The Sabbath World (16 page)

When I learned this last rule, I finally understood the plastic tablecloth, white and embossed with a floral motif, so seemingly out of place in this elegant, faintly Central European household. Every corner of the house offered up a puzzle that only further study would solve: the bathrooms with the torn stacks of toilet paper (lest you tear) and the absence of toothpaste (lest you smooth, a further refinement on the
melachah
of scraping), the bedrooms with Scotch-taped outlets (lest you kindle), the desks void of pens and scissors (lest you touch
muktzeh;
that is, an object prohibited under rabbinic law because it might lead to
melachot
such as writing and cutting).

The synagogue offered some respite from my mounting sense of freakishness. I walked there with Philip—my hostess and her daughters having stayed home to prepare the house for the afternoon luncheon—sat upstairs in the women’s section, and hoped that no one would notice my ignorance of the prayers. Not, I didn’t know at the time, that they would have cared if they did. Women don’t have to pray the same thrice-daily prayers that men do. They are not required to say prayers at specific times because they’re expected to submit to the more open-ended temporal discipline of mothering. Had I read
Arendt by then, I would have had a theory to explain the difference between male and female behavior on the Sabbath. On Saturday, men cease from purposive, end-oriented endeavors. They free themselves to sing and drink and study Torah for the sake of studying Torah,
Torah lishmah
. They take action in the Arendtian sense of the term. They meet and greet and dispute. They fulfill their human potential. Women, on the other hand, do what they’ve been doing all week. They labor. They serve and clear and tuck the children into bed. They meet biological needs and provide emotional sustenance.

All this had more appeal than I felt it should have. I explained it to myself this way: My hostess could have pulled off her wig and become a doctor anytime she wanted to, so I didn’t have to pity her. She had chosen her life, and since she had considerable personal authority she endowed it with a dignity I’d never perceived before. In Hebrew school I had learned that Judaism, as a religion, venerates the family; even if traditional Judaism doesn’t grant women the power to study or lead services or do any of the things that give Jewish men honor in the eyes of other Jews, one day a week it honors the homes their wives make, the nourishment they provide, the bodies with which they make more bodies.

When I became a new mother myself, restricted to activities that could be synchronized with a baby’s schedule, I began to see a genuine logic to this argument. That weekend, though, I thought of it as a rationalization against a much more powerful allure. I had never quite realized that there was a way to escape myself so ready to hand. I could just marry Philip and disappear into a long Sabbath afternoon! I could relinquish the overwhelming burden of being me and take up the lesser burden of being a member of a holy community. I could have my Jewish textuality and a sense of being right with the world, too.

That afternoon, Philip took me for a walk in a park. For the first time, he struck me as manly. I liked the way he steered me down the paths without touching me, a protective bulk of a man. I admired his mastery of the Orthodox idiom, the half-Yiddish of the
yeshiva bocher
. I half closed my eyes and squinted at the trees, imagining myself in
something calf-length and woolen, him in a round fur hat and a long black suit. I made myself start an argument with him about whether separate spheres for the sexes were confining or liberating, and whether women should have the right to study Talmud. But my heart wasn’t in it. His world was fixed and solid in ways mine wasn’t. It made no sense to quibble with that. After Havdalah, Philip dropped me off at my apartment. He called the next day. I never called back.

A
FEW CENTURIES AFTER THE DEATH OF THE
A
SIDOI, THERE AROSE A SAVIOR
in Israel. His name was Jesus.

By the time he appeared in the book in which we came to know him—I am talking about the Gospel of Mark—he was already the Messiah, the one destined to come at the end of the seven millennia or aeons or days. Our first glimpse of Mark’s Jesus has him being baptized in the wilderness while the Spirit of God descends and declares him to be his son. Very shortly after that, Jesus does away with the Sabbath.

You may wonder why
I
say the Gospel of Mark, since the Gospel of Matthew precedes that of Mark in the New Testament. But Mark’s Jesus is older than Matthew’s. Mark’s gospel, written sometime between 68 and 73
C.E.
, cast the mold for the other Gospels. The Gospels according to Matthew and Luke incorporated much of Mark; the Gospel according to John came along a generation later. Mark, in fact, probably invented the genre called “gospel,” the quasi-biographical novella offered up as an act of evangelical witnessing. The real importance of Mark, though, is that he wrote a literary masterpiece.
His Jesus towers above the others, an abrupt, difficult man-god impatient with his disciples, secretive about his mission, and brimming with irresistible life. It is in Mark’s Jesus that we feel the rough, uncanny power that inspired a new religion, rather than just a following.

