The Sabbath World (2 page)

Mine was not exactly a socially productive obsession. Saying that I’d been reading up on the Sabbath was a good way to cut a vigorous conversation short. Occasionally, some kind soul would agree to chat briefly about the great modern work on the subject, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s
The Sabbath
, a retelling of Hasidic legend that has become a popular primer for people taking their first steps back to Judaism. This is a beautiful book, but many of the others I could have talked about were not. The more I read about the Sabbath, though, the more I was struck by the power of the idea. It seemed to me that I could justify my interest in utilitarian terms. I could explain to my skeptical friends that a structured period of non-productivity could be very useful for an overscheduled society.

Soon after that, I came across another beautiful book. It was called
The Seven Day Circle
, by Eviatar Zerubavel, an American sociologist. Zerubavel grew up in Israel, a country where religious holidays are enforced with a strictness unusual in highly modernized societies. His immersion in the religious calendar had helped him to invent a whole new field, the sociology of time. Reading this book, I learned that the seven-day week was a by-product of the Jewish Sabbath. (The Israeli poet Chaim Nachman Bialik called the day “the most brilliant creation of the Hebrew spirit.”) More important, I discovered that time has an architecture, and that that architecture has the power to affect us as deeply as the architecture of space does. Heschel wrote charming fables that revealed a world of legend inside the Sabbath. Zerubavel wrote dry social theory that made me grasp that even something as basic as the week has a history and an intoxicating power—the power to seem so natural that we don’t realize how carefully constructed it has been. It made me eager to understand the shape of
my
week—where it came from, what it meant, what values it incarnated.

I remember the exact moment when I realized that I wanted to write a book on this unwieldy subject. I was closing a gate behind me. The gate led to the backyard of a lovely little Tudor-style cottage that belonged to the man who would become my husband. The inside of this house, with its sloped ceilings and plain furniture, put me in mind of an English country church. Heschel calls the Sabbath a cathedral in time. My future husband’s house was a parsonage in the suburbs. We had just driven up from somewhere and I had been trying to explain to him what the Sabbath was, and why it mattered to Jews, and how it had once mattered terribly to Christians, too—particularly American Christians, and most particularly the American Puritans who founded this nation. They had such a deep hunger for the Sabbath—for the right
kind
of Sabbath—that they left England, whose Sabbaths they considered corrupt and lax, and sailed to America, in order to keep the kind of disciplined, godly Sabbaths they believed would transform their earthly existence into a New Jerusalem.

My future husband was a man with an impressive background in American history, but he didn’t know about the role the Sabbath had played in it. He belonged to a synagogue, but he had never thought of the Sabbath as anything but an antiquated practice reserved for those with a masochistic taste for censorious laws. His face lit up, as it always does when he is given a fresh idea to mull over, and suddenly I saw what he saw: a largely forgotten aspect of the history of Western civilization and a non-academic way to explore an arcane but fascinating subject—that is to say, the social morality of time.

The social morality of time! I said. What a great phrase! No one thinks of time as a moral entity. We think of it as a mathematically neutral one. But what was the labor movement’s fight for shorter days and workweeks about, if not the social morality of time? And how about the way we’re always recalibrating our feelings for our friends, or our sense of how they feel about us, with the neurotic precision of a Larry David, based on how many minutes they’ve kept us waiting? If other people’s use of our time isn’t the object of infinitesimal ethical calculation, I don’t know what is.

But that’s not all the Sabbath is, I added. At this point he was opening the door to his house, which we knew, without ever having talked about it, I would soon be moving into. The Sabbath, I said, is not only an idea. It is also something you
keep
. With other people. You can’t just extract lessons from it. Me, I want to keep it and teach my children to keep it. But at the same time, since I grew up watching a religious mother and a skeptical father play tug-of-war over our upbringing in a home in which the Sabbath was largely the occasion for unspoken recriminations about how we were being raised, I’m afraid that if I impose the Sabbath on my children they will resent me as much as I resented my parents. They will suss out signs of my ambivalence and use them as proof of my inconsistency and hypocrisy, as I did in my time. I like the
idea
of keeping the Sabbath, but at the thought of actually
doing
it, of passing an entire day following strange rules while refraining from customary recreations, I am knocked flat by a wave of anticipated boredom.

