The Sabbath World (31 page)

It was the chain stores that worked hardest to persuade legislatures to do away with Sunday laws. Some states abolished their blue laws only after campaigns organized and funded by chain retailers, such as Kmart, Toys “R” Us, Sears, Walgreens, Bradlees, Stop & Shop, and
Home Depot. And while the enemies of blue laws acted in their own self-interest, they also made an argument that was designed to appeal to politicians and their constituents. By dampening competition, they said, Sunday restrictions kept retail prices artificially high. Protecting small businesses may have been good public policy, but, the bigger businesses argued, it was bad economics. States that repealed the laws would be able to cut prices, attract new businesses, and create jobs.

In 1961, when
McGowan et al. v. Maryland
was handed down, forty-nine states outlawed something on Sunday that was legal the other six days of the week, even if the forbidden activity was nothing more threatening to the Sunday peace than barbering or the sale of liquor. (Alaska was the only state that had no blue laws at the time.) Today, a majority of states have such laws on the books, but they do little to preserve Frankfurter’s “atmosphere of entire community repose,” nor do they back up his claim that the line of demarcation between permissible and non-permissible activities is “reasonable.” These days, no two sets of blue laws look remotely alike; each is riddled with oddly specific proscriptions and exceptions; all are laxly or inconsistently enforced; and very few people even know they exist.

The most common blue laws restrict sales of alcohol on some period on Sunday, usually the morning. But there is indeed a potpourri of other proscriptions. Arkansas, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Maine, and New Hampshire outlaw Sunday horse racing. Maine enjoins boxing, air circuses, and wrestling. Arkansas disallows Sunday dog racing. Connecticut and Tennessee forbid Sunday car racing. Connecticut, Maryland, New Jersey, and North Carolina impose complicated and highly qualified restrictions on Sunday hunting. New Jersey and Virginia forbid oyster fishing on Sunday. Baltimore County, in Maryland, prohibits bingo on Sunday, while New Jersey bans all Sunday “games of chance.” Tennessee requires that all “adult” establishments shut down for the day. Several states shut down car showrooms on Sunday, although that particular prohibition has been singled out for attack in recent years and is fast disappearing.

To make matters more confusing, many states allow cities and counties to opt out of the blue laws if they want to. A large number
do, or make exceptions for kinds of labor or business that happen to be important to their economies. For instance, South Carolina bans “worldly work … and business” but exempts rubber and plastic mold-making, as well as textile manufacturing. New Jersey allows municipalities to opt
in
to its blue laws; naturally, few do. (Paramus, which lies right across the Hudson River from New York City and has a high concentration of big-box stores, is one borough that has opted in, a fact that occasions bitter complaints from New Yorkers looking for weekend access to cheaper merchandise.)

It can be argued (and has been argued) that Sunday-closing laws reflect the interventions of so many special interests that they can no longer protect the communal aspect of the day of rest. One legal scholar goes further, declaring that since many of the laws that remain prohibit not work but recreational activities such as gambling and hunting, they can be interpreted only as fossils from America’s theocratic days and should be ruled unconstitutional.

I
T’S TRUE.
The Sabbath
is
a fossil. It’s the past hardened into rock, whereas time becomes more fluid with each passing day. Cell-phone and text-messaging and social-networking technologies have begun to wash away at adamantine “mechanical time,” the unyielding time of clocks, and to suspend us within “mobile time,” which can be made to flow whichever way we want. Whereas what is called Universal Time emanates from an atomic clock at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England, the time of mobile communications emanates from each of us individually. Universal Time coordinates local time around the globe, so that institutions and the public know when to interact with one another. Using our cell phones and other devices, we micro-coordinate our time with that of our associates, which allows us to bypass Universal Time and operate on what I would call Particular Time—time that can constantly be adjusted to fit our own idiosyncratic needs. If we encounter traffic jams on our way to a rendezvous, we can call or text and prepare our friends or colleagues for
late arrivals. If six college friends don’t know enough about their schedules in the morning to make a plan for the evening, they can simply communicate with one another electronically over the course of the next several hours until they arrive at one. “The mobile telephone relaxes the implicit contracts around time,” the sociologist Richard Ling writes. “It softens the schedule.”

