The Sabbath World (7 page)

Looking for test subjects who were likely to have made the message of the parable a part of their lives, Darley and Batson recruited students from the Princeton Theological Seminary. Their study proceeded as follows: First, the researchers ran tests to determine each student’s personality type. Then the researchers announced that they needed more information. The students would have to give a talk. Half of them were asked to deliver a sermon on the Good Samaritan. The other half were told to discuss the job prospects that faced them as future ministers and were instructed to report to another building, where their audiences would be waiting for them. As the students left the first building, a researcher urged about a third of them to hurry, because they were already late. He assured another third that they were right on time but shouldn’t dawdle. He told the last third that there was a slight delay in the proceedings but that they should wander over anyway. As the students walked to the second building, they passed a man slumped against a doorway in an alley. They didn’t know it, but this was the real test. As each student approached, the man coughed and groaned. If the student stopped, the man told them in a confused and groggy voice that he was fine but he had a respiratory condition; he had taken medicine that would begin to work any minute now. If the student insisted on helping the man, he allowed himself to be taken into a building nearby.

After the data was weighted and the variables analyzed, only one variable could be used to predict who would stop to help and who wouldn’t. The important factor was not personality type or whether a student’s career or the parable of the Good Samaritan was foremost in his mind. It was whether or not he was in a hurry. Personality had significance only among those students who stopped. Particularly empathetic students stayed with the man longer; those who were doctrinally
rigid forced him to drink a glass of water even when he said he didn’t want one. As for the effects of culture, Darley and Batson pointed out that it would be hard to name a cultural norm more powerful for a seminary student than the example of the Good Samaritan, but it still didn’t make a student more likely to stop.

The study made it hard not to conclude, said Darley and Batson, “that ethics becomes a luxury as the speed of our daily lives increases.” The psychologists weren’t quick to judge these seminarians. Even though all the students who hadn’t stopped admitted that they’d seen the man, Darley and Batson pointed out, several said that they hadn’t realized that he needed help until after they’d passed him. Time pressure had narrowed their “cognitive map”; as they raced by they had seen without seeing.

Meanwhile, the students who had realized that the man required assistance but had withheld it from him showed up for their talks looking “aroused and anxious.” Darley and Batson speculated that their subjects felt torn between their duty to help the man and their desire to live up to the expectations of the psychologists whose test they had freely agreed to take. “This is often true of people in a hurry,” Darley and Batson wrote. “They hurry because somebody depends on their being somewhere. Conflict, rather than callousness, can explain their failure to stop.”

T
HE ONE THING
I
DO CONSISTENTLY
on Friday nights is drink. I drink whether I’m at home or at a more traditionally laid Sabbath table or attending an entirely non-Jewish event that I couldn’t bring myself to pass up. I drink red wine, if I can, and right up to the line where looseness looks a lot like rudeness. Preferring not to think of myself as a weekly alcoholic, I tell myself that wine stands in for the Sabbaths I so rarely manage to keep. A full-bodied red wine is what a poet might call the objective correlative of the Sabbath, with the color of kosher wine I sipped as a child (though not the poisonous sweetness), the
warmth of the candles, the mollifying effect on critical consciousness that Ferenczi said Sunday ought to have.

This is not precisely in the spirit of the Jewish Sabbath, but there is a family resemblance to it. The rabbis disapproved of drunkenness, but they also decreed that the Sabbath be a time for joy. “Call the Sabbath a delight,” the prophet Isaiah said. Not being nearly as impractical as they are often made out to have been, the rabbis knew that you couldn’t rejoice without good food and strong drink. “When the Holy Temple stood, there was no rejoicing without meat,” the Talmud says. “Now that the Holy Temple is not standing, there is no rejoicing without wine.” Note the logic of substitution at work in that saying: We ate meat when we brought sacrifices to the Temple, but now that there’s no Temple we drink wine. Religions evolve through a process of condensation—call it distillation. First there’s some primal spiritual experience, then it’s boiled down to a symbol; when the old symbol threatens to lose its power, we turn up the heat to intensify it. Jesus was fortifying an ancient symbol with a strong new spirit when he told his disciples at the Last Supper, “This cup is the new testament in my blood.”

Sometimes I think that drinking wine is the only form of religiosity I can consistently muster. This is slightly less crazy than it sounds. There’s an old habit in religious life of achieving joy by oenophilic means. Everyone swigs wine in the Bible, and a social historian named Elliott Horowitz has collected a remarkably large number of examples of ancient, medieval, and early-modern Jews pushing the Sabbath delights—drinking, copulating, and schmoozing—a lot further than you’d expect them to, at least if you’re foolish enough to believe the usual clichés about Jews being sober and law-abiding. In the first century, Plutarch speculated that the Jews had a Dionysian streak, since they were so eager to celebrate the Sabbath by urging drink on one another. Horowitz recounts tales of Sabbath drinking contests held by fifteenth-century Egyptian Jews; he tells of a seventeenth-century rabbi in Frankfurt who chided the young men of his synagogue for drinking brandy during the Saturday-morning service,
“sometimes becoming so drunk they forgot to recite the musaf prayer.” The repetitive songs sung at the close of the Passover service—the Seder, in which one is expected to drink at least four cups of wine—are said to derive from nursery songs, but they also have the classic structure of drinking songs: the repeated refrains, the lengthening verses, the fixed rhythms, the simple lyrics. The same can be said of many of the songs sung—or, rather, roared—after dinner around a Sabbath table. “Work makes for prosperous days; wine makes for happy Sundays,” as Charles Baudelaire put it in an essay on wine and hashish. Wine is the Sabbath in a bottle. Wine steps in when religion loses force.

