The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time

by Judith Shulevitz

  As the weeks passed, I began to soften. I liked being clean once a week, and smelling everyone else’s sharp clean smell. I looked forward to the meal, which featured challah and roast chicken and potatoes and cake, rather than the usual mess-hall stews and spaghetti, and was served on plates and tablecloths rather than on trays and bare tables. I got to know the songs and prayers well enough to bang on the table at the appropriate moments, even if I didn’t have the nerve to look enthusiastic or sing. After dinner there was Israeli folk dancing, which was cheesy and dispelled the charm, though years later I still hum the tunes.

  On Saturday mornings, though, there was no loudspeaker blasting Israeli pop songs to wake us up. We were relieved of the burden of a formal breakfast. In the afternoon, there were hours of respite from planned camp activities, time in which you couldn’t do anything to win points against the other bunks. You couldn’t clean up your bunk, or lengthen your lanyards, or work on your group’s theatrical productions, or even acquire your fellow bunkers’ savings by beating them at jacks, my one good sport. All you could do was alleviate your boredom. You lay around and chatted or, if no one wanted to talk to you, you wandered off for an hour or two by yourself to marvel that the sites of your daily striving—the waterfront, the softball fields, the study cabins—could seem so pastoral in the absence of counselors and whistles and scoreboards. The Sabbath of summer camp, because everyone around you observed it, too, felt much more real than any Sabbath I’d ever experienced in the real world, where my mother and my siblings and I seemed to be the only ones who even noticed it.

  Because I spent so much of it on my own, the Sabbath was also the only day of the week in which popularity and the lack thereof failed to dominate my consciousness, when I didn’t have to pretend to be indifferent to status rankings whose minute calculations I apprehended in their utmost complexity. I could just be indifferent, at which point, of course, being indifferent no longer seemed so necessary.

  So that was what I took away from camp at the end of the summer: the relief of my weekly respite from it. That, and something like a friend. My bunk’s head counselor, Marjorie, who was headed to Brandeis that fall, began giving me books to carry off on my Saturday expeditions. These were mostly fairly standard college-freshman fare, which means there was a lot of Kurt Vonnegut. One Friday night, though, she handed me her copy of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto.

  This is not a story about how summer camp made me a Communist, because it didn’t, although later, inevitably, as a teenager experiencing adolescent rage before the fall of the Soviet empire, I would fling Marxist-Leninist jargon at my father and conflate my own alienation with that of the proletariat. What The Communist Manifesto inspired was a fascination with the idea of the community that sets its face against the world and defines reality for itself. I picked this up from Marx’s riff about “Critical-Utopian Socialism,” which had something to do with people named Owen and Fourier. Actually, though this went over my head at the time, Marx was ranting against these men, ridiculing their utopian dreams as small-minded, counterrevolutionary, doomed to failure. To me, though, the nineteenth-century idylls he mocked sounded, well, idyllic, with names like “Home Colonies,” “Little Icaria,” “New Jerusalem.” I was coming across this not long after the heyday of the hippie commune. I’d had no idea that the hippies hadn’t been the first to come up with the idea. The utopias Marx described were like lively line drawings accompanying a dry, dull text. They made the revolution imaginable and since I couldn’t seem to be a member of the community I found myself in, I wanted to be a part of that one. These were the real summer camps, the Platonic ideals (not that I knew from Platonic ideals) of which my camp was but a wishful shadow. They were genuinely communal, genuinely remote, genuinely unfallen from grace. In them, one might, on a permanent basis, achieve the kind of Sabbath my camp leaders were always talking about, one freed from the evil machinery of exploitation, rather than the corrupted, fashioncentric, Zionist Sabbath of actually existing Jews.

  On the other hand, if you had to live among actually existing Jews, the New Hampshire summer-camp Sabbath seemed preferable to the August in Puerto Rico Sabbath. That fall and winter, I wrote my camp counselor friendly letters, telling her what I’d been reading, and in the spring, when my mother asked me if I wanted to go back the following summer, I said yes.

