Nehemiah got very bent out of shape about violations of the Sabbath. After he chewed out the nobles of Judah, he locked down the city at sundown on Friday and posted guards at the gates. For the first couple of weeks, the merchants camped outside the gates, hoping, presumably, to pick up some business from passersby. When Nehemiah found out about this, he threatened them, with his usual vigor, and they finally got the message. For Nehemiah it was clear that Israel’s failure to observe the Sabbath was one of the sins that had led to their exile. The commandment about Sabbath is right up there at the top of the Ten Commandments, alongside the prohibitions against idolatry and graven images. Once again it is about holiness—honor the Sabbath and keep it holy. Part of Israel’s calling to be a nation utterly unlike other nations is the instruction to set apart one day—the last day of the week, the day on which God rested after the work of creation—and to make it utterly unlike other days.
The separateness of the Sabbath—which runs from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday—from the other six days of the week is one of the most distinctive features of Orthodox life. Like every detail of the Torah, the commandment about honoring the Sabbath and keeping it holy has been interpreted and debated and elaborated on through the centuries. The most important bit of interpretation identifies the prohibited work as the thirty-nine activities involved in building the Temple, so on Shabbos (the Hebrew word my neighbors use) you can’t do anything that the Jews are recorded as having done while working on the Temple. This rules out writing, sewing, building, washing, buying, selling, carrying, tearing (on Friday night some families take the toilet paper out of the bathroom and put a box of tissues in instead—or so my children tell me; it’s not the sort of thing that comes up in conversation if you’re older than ten), and thirty-one other things.
The prohibition that probably has the greatest impact is that against kindling a fire. This, in the judgment of the rabbis whose work it has been to guide Jewish life through an ever-changing world, includes anything that creates a spark, including internal combustion engines. The most obvious effect of this is that observant Jews can’t drive on Shabbos. The beat-up vans, cluttered with car seats, strewn with cookie crumbs, and occasionally decorated with Yiddish bumper stickers, park on Friday night and don’t move for twenty-five hours. The families who crowd into them on the other six days of the week walk to shul in their best clothes. But there’s a lot more to it than not driving. Going twenty-four hours in the modern world without using electricity involves a serious reorganization of life. No turning lights on and off, no cooking, no hot water, no telephones. Getting ready for Shabbos is a big rush: a whole day’s worth of meals need be cooked and set on a low heat to keep warm, and everybody needs to take showers before the sun goes down. On Friday afternoon the grocery store up the road is full of men with big hats and small children. I can imagine harried women in chaotic kitchens yelling, “Two hours to go and we’re out of eggs! Go get some, would you? And we could use some pasta while you’re there. And take these kids with you before I step on one of them!”
People make arrangements. Jewish tradition agrees with Jesus that Shabbos is made for man and not man for Shabbos. If you need to take your child to the emergency room, you put her in the car and go without giving it a second thought. And whatever you can do to keep life as smooth as possible is fine. There are timers for lights, special settings on stoves, and so on; so the things that need to get done can, without anybody doing anything that will create a spark.
But occasionally it goes wrong and someone forgets to set the timer or a kid turns on a light in the bedroom or a plate on the stove overheats and starts to look dangerous. This is where my family comes in. Every now and then someone will come and knock on our door—of course, they can’t ring the bell—to ask us to turn on the furnace or the bathroom light. I love being called on as a Shabbos goy. If I hear the loud telltale knock at the door, I race Glen so I can get there first and be the one to help. Partly it’s that I take a childish pleasure in little errands and petty usefulness on any day of the week. More than that, however, I have come to like being part of Shabbos. The day does not enter our neighborhood with the grand drama in which it comes to the Western Wall, but we certainly notice it; we are aware of the sun going down on Fridays in a way we are not the rest of the week. As we unwind at the end of the week, we often find ourselves drifting out onto the porch to watch and wave as people walk by on the way to shul. Shabbos has become part of the rhythm of our lives.