My soon-to-be fiancé looked baffled and a little worried: What was he getting himself into?

Religion is made up of rites and customs, I explained, or would have explained, had I thought of it at the time. These rites and customs get handed down like pieces of antique furniture, the names of their makers lost, their sentimental value forgotten along with the ancestors who treasured them. To dig up the meaning of this inheritance, to honor those ancestors and put myself in some sort of relation to them—that is what I want to do.

But to do that you have to give up so much! To do it right, at least as I construed “right” at the time. To submit to the rituals of the Sabbath and let them take you where they will, which is a place far beyond what Heschel called, with some irritation, “religious behaviorism” and “the sociological fallacy.” By that, he meant the purely external understanding of religion as a set of behaviors and traditions worth preserving: religion construed as a social asset. To be transformed by a religious experience, rather than merely to appreciate it, to drop an anchor into the depths of the past and keep your life from drifting away, you have to be willing, I thought, to give yourself over to a different way of living, one that seems antiquated and foreign and extinguishing unless you’re already immersed in it. You had to become that dreadful thing,
a religious person
.

I had always associated being religious with all sorts of unfortunate character traits. Being
really
religious, I mean. Because in my family we did not think of ourselves as religious. We kept the Sabbath by lighting candles and having dinner on Friday night. We kept kosher, sort of, at least in the house, by not mixing milk and meat and eating only kosher-slaughtered meat, though we didn’t keep two sets of dishes, the way Orthodox Jews do, and all of us except my mother ate whatever we liked in restaurants or at other people’s houses, although she sometimes muttered things about having failed as a parent when we ordered pork or shrimp. We did what our parents did and they did what their parents did, largely in defiance of
their
parents, with their old-world styles of observance. Apart from my mother, there was no one around to care whether it was done in the prescribed manner—and even she didn’t care enough to stop us from breaking the rules.

Religiosity, to us, was obsessive-compulsive, masochistic, intellectually narrow, irrational, tribalistic, antimodern. Living the religious life, especially the Jewish religious life, means making a commitment to live by rules that are neither logical nor natural. Why should we only eat animals that chew their cud and have cloven hooves? Why are we forbidden to wear clothes that mix wool and flax? You have to take these rules on faith, and derive their legitimacy from tradition. To become religious is to brave a leap into the absurd. Kierkegaard understood that to be a terrible leap. You have to bow to that which is commanded. You have to give up your ability to control your world. It’s a form of self-sacrifice. Kierkegaard compares it to Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac.

Kierkegaard couldn’t make the leap. He could describe the movements of faith, he said, but he couldn’t perform them. They were, he said, like hanging by the waist from a belt attached to the ceiling and making the gestures people make when they’re swimming. He could tell us what the gestures of faith were, but if he were thrown into the waters of belief he would not be able to swim the way one who had faith would swim—whatever way that might be. (Kierkegaard isn’t very good at describing it.) But he did admire the faithful.

The problem was—Kierkegaard went on—that he had never met a man of true faith. To uncover the meaning of the religious experience, therefore, he has to make such a man up. He imagines he meets a man whom he recognizes instantly as “a knight of faith.” To his amazement, this man betrays absolutely no connection to a higher order of things. His façade has no “crack from which the infinite peeped out.” He looks like a member of the petite bourgeoisie. He looks, in fact, like a tax collector. And one way in which he expresses his petite bourgeoisie-ness is by keeping the Sabbath: “He takes a holiday on Sundays. He goes to church.” He sings the psalms lustily, but offers up no other sign of exceptionality. In the afternoon he takes a walk in the woods, delighting in everything he sees. On the way home, he thinks about his wife and the “special warm little dish” she will have prepared for him. He engages in various other small pleasures and has minor social interactions, including an exchange that might drum up some real-estate business. In the evening, he smokes his pipe: “To see him you would swear it was the cheesemonger opposite vegetating in the dusk.” And yet, Kierkegaard continued, “and yet—yes, it could drive me to fury, out of envy if for no other reason—and yet this man has made and is at every moment making the movement of infinity.”

