The Sabbath World (3 page)

And, second, I am struck by the fact that Kierkegaard made his “knight of faith” a tax collector. To compare the accursed tax collector to the blessed Abraham is—given the long association of Jews with the handling of money, not to mention tax collection—to make
him
the Jew, rather than Abraham, the father of Christians. It is to imbue his carnal Sabbath with the gross corporality that befouls the body of the stereotypical Jew. The incredulity in Kierkegaard’s voice is that this improbably, laughably
Jewy
character should be the “knight of faith.”

You can always count on Franz Kafka to get the joke, and to push it one step further. In a letter to his best friend, Max Brod, Kafka complained of
Fear and Trembling
—which he loved—that Kierkegaard is blind to Abraham “the ordinary man,” the Abraham who
did
have elements of the philistine in him. Kierkegaard, instead, gives us “this monstrous Abraham in the clouds.” Kafka had another Abraham to propose, a comical Abraham, who is, in fact, exactly as picayune and rule-bound as the “knight of faith,” except that he’s also neurotic, overeager, Woody Allenesque. He just can’t stop getting ready for the big day, his sacrifice of Isaac. This is an Abraham, Kafka wrote elsewhere, who “would be ready to fulfill the demand of the sacrifice immediately, with the promptness of a waiter, but who could not bring off the sacrifice, because he can’t get away from the house, he is indispensable, the household needs him, there is always something more to put in order, the house is not ready.” This Abraham is like a Jew obsessively getting ready for the Sabbath, a Jew bogged down in the physical details of spiritual preparation.

Everyone knows that Christians, early and late, have had mixed feelings about Jews. It is less well known that they have had mixed feelings about the Sabbath. More than mixed feelings, they had questions: Would Christ have wanted them to keep it? If so, how strictly? Did they
really
have to worry about the innumerable rules? Or was the Sabbath just too
Jewish
, a discardable artifact of Jewish “chosenness,” antithetical to the spirit of the new universal religion? There are many complex explanations for their uncertainty, but there is also a simple explanation. The simple one takes us back to the interpreters and followers of the apostle Paul, who said that Christ had superseded the “ceremonial,” or purely physical, external aspects of the Law, making it permissible for Christians to keep only its “moral” or spiritual components. (What Paul himself said is harder to suss out.) The one Old Testament ceremony that resisted supersession, however, was the Sabbath. For even though in the Gospels Christ objected to its over-punctilious observance—“The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath,” he told the Pharisees who scowled at his disciples’ Sabbath violations—he appears, on the whole, to have kept it. Moreover, the Sabbath was the only ritual law among the Ten Commandments, which Christians have held to be universal or natural laws—that is, a kind of innate morality implanted by God in the human soul. But the Old Testament called the Sabbath a sign of the covenant between God and the Jews. It was particular to them, not to mention peculiar, and not easily alchemized into something universal. And yet there it was, number four on the list.

At this point I’d better step back and try to define the Sabbath. As I’m using the term, it’s the day in the week on which Jews and Christians (at least those who accept the Sabbath) are commanded not to work. It is the execution of a set of ritual proscriptions and prescriptions, the proscriptions largely having to do with work and the prescriptions largely having to do with making the day worshipful and festive. It is derived from the Fourth Commandment: “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates.”

By this definition, I should add, the holy day called Al-Jumuah, which Muslims celebrate on Friday, cannot be considered a Sabbath, though it is sometimes said to be the Muslim Sabbath. The scholarly footnotes in my Koran insist firmly on this point. Al-Jumuah is not a day of non-work, nor is it necessarily a time for socializing inside or outside the mosque. It is an hour or so of prayer, accompanied by a weekly sermon. Shortly before noon, Muslim store owners shutter their stores and workers leave their offices and places of employment for the service—in New York City, taxicabs line the streets outside mosques—but on the whole they return to work a few hours later. One Muslim teaching reads: “When the time for Jumu’ah prayer comes, close your business and answer the summons loyally and earnestly, meet earnestly, pray, consult, and learn by social contact: when the meeting is over, scatter and go about your business.”

