Unplug Challenge

Judith Shulevitz: We Can Have the “Light” Sabbath

Judith Shulevitz, author of the new book “The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time,” wrote in the April 16 Washington Post’s “On Faith” column that people have largely rejected the Sabbath because “there’s a light Sabbath and a dark Sabbath.”:

“The light Sabbath features community and festivity and what a famous professor of psychology once called ‘freedom from all slavery to the clock.’ The dark Sabbath bristles with rules and regulations, and at the extreme, fanaticism…Americans may recall the light Sabbath with a certain fondness, at least if they hanker after a calmer way of life. But they are mostly thrilled that over the past 50 years we’ve done away with the dark, coercive one.”

“But what if I told you that we could have some of the light Sabbath back, if we’d accept just a little bit of the dark one? We could have something to which we’d probably say yes–namely, more time for self and family and neighborhood–and all we’d have to do is let ourselves be governed by a few nos, a few rules about not working at a pre-arranged time. Conversely, if we don’t accept a no or two, then the kind of time that used to be protected by the Sabbath–time during which everyone leaves the office or factory and turns to one another for entertainment and sustenance–is in danger of disappearing.
Am I calling for a return to blue laws? Not exactly, if by that you mean the laws that forbid us to buy liquor on Sunday, as well as (depending on the state) to wrestle, box, race cars, play bingo, or go oyster-fishing. What I am saying is that we could learn from the Sabbath how to protect our time against the two grand addictions of the age–work and the Internet. What we’d learn is the immense usefulness, to society, of a structured period of non-productivity, as well as the need to enforce that pause. Putting teeth into a neo-Sabbath might involve legislation–tougher laws restricting off-hours and weekend work, or compensating it at a higher rate. Or it might involve the voluntary revival of old customs, such as the list of non-activities recommended by the just-launched Sabbath Manifesto Project: ‘Avoid technology.’ ‘Get outside.’ ‘Drink wine.'”

“The problem many Americans have with the Sabbath is that it smacks of religiosity. If the Sabbath is a strictly clerical institution, then any laws that help us to keep it breach the wall between church and state, right? Wrong. A mere half-century ago, in 1961, the Supreme Court upheld Sunday-closing laws on the grounds that they did not violate the constitutional rule against state sponsorship of religion. Justice Felix Frankfurter argued that though the Sabbath was first taught in the Bible, the American Sunday had evolved into a secular institution, a civic good, ‘a cultural asset of importance: a release from the daily grind, a preserve of mental peace, an opportunity for self-disposition.'”

  • John Trainor

    In various interviews, Judy Shulevitz is unmistakably speaking on Sunday ENFORCEMENT. What about religious freedom? What about liberty of conscience? I choose to observe a day other than Sunday as the Sabbath. If her suggestions were put into practice I would be forced to keep two Sabbaths. Such laws would be directly contrary to the principles of this government, to the genius of its free institutions, to the direct and solemn avowals of the Declaration of Independence, and to the Constitution. The founders of the nation wisely sought to guard against the employment of secular power on the part of the church, with its inevitable result– intolerance and persecution. The Constitution provides that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” and that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office of public trust under the United States.” Only in flagrant violation of these safeguards to the nation’s liberty, can any religious observance be enforced by civil authority.

    Judy Shulevitz quotes:

    But one of the things I argue in the book is that, one of the ideas, the political ideas, that is sort of embedded in the Sabbath, is the idea that as a society we have a right to take control of our time, and say that maybe as a democratic society, we want to decide to bring back some rules about what can and can not be done one day a week.

    It’s just as difficult to envision the Sabbath surviving the current speeding-up of everything without some generally enforced slowdown.

    What we’d learn is the immense usefulness, to society, of a structured period of non-productivity, as well as the need to enforce that pause. Putting teeth into a neo-Sabbath might involve legislation–tougher laws…

    The Sabbath is an extraordinary piece of machinery for creating solidarity and fellow feeling, and it sort of works. There’s a four step program for creating community, that the Sabbath does. Imagine that you are a social engineer. Imagine that you wanted to create a particularly cohesive society. How would you do it? Well, one thing you would quickly do is you would put everyone on a common calendar…The first thing you would really do is set aside one day in which everybody could sort of come together, be free from their work and would come together. And the second thing you’d do is make that day is the same for everyone – that everyone could come together, everyone could not work at the same time – and the third thing you would do is make it habitual so that everyone did this regularly.

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