  PART THREE

  THE SCANDAL OF THE HOLY

  1.

  WHAT IS THE SABBATH, ANYWAY? YOU COULD CALL IT A RELIGIOUS institution—most people do—but its association with religion is in part an accident of history. The Sabbath is a relic of the days when most collective experiences were choreographed by professional clerics. You’d be safe if you called it a social institution, since society is a multiplication of the bonds that people weave among themselves, and the Sabbath helps tie such bonds, like a sort of sociological loom. You might characterize it as a legal entity, which is how the yeshiva bocher, the student of the Talmud, is taught to think of it. After all, for the Sabbath to exist at all there must be a set of rules that ensure that people don’t work, and that those who don’t work won’t suffer for it. You might deem the Sabbath a cultural institution. If you wanted to make Sabbatarians of people who are fond of music and art, you would do well to explain to them that by setting aside one day in seven for non-employment they erect a temporary cultural venue for themselves, a concert hall in time. Or you could call the Sabbath a political institution. It makes the radically egalitarian claim that everyone—men, women, children, strangers, and animals—has the right not to work. The Sabbath asserts the fundamental dignity of the human being, beyond his or her productive function.

  But the Sabbath has another definition. It’s also a holy day. Thomas Shepard, a seventeenth-century American Puritan minister, is very emphatic about this: “The word Sabbath properly signifies not common but sacred or holy rest.” God said it from the slopes of Mount Sinai: “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.”

  If it strikes us as strange that this commandment comes before “Honor thy father and thy mother,” that’s not just because the Sabbath seems less germane to life today than does our relationship with our parents. It’s because the words “keep it holy” no longer make sense to us. When people complain that they find praying to be an empty experience, that senselessness is what they’re talking about. It’s weird to fill your mouth with words that have been drained of meaning; it’s like wrapping your tongue around a fossil. To those of us who live in a disenchanted, Euclidean world, the category of the holy feels like a superfluity, a drawer into which you might toss odds and ends. Sacred things are relics. Sacred words are abracadabra (the word is a parody of an Aramaic sentence describing God’s act of creation: avra ke’davra, “I create as I speak”). Holy days, once meant to open up the heavens for a glimpse of time on a cosmic scale, are now “holidays,” meant for skiing trips or preschool parties.

  The notion that we’re to keep the Sabbath holy—as opposed to just keeping it—makes it unpalatable to many Americans who might otherwise be eager to set aside one day a week for organized non-productivity. Take Back Your Time, an American and Canadian group formed to push back against the encroachment of the work ethos, states its policy goals in the bureaucratese of the human resources professional, speaking of “time poverty relief” and “paid family leave” and “time for civic participation.” This group and others like it, such as the volunteer simplicity movement, share a key objective—protecting people from the compulsion to overwork—with Sabbatarian organizations, such as the Seventh-Day Adventists, which fight to keep one day a week free using the constitutional tool of religious-accommodation law. Some of the non-religious groups also get funding and support from churches, synagogues, or religiously affiliated foundations. But they don’t acknowledge it openly. The secular groups do not want the taint of the Fourth Commandment to scare unbelievers away.

  Holiness scandalizes, as well it should. It’s the very incarnation of unreason. Once Isa
ac Newton convinced us that time was a mathematical quantity, wholly measurable, infinitely divisible, and expressible in numbers, and economists showed us that time could be a commodity, exchangeable for money, we were bound to find implausible the notion that certain times were holy while others weren’t. How could some points on a graph be charged with supernatural power while others rest inert? Where, precisely, would the holiness lurk? If it can’t be measured, how do we know it exists? Then there’s what I call the non-commutability of sacred occasions—the conviction that specific periods of time (such as the twenty-five hours or so of the Sabbath) are sacred in and of themselves, and that you can’t substitute one day for another, making a Thursday, say, stand in for a Saturday. That seems like a childish lapse into concrete thinking.

