The Sabbath World (12 page)

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 Isaac 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.”

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.

S
O HOW DOES THE
B
IBLE 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.

The most remarkable feature of P’s protoscientific narrative, though, is that it leads us with every weapon at the poet’s disposal—rhythm, repetition, parallelism—toward its conclusion: the seventh and final day. This is no accident. P is working out the details of a monotheistic cosmos, and the Sabbath would seem to be an essential element of it. Behold creation in all its magnificence, P appears to be saying. This can’t be the work of some squabbling, inconsistent, all-too-human gods. It can only be the work of the one God who dwells beyond time and space, light and matter. The Sabbath is that dwelling.

To grasp where the Sabbath ranks in P’s world, you have to compare the creation of things to the creation of time. As God creates things, he moves from the lowest (the creatures of the sea) to the highest (humans, made in God’s image). As he ekes out the units of time, he also ascends. Each day has more acts of creation than the previous one, and each is deemed to be good, but still, the stakes get higher each time. On day six God creates man and woman, and that, he says, observing his handiwork with satisfaction, is “very good.” At long last, we get to day seven. We reach the end of the week.

Whereupon God rests. It seems an odd thing to do. As endings go, it’s pretty muffled. One way to interpret it is as a loud silence, a deliberate not-saying of something. That’s how students of comparative religion explain the story. God’s apparent passivity at the very peak of narrative excitement, they say, is covert commentary on a competing epic, the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian myth of Creation. In that saga, after the gods create men, they free themselves for leisure by creating men, turning them into slaves, and putting them to work. Then the gods celebrate. They throw a party. If you were making a Hollywood version of the Enuma Elish, you’d base the party scene on Fellini’s
Satyricon;
you’d want that Roman orgy feel, with naked servants glueing their eyes to the ground. The God of the Bible, on the other hand, also rests after creating humans, but he doesn’t turn them into slaves. On the contrary, when God gathers his people at Sinai and commands them to rest because he did, too, he will generously share with humanity what theologians call the “divine otiosas,” the godly rest.

Another way to solve the riddle of the ending is to stay inside the
biblical text, rather than search for answers outside it. At the end of Exodus, in a passage also ascribed to P, we find the language used to describe Creation—the same words, in more or less the same order—being used to narrate the construction of God’s Tabernacle in the desert. Moses
sees
(same word) the
work
(same word) the people
did
(same word), and
blesses it
(just as God blessed man and woman when they were created). A rabbinic midrash, or imaginative meditation, puts it this way: