The Sabbath World (29 page)

What is natural time like, for Wordsworth? It was like his late mother, he says, who in her maternal patience never demanded developmental milestones from her son, never “from the season asked / More than its timely produce; rather loved / The hours for what they are.” Unnatural time, on the other hand, demands too much and destroys the soul. If natural time was female, unnatural time was male. Men are “the keepers of our time,” who chain the young people in their charge to a predetermined path, “to the very road / Which they have fashioned would confine us down / Like engines.” Accepting the “Sabbath of that time,” then, means stopping unnatural time so as to create a moment for natural time, which allows one to expand and flourish according to its organic laws.

A less individualistic vision of the natural Sabbath—we could call this one the Communitarian Sabbath—comes to us from the novels of George Eliot, the nom de plume of Mary Ann Evans, who received an evangelical education but lost her religion when she entered the world of letters. Eliot had a broader vision of nature than Wordsworth did; for her, it was social as well as environmental and temporal, comprising not only the wilderness that lies beyond the reach of civilization but also the kind of community that is held together by organic bonds, by the ties of family, affection, and village economy. Eliot grew up in the countryside and possessed an encyclopedic understanding of the religious life of the small English town, and in her first novel,
Adam Bede
(1859), Eliot devotes a chapter to the sympathetic depiction of a village Sabbath in an English hamlet called Hayslope.

Adam Bede
takes place sixty years before it was written, at the turn of the nineteenth century, when livelihoods still came from small farms and artisanal cottage industries. The Sabbath described in the novel probably seemed more pastoral in retrospect than at the time it occurred. When Eliot looked backward, she found “the deep-rooted folk memory of a ‘golden age’ or ‘Merrie England,’” as E. P. Thompson put it, which “derives not from the notion that material goods
were more plentiful in 1780 than in 1840 but from nostalgia for the pattern of work and leisure which obtained before the outer and inner disciplines of industrialism settled upon the working man.” In Hayslope, the Sabbath does not descend from the heavens above; it ascends from the natural world below, “the cocks and hens,” which “seemed to know” that it was Sunday “and made only crooning subdued noises,” and the bull-dog, which looked “less savage, as if he would have been satisfied with a smaller bite than usual.” The very sunshine “seemed to call all things to rest and not to labour.”

Next to respond to the call of the Sunday sun are the people of the village, who primp for church then amble toward it, converging in the churchyard as the animals did in the farmyard. When the church service begins, the resonant spirits in the congregation swell with an imaginative capaciousness not available to them on any other day of the week. Adam Bede proves particularly susceptible to “the other deep feelings for which the church service was a channel … as a certain consciousness of our entire past and our imagined future blends itself with all our moments of keen sensibility.” This Sunday sensibility does not grace only the spiritually gifted. It serves as the fulcrum of Hayslope life, and of the novel. Almost all of the important plot developments in
Adam Bede
occur on Sundays, when people have the time and the inclination to acknowledge and interact with one another. The hushed air of holiness that prevails when the church service ends turns a fractious town into a blessed community, for after that comes “the quiet rising, the mothers tying on the bonnets of the little maidens who had slept through the sermon, the fathers collecting the prayer-books, until all streamed out through the old archway into the green churchyard, and began their neighbourly talk, their simple civilities, and their invitations to tea.”

In a letter written one Sunday about the Sabbath state of mind, George Eliot equated the religious experience with the poetic experience. Without religion, she said, we suffer the fate of “poor mortals” who wake up one morning and find “all the poetry in which their world was bathed only the evening before utterly gone—the hard angular world of chairs and tables and looking-glasses staring at them in
all its naked prose.” Sunday cleared a space in which the imagination might roam free—the social imagination as much as the individual imagination; and the imagination, for Eliot, as for Wordsworth, is what gives minds the power to tease out of ordinary life intimations of beauty and a moral order.