Also remarkable is how much Mark makes of the Sabbath. No sooner does Mark’s Jesus return from the wilderness than he strides into a synagogue in Capernaum during Sabbath services and drives a demon out of a man. It is his first miracle. His audience is stunned into silence, in part because the exorcism succeeds so well and in part because Jesus broke Sabbath law to perform it. Possession by a demon is a chronic condition and therefore something one should wait until the Sabbath is over to address. Jesus’ disrespect for Sabbath law infuriates the Pharisees, the local religious leaders. (After the destruction of the Temple, the Pharisees evolved into what we call the rabbis, and they were very particular about their Sabbaths.)

The Pharisees start stalking Jesus, and soon enough they catch his disciples plucking grain on the Sabbath. He utters his aphorism: “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.” And right after that, possibly even on the same Saturday, Jesus enters a synagogue and heals a man with a withered hand, another chronic condition that could have waited. At which point the Pharisees, who have begun muttering in dismay in the back of the room, step outside and set in motion the plot against Jesus that will ultimately result in his arrest and crucifixion.

Why does Mark care so much about the Sabbath? Don’t be too distracted by the question of who Jesus “really” was and what he would have thought about the Sabbath. That someone named Jesus, Yehoshua, existed, that he had a message and a following and an effect on the world—historical evidence renders that fairly indisputable. It is probably safe to say that the historical Jesus would not have been dismissive of something as deeply woven into Jewish life as the Sabbath. The historical Jesus would have been a passionately religious Jew talking to other passionately religious Jews, or, more specifically, a Galilean talking openly to other Galileans and more cautiously to
Judeans. (Galileans were known for their folk piety, Judeans for their intellectual prowess and a certain condescension toward Galileans.)

That Jesus, if he raised the topic at all, would not have been making an argument
against
the Sabbath; he would have been taking a stand in the larger debate about what it meant to be a good Jew, with a corresponding opinion on the proper observance of the Sabbath. For that Jesus lived in a time of acute anxiety and extremes of behavior both religious and irreligious. The monkish Essenes in their desert communities forbade defecation on the Sabbath, while just up the road, in Jerusalem, Hellenizers blithely ignored the niceties of Sabbath boundaries. In between lay thousands of shades of ritual precision, with most people probably looking no further than their neighbors for guidance. When it came to the Sabbath, the historical Jesus would have had reform, not revolution, in mind. He was a Reform rabbi, not a Jew for Jesus.

But Mark was not talking about the historical Jesus. He was talking about the Christ, the anointed one, a hero in a cosmological drama. Mark doesn’t explain Christ’s attitude toward the Sabbath, but he does give hints in the way he tells his story. Of all the Gospel writers, Mark is the least patient. He moves his story along much more efficiently and economically than his counterparts do, and he says “immediately” a lot. The Greek word for “immediately,”
euthys
, occurs fifty-one times in the New Testament; forty-one of those times are in Mark. John the Baptist dunks Jesus in the water, and the instant Jesus comes up—
euthys
—the heavens rip open and the Spirit descends like a dove from the sky. The Spirit tells Jesus that he is God’s beloved son, and immediately casts him out into the wilderness. Jesus tells the fishermen Simon, Andrew, James, and John to follow him, and they do so immediately. The next thing you know, it’s the Sabbath and they’re barreling into the Capernaum synagogue and Jesus immediately begins to teach.

What follows is one of the most startling scenes in the New Testament, replete with “immediately”s. Not long after Jesus begins to speak, a man with “an unclean spirit”—that is, a demon or two—shouts him down, saying, “Let us alone; what have we to do with thee,
thou Jesus of Nazareth? Art thou come to destroy us? I know thee who thou art, the Holy One of God.”

