The Sabbath World (30 page)

Well, yes, it did. But it was the standard form for vows in the ancient world. But what did it mean?
What did it mean?
Had we never asked ourselves why there are so many rules about sexuality in the Torah? Were our forefathers nothing more than unenlightened prudes? Had they simply never considered the advantages of sexual liberation? It seemed to Rabbi Paul that they had, and had rejected it. Consider the content of the vow the servant is asked to make: He is to swear that he will choose the right wife for Abraham’s son. She is not to be Canaanite, which is to say, licentious. She is to be from Abraham’s family, which is to say, decent. It seemed to Rabbi Paul that our forefathers did not fail to appreciate the terrible, necessary power of sexuality. Consider the almost baroque suspense that dominates several chapters in Genesis, as Sarah and Abraham wait impatiently into their nineties before God grants them a son. Think of what God said to Abraham: “And I will make thy seed as the dust of the earth: so that if a man can number the dust of the earth, then shall thy seed also be numbered.”

From that penis springs the fulfillment of God’s promise. Sex drives the biblical narrative. That is why Abraham makes his servant place his hand on his penis to swear. Sex bears the word and the power of God himself. And for that reason it is to be understood as the most sacred of human activities. It is not enough for Abraham’s son to ejaculate, to copulate, to reproduce. He must do so in the right way. He must circumcise the organ. He must marry a woman who can live up to the promise. And so, likewise, we must learn to respect the awesome significance of the sexual act by following the strictures and rituals the Torah gives us to sacralize it, or at least by meditating upon their meaning. That goes not just for circumcision, which, of course, has made itself palatable to the modern mind by passing for hygiene, but also for the more troubling edicts, such as the rules about when a wife is impure to her husband.

I remember noting, at the time, that Rabbi Paul gave us an out. We could
meditate
on the laws. We didn’t always have to follow them. I didn’t entirely agree with him about that. It struck me as arbitrary. How do you decide which laws to follow and which ones to meditate on? Nor did he, who was so strict about some things and not so strict about others, always agree with himself. He manifested all the contradictoriness of the American Conservative movement, to which he tenaciously adhered; the effort to juggle modernity and the ancient mechanisms of rabbinic law produced many contortions, such as permission to drive a car on the Sabbath. Rabbi Paul was always able to cite some well-thought-through Conservative ruling to justify some apparent Conservative oxymoron, and, of course, I was not qualified to judge the merits of those. But his apparent contradictoriness made me love him with a protective tenderness that was all the more fierce and tender because he had made himself so offensive to everyone else.

I took, I have to admit, a rather adolescent pleasure in playing the rabbi’s defender during the many synagogue social events at which his flaws were anatomized and deplored. But I genuinely loved the man. I loved his arrogance, his abruptness, his bullheadedness. His difficultness embodied, for me, the difficultness of religion itself. If he was hapless, religion was hapless. At least he wasn’t a smooth talker effacing its unpleasantnesses with a free application of smarm, which had previously been my idea of what religious professionals do.

I loved him because he showed me how to love Jewish law. I knew (though I often pretended to myself that I didn’t know) that I would never be born again as an Orthodox Jew. I would never, for example, observe the laws of
niddah
, which determine at which point in a woman’s menstrual cycle she may have sex with her husband. Nor would I be able to uproot myself and join the kind of community that would make it possible for me to follow every jot and tittle of Sabbath law. But I could also refuse to reject such laws as merely antiquated. I could allow myself to love them. I could hold them in my mind as if they were poems to live by. For though I knew that blood is life, when it pours out of my body, I could remember the laws of
niddah
and know that blood is also death, which is why one is supposed to purify
oneself after menstruation. I could remember that menstruation is also a tragedy, albeit on a very small scale—the disappearance of a possible life, the evanescence of an angelic ghost—and soon to be overturned by the joyous comedy of ovulation. I didn’t want a baby when I first had this thought. But
niddah
is what first made me grasp the enormity of the fact that I
could
have one. And as with
niddah
, so with the Sabbath. I need not
be
a Sabbatarian to be a Sabbatarian. I could grasp, even celebrate, the urgent necessity of a day of rest without cutting myself off from the busy, convenient, 24/7 world that I knew and loved.

Or could I?

C
AN WE DO NOTHING MORE THAN TURN THE
S
ABBATH OVER IN OUR
minds, the way we would a poem, and extract from it anything worth having?

The answer is obvious: obviously yes, and obviously no. Of course the Sabbath is worth mulling over—everything is—and of course you can’t derive much lasting benefit from a regularly observed period of rest if you don’t observe it regularly. Even if you do nothing but remember the Sabbath, though, you press your nose up against a different order of time, and that has its uses. For one thing, it will make you appreciate the near-impossibility of bringing it back. We have changed too much to contemplate its return, at least in its old form, even though the bulk of that change has happened in a short span of time.

