The Sabbath World (15 page)

What do you have to believe about the Sabbath to be willing to die for it? Considering it a preferable form of social organization clearly won’t suffice. Even perceiving it as a gift from God wouldn’t seem to be enough, since life—creation—is also God’s gift, so that when you die for the Sabbath you are simply trading one gift for another. Some historians of the Maccabean period interpret the Asidoi’s religious intransigence as a form of class warfare. The country Jews resented
the city Jews because the city Jews had access to élite Hellenistic institutions, such as gymnasiums and schools. So the country Jews took a radical stand against the city Jews, denouncing them as impious and unclean and becoming fanatical themselves. This explanation has a certain contemporary appeal. When you look at the events of our age, you can see how class resentment might merge with theology to form a glorified ideology of suicide.

But it also seems clear that these pious Jews brought a new intensity to the idea of the Sabbath itself. The seventh day was holy not just because God chose to rest on it; it was holy because it affirmed the divine order. It promised those who kept it that there
was
order rather than chaos. The future of the world depended on getting that order right.

Like Hamlet, the Asidoi felt that they lived in a time that was out of joint. It was during this era that the Jews invented another genre: the apocalyptic. In books such as Daniel and Enoch, also written in the time of Antiochus Epiphanes, angels revealed themselves in dreams and told tales of bloody wars of redemption. When would God make the time right again? Soon, the angels said. Daniel had a vision of a beast with teeth made of iron, nails of brass, and ten horns on his head. This image represented an evil kingdom out of which a king would arise who would “speak great words against the most High, and … think to change times and laws.” Opposing them would be righteous men, and wise teachers, who would die by the sword. But the end of time would come, and then—in the very first reference we have to resurrection and judgment—“many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.”

It is thought that Daniel’s “wise teachers”—whether historical personages or poetic longings—inspired the Asidoi to go down into the caves and die on the Sabbath. If the Asidoi read Daniel literally, which they probably did, they believed that if they died while keeping the Sabbath, the end of time would come and they would rise again.

Even if their faith was less scripturalist than that, they felt that to
keep the Sabbath was to assert that time had a beginning, a middle, and an end. Along with the apocalyptic, the ancient Israelites also invented the idea of a history moving toward a divine end—toward the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth. “They had learned from the Bible,” Yosef Yerushalmi writes, “that the true pulse of history often beat beneath its manifest surfaces.” But you couldn’t keep believing in God’s time if you didn’t remind yourself of it every week. If you forgot that time has a pattern, you might forget that history has one, too, and you would despair in the face of conquest, massacre, destruction; you’d start to doubt that the Babylonians, or the Assyrians, or the Romans were instruments of God’s wrath; you’d start thinking that your suffering had no meaning.

It is no coincidence that many apocalyptic ways of dating the moment of redemption have a cosmic week—a seven—in them somewhere. Seven was a number pregnant with God’s presence. A few centuries later, the Jewish philosopher Philo would argue that seven is the most perfect number, not just in God’s mind but in nature as well. In the apocalyptic numerology, God would reappear and set the world to rights in seven ages, or in seventy weeks, or in seven thousand years. In keeping the Sabbath no matter what, you signaled your willingness to wait for that moment.

A
DECADE AFTER
I went to summer camp, I went to college. I should say, I went to Yale. It’s important to say that not only because I still have to fight a bad habit many Yalies fall into, which is to mumble the name, or to say, with supremely false modesty, “in New Haven,” when asked where they go or went to school. It’s also important because only at Yale in the 1980s could I have become a member of a new religion. The church of my sect was a modest colonial rectangle on a quiet patch of grass in the shadow of the neo-Gothic Old Campus. This was the comparative-literature department. Its charismatic leader was another proud murmurer, a Belgian with an old-world gentleness and remoteness of manner. This was Paul de Man.

