The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time

by Judith Shulevitz

  The Puritan Sabbath, for the pious Puritan, did not consist of long, throttling hours of enforced inactivity. Underneath its carefully choreographed plainness, the day crackled with high drama and sensual joy. It’s just that all these things happened inside the soul, not out in the world. Sinners entered the presence of God on this day of “state and royal majesty, when all his saints compass his throne and presence,” Shepard wrote, and repent the “soil” and “decays” of the week before. And they were to lie with Jesus, “in the bosom of his sweet mercy,” the whole day long, and he would rest with them, tenderly, lingeringly.

  Puritans disapproved of the theater as a cultural institution because it distracted from the greater drama of the struggle for redemption. But nonetheless, on the Puritan Sabbath, mimetic rules applied. It was necessary to follow the letter of the law, in part because God commanded it but also in order to re-create the requisite atmosphere. Shepard called for the New England Sabbath to begin at sundown, as it does in the Old Testament. At that point, all work was to stop. He made use of traditional Christian definitions of work, distinguishing between servile works—labor done for worldly gain, profit, or livelihood, in order to acquire and purchase the things of this life—and works of preservation that made life tolerably comfortable. There was to be no “buying, selling, soweing, reaping”; nothing that could be done the following day, including bringing in the harvest or setting sail or cleaning house. But one was permitted “to rub the ears of corn, to dress meat for the comfortable nourishment of man,” or “to pull a sheep out of a ditch, to quench fire in a town, to save corn and hay from the sudden inundation of water, to keep fire in the iron mills, to sit at stern and guide the ship.”

  All this not working and not playing certainly made the day quiet. “Sweet to the Pilgrims and their descendants was the hush of their calm Saturday night, and their still, tranquil Sabbath—sign and token to them, not only of the weekly rest ordained in the creation, but of the eternal rest to come,” Alice Morse Earle wrote in a nineteenth-century paean to the early New England Sabbath. “No work, no play, no idle strolling was known; no sign of human life or motion was seen except the necessary care of patient cattle and other dumb beasts, the orderly and quiet going to and from the meeting, and at the morning, a visit to the churchyard to stand by the side of the silent dead.”

  Biblically inspired though it may have been, the Puritan Sabbath had a rigor all its own, particularly in New England. On Saturday night, the pious New England Puritan would gather the members of his family and household together and catechize them. On Sunday they went to the meeting house, called there at 9 A.M. by the blowing of horns or conch shells or the beating of drums. There they sat through two services, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, with a break in the middle of the day for lunch. Sermons were known to last for as long as four turnings of the hourglass. The Puritans chose not to heat their meeting houses, nor did they build backs on their pews. Some women brought coal foot stoves in the wintertime, and some towns had a noon-house, a low, stablelike building nearby, in which they built a fire, and where people who came from far away could eat and rest and warm themselves. Should a churchgoer nod off to sleep, he might be woken by a tithing man, a member of the congregation appointed to wander the building with a long staff. The staff had a knob on one end and a foxtail hanging from the other, and the tithing man would either rap the sleeper on the head or slap the fur against her face until she woke up.

  How else would the Puritans have enforced such demanding religious discipline? The first Puritan colony in Massachusetts had no written code of laws; it was governed by magistrates interpreting the Word of God. But, by 1635, several Puritan ministers had begun to draft some. The very first code of laws—never actually adopted—was called Moses’ Judicials, and it pursued the long-cherished aim of creating a holy commonwealth. Citing the tale of the wood gatherer in Numbers, who was put to death for violating the Sabbath, Moses’ Judicials called for capital punishment for Sabbath-breaking. Later, Thomas Shepard was drafted to help write more reasonable laws, and in 1648 the General Court published The Book of General Laws and Liberties.

  These were the blue laws, so called either because of the blue paper on which an early history of Connecticut was written and in which the laws were outlined, or, more likely, because blue meant rigidly moral in eighteenth-century slang. The laws made Sabbath church attendance compulsory; outlawed the denial of the morality of the Sabbath; prohibited Sabbath-breaking; and strictly punished acts of Sabbath burglary, which was rampant, given that houses often stood unattended all day long while their owners went to church. Other states soon followed Massachusetts’ lead.

