet and Peter Meiksins, Changing Contours of Work: Jobs and Opportunities in the New Economy (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Pine Forge Press, 2008), pp. 147–50.

  “disputes at the boundary of time”: Todd D. Rakoff, A Time for Every Purpose: Law and the Balance of Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 143.

  “cultural blindness”: Ibid.

  “Leopards break into”: Franz Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes, in German and English, edited by Nahum H. Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1961 [1935]).

  “a repetition and a commemoration”: Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, translated by A. A. Brill (New York: Random House, 1946), p. 183.

  “When I was a young man”: Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, translated by Joyce Crick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 165.

  QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. Judith Shulevitz says, “The Sabbath does something, and what it does is remarkable” (this page). What does the Sabbath do? Do you agree that what it does is remarkable, or do you think all rituals performed by an entire community accomplish more or less the same thing? Do you think the Sabbath could do something remarkable for you or your family?

  2. Shulevitz argues that the Sabbath was probably taken over from a Babylonian custom involving the ume lemnuti, the evil or inauspicious days, when neither the king nor the priest were allowed to work for fear that they might do harm to their communities. The Fourth Commandment, however (“Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy”), says nothing about kings or priests. It gives the commandment to you, your household, your servants, your animals, and the stranger at your gate. What’s the difference between the Babylonian custom and the commandment? What does the Jewish Sabbath tell us about the people who created it?

  3. Why do some people see the Sabbath as having environmental implications? Why do observant Jews refuse to use tools on the Sabbath? What could you do to achieve the same end, even if you don’t follow Jewish law?

  4. The Sabbath crops up a lot in the Book of Mark—indeed, throughout the Gospels. Jesus preaches on the Sabbath and heals on the Sabbath; Jesus’s Sabbath-breaking infuriates the Pharisees so much that they step outside the synagogue and start plotting against him. Shulevitz says that performing miraculous acts on the Sabbath is a way for the Jesus of the Gospels to make a point about time. What’s Jesus’s point? Did the early Christians believe that Christ’s arrival on earth changed the very nature of time? What’s the difference between Jewish time and Christian time, according to Shulevitz? Does this explain, in your opinion, the difference between Jews and Chri
stians in their approach to Sabbath-keeping today?

  5. The American Puritan Sabbath is notorious for being strict and joyless. But Shulevitz thinks the Puritans found it joyous because it allowed them to re-enact their vision of life in Biblical times. Can you imagine finding the Puritans’ Sabbath appealing? Would you like the quiet and hate the discipline, or would you welcome the discipline but secretly chafe at the boredom?

  6. Why did America’s extensive Sunday-closing laws eventually disappear? Do you think that that was a good thing or a bad thing? How has modern technology changed our sense of time? Does the prevalence of cell phones make it easier or harder to keep the Sabbath?

  7. Shulevitz dwells at length on her own feelings of ambivalence toward the Sabbath. Why is she so conflicted about the Sabbath? Do you share her ambivalence, or do you feel wholeheartedly either for or against the Sabbath?

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  JUDITH SHULEVITZ is a journalist whose work appears frequently in The New York Times. She is the former culture editor of Slate and lives in New York with her husband and children.

  Copyright © 2010 by Judith Shulevitz

  Reading group guide copyright © 2011 by Random House, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Portions of this work were originally published in The New York Times Magazine.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Shulevitz, Judith.

  The Sabbath world : glimpses of a different order of time / Judith Shulevitz.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-58836-771-6

  1. Sabbath. 2. Sunday. 3. Time—Religious aspects—Judaism. 4. Time—Religious aspects—Christianity. 5. Time—Psychological aspects. 6. Rest—Religious aspects—Judaism. 7. Rest—Religious aspects—Christianity.