I came to comparative literature from classics, where I had no business being, not having studied Latin and Greek in high school. After semesters and summers of trying to keep pace with boarding-school graduates who sang out their Latin and Greek like dons-in-training, and slogging through pages of Virgil and Homer each night when just to parse a line could take me an hour, I was relieved to take a literary-theory class in which intellectual success was measured out in brilliant or at least clever acts of mind, not philological mastery, and social success in degrees of sartorial and intellectual sophistication, and every paper seemed like a gleeful attack on exactly the sort of grim, grinding, grammatical puzzles I’d been struggling to solve for two years.

It was a good time to be a deconstructionist at Yale. De Man had cancer but was still among us, and his 1941 essay in a Belgian newspaper calling for a “solution” to the “Jewish problem” and an end to the “Semitic interference” in Western literature had not yet come to light. Literary theory still held the answer to everything, and attracted the brightest graduate students in the country. De Man’s classes were hushed and reverential; he was dying, and we knew it, and prepared for class as if we were dying alongside him, starved for his thin smile of approval, his quiet nod to continue. We waited for him to unfold poems like pieces of origami. He and the French philosopher Jacques Derrida and the critics of the Yale School (Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, Harold Bloom) had revealed the volatile core of instability and indeterminacy lurking underneath every philosophical assertion, every scientific method, every work of literature. Nothing we’d learned (we learned) meant what it claimed to mean. All texts were allegories of their own blindness. They glossed over the unthinkable. Our job was to think it for them. We would turn rhetoric against literature and literature against everything else, and come up with something cold and pure and undeluded.

All this gave me an unusually palpable sense of purpose. I was a mole burrowing under the foundations of the tottering edifice of Knowledge. I hung out in the underground undergraduate library, so much uglier and friendlier than the classics library, all bright lights and
stale air and soft-cushioned sectional sofas, and read the authors of the new canon: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Rousseau, Freud, Baudelaire.

I read the French feminists, too, and learned about the provisionality of identity. My identity had always felt pretty provisional to me, and now it turned out to be a social construct, not a biological fact or a matter of inheritance. My womanhood was an effect of material signifiers—lipstick, hairstyles, clothes—and literary and cultural texts that, in the interests of hegemonic power, denied me, suppressed me, objectified me, and shoehorned me into false binary oppositions, such as the opposition of sensuousness to reason, heterosexuality to homosexuality. “I” was a performance, not an essence, although in the labyrinthine world of campus politics this was a tricky distinction: I knew several undergraduate staffers at the Yale Women’s Center who were busily discovering their essential lesbian selves, and others who were very performatively declaring themselves “political lesbians”—lesbians for all intents and purposes, that is, except in the apparently non-essential matter of sexual desire.

Not that any of this solved the basic problem of what to do about my life, particularly my romantic life. If femininity was nothing more than a performance, then appearances mattered more than ever—were all that mattered, really—and being successfully feminine required an even fiercer commitment than I’d ever managed to make to the art of self-presentation: to fashion, hair, weight loss, and, for a would-be female graduate student in comparative literature, the exact right mix of sweetness and knowingness. Far from liberating me, feminist theory was making me more self-conscious than ever.

One aspect of my self that was starting to seem usable, though, was my Jewishness, which I had refused to think about once my bat mitzvah was over. Jewishness was hot. Jewish writers and thinkers—Kafka, Paul Celan, Emmanuel Levinas—had been reconfigured as deconstructionist precursors. Graduate students were parsing rabbinical texts to learn the rabbis’ playful approach to interpretation, their Walter Benjamin–like appreciation for the fragment, their disregard for the plain sense of texts. During my senior year, the French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, who was doing the final cut of his nine-hour
Holocaust movie,
Shoah
, visited Yale from Paris, and one of my professors made his interviews with camp survivors the main text for her class on psychoanalytic theory. Geoffrey Hartman was starting a video archive of Holocaust testimonies and was editing a volume of critical studies of midrash, to which Derrida would contribute.

Meanwhile, I started dating an Orthodox graduate student. Or rather, I should say, I was dated by him, since our romance, such as it was, was largely a product of his energy. Harold Bloom, a powerful reader of mystical and heretical Jewish texts, had taught us to be suspicious of “normative” Judaism, but that wasn’t a concern for me, because I was only playing along, an accidental, undercover anthropologist.