  And yet we never really free ourselves from concrete thinking. Human beings make qualitative distinctions among kinds of time; that is one of the things that make us human. Animals do, too, of course, or at least they recognize that one time is different from another time—there is feeding time, and there is mating time. But we, unlike them, are conscious of time as time. We wouldn’t even conceive of time as such, as something that moved forward or backward or back and forth, if we didn’t slice it up into alternating units—tick, then tock.

  “What is the origin of that differentiation?” Durkheim asked. The religious calendar, he answered. Durkheim’s radical insight into religion was that what it made sacred was collective experience; religion also gave a subjective account of that experience. Religion, he said, is “the eminently social thing.” How did societies learn the very act of making distinctions? By segregating the holy from the unholy. “The sacred thing is par excellence that which the profane should not touch, and cannot touch with impunity.” And how could the calendar be used to help in this effort? By establishing a temporal rhythm of rites, festivals, and public ceremonies, the calendar held the sacred apart from the mundane. “There is no religion,” Durkheim wrote, “and, consequently, no society which has not known and practised this division of time into two distinct parts, alternating with one another.”

  An anthropologist named Edmund Leach came up with a clever twist on Durkheim’s take on holy time: He called it the time of false noses. “All over the world men mark out their calendars by means of festivals,” Leach observed. “We ourselves start each week with a Sunday and each year with a fancy dress party.” Why do we do it? Why “wear top hats at funerals, and false noses on birthdays and New Year’s Eve?” Leach held that our intermittent masquerades create the sensation of time moving in a steady forward march—not merely, he argued, by marking off regular intervals between festivities but also, paradoxically, by making time swing like a metronome. Festive time lets us toggle between social personae, between our regular selves and our dress-up selves. We put on suits for church or graduation or a wedding and become higher-status versions of ourselves. We don skeleton masks or superhero costumes for Halloween and enter the realm of death and the uncanny.

  Holy time, then, is time that we ourselves make holy—time that we sanctify by means of our selves. We have to commit ourselves to holy time before it will oblige us by turning holy. How do we sanctify the Sabbath? By wearing a special robe, said the rabbis. By beautifying ourselves and our homes.

  From this perspective, Sabbath rules can be seen as formal exercises in sanctification. Don’t do on that day whatever it is that you do on all the other days. What could be less enchanting than that? By divvying up the world into this kind of activity and that kind of activity, we fabricate holiness. The atheist would say that this proves that religion is a charade. The rabbis would say that this is how we become like God. After all, God ushered his world into being by dividing one thing from another: light from darkness, the heavens from the earth, and so on. Much of Jewish law flows from the Durkheimian notion that drawing distinctions is a holy act. (It can’t be irrelevant that Durkheim, son and grandson of rabbis, spent some portion of his early education studying to be a rabbi.) On Saturday nights, for instance, once the sun has set and three stars have appeared in the sky, Jews mark the end of the Sabbath with a ritual called Separation (Havdalah), which involves lighting a braided candle and saying some blessings. One blessing reads, “Blessed are you, God, because you separate the holy from the everyday, the light from the darkness, the people of Israel from everyone else, and the seventh day from six days of creation.”

  2.

  SAYING THAT HOLINESS PARTAKES of God is not to say that it is necessarily good. Contrary to what is implied in Sunday school, the biblical quality of holiness is not morally positive; it’s morally neutral, rather like an electrical current. It can enliven or kill. God lets Moses glimpse him in the burning bush but does not reveal himself directly, for his unveiled presence could destroy the future liberator of the Jewish people. Holiness flows from one conductor to another. God gives his blessing to Abraham, who gives it to Isaac, who gives it to Jacob, who passes it on to his sons, who become the holy nation of Israel. This transmission is anything but a conventionally moral process. Abraham’s and Isaac’s wives Sarah and Rebecca, for instance, conspire against elder sons so that younger ones will receive their husbands’ blessings—a clear violation of the rules of the society in which they live, and acts of deception that ought to bother us today. Sarah insists that Abraham leave Ishmael, his firstborn, and Ishmael’s mother, Hagar, in the desert to die, in order to protect the inheritance of Sarah’s son, Isaac. Rebecca tells her son Jacob to trick his father, the now elderly Isaac, into giving him a blessing rightfully owed to Esau, Jacob’s ever-so-slightly older twin brother.

