IN DEFENSE OF A SECULAR SABBATH

by JUDITH SHULEVITZ

A nyone who has ever found herself on a synagogue mailing list has come across this aperçu by the writer and Zionist Ahad Ha’am: “More than Israel has kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath has kept Israel.” Though raised Hasidic, Ahad Ha’am (1856-1927) was very much a Haskalah rationalist. Nonetheless, he based his Zionism on Jewish institutions like the Sabbath, for he thought Israel should root itself, as a nation, in Judaism’s cultural, social and ethical traditions rather than in ethnic nationalism and anti-anti-Semitism. But was he right? Does the day of rest strengthen the bonds of a nation, or is that grandiloquence? Certainly Sabbath laws now divide Israel as much as they unite it.

In the past decade or so, however, prominent secular Israeli intellectuals have begun expressing the same thought as Ahad Ha’am. These non-Haredi Sabbatarians want to protect the Sabbath from consumerism and save it for not only rest, but also for unifying the Israeli public. For, in theory at least, the Sabbath is a profoundly political institution, in that it makes time for people to gather and partake in the discussions that lead to collective activity.

Throughout the 19th and much of the 20th Century, American Christians debated the merits of the Sabbath with a similar passion, and many of their arguments had as strong a political flavor as Ahad Ha’am’s. The civic (as opposed to theological) discussion turned on the question of whether there was anything about Sunday that warranted preservation once the old Puritan rigor had lost its appeal. The answer was that the American Sunday had become indispensable to the task of fostering America’s exceptional qualities — its egalitarianism and pluralism.

In a famous 1872 speech pleading for the opening of libraries and for public transportation on Sundays, the minister and abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher argued that only the liberalization of the Sabbath would conserve its character as “a day peculiarly American” in its serendipitous neighborliness, family-minded “household love,” moral uplift and “poetic element.” (Henry Ward Beecher, “Libraries and Public Reading Rooms: Should They Be Opened on Sunday?” Cambridge, Mass., J. Ford, 1872).

In 1906, an Episcopalian minister in Boston claimed, portentously, that Sunday had given the American character its “moral earnestness ... that utters itself in every grand institution of freedom” and allowed “eighty million persons, the refugees of every land” to become a single people. In 1961, Supreme Court Justices Earl Warren and Felix Frankfurter wrote into legal history the link between the Sabbath and civic consciousness in separate but concurring opinions in defense of Sunday-closing (or blue) laws in a case called McGowan et al. v. Maryland. It’s jarring to remember how recently Americans couldn’t work or shop on Sunday, except when medically necessary or when certain services or stores were deemed essential to fun on days off. What was wrong with letting people shop? Frankfurter glossed over the obvious point that it forced everyone in the retail sector to work and emphasized instead something less tangible: the bustling, humming feel of a street open for business, which, he said, had the power to destroy “a cultural asset of importance: a release from the daily grind, a preserve of mental peace, an opportunity for self-disposition.” Warren and Frankfurter maintained that 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. Therefore, they ruled, blue laws did not violate the First Amendment’s stricture against the establishment of religion.

As for the day of rest falling on Sunday, Frankfurter — who was Jewish — pointed out that to share a day of rest, you had to pick one, and it might as well be the one that most people already observed. The secular Sunday was implicitly a national holiday. One day a week — it is worth remembering — the country honored life beyond duty and the imperatives of the marketplace. For 24 hours, Americans stayed home and ate huge family dinners, or went to church, or set off on afternoon drives. And they not only did these things with members of their inner circle; they did them with the knowledge that everyone else was doing them, too. That gave them permission not to work, along with the rest of the nation. They had fewer choices, but it has now become evident, in retrospect, that buried inside that lack of choice was a certain freedom, because trailing behind the inexhaustible options for leisure we enjoy today is the realization that we’re not doing everything we could be doing.

Not too long ago, David Levy, a professor at the Information School at the University of Washington, updated Frankfurter’s secular Sabbatarianism for the networked age by calling for a new “informational environmentalism.” He says we need to fight to save ourselves from the “pollutants” of communications overload: the overabundance of information that turns us into triagers and managers, rather than readers; the proliferation of bad or useless or ersatz information; the forces that push us to process information quickly rather than thoughtfully. If we don’t fend off those pollutants, he cautions, we risk becoming cut off from the world, less able to make wise decisions, stressed and out of control of our own lives. “Much as the modern-day environmental movement has worked to cultivate and preserve certain natural habitats, such as wetlands and old-growth forests, for the health of the planet, so too should we now begin to cultivate and preserve human habitats for the sake of our own well-being,” Levy writes. (David L. 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 Hyperspace,” 2006.)

How would we go about this? “We will need to cultivate unhurried activities and quiet places, sanctuaries in time and space for reflection and contemplation,” he says. Which sanctuary in time does he have in mind? The Sabbath, of course. “I by no means want to argue for the broad-scale adoption of traditional Sabbath practices ... by the larger population,” he says. What does he want to argue for? He is loath to say: “I could speak to the ways I myself am experimenting with such ideas at home and in the workplace, but effective change will most importantly come through collective reflection, experimentation, and action: local communities creating sanctuaries that fit their particular circumstances.”

But his hesitation to commit himself seems a little misplaced, because the Sabbath already exists, and, as Frankfurter might have said, presents itself as the obvious answer. The Sabbath has a claim on us in that it comes to us out of the past — out of the bodies of our mothers and fathers, out of the churches and synagogues on our streets, out of our own dreams — to train us to pay attention to it. And why do we need to be trained? Permit this quasi-secular Jew to quote a midrash. Consider the mystery surrounding God’s first Sabbath. Why did God stop, anyway? In the 18^th 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 — as Gaon didn’t say — 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. ■

Judith Shulevitz is an editor and columnist at The New Republic.Before that, she was the founding culture editor of Slate and the editor of Lingua Franca. She has been a columnist for The New York Times Book Review, Slate, and New York Magazine. Her book, The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time (Random House, 2010), was a New York Times Notable Book, a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, and winner of The American Library Association’s 2011 Sophie Brody Medal for Jewish Literature.