  Enforcement of these rules was never quite as draconian as one might think from the horror stories promulgated even at the time. It is doubtful, for instance, that a man was ever actually put in the stocks for kissing his wife on the Sabbath. The court’s most common response to Sabbath-breaking was admonishment. On the other hand, people were flogged, branded, put in stocks, and made to pay steep fines for breaking the Sabbath. The harshest punishments were for Sabbath burglary and other crimes committed on the Sabbath. But even if the actual penalties didn’t always meet the standard of severity called for in the law books, the matter did not lack for attention. The court records brim with arrests, fines, and admonishments for everything from catching eels on Sunday and riding too “violently” to wringing out one’s laundry and sitting under the apple tree with one’s beloved. Walking, traveling, or visiting on the Sabbath could result in a fine. Failing to go to church almost certainly would.

  A decade later, thanks in part to these laws, the Sabbath had become an entrenched American institution, kept even in towns filled with converted Indians. Though the actual number of American Puritans was never large, the Puritan Sabbath—enshrined in law by vigorous, literate leaders and bolstered by the Sabbatarianism that held sway in England in the seventeenth century—dominated the American Sunday until the beginning of the nineteenth century, at least in the northern half of the country. (Puritanism never found a foothold in the South.) Nonetheless, as soon as the Puritans passed their Sunday laws, and even before they did, the courts found themselves embroiled in battles over civil and religious liberty. The dissenter Roger Williams began his long career of annoying Bay Colony leaders by opposing their right to punish Sabbath-breakers. He was later exiled from Massachusetts and went on to found the colony of Rhode Island, the first to enshrine in law freedom of conscience and separation of church and state. A powerful splinter group called the Antinomians, led by Anne Hutchinson, derided laws enforcing Sabship and behavior as “legalistic.” A wave of Quakers came to New England in the late 1650s and fell afoul of the Sabbath laws by refusing to appear at Sunday public-worship services and holding their own meetings instead.

  The Sabbath laws were among the most divisive of Puritan policies, and may well have provided the most ammunition, over the centuries, for the enemies of Puritanism. By the nineteenth century the Sabbath laws were a symbol of the Puritans’ indifference to, and even intolerance for, individual pleasures and religious freedoms, as well as their will to compel worship rather than allow it to emerge from natural feelings. The laws were so controversial, even as they were being written, that you have to wonder what blinded the Puritan fathers to the inevitable repercussions. Why did they not worry about backlash? What was in their minds?

  They were thinking of the Bible, of course. It stood before them as the text of reality, more real than life itself. It was not just a but the only possible model of society. Consider the biblical terms that Thomas Shepard uses when he justifies the use of state power to enforce a narrow notion of Sabbath rest. “Children, servants, strangers who are within our gates,” he wrote, in a direct echo of the Fourth Commandment, “are apt to profane the Sabbath; we are therefore to improve our power over them for God, in restraining them from sin, and in constraining them (as far as we can) to the holy observance of the rest of the Sabbath.�
�� And if parents must keep their children from breaking the Sabbath, then how much more must the state keep its citizens from doing the same? Puritan political theory was nothing if not patriarchal. As Shepard wrote, invoking Nehemiah: “And if superiors in families are to see their gates preserved unspotted from such provoking evils, can any thing be but that the same bond lies upon superiors in commonwealths, who are the fathers of these great families, whose subjects also are within their gates, and the power of their jurisdiction?”

  Historical hindsight makes it all too easy for us to see why some people might be oblivious to the larger blessings of the day. For one thing, the Puritan Sabbath had its morbid side. To be a Puritan was to live in a perpetual state of unfulfilled and unfulfillable expectation, for to the Calvinist death was certain, but redemption could never be. The Puritan Sabbath, like the Puritan diaries, was a tool of anxiety management. It allowed the Puritan to master his fear of the passage of time, and of death. You died for a day, and if you did it right, you got a taste of eternal rest. You prepared for the Sabbath as you prepared for heaven, Shepard said in the Theses Sabbaticae.

