The Sabbath World (10 page)

This, too, is an old vision of the Sabbath. The Sabbath, wrote the Babylonian scholar Saadia Gaon, “affords men leisure to meet each other at gatherings where they can confer about matters of their religion and make public pronouncements about them, and perform other functions of the same order.” But Gavison’s reference point is Ahad Ha’am, the late-nineteenth-century Zionist who argued for a cultural, rather than a political, Zionism—an Israel based on a positive Jewishness rather than on ethnic nationalism and anti-anti-Semitism. What he was calling for isn’t clear, either, though anyone who has ever found himself on a synagogue mailing list will be familiar with his sociological aperçu: “More than Israel has kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath has kept Israel.”

Can a day of rest really strengthen the bonds of a nation, or is that grandiloquence? Throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, Americans debated the merits of the Sabbath with the
same passion that Israelis bring to it today, and on largely the same grounds. The discussion turned on the question of whether there was anything about Sunday that warranted preservation once the old Puritan rigor had lost its appeal. The secular answer was that the American Sunday had become indispensable to the task of fostering America’s exceptional qualities—its egalitarianism and pluralism.

In a famous 1872 speech pleading for the opening of libraries and for public transportation on Sundays, the minister and abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher argued that only the liberalization of the Sabbath would conserve its character as a “a day peculiarly American” in its serendipitous neighborliness, family-minded “household love,” moral uplift, and “poetic element.” (Beecher was not above mixing xenophobia into his praise for the American Sunday. “Look at the countries where there is no Sunday,” he said. “Yes, look at the countries where people are not educated. Look at the countries where the people are priest-ridden. Look at the countries where there is no popular liberty. There you find that the tyrant, whether he be hierarch or potentate, pays off the people for their political liberty by giving them holidays to play on. They please them with amusement on Sunday, and other bribes, to make them willing to part with their privileges. But that is not the case in this country.”)

In 1906, an Episcopalian minister in Boston claimed, portentously, that Sunday had given the American character its “moral earnestness … that utters itself in every grand institution of freedom” and allowed “eighty million persons, the refugees of every land” to unite into a single people. In 1961, the Supreme Court justices Earl Warren and Felix Frankfurter issued separate but concurring opinions in defense of Sunday-closing (or blue) laws in a case called
McGowan et al. v. Maryland
, which wrote into legal history the bond between the Sabbath and civic consciousness. It’s unsettling to remember how recently Americans couldn’t work or shop on Sunday, except when medically necessary or when certain services or stores were deemed essential to fun on days off. What was wrong with letting people shop? Frankfurter glossed over the obvious point that it forced everyone in the retail sector to work and emphasized instead something less tangible:
the bustling, humming feel of a street open for business, which, he said, had the power to destroy “a cultural asset of importance: a release from the daily grind, a preserve of mental peace, an opportunity for self-disposition.” Warren and Frankfurter maintained that the Protestant Sunday had evolved into a secular day of recuperation, a public good that promoted the health of the American people and the orderliness of its society. Therefore, they ruled, blue laws did not violate the First Amendment’s stricture against the establishment of religion.

N
EARLY FIFTY YEARS AFTER
the Judahites were carried off to Babylon, Cyrus, the warrior king of the Persians, entered the city and took its puppet king prisoner. The Judahites hailed him as a savior. “He is my shepherd,” Isaiah has God say of Cyrus. Cyrus sent the Judahites home to reestablish their government and rebuild their Temple. The Bible claims that Yahweh inspired Cyrus’s generosity. Cyrus would have credited the principles of sound imperial administration. A shrewd and effective tyrant, he understood that he could ensure peace and stability in his kingdom by giving his subjects some control over their own destinies, but he handpicked their leaders to make sure that they were loyal to him.