But unless someone needs me to unscrew the bulb in the refrigerator that they forgot about, we rarely see our neighbors on Shabbos. The kids who are in and out of our house all week are not allowed to come because they must be in a “Shabbos house.” And although our kids are welcome at their houses, I don’t generally let them go, as I can’t imagine they wouldn’t be in the way. My friends always told me that they love Shabbos, but quite frankly, I never believed them. Until recently I assumed that Shabbos observance was a big nuisance—some sort of penitential thing that Jews had to make the best of and pretended to like for the benefit of outsiders. When someone summoned me as a Shabbos goy, I would do the job, chat for a couple of minutes, and then leave, assuming that they would find it an irritation to have me hanging around watching them navigate all the annoying rules.
My attitude changed suddenly and completely when I stopped by Ahuva’s for some reason one Shabbos afternoon. An appetizing smell was coming from the kitchen; Yaakov and Simcha were doing puzzles on the floor; Yosef was bent over a Hebrew book at the table; Dovid was trying to stand on his head. Something about the scene struck me as peculiar, but it took me a minute to figure out what it was. Ahuva has eight children, runs a catering business from home, heads fund-raising for the Day School, works in the mikveh every evening from her children’s bedtime until her own, and sews most of the clothes for her own family and lots of other people besides. She is perpetually on the move, manhandling toddlers and shopping bags in and out of the car with her sleeves rolled up, flour on her nose, needles stuck through her shirt, and the cell phone clipped to her belt ringing every two minutes. In years I don’t think I had ever seen her sit down for three minutes at a time, even during meals. But here she was lying on the sofa with the little ones lolling against her, listening to Dina read a sci-fi novel. She couldn’t cook; she couldn’t sew; she couldn’t shop; she didn’t have to answer the phone. She just had to be.
It was one of those sudden shifts in perspective, like when you think you have been looking at two black faces on a white background and suddenly all you can see is a white vase on a black background. I had always thought of Shabbos as a twenty-five hour prison of petty regulation, enlivened by a bit of religion. Suddenly I saw why my friends spoke of it with such love, why they thought of the day not as a prison but as a queen, why Ahuva insists that her children spend the day in homes where Shabbos is observed. “There’s an atmosphere in a Shabbos house that’s not like anything else,” she says. It’s not just that Ahuva was getting a break from her hectic life, but that she was at the epicenter of a place where restfulness was absolutely palpable: not just an absence of activity but a real presence. Had there been royalty in the house, the atmosphere could not have been more different from the other days of the week.
Of course, we have a holy day too. From the very beginning, Christians met to worship not on the last day of the week, when God rested, but on the first, when Christ rose from the dead. In the fourth century, Sunday was declared to be a day not only of worship but also of rest, and this has been observed in a variety of forms by different bits of Christianity since then. In our family we do try to make it a special day. We go to Mass, and in theory I don’t “work” on Sunday. In practice all that means is I don’t do the sort of things I do for my job, the one I get paid for. But the break from reading for class, writing lectures, editing articles, and grading papers gives me time to write letters or weed or sew on buttons or pay bills or do some cooking to ease the week ahead or do all the things I put off during the week knowing that Sunday will give me a chance to “catch up.” If we ever do get “caught up” and “on top of things” so we can “afford” to take a “day off,” it generally involves either preparing a big roast dinner (with Yorkshire pudding, three veggies, and homemade pies as compensation for a week of pasta) or packing lunches, diapers, and changes of clothes and loading the car to head out to do something a lot less restful than sitting in my nice quiet office “working.” Really, our Sunday “rest” is not much more than a minor reshuffling of work—a break from routine but still a calculated part of accomplishing everything that my life demands I accomplish.
