Q and A with Judith Shulevitz
Michael Orbach: First question, a book about Shabbat, why?
Judith Shulevitz: That’s the key question. I kept on trying to figure it out even to the very last minute. I think it becomes clear that something was missing and I spent a lot of my life trying to figure out that missing thing, and taking steps and keeping the Sabbath as I felt it should be kept. In the end, just keeping it wasn’t enough; I wanted to learn about it and think about it really hard as a principle and not a ritual, as an idea about how to organize your life.
I wanted to get down to something basic about the Sabbath. We in the Judeo-Christian world kept to this tradition for thousands of years. It influenced us in profound ways and it seems to be going away except in small communities and what does it mean.
MO: What does it mean?
JS: I tried to describe the various natures of our time changing, not time as an absolute quality but how we are together — social time — the way we use time as a society. We are losing those kinds of boundaries that once protected a day of work and a day of family where it was understood people didn’t work. As a common conception it’s gone.
Over the past 50 years there has been a steady erosion of the standard workweek and the erosion of the weekend. The expectations used to be assumed that people would not work on Sunday in America. That expectation is disappearing and so are the rules that under-girded that expectation. What I’m calling for in my book is to stop, now that it’s going away, and let’s see if it was a good assumption and if we want to bring it back and do we want to bring it back with rules to give it teeth. It’s what we can do as a society to protect our community time and our social time.
MO: So, practically speaking, what has Shabbat done?
JS: In a really general way, not just a religious way, it provides a way to take time off together. It creates a sort of rule that allows people to not work. It establishes two principles: you have the right not to work and you have the right to spend the time not working. In fact, you can say there is an obligation to spend that time with family and it discourages things that take away from each other... I couldn’t prove it, because it’s an enormous claim, but were it not for the world of the Sabbath we would not have the concept of the dignity of laborers and having the right of time off.
Ahad Ha’am [pen name of 19th century essayist Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg] said, “More than the Jews have kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath kept the Jews.” It makes it possible that no matter where they [the Jewish people] were in the community, they would be together one day a week. It has an extraordinary ability to make them a cohesive and coherent community. It is the most powerful and most beloved of all rituals we are given as Jews. It’s very transformative. It’s made it possible for us to survive. I wouldn’t say it’s the only thing that explains the extraordinary Jewish survival, but it’s one of the things and it’s high on the list.
MO: What about your own beliefs concerning Shabbat?
JS: I’m not shomer Shabbos in a traditional way. We drive and turn on lights but we don’t use electronics and we have a Shabbat dinner. I go to shul; I go to seudat shlishit. I have the form of a fairly Conservative Shabbat but it’s not a strictly shomer Shabbat.
I became more and more shomer Shabbat. Admittedly, I’m not Orthodox, but when I had children it became very clear to me that the only way to pass the traditions on is to do them. It has been very gratifying to see my kids love Shabbat. When my son was three and four he wept at Havdalah. I can’t tell you what that does to a mother.
MO: What do you think would happen in a world without Shabbat?
JS: Stalin experimented with a continuous workweek. He shaved the weekend and instituted a five-day week and different days off for different sectors of society. It broke up families and it didn’t work and didn’t last. He was trying to generate more labor. I worry about the Stalin-type work-week, except Stalin isn’t doing it, we are. I worry that we will push ourselves to work non-stop and lose the ability to rest.
