The second-best book on the Sabbath

"The Sabbath, I said, is not only an idea. It is also something you keep. With other people." 

- Judith Shulevitz

If you read only one book about the Sabbath, it should be Abraham Joshua Heschel's 1951 classic. If you have time to read another one, I recommend a book that was published just last week: The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time by Judith Shulevitz. (If you don't have time to read either book, you need both of them more than you realize.)

I grew up keeping Sabbath. My parents were staunch Seventh-day Adventists, and every week by late Friday afternoon the house was clean, the next day's food was cooked, and baths were taken. Fridays were hell, but they ensured that for the next 24 hours we would have a total respite from paid work, house work, yard work, and school work. As a basically lazy person whose responsible behavior was motivated by guilt, I appreciated the weekly shift : every Sabbath, guilt attached itself not to sloth but to work.

In the three decades since I left the Adventist church, I have read a variety of Protestant books about the Sabbath. Most refer to the Jewish Sabbath, offer some wisdom about the Western enslavement to work, and suggest taking time off for worship and restoration : weekly, if possible (Tuesdays would be fine), less often if necessary, and don't forget the annual vacation. Good counsel, to be sure - but from authors who do not understand Sabbath because they have never really lived it.

Judith Shulevitz understands Sabbath.

My friend the orthodox rabbi might disagree, since he has kept Sabbath faithfully for over 60 years while Shulevitz keeps "the Sabbath, but only halfway - by strict Jewish standards, at least - which sometimes feels fine and sometimes feels shameful but has come to feel inevitable.... Probably the only way for me to trick myself into being shomer Shabbat," she writes, "would be to restrict myself to circles where such behavior is the norm, not subject to constant question."

Shulevitz's disclaimer is one reason I find her understanding of Sabbath so much deeper than that of most contemporary Protestants (though not than that of the observant rabbi) : she knows you can't keep a real Sabbath on your own. Sabbath is a community affair, and no amount of individual days off can replicate it, even if you spend part of your Sabbath time in church.

Not only is Sabbath impossible without community, but community is much harder to create without Sabbath. "People who study the ways in which cultures evolve might say that the Sabbath gives societies a competitive advantage. It promotes social solidarity," Shulevitz writes. It does this by limiting work time in order to allow time for social bonding, by giving everyone the same day off so they can do things together, by insisting that this day be observed every week so that it becomes a habit, and by making the day festive, "filled with song, wine, food, and pretty clothes."

Adventists didn't get the memo about wine, but the SDA enclaves of my youth excelled in the other three categories, plus nature walks and games involving Bible verses. A festive day it was and still is, according to frequent Friday-afternoon status updates by my still-SDA Facebook friends. Now tired, overworked, fragmented adults, many of them can't wait for the sun to go down so that Sabbath can begin.

They may be as interested as I was by Shulevitz's brief but accurate history of the Christian Sabbath. Her handling of the Sabbath-to-Sunday switch is essentially what I learned from Seventh-day Adventist seminary professors, and Adventists may see traces of their own heritage in her comments on Sabbath and Bible reading, the Puritan Sabbath, the Transylvanian Sabbath (who knew?) and religious liberty, and the evangelical and romantic Sabbaths of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Shulevitz, who has written for Slate, the New York Times, The New Yorker, and The New Republic, calls this book spiritual autobiography, but she focuses much more on Sabbath than on herself. She may begin a paragraph with "Sometimes I think that drinking wine is the only form of religiosity I can consistently muster," but before the next indent she will mention Elliott Horowitz, a contemporary social historian; the first-century biographer Plutarch; a 17th-century rabbi from Frankfurt; Passover rituals; and the French poet Charles Baudelaire. Sometimes her erudition is dizzying, but it is never heavy-handed. "Wine," the paragraph concludes, "is the Sabbath in a bottle."