Philip—I’ll call him—was a
ba’al teshuvah
, a born-again Jew. I registered him at first only as a misfit seeking the company of other misfits, such as—I figured that he figured—me. He was a physics geek, smart and round and sweaty and abrupt. I can’t remember how we met or what exactly we did in the early phase of our relationship, though I recall a lot of coffee being drunk in the underground library’s cafeteria, otherworldy because lit almost entirely by vending machines. We didn’t go out on dates. He asked a lot of questions, and I gave a lot of answers. It was, I think, an interview. Once I met Philip’s criteria, we moved quickly to the next phase of the operation, which was spending Shabbat together.

“Together” is the wrong word, actually. It’s not as if I was going to stay with him. He drove me to the home of some friends of his in Westville, a neighborhood in northwest New Haven where many Orthodox Jews lived, and left me there. He then went to stay with another friend nearby. My hosts were very normal and very nice. The father of the family was another bearded
ba’al teshuvah
, a graduate of our school, pleasingly formal in his white shirt and black pants. His wife was sweet-faced, Orthodox-born and-educated, and her headscarf and long skirt had an odalisque sensuality. I remember three daughters, the oldest being about nine; there may have been a baby. The girls followed me around in happy astonishment, delighted to discover someone in greater need of correction than themselves. I
could sing the blessing over the candles, but when I went to the bathroom I tore the toilet paper, a mysteriously forbidden act. I nearly began eating without waiting for the blessing—less out of ignorance than nerves. The following morning, I brushed my teeth with toothpaste and applied lipstick, two more mysterious violations of etiquette. The girls asked me repeatedly to reassure them that my parents were Jewish. They made a big show of trying to parse the categorical error that I represented: a Jew with no idea how to conduct herself on Shabbat.

Dinner was an exercise in successful cliché. There was the authentic version of everything that had been pallidly alluded to on my family’s Shabbat table. The dining room was ablaze with candles, one for each member of the family and a pair just for me. My hostess waved her hands enigmatically in the air and covered her eyes before saying the blessing. There was a two-handled laver and a basin for washing the hands before saying the blessing over the challah. There was a smell of braised meat. Sabbath songs were droned in a minor key throughout the meal. Crystal bowls of candy had been put out for snacking before dessert. Philip dropped me off and left for synagogue with his friend; my hostess and her children and I dressed, lit the candles, then, after the men returned, stood at attention during the blessings. Then the meal was served. I was glad to be a stranger in this particular strange land, I thought, because as a woman I had the option of hiding behind the gestures of female obligation. I could help lay out the silverware, carry in the food, clear the table, wash the dishes.

Except that I was never allowed to. My hostess deflected almost every offer to help. Her children could set the table, she said. She let other female guests clear, but when I tried to help she shooed me away with a friendly laugh. I slunk embarrassed back to the realm of the men, where my host was teaching some piece of Torah that I didn’t understand.

It took me decades to understand that I had entered a domain so defamiliarized that I had to be maneuvered carefully around it, like a space alien likely to smash the furniture. The thirty-nine
melachot
and
the rabbinic add-ons ramify throughout a Sabbath-observant household, transmogrifying the performance of the most apparently simple tasks. Most people have heard of the rules about not turning on lights or stoves or electrical appliances, but fewer understand that when an Orthodox Jew clears the table on the Sabbath she won’t sort the dishes by size, lest she perform the
melachah
of sorting. When she washes the dishes, she’ll wash only those she needs later in the day; the others she will set aside or, if that means they’ll turn foul, rinse. She won’t use a sponge, a scouring pad, or a dishtowel, lest she perform the
melachah
of wringing. She will use only one of those nylon pads with big fibers, or a nylon bottle brush. She may refuse to scour congealed grease, lest she violate the rabbinic edict against
molid
, making a new substance by changing something from one state to another. If she dries a dish, she will hang up the towel, not squeeze it out. When she wipes down the tablecloth, she will blot a spill, not scrub it out, lest she wring or launder, another
melachah
.