The Sabbath World (25 page)

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.”

N
O 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 desire 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.”

R
EADING THE
T
ALMUD 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.

Raised by well-intentioned Jews, taken to synagogue on Sabbaths and holidays, given a bat mitzvah, currently residing in New York, the most Jewish city outside Israel, by what excess of self-pity could I possibly claim affinity with Jews like that? By what enemy had I been captured? By the enemy, I thought, that is myself. By my disdainful teenage self, which sneered at the cheap brutalist architecture of the suburban synagogue that we joined when we left San Juan for Miami, as well as at the windowless sanctuary filled with old women in hats. By my willful, authority-baiting self, which smoked dope behind my after-school Hebrew school, before and after class. By my cynical self, which scoffed at my parents’ Holocaust obsession and the endless pictures of dead Jews in their library. By my lit-crit self, which read the world against itself. By my grandiose, ambitious, jealous self. By every self that I had been and seemed destined to become. I wanted to be reborn, fresh and pure. I wanted to be led back to the paths of righteousness.
I wanted to bring the sacrifice prescribed by the rabbis as penance for my obliviousness to the Sabbath. And, I thought, the best thing about me, really the only good thing about me, is that, when I was a child, I read for the sheer joy of losing myself in books, not so that I would know things or become the sort of person who had read this or that. I thought that I might be able to read the Torah that way.

Reading the way a child reads, it has since dawned on me, has always been part of the conversion experience. Saint Augustine, as he lay weeping on the ground, struggling to be saved, unwilling to be saved, wretched at the thought of his wretchedness, “the frivolity of frivolous aims, the futility of futile pursuits,” imagined that he heard a child’s voice nearby—“perhaps a boy or a girl, I do not know.” The voice sang a ditty, over and over: “Pick it up and read, pick it up and read.” So he did. He picked it up and read the first passage his eyes lit upon in the book that he had brought with him out to the garden, which contained the epistles of Paul:
Not in dissipation and drunkenness, nor in debauchery and lewdness, nor in arguing and jealousy; but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh or the gratification of your desires
. And he read no further, for “the light of certainty” flooded his heart, and “all dark shades of doubt fled away.”

Where does the text get its power to redeem? Augustine doesn’t say; rather, he deftly sets us up for this passage, so that we see its immediate relevance for the dissipated, lustful man he represents himself as being. The Kabbalists had an answer, though. The Torah, they thought, is not just a message left by the divine author. It is not the mere traces of Revelation. Nor are its words the mere instruments of God’s will. The Torah is the actual emanation of God, Revelation itself, the will of God incarnate. To put it philosophically, the Torah has an ontological reality. It has Being—the ultimate being.

And Being, as any philosophy major knows, has Presence. And so reading becomes a way of being in the presence of—of being intimate with—God. From this point of view, it doesn’t matter what the words say, which is why the Kabbalists felt free to break words down into letters, then transpose the letters into wildly nonbiblical and non-Talmudic myths, involving a God who withdraws into himself and
primordial universes that shatter and heavenly spheres that function as God’s avatars.
Reading
is how you overcome your loneliness and grow close to God.
Interpreting
and
acting on your words
come later. The Sabbath is what gives you time to read the Book, and what you read in the Book is that you must keep the Sabbath. Each provides the necessary technology for the movement of return.

I
HAD ALWAYS BEEN A GOOD STUDENT, BUT A STUPID ONE AT THE SAME
time. I mastered material, but never actually learned anything. I was too busy displaying academic excellence. The history I would remember, the novels that would remain real to me, the languages I learned to the point where I could wrap my tongue around their strange diphthongs, I grappled with by myself, alone in a room. Only then could I read with a concentration that resembled pleasure, freed from the anxiety aroused by a group and a person with authority to grade me.

The first time I was invited to study with the Park Slope congregation on a Saturday afternoon, I felt a paper-sharp slice of shame. Me, a serious student of literary theory, reduced to a synagogue adult-education class! But I knew that I would go, and I did. The study session did not reassure me. Armed with a photocopy of a short piece of Talmud, we plunged right in.