RSSDay of Rest
Does society need a mandatory time-out? We have weekends and vacations, sure, but even those are increasingly bent toward structured pursuits. Our leisure is often as scheduled and hectic as our work—and is, consequently, just as stressful. Sabbath, with its myriad proscriptions, offers what might be the only authentic form of leisure: the act and fulfillment of doing absolutely nothing productive. If that sounds like modern-day blasphemy, it’s because it is.
—Menachem Kaiser, The Case for the Sabbath, Even if You’re Not Religious”
I am drawn to this notion for a number of reasons, not just thanks to my recent conversion to Judaism. To be sure, Sabbath observance, lax though it may be in our household (thanks in part to an imminent wedding), is also a mainstay of our observance. Gathering together to light candles, drink wine, and eat challah was the first tradition we incorporated into our weekly lives even before I began the official process of conversion. It has become not just a regularly-occuring period to put work aside and let the brain relax, work through, and return with renewed vigor, but a ready-made reason to spend time together, to be casually (if ceremonially) among friends we respect, and to dedicate quality time to extracurricular projects that are important to us.
I am inclined to agree with Rachel, who told me once that she located religion’s importance in the way it structures life, makes it cyclical, provides spaces and rituals to manage certain inevitabilities. I get the sense that she was speaking of yearly cycles as well as life cycles. Religions help people understand and deal with “blessings” and “catastrophes,” mainly the latter: death, loss, bereavement. Sabbath observance, taking time out for its own sake, seems much less consequential, but is potentially a great deal more gratifying, and not just thanks to its frequency or its spiritual foundation. Indeed, most of the rituals religions provide can be made meaningful regardless of the observer’s belief in a god or gods; the question of the connection between meaning and belief at the heart of The Atlantic‘s article is, I think, quite subordinate to the importance of structuring in unstructured time.
I will note in conclusion and in passing how curious I find it that Sabbath observance, at least in modern American culture, has come to refer specifically to Jewish observance of Shabbat. The article I quoted above was written by a reformed Orthodox Jew, and is ostensibly a review of two books by a secular Jewish author. No one asks Christian politicians —or atheist politicians, as though there were such a thing!— if Sabbath prohibitions will affect their capacity to respond to catastrophes on Sundays, but the first question on everyone’s lips when Joe Lieberman became a vice-presidential candidate was whether he would be able to work on Saturdays.1 And I suspect that the loss of widespread Sunday Christian Sabbath observance (now largely spatially and temporally confined to church services expected to end by noon) and its status as a de facto secular Sabbath, is at least part of the reason for publishing an article like this one.
Footnotes
- The irony is of course that Judaism provides numerous built-in contingencies for which it is acceptable to break Sabbath laws, particularly in cases where human lives are involved. ↩