Rarely, if ever, do Americans encounter the so-called blue laws once enforced in most states, banning all behavior deemed non-Sabbath-like—everything from traveling to card-playing and pawn-broking. But when we do it’s usually because a checkout clerk in a grocery store has refused to sell us beer or wine before noon on Sunday. You can deduce that drinking was the norm on British Sundays from these Puritan bans on alcohol, which were never fully enforced, not even in the seventeenth century, at the height of Puritan power. Puritan efforts to legislate Sunday drinking out of existence have left on the record a pungent portrait of the raucous Sundays common when the laws were written. The Sunday Law enacted under King James VI in 1656 reads:

On Friday nights, when I lived in the suburbs, I had at least one glass of wine before putting my two children in the car and driving to services. If you looked at the synagogue I was driving to, a tiny congregation in a big dilapidated house in a relatively Christian town, you would wonder why a woman would jeopardize her children’s lives to get there. The sanctuary was dark and homely. The wool on its kitschy Israeli wall hangings had begun to ball up. The services were sparsely attended by suburbanites in sweatpants or jeans. The tunes were tuneless—more like chanting—though hypnotic over time. If you could read the liturgy in Hebrew, its outrageous grandeur would make you forget the irritation you might naturally feel at being forced to read poetry before dinner at the end of a hard week. But if you couldn’t you were stuck reading translations that flattened magnificence into an institutionalized vision of exaltation.

But I liked standing in a room singing with a group of people I may not always have considered intimate friends but was glad to see once a week. Many of them seemed slightly drunk themselves, or maybe they were just getting ready to be. They swept my children up into bear hugs. They made room for us in the back. The children dashed out into the hall as soon as I let them, so that they could run up and down it with their playmates. The adults clapped and swayed awkwardly, with middle-aged bodies no longer adept at spontaneous movement.

Some would call this community. I like the anthropologist Victor Turner’s word, “communitas.” He was talking about the kind of group life that emerges at the edges of society, not in the middle of it, where people search for something—meaning, solace, truths—that the larger society doesn’t seem to offer.
Communitas
describes a gathering that may be a little offbeat, a little decrepit, rather hard to see the point of if you’re peering in from outside. Communitas is what happened in
the services in private homes that early Christians attended, where they broke the bread and drank the wine and spun out in ever more mythologized detail the stories that would eventually become the Gospels. Communitas, in its common focus on an ideal or a dream, is non-hierarchical and anti-institutional and intoxicating and intimate and also strangely, frighteningly impersonal. Under the spell of a charismatic tyrant, a Mao or a Stalin, communitas can yield the lawless ethos of a mob. Martin Buber meant communitas when he wrote: “Community is the being no longer side by side (and, one might add, above and below) but
with
one another of a multitude of persons. And this multitude, though it moves toward one goal, yet experiences everywhere a turning to, a dynamic facing of, the others, a flowing from
I
to
Thou.”
Communitas is the beginning of a shadow of a very old idea of the Sabbath.

I
F WE ARE TO FEEL OUR WAY INTO THE PSYCHES OF THE MEN AND
women who held the Sabbath so dear that they made it the Fourth Commandment—placing it above the injunction against murder—we have to start with the sensation of heat: scorching, air-conditioner-less, soul-withering heat. It is the hot part of the summer in a small city in a tiny desert nation in the 586th year before the advent of the Christian era. The Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar has been cannibalizing an empire from the aging parts of previous ones in Assyria and Egypt. Eleven years earlier, he had punished a rebellious king of the state of Judah by laying siege to its capital, Jerusalem, and exiling said king, along with several thousand of the nation’s leading citizens and craftsmen. A Babylonian puppet had been put on the throne, but the puppet had rebelled as well, and now Nebuchadnezzar’s army was once again at the walls of the city. The Babylonian soldiers had built siege towers and mounds and hunkered down. They had let neither water nor food into the city, and no one was allowed to leave. The corpses of the parched and the starved lay scattered in the streets, and no one still alive had the wherewithal to fight off the men in glinting
helmets who were about to pour in through the breaches they had just made in the walls.

It is considered credulous to take biblical poetry as literal truth, but when it comes to the siege of Jerusalem there are several accounts written early enough after the city’s sacking and the destruction of its Temple to offer eyewitness testimony. The book of Lamentations, in particular, brings a specificity to its itemization of horror that gives it the force of documentary. “The emotion seems too raw for a poem,” the poet and Bible translator Stephen Mitchell has said of Lamentations. “The reality is too raw.” Skeptical archaeologists have not yet managed to contradict the biblical account of famine. On the contrary, some fecal remains found in a toilet in use at the time support its historical accuracy, revealing a diet light on nutrients and heavy on roadside weeds and the kinds of parasites that enter the stomach through rotting meat. Lamentations fills in the details. “The tongue of the suckling [child] cleaves to its palate for thirst,” the poet writes. (Because they convey the graphic concreteness of Lamentations with particular faithfulness, the translations given from that book come from the Jewish Publication Society edition of the Hebrew Bible. All other biblical citations in the book come from the King James Version, by far the greater work of literature.) “Those who feasted on dainties lie famished in the streets; those who were reared in purple have embraced refuse heaps.” (The King James Bible translates this, more bluntly, as “lie in dunghills.”) “Alas, women eat their own fruit, their new-born babes!”