The writer who best captured the Romantic Sabbath, though, to my mind, is D. H. Lawrence—not a nineteenth-century writer, I grant you, but one whose memory encompassed enough of the previous century to be worth including here. He, too, regretted the vanishing of what he called the “Sunday world.” In a scene in Lawrence’s novel
The Rainbow
(1915) largely based on his own childhood, Ursula Brangwen, his heroine, sadly contemplates the disappearance of “the old duality of life”—“wherein there had been a weekday world of people and trains and duties and reports, and besides that a Sunday world of absolute truth and living mystery, of walking upon the waters and being blinded by the face of the Lord, of following the pillar of cloud across the desert and watching the bush that crackled yet did not burn away.”

Ursula’s memories of her childhood Sundays combine both Wordsworth’s lyrically pastoral time and Eliot’s blessed Sunday community in the figure of the happy member of the happy family. In fact, Lawrence’s description of a typical Sunday in Ursula’s family offers such a perfect vision of human happiness that I can do no more than quote it at length:

As the house began to teem with rushing, half-naked clean children, one of the parents rose, either the mother, easy and slatternly with her thick, dark hair loosely coiled and slipping over one ear, or the father, warm and comfortable, with ruffled black hair and shirt unbuttoned at the neck….

On this day of decorum, the Brangwen family went to church by the high-road, making a detour outside all the garden-hedge, rather than climb the wall into the churchyard. There was no law of this, from the parents. The children themselves were the wardens of the Sabbath decency, very jealous and instant with each other.

It came to be, gradually, that after church on Sundays the house was really something of a sanctuary, with peace breathing like a strange bird alighted in the rooms. Indoors, only reading and tale-telling and quiet pursuits, such as drawing, were allowed. Out of doors, all playing was to be carried on unobtrusively. If there were noise, yelling or shouting, then some fierce spirit woke up in the father and the elder children, so that the younger were subdued, afraid of being excommunicated.

The children themselves preserved the Sabbath. If Ursula in her vanity sang:

Theresa was sure to cry:

“That’s
not a Sunday song, our Ursula.”

“You don’t know,” replied Ursula, superior. Nevertheless, she wavered. And her song faded down before she came to the end.

Because, though she did not know it, her Sunday was very precious to her. She found herself in a strange, undefined place, where her spirit could wander in dreams, unassailed.

T
HIS IS WHAT
I
WAS LOOKING FOR
, this “strange, undefined place” in the bosom of a joyful family wherein my spirit could safely wander, but since I had not read Lawrence, I could not describe this place or spot in time and had no idea how to find it. One Shabbat, I found myself sitting in the sun at the edge of a grassy courtyard inside a low brick mid-century apartment complex, watching toddlers toddle and their parents toddle with them. A couple from my synagogue, both classical musicians, were explaining the impossibility, for them, of keeping the Sabbath, given their performance schedules. Behind me, in a ground-floor apartment, members of the synagogue were eating a potluck Shabbat lunch. There was something magical about this courtyard, I thought. We had had Sabbath picnics in the park before, but they had never felt so idyllic. The seclusion of the space, the golden shimmer of the sun against the brown brick, gave it the aura of sanctuary.

I was also conscious of being bored. The wife was describing in obsessive detail the logistical difficulties of her life—of juggling motherhood, career, and Judaism. Not having entered the ranks of parents, I didn’t actually care. I began to wonder whether by joining the shul I had prematurely entered a sort of spiritual suburb. The synagogue’s membership consisted primarily of youngish couples. There was a subgroup of lesbians, some of them in their twenties, and another subgroup of female refugees from Orthodox Judaism, several of whom came from Brooklyn neighborhoods to the east and south of us. The two groups overlapped but were not identical. I belonged to neither of them. I found myself longing for lower Manhattan, the sharp if uncertain fashions of insecure people, the spontaneous parties, the round-robins of relationships from which people my age extract a “crowd.” Suddenly, my return to Judaism struck me as an apprenticeship in being middle-aged.