  For the orphan from Towcester, however, the Sabbath offered respite from the harsh anguish of self-doubt. Sunday was the day when you made time for God, but also the day when God—that overworked parent—made time for you. A person like Shepard, who considered himself fit “to be forever banished from the presence of the Most High,” and “exceedingly unworthy to come into it,” could not fail to prize “this day to come and enter into [Christ’s] rest, and lie in his very bosom all the day long, and as a most loving friend loth to part with them till needs must and that the day is done.”

  7.

  NO MATTER HOW MUCH the Transylvanians and the Subbotniki suffered, or how long and hard the Puritans struggled, for their Sabbaths, their Sabbatarian obsessiveness could not match that of the Kabbalists, whose mystical theology predated and, through the Christian Hebraists, may have influenced the Reformation and came to a head in the sixteenth century. “It would be no exaggeration to call the Sabbath the day of the Kabbalah,” wrote Gershom Scholem, the twentieth-century scholar of Kabbalah. These mystics kept the Sabbath not because they were commanded to but because that was how they made sure the world continued to exist.

  It was the virtue of the Kabbalists to take the rituals and texts of biblical and rabbinic Judaism and imbue them with new meanings and an almost unlimited power to affect the world. The two most appealing features of mysticism are that it turns decayed metaphors into vibrant cosmic realities, as if letting a primordial poetry loose upon the world; and that it endows the mystic with uncanny powers. The mystical sense of agency—religious scholars call it theurgy, the notion that human actions can compel parallel actions in the divine sphere—dispels the impotence felt by the pious person when confronted with the presence of evil in God’s universe. In the Kabbalistic system, the most mundane feat of ritual observance echoed in the heavens, and had the capacity to ensure the ongoing goodness of Creation. Mysticism turns the God of rationalistic theologies from someone you study into someone you experience directly. So when a Kabbalist kept the Sabbath he—and it was mostly, though not entirely, men who actively kept the Sabbath—didn’t just remember Creation. He renewed Creation. He didn’t just align himself with God’s calendar; he sustained its very existence. When he rested, he didn’t just imitate God; he helped God heal a broken world.

  Kabbalists wove every ritual, no matter how trivial, into the plot of a cosmological drama. Consider the Sabbath preparation outlined by the historian Elliot Ginsburg, who, in an impressive feat of scholarship, has gathered together everything that is known about the Kabbalistic Sabbath. Rabbinic Judaism always required that one’s house be made ready for the Sabbath, but the Kabbalists, with typical intensification, required you to sweep out cobwebs, as if evil itself lurked in the bodies of spiders. You festooned the house and the dinner table with pillows and embroidered cloths, as if welcoming a bride to a wedding—to a wedding canopy, or chuppah, to be exact. (Another common image is that of the bridal bedchamber.) For on the Sabbath, according to the great Kabbalistic texts, the female and the male aspects of God met and married. The Shekhinah, or Presence, of God, as she was called in the myth system of the Kabbalah, became one with her lover, Yesod (that is, the heavenly phallus) or with Tiferet, the principle of divine activity or the axis of the world—in short, with God’s male emanation, whatever his name.

  To take another example of mystical intensification, Kabbalists turned the usual Friday bath into an act of radical spiritual transformation. According to Moshe de Leon, the author of a classic thirteenth-century Kabbalistic text called the Zohar, a Jew bathes before the Sabbath to get away from the “other,” or evil, spirit that rules during the week, and enters into “the other, holy spirit,” in order that “he might receive the supernal holy Spirit.” This is the Sabbath soul, the neshama yeterah. De Leon thought that this soul supplemented and strengthened the weekday soul. Later Kabbalists said that the Sabbath soul killed off the mundane soul every week in order to allow the Sabbath one to enter. Isaac Luria, the great Kabbalist from the northern Palestinian town of Safed, a center of Kabbalistic thought and activity in the seventeenth century, was said to be able to detect which soul was occupying a mystical adept on the Sabbath by studying that adept’s forehead. Hayyim Vital, one of Luria’s disciples, tells us that Luria once spotted the soul of the great biblical king Hezekiah on Vital’s forehead. Later that same Sabbath, however, Vital had a temper tantrum, whereupon the soul of Hezekiah fled.

