The Sabbath World (9 page)

But there’s a flaw in the main assumption of the freedom-of-time regime: that time is, like money, a pure quantity to be divided and spent at will. One minute is not exactly like every other minute, because time changes as it flows. Time is qualitative as well as quantitative. The
when
of time—its
after what
or
before what
or
at the same time as what
—matters as much as, if not more than, its
how much
. It makes a big difference whether you do something now or wait till later. We know all this intuitively, because we would have no social or professional lives if we didn’t.

To borrow one of Eviatar Zerubavel’s examples, sex means one
thing on the first date and something else altogether on the twentieth. Fifteen minutes matters a great deal when you’re late for a sales call, but counts for almost nothing when you’re waltzing into a cocktail party. The value of time is relative and situational. The true cost of a minute can’t be calculated unless you factor in who is doing what when and with whom. One hour spent listening to the leading thinkers on housing policy is worth at least as much, to the head of Housing and Urban Development, as the several hours he spent setting up the panel and wooing the participants. Two hours spent courting a potential mate will probably contribute more to your future happiness than twice that amount of time spent getting every last item out of your in-box after everyone else has gone home. And a yearlong commitment to one hour of community service at the same time each week is worth a great deal more to a nonprofit organization than a single donation made in cash representing your hourly wages for the same amount of time over the course of a year.

This is true not just because you’re making it possible for that organization to accomplish some unpopular task at below-market rates. (Don’t make the mistake of thinking that your labor is free—the nonprofit had to recruit you, after all, and coordinate your effort.) Nor is it true merely because it is worth something to a nonprofit to be able to make up a schedule in advance and stick to it. Your commitment adds value to that nonprofit, and to your town, and to your nation, because, as you get to know a like-minded group of people and let them know that they can trust you, you form bonds with your neighbors and maybe even create a group where none existed before. You’re adding to what economists call human capital and building what Third World development specialists call civil society.

T
HE
T
ORAH
, otherwise known as the Five Books of Moses, tells the tale of God’s efforts to fashion for himself a Chosen People. Moses’ task is to extract a nation out of a rabble of former slaves. He has to create a civil society. In this mission, he fails. His failure, I believe, explains
one of the great mysteries of the Bible: why God insists that Moses must die before his people enter the Promised Land.

What did Moses do wrong? When he asks God, God tells him that he struck a rock to make it yield water when he was supposed to speak to it—“because ye sanctified me not in the midst of the children of Israel.” Millions of young Bible students have stopped reading at this point, appalled. One tiny infraction and Moses is denied entry into the Promised Land? Ask yourself, though: Why did he strike the rock? Because the people were thirsty, angry, and rebelling against him. Why were the people rebelling against him? Because they doubted God’s ability to provide for them in the desert. Why did they keep doubting, when God had come through for them so many times? Because they were not yet a people who placed their trust in the Lord.

Another way to explain it is to say that Moses had not yet manufactured social cohesion. The Sabbath plays a small but important part in his effort to do so. In the book of Exodus, God gives the Israelites the Sabbath. The day makes its first appearance in their midst with a curious absence of fanfare. Its arrival is eclipsed by a more miraculous gift: manna, the breadlike substance that God deposits on the ground every morning, along with the dew, for the children of Israel to eat as they wander in the desert.

Six weeks out from Egypt, their provisions gone and nothing but sand as far as their eyes can see, the Israelites panic. They murmur, as the Bible puts it, against Moses and Aaron, exclaiming, “Would to God we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the flesh pots, and when we did eat bread to the full; for ye have brought us forth into the wilderness, to kill this whole assembly with hunger.” God hears their complaints and tells Moses that he will “rain bread from heaven,” and that the people should go out and gather only a certain amount every day.

Why not let everyone run out and grab as much as he can, and store it in case of need? God explains: He wants to test the people. He wants to see whether the Israelites can be taught to follow rules—to “walk in my law, or no.” The law he has in mind is that of sharing,
fairly, a scarce resource. So important is this lesson that God presses the manna into service as an instrument of pedagogy. The next morning, when the people go out to collect the stuff, each of them will come back with exactly one portion—one
omer
—no matter how much he plucked from the ground. That night, all uneaten manna will spoil, demonstrating the ill-advisedness of hoarding.

