The Sabbath World (37 page)

“The Soviet authorities”: Eviatar Zerubavel,
The Seven Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 35–43.

“the enormous flywheel”: William James,
The Principles of Psychology
, vol. 1 (New York: Henry Holt, 1890), p. 121.

“When we are learning”: Ibid., pp. 112–13.

The biologist Eric R. Kandel: Kandel,
In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.)

“The mere fact”: Max Weber,
Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology
, edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, translated by Ephraim Fischoff and others (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 326.

“Processing fluency”: Christian Unkelbach, “Reversing the Truth Effect: Learning the Interpretation of Processing Fluency in Judgments of Truth,”
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition
33, no. 1 (2007): 219–30.

“We do and we hear”: Exodus 24:7.

“Leisure is a form of silence”: Josef Pieper, quoted in Al Gini,
The Importance of Being Lazy: In Praise of Play, Leisure, and Vacations
(London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 35–36.

In 1962: Sebastian de Grazia,
Of Time, Work, and Leisure
(New York: Twentieth-Century Fund, 1962).

“Much as the modern-day”: David M. Levy, “More, Faster, Better: Governance in an Age of Overload, Busyness, and Speed,” in
First Monday
, special issue, no. 7 “Command Lines: The Emergence of Governance in Global Cyberspace,” 2006),
http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/
article/view/1618/1533
.

“relaxation and self-reflection”: Jack Wertheimer,
ed., Jews in the Center: Conservative Synagogues and Their Members
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000), p. 314.

“I love technology”: Jill Serjeant, “Taking a Sabbatical from the Internet: Tech Geeks Vow to Wrestle Back Control of Their Lives if Only for a Day,”
The Toronto Star
, May 22, 2008.

“a mistrust of the pleasures”: Michel Foucault,
The History of Sexuality:
The Care of the Self
, translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 39. Much of the following comes from this volume, particularly pp. 37–71.

Two out of three countries: Stephen Sweet and Peter Meiksins,
Changing Contours of Work: Jobs and Opportunities in the New Economy
(Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Pine Forge Press, 2008), pp. 147–50.

“disputes at the boundary of time”: Todd D. Rakoff,
A Time for Every Purpose: Law and the Balance of Life
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 143.

“cultural blindness”: Ibid.

“Leopards break into”: Franz Kafka,
Parables and Paradoxes
, in German and English, edited by Nahum H. Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1961 [1935]).

“a repetition and a commemoration”: Sigmund Freud,
Totem and Taboo
, translated by A. A. Brill (New York: Random House, 1946), p. 183.

“When I was a young man”: Sigmund Freud,
The Interpretation of
Dreams
, translated by Joyce Crick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 165.

1. Judith Shulevitz says, “The Sabbath does something, and what it does is remarkable” (
this page
). What does the Sabbath do? Do you agree that what it does is remarkable, or do you think all rituals performed by an entire community accomplish more or less the same thing? Do you think the Sabbath could do something remarkable for you or your family?

2. Shulevitz argues that the Sabbath was probably taken over from a Babylonian custom involving the
ume lemnuti
, the evil or inauspicious days, when neither the king nor the priest were allowed to work for fear that they might do harm to their communities. The Fourth Commandment, however (“Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy”), says nothing about kings or priests. It gives the commandment to you, your household, your servants, your animals, and the stranger at your gate. What’s the difference between the Babylonian custom and the commandment? What does the Jewish Sabbath tell us about the people who created it?

3. Why do some people see the Sabbath as having environmental implications? Why do observant Jews refuse to use tools on the Sabbath? What could you do to achieve the same end, even if you don’t follow Jewish law?

4. The Sabbath crops up a lot in the Book of Mark—indeed, throughout the Gospels. Jesus preaches on the Sabbath and heals on the Sabbath; Jesus’s Sabbath-breaking infuriates the Pharisees so much that they step outside the synagogue and start plotting against him. Shulevitz says that performing miraculous acts on the Sabbath is a way for the Jesus of the Gospels to make a point about time. What’s Jesus’s point? Did the early Christians believe that Christ’s arrival on earth changed the very nature of time? What’s the difference between Jewish time and Christian time, according to Shulevitz? Does this explain, in your opinion, the difference between Jews and Christians in their approach to Sabbath-keeping today?

5. The American Puritan Sabbath is notorious for being strict and joyless. But Shulevitz thinks the Puritans found it joyous because it allowed them to re-enact their vision of life in Biblical times. Can you imagine finding the Puritans’ Sabbath appealing? Would you like the quiet and hate the discipline, or would you welcome the discipline but secretly chafe at the boredom?

6. Why did America’s extensive Sunday-closing laws eventually disappear? Do you think that that was a good thing or a bad thing? How has modern technology changed our sense of time? Does the prevalence of cell phones make it easier or harder to keep the Sabbath?

7. Shulevitz dwells at length on her own feelings of ambivalence toward the Sabbath. Why is she so conflicted about the Sabbath? Do you share her ambivalence, or do you feel wholeheartedly either for or against the Sabbath?