As we grow accustomed to ever softer time contracts, the Sabbath’s granitic temporality begins to seem ever more unreasonable. Very few situations require fanatical punctuality anymore. Moreover, a softer schedule uses time more efficiently. No longer need we squander precious minutes waiting for dates who don’t show up, or on other scheduling mishaps (although it should be said that we lose some of that saved time in making and refining our plans). As a result, accommodating ourselves to the uncompromising demands of the Sabbath schedule becomes less a matter of fitting it into our calendars than of forcing ourselves to conform to a kind of time that seems obsolete. Remembering and keeping the Sabbath under these conditions also exact a higher social price. More friends and colleagues lift a querying eyebrow when we say that we can’t be reached or disturbed for a full twenty-five hours than were likely to have done so in the days before phone calls and emails could track us down at any location. In short, the advent of mobile time erodes the plausibility of the Sabbath the way coastal waters turn boulders into sand.

This sea change isn’t as complete as it may yet become. The large temporal frameworks of our lives remain fairly firm. We still work comparatively standard hours or go to school from morning till afternoon, fall through spring. But to the degree that electronics take over our activities and our interactions, personal time becomes more fungible. We shop when it’s convenient, not when stores are open. We watch movies and television on DVDs and On Demand and TiVo, not according to published schedules. We correspond via email and Twitter and Facebook in instant, staccato bursts throughout the day, or over the course of several days, not when the mail is delivered.

Mobile time is time that
we’re
in charge of, and who would want to lose that? Ling says that he has found a “gendered dimension” to
the way people talk about this kind of time in interviews. Temporal flexibility finds its most passionate advocates among those with the sharpest conflicts between personal time and public time, which is to say working mothers (although this description also fits working care-givers of all kinds). These women often find themselves coordinating the loose, task-oriented time of child rearing and home maintenance with the closely measured, more fixed time of the workplace. Mothers today can call babysitters at any hour, be reached anywhere in case of emergency, be asked to pick up milk or antibiotic ointment and Band-Aids on their way home even if they’ve already left the office. All this allows them to manage their complicated lives with an ease their mothers would never have dreamed of.

But being in perpetual contact can also make us feel as if time is in charge of us. In that case, we may be experiencing what sociologists call the Lazarus effect, the nagging consciousness of “dead” time that wouldn’t strike us as wasted if we didn’t have a mobile device in our hands. Micro-coordination, being more efficient, also sets a more exacting standard of time use. It used to be possible to wiggle free of the Lazarus effect by taking yourself off the grid, but that option is fast vanishing. Five years ago, when I went on summer vacation, I could tell my friends and colleagues that it might be days before I could log on and get their messages because the impoverished Catskill Mountain town where I rented a house hadn’t yet been wired for broadband. Now that the region has entered the twenty-first century, that excuse no longer works.

We might, if we were inventive grammarians, call this state of being incessantly
on
the “embryonic progressive tense.” “Progressive” in the grammatical sense—in the progressive tense we don’t complete an action, we are in the process of doing it—because we are available and attached to others on a continuing basis, not just in the present but also in the past, and in all likelihood in the future, too. And “embryonic” because cell phones function like umbilical cords, tethering friends and family who might otherwise drift off and become artifacts of our personal histories, and because social-network sites fish out of oblivion the high-school classmates, office co-workers, and one-night
stands who would otherwise vanish without a trace. In the embryonic progressive, nothing ends. The Sabbath, by contrast, demands of us a hard and tragic sense of beginnings and ends.