But God is not finished making demands. On the sixth day after the manna’s first fall, he says, the people should gather twice as much as they do every other day. And that is all that God says by way of introduction to the Sabbath. His admonition goes by so fast that Moses doesn’t even mention it to the people until the sixth day—an oversight so grave that the rabbinical commentator Rashi says it gave God another reason to punish him. But the idea of gathering twice as much on Friday sounds, at first, arbitrary, like an exercise in discipline rather than something worth doing on its own merits.

At this point, we have to turn back a few pages in the Book. Right before the miracle of manna takes place, another miracle occurs that is nearly identical to it. Three days after leaving Egypt, having found no water, the Israelites come across a spring that proves too bitter to drink, and murmur, in the Bible’s verb, “against Moses, saying, What shall we drink?” Moses turns to the Lord, who shows him a tree that would, if thrown into the water, make it potable. Moses throws it, and they drink. Then and there, the Bible adds, God makes “for them a statute and an ordinance.” Which statute and which ordinance? The Bible fails to say. The rabbis speculate that
that
was really the moment when God gave them the Sabbath. Maybe, maybe not, but the plain meaning of the passage is that God dreams up on the spot the very idea of the tit for tat. He imposes statutes and ordinances on the people in exchange for giving them the means of survival.

From God’s breast issues the manna, which is as white as coriander seed and tastes like “wafers made with honey” and mysteriously manages to satisfy everyone’s needs. (“What is it but heavenly, sweet, creamy milk that allows the entire congregation to nurse at once?” the commentator Ilana Pardes muses.) In return, God expects the self-restraint without which collective life would be impossible. As God
gives to them, so they should give to him; and as God shares his bounty with them, so should they share it with one another, distributing it justly.

Of that lesson, the Sabbath can be said to be the perfect test, for it poses fundamental questions about social coexistence. Have the people grasped the principle of reciprocal altruism? Have they applied those principles with enough rigor and evenhandedness that individuals feel they can afford to stop competing for resources for an entire day? Are they comfortable enough with one another that each person doesn’t feel he has to rush out and grab some manna before the next guy does?

The answer is no. “And it came to pass,” the Bible goes on, “that there went out some of the people on the seventh day for to gather, and they found none.” God, not yet used to being defied, fumes, “How long refuse ye to keep my commandments and my laws?” Then he states the rule again: “Abide ye every man in his place, let no man go out of his place on the seventh day.” And so, the Bible says, “the people rested on the seventh day.” But they obey God more out of fear than out of mutual trust.

This, by the way, is not the last we hear about the social dimensions of the Sabbath. Another cautionary tale appears in the book of Numbers, and it is even more disturbing. In it, God resorts to more punitive tactics. The Israelites come upon a man gathering wood on the Sabbath and bring him to Moses and Aaron, who don’t know what to do with him. They take him into custody, and then they seek God’s advice. He gives them a shocking answer: “The man shall be surely put to death: all the congregation shall stone him with stones without the camp.”

Even the rabbis were taken aback by the severity of the sentence. In the Bible, religious violations often incur the ultimate penalty. But there are two kinds of ultimate penalty in the Bible, one executed by man and one by God; sins against man are almost always punishable by man, and sins against God are almost always punishable by God. The divine corollary to the death penalty, a punishment executed by human hands, is
karet
, or “cutting off.” He who flouts God’s law, according
to the legal formula, will have his soul “cut off from among his people.” The exact meaning of “being cut off” has been the subject of much debate: some have said childlessness; some an early death; some that the soul dies with the body, so that the culprit may not join his kin in the hereafter. What is clear is that the divine penalty differs from capital punishment, and it is left to God to execute it.

In a rare instance of double jeopardy, though, violations of Sabbath law incur both human and divine penalties. What makes God so harsh in his enforcement of the Sabbath? He must have considered violation of the Sabbath to be an offense against man as well as himself. A man gathering wood on the Sabbath is not only doing forbidden work; he violates the mutual non-compete clause that lets Sabbath-keepers feel they can afford not to work. If he gets away with it, then everyone else can, too, and no one will be able to rest. It will no longer be feasible to keep the Sabbath, and that, in the biblical construction of the holiday, indicates that no higher form of social order can be maintained.