“Shut up!” Jesus says to the demons—
phimotheti
, or “be muzzled,” quite a rude expression in Greek; the King James Version renders it “Hold thy peace!”—and orders the spirits to leave the man. They do so promptly. Like the eyewitnesses, we readers are “all amazed,” and, like them, we ask ourselves: Who were these demons who called Jesus by name? Why did they add, “Holy One of God”? How did Jesus
do
that? Or, as the Gospel puts it: “What thing is this? What new doctrine is this? For with authority commandeth he even the unclean spirits, and they do obey him.” But there’s no time for explanation. Word of Jesus’ deeds ripples
immediately
across Galilee, and he has to cope with the vicissitudes of fame. By the time three stars have appeared in the sky, marking the end of the Sabbath, all the inhabitants of Capernaum have massed outside the house Jesus has retreated to and are demanding that he cure their sick and demented relatives.

We are still ten verses shy of the end of the first chapter of Mark.

Mark is in a hurry, we realize, because Jesus is in a hurry. “Mark’s Jesus is a man of action: dashing, busy, driven in rapid motion from synagogue to invalid, from shore to grainfield to sea,” the historian Paula Fredriksen writes. Spiritually speaking, he’s a shock trooper. He takes Galilee by surprise. As the demons suspect, he has come to destroy them, but by the time anyone else figures this out he has won his first battle. He has established a base camp on earth.

Or, as Harold Bloom puts it in an essay on Mark, “Apocalypse hovers.” Joel Marcus, the editor of the Anchor Bible edition of Mark, uses the phrase “cosmic apocalyptic eschatological” to describe the kind of war that Mark’s Jesus has come to fight. “Cosmic,” because its scope comprises the heavens and the earth. “Apocalyptic,” because Mark’s gospel features epic battles between the forces of good and evil. “Cosmic apocalyptic”: the entire cosmos has been captured by evil—by Satan and his demons—and requires liberation. And “eschatological,” meaning “having to do with the end,” because the final, transformative battle could occur at any minute. “Whether the Jewish War is ongoing or Jerusalem has already been destroyed, we are never
told,” Bloom says, “but Mark lives in what he believes to be the end-time.”

In short, when Mark’s Jesus bursts onto the stage like someone breaking through the back wall of a set, time itself changes. It speeds up. Jesus’ arrival signals the beginning of the end. He operates within the compressed time frame that we now call a state of emergency. In an emergency, normal rules are suspended and new ones are devised. “The time is short,” Paul will write to his followers in Corinth. Under the circumstances, who would expect Jesus to let the Sabbath slow him down?

But therein lies Jesus’ problem. When he gets to the Capernaum synagogue, no one besides Satan, the disciples, and the demons knows what the circumstances are. It is up to Jesus to show the people who he is and what his coming means. So he must violate the Sabbath, and not only to defeat the demons. He has to get across, boldly and publicly, the novel notion that there
is
an emergency, and he has to convince his listeners that he has the authority to declare it.

The confrontation in the synagogue achieves both ends. Jesus gets up and, Mark says, speaks with authority. You have to understand this sentence in its technical sense: “Speaking with authority” would have meant breaking the well-known and firmly established rules of Jewish argumentation. According to these, a teacher advancing an interpretation of Scripture must invoke the authority of older interpreters in order to avoid appearing to make an original point, for to the Pharisaic mind
original
meant
unsubstantiated
. Mark never tells us
what
Jesus says, however, because the content of his speech doesn’t matter. What matters is
how
Jesus says it. He speaks from his own authority, which upsets his listeners. Then he backs up his right to speak in this fashion with a show of uncanny power over demons. And he performs these acts on the Sabbath, an opportune time from his point of view, since it is the day of the week when the people gather together and make themselves available as witnesses.

Whatever the actual Jesus may or may not have thought of the Sabbath, the Pharisees of the Gospels do not misinterpret the Jesus of the Gospels when they suspect that he does not hold the Sabbath in
as much esteem as they do. The Pharisees surrounded the Sabbath as if it were the Temple, with a series of protective fences. Mark’s Jesus seems determined to knock those fences down. With the end so near, indeed already here, with the advent of a Messiah who is himself divine,
all
time is holy time. To deem one day holier than another is to make distinctions at a time and in a place where such distinctions have been rendered null and void. It is to demonstrate a spirit so narrow, so lacking in imagination and capaciousness, that it can’t free itself from the past and move into the future.