I am always astonished, in retrospect, at how quickly the world collaborates with you once you have determined to run away from yourself. A few weeks after that moment, I met a man fifteen years
older than me. He lived on the Upper West Side. He was an atheist, a comedy writer, a divorcé, a cynic. He had been middle-aged—by which he meant married—and didn’t want to be again. His ex-wife was a writer, too, a well-known feminist, and together they had read, and talked about, and worked through the object lessons provided by writers I had encountered only as subject matter for term papers—Samuel Johnson, Mary Wollstonecraft, Antonio Gramsci. My new boyfriend was a man of the world. His jokes were allusive. He knew many people in the television industry personally. Being with someone so much older made me feel young again. He was funny and mean. He made me unhappy, and he made me laugh. He was elaborately patient with my newfound Judaism, by which I understood that he found it ridiculous, so that pretty soon I did, too. I stopped going to synagogue and moved to the Upper West Side.

I
T WAS FOUR YEARS
before I began going to synagogue again on Saturdays, and when I did it was because I married (someone else) and moved to the suburbs, but, also, and more important, because I found another teacher. He was utterly different from my first teacher. Rabbi Paul (I’ll call him) was a brilliant and widely disliked man. He had bold features and close-cropped curly black hair. He was Byronic in appearance and fearsome in his love of Jewish law, even though he had been a professor of philosophy before he became a pulpit rabbi, and did so largely because he had failed to get tenure.

Now that I spend so much time reading theology, people often ask me if I want to be a rabbi. I shudder at the thought. I can’t imagine a more terrifying job. My answer is, go and read a very early novella by George Eliot called
The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton
(1857). The Reverend Amos Barton is a very good man but a very bad minister. His oratory resembles the bleatings of “a Belgian railway-horn.” His predecessor in the parish generated “a certain amount of religious excitement,” but now that feeling has died down. It is when he must preach to a gathering of poor folk that his deep
pedestrianness shines through. Trained at Oxford, tenaciously pedantic, he simply can’t think from the pauper’s point of view. He can only deliver a dry sermon irrelevant to their lives. He knows full well that his congregants hold him in low esteem and probably contempt.

Rabbi Paul’s unpopularity derived mainly from his uncompromising rigor in matters of ritual, but it also had a lot to do with his pastoral manner, or, rather, his unpastoral manner. He did not give sermons on Saturday mornings. He led graduate seminars. He would elicit opinions from members of his congregation about whatever portion of the Torah they were reading that week, and then, like the Socratic master he was trained to be, he’d derive from our innocent observations the deepest principles of religious thought. His speciality was the phenomenology of religion—the philosophical study of religion as experience, rather than as a set of claims that can be proved to be true or false. He adored Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but he told us to read Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who was less difficult and more Jewish. (The book he had us begin with was
The Sabbath.)

Rabbi Paul’s rhetorical style bored some and piqued others. I loved it. But this wasn’t what got his congregants most riled up. Their complaint had to do with the way he reacted when someone gave an answer that he didn’t like. Puritan preachers may have thundered, but clergymen today do not. Theological mandates no longer dictate the laws of the land. Religion, in our liberal pluralistic society, competes humbly with other lifestyle choices. Today, it is incumbent upon a minister to boost the members of his or her church, not to humiliate them. He or she stresses a God of self-actualization, not a God who shames and judges.

Rabbi Paul, however, shamed and judged. Not so much our moral failings as our intellectual ones. We gave dumb answers to his questions. We couldn’t see where he was trying to go. We lacked original religious minds. To some congregant’s halting guess about what gem the rabbi wished him to unearth in a dusty verse, he’d reply, “No! Next?” Had we not read the Torah portion? Had we not seen that the dying Abraham makes the eldest servant of his house put his hand under Abraham’s thigh and swear to him that he will not let Isaac
Abraham’s son, choose a wife from among the Canaanites? Had we not asked ourselves what “under his thigh” meant, exactly? It meant the genitals, of course.
Put your hand on my penis:
Didn’t that strike us as an odd form for a vow to take?