M
ODERN
J
ERUSALEM IS A GOOD PLACE
to go to think about the Sabbath’s social efficacy. Jerusalem on a summer Saturday can stun you with its sweetness—its taste of the world to come, the rabbis liked to say—or leave you sweaty and bored. It depends on how you spend it. If you follow the flow of foot traffic to some gorgeous old synagogue packed with enthusiastic young Jews, then get yourself invited to a leisurely luncheon underneath a spreading tree, you may thank the God who invented the Sabbath and the rabbis who made it the law of the land. If you’re stuck with two sick children in a guesthouse that serves no meals on Saturday, as I once was, you’ll be less grateful.

Keeping the Israeli Sabbath is hard work, even if you aren’t a tourist, particularly if you’re unmoved by its pleasures. Hence the dislike of many secular Israelis for Saturday—the streets cleared of buses, the shuttered grocery stores and pharmacies, the understaffed hospitals—as well as for the black-hatted men in ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods
who stone Sabbath-breakers and riot against the opening of parking lots, and who have in Israel’s half century of existence twice nearly brought down governments that violated Sabbath laws. And hence my surprise when I learned that other secular Israelis have begun to treat the Sabbath as a national treasure in need of preservation.

In a column in
The Jerusalem Post
in 2002, the writer Hillel Halkin, who is not exactly religiously observant, noted that so many Israelis now shop at malls on Saturday that it seemed silly to complain about it—and then he complained about it. (Hundreds of stores at Israel’s malls violate Saturday-closing laws, and Saturday has become the biggest shopping day of the week.) As a struggling writer and a father of two, Halkin said, he used to take solace from the ban on getting and spending, especially on Friday nights—the only night of the week that he failed to wake up in a panic “because the next day was a day on which you could not do anything about money anyway.” A week without a break from acquisitiveness, he added, rather grandly, “is bad for the human spirit and it is bad for Israeli society.”

Several prominent secular Israeli intellectuals have lately expressed the same thought. Like Halkin, and like American adherents to the volunteer simplicity movement, these secular Israeli Sabbatarians want to save the Sabbath from consumerism. They also want to remove it from the exclusive control of Israel’s Orthodox rabbis. Ruth Gavison, a law professor at Hebrew University who has been working with a prominent Orthodox rabbi to draft a proposal for a less stringent Sabbath, told me that devising a Sabbath that even the non-pious could enjoy was part of a larger effort to rescue Israeli society. From what? I asked. From the widening chasm between secular and religious Israelis, and also from those who no longer see a rationale for a Jewish state, she explained. What does the Sabbath have to do with the legitimacy of Israel? I asked, somewhat surprised. A viable Jewish state must have an authentically Jewish public culture, she replied.

At the legal level, Gavison’s idea is simple. She would codify permission for much of the noncommercial activity that already goes on and enforce the pause in commercial activity and industry already
prescribed by law. Restaurants, concert halls, art galleries, and movie theaters would stay open—not just in cities and towns that have made special arrangements to do so but throughout the country. Buses would run, which they do not do now. Malls would be closed.

It is not as easy to understand Gavison’s vision of a unifying Jewish public culture. She isn’t sure herself what she means. Like many Israeli intellectuals, who model themselves on their European, not their American, counterparts, Gavison takes a high-minded approach to culture. She imagines bigger audiences for music, art, and theater; more meetings of affinity groups; more salons devoted to Jewish texts. One Jewish holiday celebrated in a semisecular way that might serve as an example is Shavuoth, which commemorates God’s giving of the Torah to Moses at Sinai. It’s an occasion marked by all-night study sessions held not just at synagogues but also at theaters and conference centers and other public venues. I once happened to be in Jerusalem for Shavuoth, and I saw the streets come alive at 11
P.M.
with the rather astonishing apparition of Israelis of all kinds, not just the religious, roaming from lecture to lecture in small groups under the Jerusalem moon, seeking enlightenment on both the Bible and contemporary politics.