Why, exactly, do I have so much to do? The easiest answer is that I am acceding to the demands of a high-paced, competitive, technological, efficiency-obsessed culture and allowing it to drown out my need for spiritual tranquility. Now there’s a lot in that, and it is quite bad enough. But high-paced efficiency-obsessed cultures do not create themselves. David Dawson suggests a challenging and rather sinister answer to the question of why we are so busy.“Though we say that we yearn for more free time,” he says,
we avoid it like the plague, preferring instead to seek out periods of leisure time, during which we can pursue leisure activities. And if we are successful, if we can keep the calendar full and time moving under our control, we can continue to live as though we believed our greatest illusion—that we are immortal.1
If Dawson is right—and I’m rather afraid he is, at least in my case—then our obsessive busyness is a way of distracting ourselves from our mortality, our contingency, from the fact that our world and our lives are not our own. He suggests that simply paying attention to life as it is, rather than striving to maintain the illusion of mastery over it, would be transformative. I know that he is right. I had a spiritual director once who made me spend half an hour a day sitting. Not reading or praying or meditating on a Bible passage—just sitting. I hated it. I was bored and anxious all at once, and I probably snuck a look at the clock forty times in thirty minutes. But somehow during the short months I actually kept up the discipline, the rest of my life really was different: I was calmer,my mind clearer, less cluttered by anxieties and resentments and fantasies. Then something minor—I can’t remember what—changed in the circumstances of my life, and I seized on it as an excuse to stop the tedious discipline of freeing time and sitting with it.
Now, of course, I have myriad excuses, which I recite to myself like a mantra (a full-time job, a marriage, four kids, a house that is a perpetual work in progress, and at present a book to write), and I am no closer to taking half an hour to let time be free than I am to training for a marathon. I even multitask prayer, folding it into the kids’ bedtime, so I can cross “Provide positive spiritual role model,” “Spend quality time with children,” and “Cultivate relationship with my Lord and Savior” off my “things to do” list with one efficient sweep of the pen. This, of course, is blatant cheating: quite staggeringly dishonest, really, but I have such good excuses, such a lot I have to get done.
Ahuva’s life places just as many demands on her and then some, but the commandment to honor the Sabbath and keep it holy trumps everything else. And the commandment means that she, all her family, the four other Orthodox families on our block, and all Shabbos-observant Jews everywhere spend the time from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday inhabiting time and space in a way that is quite unique. The job of the Shabbos laws is to prevent Jews from making any changes to the world, from tinkering with what God made for the space of one day. For one day they simply have to live in the world as it is and cede control to God. All the laws, the thirty-nine acts that generations of rabbis have multiplied into hundreds of prohibitions on the most trivial everyday activities, are an adamantine edge to chisel holiness into the week in a way that cannot be ignored or evaded by distraction and must therefore be welcomed and embraced and celebrated. There is no way to cheat, catch up, get ahead, achieve, manage, accomplish, or do anything at all except experience time as creatures whom God has made in his own image and blessed and chosen and called.
It would be nice, wouldn’t it, if at this point I could write that we have embraced a sort of Shabbos of our own: that after my revelation about the beauty of a holy day, I have led the family into allowing Sunday to be a day of real rest and beauty. If we had, I have no doubt it would be wonderful. If three hours a week of getting-nothing-done turned down the flame under my compulsion to fret and nag and accomplish, I can only imagine what twenty-five hours might do. It hasn’t happened. I am still a dedicated fretter and nagger and accomplisher. But nowadays I am drawn to Shabbos houses, to time that is truly free, to space that, under the guidance of Torah, is set apart to welcome holiness.
I still feel awkward about hanging around on Shabbos, mind you. No longer because I think that my friends will be embarrassed by having me around to see what a pain in the neck Shabbos is, but because I am embarrassed to bring my usual compulsive self into a space that is not usual. Nonetheless, I am drawn to Shabbos houses; I look for excuses to drop round and angle for invitations to go over to play Scrabble. (Scrabble doesn’t violate the prohibition on writing because all you are doing is rearranging tiles. Keeping score would be a problem, however, because writing down numbers on paper would involve making permanent marks, thus creating something new, and even God did not create on the seventh day. But as Shabbos was made for man and not man for Shabbos,we don’t let that stop us; we each get a book and keep score by putting bookmarks in the pages.) Maybe something of it will rub off on me, and in a few years—when everyone is out of diapers, and I’ve finished those syllabi on missiology and science and religion I’ve been toying with for years, and I’ve finally written my book on Victorian religious historiography—I’ll get the point, learn to stop being efficient and overachieving, and, for a few hours, simply be God’s creature.