The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time by Judith Shulevitz

I heard of this book quite a while back and had it on my list of books I want to read. We hear lots of talk about the way technology becomes addicting, and our need to take breaks from it. I heard Judith Shulevitz speak at some point and it sounded as if this book would be about how she did that -- created a "sabbath" from technology. It did speak to that, but it was actually much more about the Sabbath, its history and the understanding of it.

I came away feeling there is good reason for humanity to have Sabbath, far beyond it being a break from technology. It was also interesting to learn about how the Sabbath has been perceived, practiced, and formed over the years, and in different groups of people.

Sometimes we hear people extolling the Sabbath as a break, a time to renew and refresh in preparation for the week ahead. It has that element, but I've read, and this book talks about, too, the way the Sabbath is not just about giving us a break. I heard or read someone who talked about the Sabbath being for God, not us, and of course Jesus himself said, "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath." (Mark 2:27) There's a lot to that remark.

If I were forced to single out one thing that is truly exceptional about the Sabbath, it would have to be its efficacy. The Sabbath does something, and what it does is remarkable. People who study the ways in which cultures evolve might say that the Sabbath gives societies a competitive advantage. It promotes social solidarity.

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If a strong and powerfully interconnected communal life was high on your priority list, you’d quickly realize that you had stumbled on a very good way to achieve it, because the Sabbath can easily be reconfigured as a four-step program for forging community spirit.

The four steps Shulevitz outlines are: (1) laws to limit work time, making room for other time such as rest time, family time, etc.; (2) designate one particular day as everyone's day off so everyone would be able to be together for the other kinds of time; (3) have that day off once a week, not just once in a while, so it becomes a habit; and (4) make the day festive, a treat people look forward to rather than a burden.

This is an intriguing theory. I had not thought before of how important it could be to have a Sabbath in order to allow for other times.  Shulevitz expands on this, explaining how we generally feel that "time is money" and that we have to look for the most efficient way of using our time. Having an agreed-upon Sabbath day makes that time as valuable as the other, what might be considered more efficient ways to use our time.

I had not thought, either, of the importance of the Sabbath for social cohesion. The Supreme Court, in 1961, ruled that blue laws were not against the First Amendment because the "Protestant Sunday had evolved into a secular day of recuperation, a public good that promoted the health of the American people and the orderliness of its society."

As you probably do, I wanted to know how to apply the Sabbath personally. The history, the reasoning, the evolution -- those are all interesting, but what does it mean I should do? Shulevitz writes about that at length. She talks about two options for bringing back the Sabbath: "We could bring it back individually or we could bring it back collectively."

The individual approach is appealing because "it is voluntary. There is no talk of legislating morality." Shulevitz does not propose bringing back the blue laws. "The emphasis on commerce seems misplaced anyway. The Fourth Commandment doesn't explicitly forbid us to shop. It tells us not to work, and not to force others to work."

Shulevitz talks about how the American work force has changed in ways that make Sabbath more difficult. There are few rest breaks, vacations are determined by the corporations, and even the need for dual incomes -- women in the workforce -- has an effect on our schedules, making our non-work times the only time for the many responsibilities of caring for ourselves and our families. She writes about the possibilities of collective Sabbath.

What might neo-Sabbatarian laws—laws that protect coordinated, rhythmic social time—look like? We have dedicated so few brain cells to the problem during the past half century that it’s hard to envision the exact dimensions of a solution. Who knows what a team of crack labor-policy wonks might come up with? But if we do make the collective decision that this kind of time is worth protecting, two things should become apparent: one, that the market is unlikely to protect it for us, and two, that we have more tools at our disposal than simple legal proscriptions. We could start by tackling overwork. We could adopt European Union vacation policies (a minimum of four weeks), shorter workweeks (thirty-five hours, say), paid parental leave, and limits on overtime. We could emulate Germany and the Netherlands and give workers the right to reduce their hours and their pay, unless companies can prove that this would constitute a hardship.

But Shulevitz is realistic.

...we should concede that a full day of rest in the global era is probably a fantasy. But Henry Ward Beecher was right: The idea does have uplift. Who thinks in terms of preserving public culture anymore? Everybody talks about popular culture, but pop culture is a creature of segmented markets, not common ones. Sunday once gave Americans an experience that was national in scope, personal in character, and religiously neutral. As soon as religion was disestablished, no one had to go to church—or anywhere else, for that matter.

At the end, Shulevitz talks about what she herself (and her family) do to practice the Sabbath. She and her husband "work hard at the celebratory aspects of the Sabbath," planning large meals, inviting friends over, sometimes dressing up, then lighting the candles and blessing the children and food. "As for the negative proscriptions -- the "do nots" -- we observe those largely by keeping electronic devices off, including cell phones," and they "put our wallets away, with the same resolution about money, which is not to be handled on Sunday."

She admits, though, that it is difficult to keep to these practices. Not only is there pressure from the things going on in the world, what her children want to do, and the restlessness sometimes engendered by these "do nots", Shulevitz writes she also struggles with indecision. "Why follow this rule and not that one? Where to begin? But also, I think, it's because my religious commitments remain too abstract to overcome the iconvenience of making them. Probably the only way for me to trick myself into being shomer Shabbat would be to restrict myself to circles where such behavior is the norm, not subject to constant question."

Shulevitz ends with this:

So why remember the Sabbath? Because the Sabbath comes to us out of the past—out of the bodies of our mothers and fathers, out of the churches on our streets, out of our own dreams—to train us to pay attention to it. And why do we need to be trained? Consider the mystery surrounding God’s first Sabbath. Why did God stop, anyway? In the eighteenth century, Rabbi Elijah of Vilna (the Vilna Gaon) ventured this explanation: God stopped to show us that what we create becomes meaningful only once we stop creating it and start remembering why it was worth creating in the first place. Or—if this is the thought to which our critical impulses lead us—why it wasn’t worth creating, why it isn’t up to snuff and should be created anew. After all, God, contemplating his first Creation, decided to destroy it in a flood. We could let the world wind us up and set us to working, like dolls that go until they fall over because they have no way of stopping. But that would make us less than human. We have to remember to stop because we have to stop to remember.

That's good, isn't it? "We have to remember to stop because we have to stop to remember."

Personally, I don't celebrate the Sabbath in the way it deserves. I do have some practices, though, that I try to do in order to elevate the Sabbath, and make it different from the rest of the week. A small thing I did as our kids were growing up was to have a special breakfast on Sundays: boiled eggs and blueberry muffins. I also kept the TV off in the morning (once I'd watched "Sunday Morning") and put on classical music while we had breakfast together (Pachelbel Canon in D is a favorite). We also went to church pretty much every Sunday, even twice on Sundays while that was the practice in our church. I TRIED to plan ahead in order not to have to do things like grocery shopping and laundry on Sundays, and we were successful in not working on Sundays.

What about you? Do you celebrate the Sabbath? Why or why not? How do you practice Sabbath?