  Kabbalistic Sabbath preparation spared no part of one’s house or person. My favorite rule is one instructing the adept to pare the nails. De Leon hallowed fingernails and toenails above other parts of the body, for, he said, they are all that remain of a primordial garment worn by Adam in the Garden of Eden before the Fall, sometimes called a “chariot of light.” Nails, de Leon said, mark the border between the sacred and the mundane, and that border must be purged of all filth before the Sabbath. And not only that; the nail clippings must be disposed of properly, as befits sacred refuse: “Three things were said in reference to nails: One who burns them is pious, one who buries them is just, and one who throws them away is a villain,” as one Talmudic saying has it. This was the Kabbalist’s standard procedure, to seize upon a chance Talmudic remark and embroider it until a new ritual emerged, rich with esoteric backstory. According to Lawrence Fine, Luria’s biographer, Luria took a hint from the mention of a rabbi from the Talmudic era who stood at sunset to greet the Sabbath Queen, and developed a Sabbath dramaturgy that still has a powerful appeal to the modern sensibility and is echoed in today’s Friday-night liturgy. On Friday nights, he and his followers went out to the fields outside Safed—to the “field of holy apple trees,” trees being a symbol of the masculine aspect of God—to welcome the Sabbath bride. Dressed in white—for “the color of the garment one will wear in the world to come, following death, will be the same color as the clothes we wear on the Sabbath in this world”—they faced west, holding their hands in particular positions on their breasts that echoed the placement of cosmic forces in the universe.

  When they went home, they circled their tables with myrtle in their hands, myrtle having been used once upon a time to make bridegrooms’ wreaths, and also as an allusion to a story in the Talmud about a man who held two bundles of myrtle in his hand on the Sabbath, one to “remember” and one to “observe.” They had their wives bake twelve loaves of challah, instead of the usual two, and place them upon the table, since twelve showbreads had been laid out in the Temple on the Sabbath. And they had sex with their wives every Friday night, whenever the women were not menstruating, in compliance with a detailed script. Luria, who seems to have been rather obsessive-compulsive, specified the time (after midnight), conditions (total darkness), and position (head facing east, feet facing west, right hand south, left hand north). Happily for the wives, the Kabbalist was also supposed to arouse his wife’s desir
e before initiating sex. For these sexual activities, too, had God-changing implications. Sabbath orgasms echoed in the highest spheres of the sky, where the masculine and the feminine aspects of the Godhead were also trying to achieve their requisite Sabbath coupling.

  Anyone watching these proceedings who was not familiar with their mythological depths would surely have thought himself in the company of madmen, but I can’t help envying the Kabbalists. They found a way to overcome the alienation that chills our sensation of holy—its way of reminding us how far from God we really are. They felt themselves to be not just part of an intentional community but to dwell at the very center of the cosmos, which hung on their every act. “If the whole universe is an enormous complicated machine,” Gershom Scholem wrote, “then man is the machinist who keeps the wheels going by applying a few drops of oil here and there, and at the right time.”

  8.

  READING THE TALMUD ONE DAY, I came across the phrase tinok shenishba, “the child who was captured.” The rabbis were discussing the legal implications of forgetting the Sabbath—not just forgetting that it happens to be Saturday, so that you inadvertently perform a melachah, but forgetting, or perhaps not even knowing, that such a thing as the Sabbath exists. What would the penalty for such amnesia or ignorance be? Should there be one? And what kind of Jew could be so oblivious to the Sabbath? Only, the rabbis thought, a Jew who had suffered extreme cultural dislocation. Only a Jew who had been kidnapped as a child and raised by non-Jews.

  Tinok shenishba turns out be a technical category in Jewish law, one that gets thrown in the faces of secular Jews—Jews who are ignorant of, or oblivious to, the rules. Had I known that at the time, I might have been insulted. Luckily, I didn’t, so I seized on the romantic image and let it take me to all sorts of fanciful picture-postcard locales, gleaned from random book reviews: the Palestinian desert; the Italian ghetto, where Catholic nannies kidnapped their Jewish charges; Latin America, land of Marranos.