  The matriarchs’ behavior is indefensible, yet God defends it. He instructs Abraham to do as Sarah says, and after Jacob takes flight from an enraged Esau God comes to Jacob in a dream, blesses him, and tells him that he, too, like Abraham and Isaac before him, will father a great nation. The ethical strictures governing family and tribal life fade before the importance of choosing a person capable of carrying the blessing unto the next generation. “Divine election is an exacting and perhaps cruel destiny that often involves doing violence to the most intimate biological bonds,” the critic Robert Alter writes.

  Holiness, in the Bible, is not only family-unfriendly; it is socially discriminatory. Anyone who has ever studied the book of Leviticus, for example, has been stunned by the radical non-inclusiveness of its laws, which force lepers out of the community and make menstruating women taboo. “Holiness means keeping distinct the categories of creation,” the anthropologist Mary Douglas writes. “It therefore involves correct definition, discrimination, and order.” Animals with blemishes may not serve as sacrifices. The blind and the lame may not be priests. Women who have given birth and men who have ejaculated must purify themselves, because bodies that leak aren’t whole.

  You can construct a dark and alienated existentialism on the scaffolding of qadosh, with its implication of God’s separating himself from us. The biblical scholar David Damrosch says that the Law, which creates “a principle of separation” between humans and animals, Jews and non-Jews, should be seen as “a metaphor for the transcendental otherness of God.” But another way to think about that is to say that the laws of holiness make you continually aware that God lives in heaven and you don’t.

  3.

  SO HOW DOES THE BIBLE EXPLAIN the holiness of the Sabbath? It refers us to the story of Creation.

  It is possible to summarize the Creation story as a set of answers to some basic questions. Why is there something rather than nothing? Because in the beginning God created. Why is there what there is and not something else? Because he created heavens, earth, sea, land, stars, moon, sun, plants, animals, and humans. And why do we have the Sabbath? Because when God was done creating he rested.

  At this point, though, we circle back on ourselves. Why did God rest? Because he wanted to create the Sabbath. We still don’t know why the Sabbath should be a part of Creation. To understand that, you have to know about P. P and J are
the authors said by modern biblical scholars to have written the two accounts of Creation that open the book of Genesis. P wrote the version that starts at the beginning, with God creating the heavens and the earth, and J wrote the one that starts with the Garden of Eden and features Adam and Eve. P, who was also the law- and purity-obsessed author of the book of Leviticus, is thought to have been a priest living sometime in the fifth or fourth century B.C.E. Some scholars feel that P was not just P; he was also R, the Redactor responsible for stitching together the Five Books of Moses as we know them. A handful of scholars go further and claim that Ezra, the priest who first read the Bible as we know it to the assembled people of Israel upon his return from Babylon, was both P and R.

  Whoever he was, P does not benefit by the comparison to J, whose supple story of Creation features Adam, Eve, the snake, and God circling around a tree in a dance of good and evil. P, by contrast, writes like a cleric. His prose reads less like a story and more like a sermon. He has no characters; he never descends to the human level. He perches with his God above the cosmos, laconic, untouchable.

  One thing we can say in P’s defense, though, is that he was Judaism’s first philosopher. Call him the Jewish Aristotle. His account of Creation lacks J’s subtlety but achieves the grandeur of keen analytical thinking. It begins as simply as a folktale and ends with the magnificence of church-organ Bach. Along the way, it offers a tantalizing glimpse of ancient science. P doesn’t just tie the material world to the creativity of his First Cause; he categorizes God’s creations. There are sea and sky and land; fish and birds and animals; beasts that run wild, beasts that can be domesticated, and beasts that crawl; and, of course, humans. P doesn’t limit himself to the physical, either. His God creates the temporal, too, though he doesn’t so much call forth the units of time as divide them one from the other. Light he creates, but then he divides day from night, allotting much light to day and a lesser amount to night. Evening is winnowed from morning. There is one day, then two days, then three, then six.