The book is already attracting a lot of media attention. For example, read Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's highly personal review/response, "On the Seventh Day," in the New York Times Sunday Book Review (March 25), or listen to Terry Gross's interview of Shulevitz on NPR's Fresh Air (March 31). If you're reading this today, April 1, a real treat is in store for you : Shulevitz will be tonight's guest of honor on  The Colbert Report (no foolin').

Viral Social Change

Yesterday I commented on Gail Collins's op ed piece by asking if all we can do in the face of global climate change is cultivate our gardens, as Voltaire advised. This morning Michael Pollan says yes.

Check out his excellent article in the New York Times Magazine's Green Issue: "Why Bother?" (Pollan is the author of two of my favorite books: The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food.)

Pollan, acknowledging our apparent helplessness in the face of a huge problem, offers no simplistic solutions. Instead, he writes about morality and virtue--not personal priggishness, but rather a kind of viral virtue that might start at the grassroots (literally) and work its way up and out.

I just reread the article, looking for a sentence or two to quote. Trouble is, the entire article is so well conceived and so well written that to present just a few words of it would be to distort its overall effect. But OK, here's one of many striking paragraphs. I hope it will motivate you to read the whole article:

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For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we’re living our lives suggests we’re not really serious about changing — something our politicians cannot fail to notice. They will not move until we do. Indeed, to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money and grand schemes, to save us from our predicament represents precisely the sort of thinking — passive, delegated, dependent for solutions on specialists — that helped get us into this mess in the first place. It’s hard to believe that the same sort of thinking could now get us out of it.

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I am not a gardener. Green plants bow down before me--and die. But Pollan has almost persuaded me . . .

Give me a break--or a Sabbath

Years ago while driving in England, my husband and I encountered a "no" sign by the side of the road. Trouble was, it didn't tell us what not to do. Did it mean no parking? no overtaking? no hitchhiking? no tractors?

I grew up in a Sabbath-keeping community. Every Friday at sundown, a nonspecific "no" sign seemed to hover over our town. We knew it meant no working--that was straight from the book of Exodus. Our parents were pretty sure it meant no TV (except when JFK died on a Friday), no radio (except for stations that broadcast classical or religious music), no newspapers (though we could read religious magazines).

What about play? Well, probably not your usual games (so my friends and I invented "Bible ping-pong," where you shouted out a memory verse every time you served). Certain games had been developed for our limited market--Going to Jerusalem, Bible Seek--but they were about as exciting as Chutes and Ladders.

That left us with interminable nature walks. Sitting around the house with our parents and their friends. Or, more likely, hanging out with our own friends, gossiping and plotting what we would do as soon as the sun went down Saturday night. Sabbaths were long. God must have invented them to give us a taste of eternity.

In retrospect, these days of enforced inactivity sound idyllic. Maybe we didn't appreciate them because people had not yet learned how to be maniacally busy. Our parents worked hard, but they were usually home, off duty, by dinnertime. They did not generally help us with our homework (in those days, it was assumed that school was for the students, not their parents), and they rarely carpooled us to extracurricular activities.

For that matter, we didn't have all that many activities beyond the school day. A sandlot baseball game now and then, a "young people's meeting" at the church Friday evenings, a weekly piano lesson (generally within walking distances, and we walked a lot)--that was about it.

The biggest difference, though, was that we didn't live electronically. The personal computer had not been invented, so we did not have e-mail, blogs, facebook, computer games, blackberries, or Google-assisted net-surfing. Our ears were free of ipods and bluetooth headsets. We communicated by handwritten letters, which took from three days to a week to cross the country, or by telephone; and the only way to move around the house while talking on the phone was to buy an extremely long coiled cord which inevitably got tangled up in whatever else we were trying to do at the time.

Multitask was not a word.

We had Sabbaths then, and we didn't appreciate them. We are on call 24/7 now (and proud of it!), and we are desperate for relief. Check out Mark Bittman's excellent article in today's New York Times, "I Need a Virtual Break. No, Really," in which he recommends restoring sanity by keeping a secular Sabbath. Writing this on my computer on a Sunday morning before church, I think he's absolutely right.