I should also add that the image we hold in our heads of the Jewish Sabbath isn’t wholly based on the Fourth Commandment, either. The Sabbath of candlelighting and dinners and not driving and not turning lights on and off was shaped more by rabbinic law than by the Torah. This Sabbath may have been practiced in Christ’s time, but it was codified in the Talmud in the centuries following his crucifixion. This law identifies thirty-nine main categories of work that may not be done from the moment the Sabbath begins until it ends, unless the life of an individual or the welfare of a community is at stake. There are countless subcategories of the categories, and innumerable permutations of those.
Shabbat
, the Talmudic tractate, or book about the Sabbath, is the longest of all the tractates in the Talmud, and there’s another tractate devoted entirely to the law of Sabbath boundaries, called
Eruvin
. “There are one hundred and fifty-seven two-sided pages in tractate Sabbath, and one hundred and five in Eruvin,” the Israeli poet Bialik complained, notwithstanding his admiration for the Sabbath. “For the most part they consist of discussions and decisions on the minutiae of the thirty-nine kinds of work and their branches…. What weariness of flesh! What waste of good wits on every trifling point!”

How
can
Jews bear to obey all these laws? Well, why does any society adhere to its customs? These rituals make sense to Jews because being members of their community means being committed to making sense of them. The Law—Torah—is the language Jews use to speak to one another. It is their way of discussing the mandated acts, inherited traditions, and interpersonal obligations that make up any discernibly discrete cultural group. It is a Jew’s commitment to the ongoing process of Law, of studying and interpreting and reinterpreting—and following—the laws, that brings out the aspect of the Law that is world-creating, rather than soul-stifling. Besides, the Law is said to make God’s will manifest, and following it is not thought to be a burden (though it may be experienced as such) but the chance to make God’s transcendental goodness a reality on earth.

By the time the rabbis began writing their books on the Jewish Sabbath, however, Christians had on the whole (though not entirely) cut themselves off from Jewish communities. Many Christians had never had any contact with Jews to begin with. The Jewish Sabbath had stopped making sense to them, and had stopped being made sense of by them. Paul had already told Gentile converts that Moses’ Law was a dead weight on them, a yoke to be cast off. The theological principle of supersession expressed a sociological fact. The Christians had moved on. Yet they still lugged the Sabbath around with them.

I first grasped what it must have felt like to have to carry the Sabbath around like a suitcase full of stuff you don’t need anymore but are unable to drop into a dumpster while I was having a small fit of petulance about having to get up from my desk and go to see my psychoanalyst. Now, like, say, rabbinic Judaism during the time of medieval Christendom, psychoanalysis is considered an anachronism. Who has the time or the money to undergo analysis anymore? Who believes in its efficacy? Well, I do, or at least I have a superstitious inability to stop seeing my analyst. But when I do so I often find myself mumbling grumpily to myself about her and all her rules. As I boarded my train, glancing anxiously at my watch, it occurred me that the psychoanalytic session, with its rules and rhythm and punctuality, is a modern Sabbath.

The psychoanalytic session, like the Sabbath, takes you out of mundane time and forces you into what might be called sacred time—the timeless time of the unconscious, with its yawning infantile unboundedness, its shattered sequentiality. It may not be pleasant, it may not be convenient, you may not want to go, but you do. On time. And the fixed time limits also keep you from losing yourself in that disorienting, disorganizing flux. When your fifty minutes are up, you return to the mercilessness of the regular week. But your fifty minutes will come around again, just as mercilessly, and you must present yourself on time or give an account of yourself.

The Sabbath is an organizing principle. It is a socially reinforced temporal structure. Either you want to be organized in this way or you don’t, or, if you’re like me, you do and you don’t. But if you’re like me you can’t quite forget what it feels like to have a Sabbath. You can tell when it’s missing, even if you don’t necessarily miss it.