The return took more than a century. The Judahites came in a trickle, then in waves. Their leaders were bookish, messianic, intense. Many of them hoped to restore the monarchy under Davidic rule. Rebuilding God’s house did not just mean rebuilding his Temple and protecting it with walls. It also meant disentangling his people from the seductive embrace of non-Judahites. The efforts of these determined favorites of the Persian kings enraged the locals, many of whom had mixed happily with their polytheistic neighbors and even married some of them. The Judahites who had stayed behind had their own ideas of what it meant to be a Jew in a post-Temple world, and many of them harassed their new leaders. It should be noted that,
right around this time, the returning Judahites begin to refer to themselves as “Jews,” or “yehudin” in Aramaic—that is, residents of the colony the Persians called Yehud (Judah, in Persian).

Archaeologists disagree about exactly how many people really left Judah during the exile, how many remained, how many returned, and how returnees treated those who had been left behind. Most archaeologists doubt that the land ever lay as empty or ruined as the Bible makes it sound. But you don’t need archaeology to see that, as a class, the “assembly of the exile” had little respect for the Jews who had remained in Yehud, and that these leaders devoted themselves to creating a special group of insiders free of all foreign influence and syncretism, and ensuring its dominance.

The Sabbath played a crucial role in this effort. The Sabbath was the great obsession of Nehemiah, a cupbearer and eunuch of the Persian king Artaxerxes sent to rebuild and govern Jerusalem in 445
B
.c
.E
., and for Ezra, a priest and scribe sent by Artaxerxes to investigate the state of religious life in Yehud. (Ezra is the first person we know ever to stand up before a congregation—gathered, in this case, in front of Jerusalem’s water gate—and read the Torah aloud.) Nehemiah and Ezra wanted to revive the cultic calendar, and started by enforcing Sabbath laws, which had largely been forgotten. “In those days,” Nehemiah writes, “saw I in Judah some treading on wine presses on the sabbath, and bringing in sheaves and lading asses; as also wine, grapes, and figs, and all manner of burdens, which they brought into Jerusalem on the sabbath day…. There dwelt men of Tyre also therein which brought fish, and all manner of ware, and sold on the sabbath unto the children of Judah, and in Jerusalem.” Horrified, Nehemiah complained to the city fathers, “What evil thing is this that ye do, and profane the sabbath day? Did not your fathers thus, and did not our God bring all this evil upon us, and upon this city?”

And so, Nehemiah tells us, he brought in his henchmen to block merchants from entering Jerusalem’s gates. “And it came to pass, that when the gates of Jerusalem began to be dark before the sabbath, I commanded that the gates should be shut, and charged that they
should not be opened till after the sabbath: and some of my servants set I at the gates, that there should be no burden brought in on the sabbath day.”

To understand how unneighborly it was for Nehemiah to shut the city gates, you have to know something about the city gate in the biblical world. It was much more than just a gate for going through or keeping out. “It was also the ‘center’ (even though at one side) of the city’s social, economic, and judicial affairs,” one historian writes. The city gate and the street behind it functioned as the speaker’s corner, the town hall, the law court, and the marketplace, all at the same time. That Nehemiah (or whoever wrote his book) understood the Sabbath as a way to winnow his people from the neighbors becomes clear when you read the story immediately following it—in it, he yells at the intermarried Jews and plucks their beards to prevent future intermarriage. After that dramatic illustration of his dislike of outsiders, Nehemiah brings his story to a close. His second-to-last verse goes like this: “Thus cleansed I them from all strangers.”

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EHEMIAH’S SHUTTING
of the gates made the Sabbath a geographical construct as well as a temporal one. The Sabbath, a day set apart, became a city enclosed, and a nation withdrawn into itself. Nearly a millennium later, the rabbis of the Talmud turned the Sabbath into a more modern space, a place both enclosed and open. They developed a body of laws whereby, by following certain prescribed procedures, a community could construct a boundary marking off a Jewish neighborhood for the duration of the Sabbath. In lieu of a gate, the laws called for a wall, but not the impermeable kind of wall that surrounded Jerusalem. This was not a wall of brick or clay or stone. This was to be a notional wall—a wall concept, you might say, a boundary marked by thin wires strung from pole to pole high above the head. This wall-like entity they called an
eruv
, which in Hebrew means “mixing” or “commingling,” since an
eruv
brings together entities otherwise kept apart on the Sabbath. (Technically, the word refers to
many acts that “mix” or “commingle” the forbidden with the permissible, not just this particular symbolic wall.)