Kierkegaard did not home in on his stolid burgher’s Sabbath by accident. There is no better point of entry to the religious experience than the Sabbath, for all its apparent ordinariness.
Because
of its ordinariness. The extraordinariness of the Sabbath lies in its being commonplace. We who look at religion from the outside think of transcendence as something that occurs at special moments, in concentrated bursts of illumination, but people raised in homes where religious ritual occurs over breakfast and at dinner and in school and throughout weekends know that revelation commingles promiscuously with routine. If ritual is art, then it is stretched over the frame of habit.

This is particularly true of the Judaism reinvented by the rabbinic sages, whose masterwork, the Talmud, an enormous anthology of all their legal and theological debates, transformed a temple-based religion suited to a pastoral and agricultural people into a ritual-based religion suited to an urban and far-flung one. In their Judaism, just about every activity in the day has its own blessing, and many of them follow in a carefully choreographed sequence. There are blessings for waking up, for washing the hands, for eating bread or water, for going to the bathroom. In a study of the rabbinic mind, the philosopher Max Kadushin called holiness a “normal mysticism.” It isn’t “necessarily associated with the unusual and the awesome,” he wrote. “On the contrary, it may be centered on personal conduct and be associated with the ordinary and familiar.” The rabbis demystified holiness; they democratized it, making it less a function of spiritual genius than of personal self-discipline.

If you view the stuff of everyday life as the raw material of Judaism, and its rules as a framing device, then you will grasp something essential about the Sabbath: It is meant to turn the ordinary into the singular. A weekly house scrubbing, when done on Friday, becomes a way of making one’s home ready for God. A dinner party for family and neighbors attains the status of a royal banquet, welcoming home the Sabbath queen. To the mundane satisfaction that comes from cultivating good habits—cleanliness, organization, family togetherness—is added the sublime sense of rightness that comes from following God’s commandments.

Keeping the Sabbath, I felt, would be good for me. It would force me to grow up and take my place among the generations. It would charge my domestic middle-aged life with drama and significance, whereas now it felt drained and resigned. But in order for this to happen I would have to stop feeling so ambivalent about the day.

B
UT WAS IT JUST ME
who was uncomfortable with the Sabbath? Or is it intrinsically discomfiting in some way?

Whenever I ask myself this question, I come back to Kierkegaard’s tax collector. It’s funny how he pops up just as Kierkegaard is worrying about the impossibility of attaining the faith of Abraham, a figure of indescribable heroism and fathomless trust, who was asked to destroy all that was good, all that he had waited for and loved, and yet somehow never doubted his God. That the only character Kierkegaard can conjure up for his latter-day “knight of faith” is a “philistine” (as the philosopher calls him) suggests that the man is not so much a beau ideal as a product of Kierkegaard’s irrepressible irony (even though Kierkegaard regarded irony as an attribute of lower natures). The tax collector’s “movement of infinity” turns out to be a movement of finite this-worldiness and external ceremonial. The tax collector is supposed to embody Abraham—he’s the modern Abraham—but turns out to be his opposite.

And then two more thoughts occur to me. First, when Kierkegaard chose Abraham to exemplify the paradox of faith he was making use of a very old Christian interpretation of the patriarch, according to which Abraham incarnated the higher spirituality that the Jews lost when they bound themselves to the Torah, with its physical fetishes and weird commandments. Abraham proved that faith was greater than law, for he left his home and his religion and nearly sacrificed his son Isaac, all without the crutch of ritual. Abraham prefigured Christ, who died so that those who came after him could live by faith, not by law. Abraham, by this reading, was the father of the Christians, not of the Jews, who had repudiated him.