W
HEN AND IF THE
S
ABBATH GOES
, here are the forms of time that might go, too: non-instrumental time, bounded time, shared time, and rhythmic time. We need non-instrumental time to remember our “human condition,” as Arendt put it; we need bounded and shared time to become a society; and we need rhythmic time to make the previous three a habit. But two questions remain. First, hasn’t our enhanced connectedness made it unnecessary to set aside time to be together? And, second, are habits really all that great?

Electronic communications may turn out to increase the frequency of real-world contacts, rather than replace them. After all, our heightened ability to synchronize our schedules has made it easier to get together. So maybe we have all the community we can handle, and what we want is to be alone! Besides, mobile communication liberates us. It alleviates the burdens of self-presentation. It’s a lot easier to be ourselves typing at home in our underwear than talking face-to-face.

There is one big difference, though, between face-to-face and electronic interlocution. That is what psychologists call “co-presence,” which provides, they say, “attunement.” The value of physical togetherness lies in the possibility of aligning ourselves to others at the deepest physical level. Tests have shown that people laughing together soon begin to gasp and whoop to the same convulsive beat. People happily talking together mirror one another’s blinks, nods, and finger taps. Electroencephalograph (EEG) recordings of the brains of infants and adults exchanging coos show that their brain waves rise and fall at the same time. “Face-to-face social interaction takes place among physiological systems, not merely among individuals as cognitive systems or bodily actors,” the sociologist Randall Collins writes. “From an evolutionary perspective, it is not surprising that human beings,
like other animals, are neurologically wired to respond to each other; and social situations that call forth these responses are experienced as highly rewarding.”

Perhaps we have begun to forget why being together feels good. Being shy myself, I’d almost always rather type than talk. Or maybe the pleasure of owning a cool gadget is greater than the pleasures described above. Still possessed of an old-fashioned clamshell cell phone, I certainly have iPhone envy. In any case, we are witnessing a decline in the status of the physical. A tellingly coarse term has emerged to describe real-time and real-space encounters: “flesh meets.” I once watched a young rabbi sitting next to me at a seminar-sized meeting furtively tapping on his BlackBerry under the lip of the table, even as the courtly elderly director of a major Jewish charity went around the room introducing one person to another. The fact that even a rabbi felt entitled to withdraw his fullest attention from the events in the room during the performance of such an important social ritual said, I thought, everything.

Is it possible to imagine what might happen to, say, family or community life without the regular—that is, habitual and scheduled—coordination of our physiological systems? Yes, because we have seen what happens when a society dispenses altogether with the common calendar that makes this possible. In 1929, one year into the Soviet Union’s First Five-Year Plan to speed up industrialization, the Council of People’s Commissars adopted the continuous workweek, the
nepreryvka
, so that no production facility need ever lie idle. The idea was to divide the working population into subgroups and stagger each group’s day of rest. At the same time, the Council reduced the week from seven days to five by eliminating Saturday and Sunday. This was probably meant as an attack on religion, since both days were tainted by their association with the religious calendar.

Eviatar Zerubavel tells the story in
The Seven Day Circle
. He writes: “The Soviet authorities essentially divided the entire society into five separate populations, staggered vis-à-vis one another like the different voices in a polyphonic, five-voice fugue.” On any given day, 80 percent of the labor force would be at work and 20 percent at
home—but not necessarily with the rest of their families. By then many Soviet women worked, and no effort was made to coordinate their schedules with those of their husbands and children. The reformers may even have meant to break up families, since according to Marxist ideology the family was irredeemably bourgeois. But your
nepreryvka
worker on his or her day off was hard-pressed to come up with company. Clubs, shows, and even (God forbid) churches struggled to stay open, since none of them could attract much attendance on any given day. Workers’ meetings puttered to a halt. Bored and lonely, Soviet workers had no choice but to socialize with people who were on the same schedule. Each day was given its own color—the “first day” was yellow, the “second day” was peach, and so on. Zerubavel reports that people began categorizing one another in their address books according to their color.