The Bible wished upon its readers a very localized, confining Sabbath. Biblical law forbids Jews to walk very far or carry anything on the Sabbath from one domain to another. They are not to carry from the private domain, or home, to the public domain, or street, or the other way around, or between two private domains, and so on. The rabbinic
eruv
sweeps away these restrictions by bundling together assorted city spaces—apartment buildings and alleyways, courtyards and front yards—and recategorizing them, within limits, as one large private domain. (Busy public thoroughfares don’t qualify.) The
eruv
advanced the legal fiction that all the Jews in a neighborhood live in one big
heimishe
Jewish household.

The potential for claustrophobic self-sequestration contained within this idea is, of course, enormous, and was often realized during the course of Jewish history, but its usefulness should also be pointed out. With an
eruv
in place, traditional Jews stroll through the streets on the Sabbath with a commanding ease, as if moving from room to room. Women carry their babies and push strollers; men carry their books and prayer shawls; guests carry wine to their hosts. At a more abstract level, an
eruv
delineates the contours of a Jewish space, which adds value beyond the value added when real-estate prices soar within the footprint of the
eruv
. If you read
Eruvin
, the tractate that deals with the laws of the
eruv
, you will discover that the rabbis belonged to, and wrote about, highly mixed societies. In their neighborhoods, Jews and non-Jews lived next to and on top of one another. Different kinds of Jews—rabbinic, non-rabbinic, Torah-reading, non-Torah-reading—also mingled. With the
eruv
, the rabbis uncovered a way to pry unity out of diversity. One set of
eruv
laws requires beneficiaries of an
eruv
to make a collective donation of bread, and imposes penalties on neighbors who are too stingy or forgetful to do so. As it was with collecting manna, so it is with building the
eruv:
You have to learn the lesson of cooperation. Another set of laws ponders the mystery of how to involve the non-Jewish neighbor in the peculiar act of making an
eruv
. The discussion concludes with the opinion that you
probably can’t, and that you should probably retreat to a mostly Jewish neighborhood. The
eruv
, in other words, is a segregator and identity-enhancer and nation-builder. Its quasi-fictional walls were the stage upon which the Jews imagined their way into the idea of community.

S
OMETIME IN THE MID-1970S
, my mother, certain that our Puerto Rican sojourn had weakened, if not destroyed, her children’s sense of Jewishness, began looking for a Jewish summer camp to send me to. She wound up choosing the same summer camp that she had gone to in the 1940s, an archetypal scattering of cabins, rec halls, and playing fields in rural New Hampshire. This was the institution in which my mother, a public-school student, had acquired her religious Zionism. I did not appear likely to follow her example. I was a girl growing up in the honky-tonk part of an American colony, used to spending my spare time sneaking into hotels to swim in warm, clear, forbidden pools. And suddenly I was forced to take swimming lessons in an ice-cold dark-brown body of water that the instructors called a lake, though it was clearly no more than a pond. My friends at home were the transient children of businessmen briefly stationed on the island, some American, some European. We had mastered the tone of world-weariness meant to let people know that we were well traveled, if a bit neglected. My fellow campers, on the other hand, were earnest students at Jewish day schools from the decorous middle-class suburbs of Boston. I had to play games I’d never heard of, like tetherball, and pretend to know something about the TV shows that were constantly alluded to, even though Puerto Rican television, at least then, broadcast only a handful of American programs, all a year or so late and dubbed into Spanish.

I could fake acquaintance with American pop culture, but I couldn’t fake being Jewish. My after-school Hebrew school left me with hardly any knowledge of the language, whereas my peers could read the Bible in the original. Nor did I know what to do when we
gathered to pray first thing in the morning. I was particularly confused by one move, a series of steps ending in some bows that were required at the beginning and end of the standing silent prayer called the Amidah. I usually tried to imitate the person praying in front of me, which made everyone behind me snicker.