A
MERICANS, ONCE THE MOST
Sabbatarian people on earth, are now the most ambivalent on the subject. On the one hand, we miss the Sabbath. When we pine for escape from the rat race; when we check into spas, yoga centers, encounter weekends, spiritual retreats; when we fret about the disappearance of a more old-fashioned time, with its former, generally agreed-upon rhythms of labor and repose; when we deplore the increase in time devoted to consumption; when we complain about the commercialization of leisure, which turns fun into work and requires military-scale budgeting and logistics and interactions with service personnel—whenever we worry about these things, we are remembering the Sabbath, its power to protect us from the clamor of our own desires. But when, say, we return from a trip to some less developed country and feel a sense of relief that our twenty-four-hour economy allows us to work, shop, dine, and be entertained when
we
want to, not according to some imposed schedule, at that point, too, we are remembering the Sabbath. We are remembering how claustrophobic its rigid temporal boundaries used to make us feel.

This book is about my ambivalence toward the Sabbath, which I diagnose as partly the secular American’s ambivalence toward the Sabbath and partly an ambivalence peculiarly my own. It is my theory that these ambivalences can be traced in some way to the Christian ambivalence toward the Sabbath, which can be traced in some way to a deeper ambivalence toward the idea of living a life in thrall to law and tradition, which can be traced in some way to an even deeper ambivalence toward ritual, which can be traced in some way to the most profound possible qualms about holiness, an uncanny, spectral quality that forces itself upon us from its perch in the past. All these
in some ways
should tip you off that this book is more associative than analytical and more anecdotal than historical (though there is analysis and history in it).

This book is also, to use an execrable expression, a journey—not a conversion narrative, in which the journey begins
here
and ends
there
, but an inconclusive account of a life led in the shadow of the Sabbath, and of the texts and ideas I’ve read in an effort to make sense of its strange possession. This is not a work of journalism, either. I have spent many Sabbaths with many people—Orthodox Jews, Seventh-Day Adventists—and I have always felt what Kierkegaard felt, which is that watching from the outside raises more questions than it answers. The great writer Alice Munro puts it even better than Kierkegaard does: “Only from the inside of the faith is it possible to get any idea of the prize as well as the struggle, the addictive pursuit of pure righteousness, the intoxication of a flash of God’s favor.”

So I’ve looked inside my Sabbath, compromised as it is, for some sense of the prize and the struggle, and I’ve tried to steal glimpses into the Sabbaths of history—the ones that happened to interest me, rather than the ones that are objectively considered to be the most important. Sometimes, to get a better look, I’ve stuck a sort of periscope out the window, using sociology or anthropology or even economics to give myself a longer view and ask and try to answer questions deeper than those I would have dared to pose in face-to-face interviews. I’ve organized this book around some of the themes that swam into view. I hope I’ve done this without succumbing to the fantasy that the use of these elevated terminologies lends my musings the patina of truth. This is, in the end, a work of apologetics, even though I’m still trying to get over the feeling that I have to apologize for that fact.

I
N THE POETRY OF THE PRAYER BOOK, THE SABBATH IS A BRIDE GREETED
by an impatient bridal party with an almost anguished relief. In the more prosaic dominion of my house, the Sabbath sees herself in and sits down to wait. As the woman of the house, and, more to the point, the only person in my family whose heart pounds anxiously at the approach of a religious obligation, it’s up to me to acknowledge her presence by lighting the candles eighteen minutes before sunset, when they should be lit. During the winter, however, I don’t light the candles on time. I ignore the clock at the bottom of my computer screen and when I don’t see the numbers turn to, say, 4:10, I don’t look out the window, where the shadows of our trees are beginning to black out the backyard.

I know without looking, though, that the room where the candles would be burning is having its last golden moment of the day, the sun having sunk low enough to gild the walls. The sun sets shortly thereafter and plunges the world inside my time zone into what Jewish tradition regards as a kind of temporal no-man’s-land. It’s neither the end of the sixth day nor the beginning of the seventh (the Jewish
day beginning and ending at nightfall). It’s twilight. The rabbis, who mixed their prescriptions and proscriptions with legend, defined twilight as “from sunset as long as the face of the east has a reddish glow.” They also called the twilight before the Sabbath a witching hour. The story is told that on the very first Sabbath twilight God created ten magical objects that he would later use to make miracles: the rainbow that came after the flood to assure mankind that God wouldn’t destroy the world again; the staff with which Moses wrought the ten plagues; the mouth of the earth that opened up to swallow an Israelite who tried to launch a coup against Moses; and so on.