As recently as at the beginning of the past century—to revert to that great lurch toward modernity—Sunday mornings in the United States were still filled “with Sunday school [and] church,” as the American historian Alexis McCrossen writes, as well as “excursions, picnics, movies, and trolley rides.” In 1908, G. Stanley Hall, the psychologist
and, most famously, the Clark University president who invited Sigmund Freud to visit America, eulogized Sunday’s domestic charms: “freedom from all slavery to the clock, better and more leisurely toilets and meals, the hush of noise on the deserted street, the greatly intensified charm of the sky, sunshine, trees, fields, pleasant morning anticipations for the day, more zest for reading and perhaps study, converse with friends, calls, visits, correspondence, as well as rest pure and simple, for body and mind.”

Hall’s lovely essay, however, laid bare the contradiction that doomed his high-minded Sabbatarianism. Hall, a churchgoing Protestant and a man of practical bent, begged Americans to adopt “the scientific Sunday”—the psychologically and physically hygienic day that Dickens pressed for, a day of exercise, highbrow entertainment, and family “walks and talks and nature lessons.” Innocent and appealing as this “scientific” Sunday sounds, it spelled the end of the Sabbatarian Sunday.

Before we can understand why, though, we have to remember the kind of Sabbath Hall was reacting to. In 1908, strict Sunday-closing laws remained in force in seventeen states and in Indian territory. They banned amusements, fishing, and hunting, as well as selling and working. Hall’s own Sunday had a milder rigor to it, but a rigor nonetheless. In his home state of Massachusetts, he had the right to buy a Sunday paper, that amalgam of news and gossip and fashion advice that Sabbatarian ministers still railed against. He could smoke a pipe; Massachusetts did not forbid the sale of tobacco. By comparison, many of the western states, which passed their Sunday-closing laws just as the old-time behavioral codes had begun to lose their force, were far more permissive. In Wyoming, as Hall points out, he could send a telegraph, repair farm equipment, smelt metal and glass, and buy ice cream, milk, fresh meat, and bread. In New Mexico, he could conduct business as usual on Sunday; only the kinds of work and amusements that might disturb congregations and families were prohibited.

Hall applauded this latter sort of active and permissive Sabbath, as long as it preserved a Christian decorum. Let “mild drinks” be served,
so that “gross intoxication” would not be sought. Let there be innocent entertainments at which the sexes could commingle, so that vice would not be indulged in. Let children out of doors to play sports and games, and let adults play their sports and games, too. America had to make Sunday a day of leisure, Hall argued, if it was to have a Sunday at all.

Not that such changes weren’t already under way. In the previous half century, museums, libraries, and world’s fairs had all begun opening on Sundays, along with movie theaters and baseball stadiums. And those places were where the contradictions between the “scientific” and the “Sabbatarian” Sunday became unavoidable. The problem with substituting cultural consumption and active leisure for rest is that one person’s recreation is another person’s work. If museums, libraries, and baseball stadiums are to stay open, then security guards and librarians have to work, and baseball players have to play.

Legislators tried to keep pace with changing mores by expanding the scope of “works of necessity and charity”; that is, the work required for the maintenance of expected standards of living and the enjoyment of leisure. Utilities were to keep providing power and water on Sundays; deliverymen were to keep depositing ice and milk at front doors. Presses kept printing, operators kept connecting telephone calls, radio and television stations kept broadcasting. Amusement parks, national parks, opera houses, restaurants, cigar stores, train stations, and airports kept serving up all the other goods and services required by their customers and patrons.

What destroyed the reign of blue laws, though, wasn’t just that everyone went to work on Sunday—the Sunday service sector remained relatively small in proportion to the rest of the economy—but also that the definition of “necessity and charity” broadened until the line it drew between life and work began to seem laughable. The distinctions between permissible and non-permissible Sunday commerce had always varied from state to state and county to county, but the laws had evinced a rough consensus of what was proper on Sunday and what wasn’t. By the middle of the twentieth century, though, you could dine at a restaurant in one city but not in another. Even if
you stayed within city lines, you could buy an item in one neighborhood but not in another, or you could buy
this
item at a store but not
that
one at the same store. Tackle shops and beach burger shacks stayed open; downtown department stores didn’t. You could buy film from a photo shop on the boardwalk, but not the camera needed to use it.

Sunday-closing laws came under attack in the courts for failing to pass what is called a “rational basis test.” They discriminated so unpredictably among activities, varied so widely from one region to another, and were enforced so randomly that they violated the due-process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees equal protection to all citizens. The other criticism that emerged was that Sunday-closing laws violated the First Amendment, which forbids the establishment of a particular religion and endorses freedom of religious practice. Religious minorities, such as Seventh-Day Adventists and Orthodox Jews, began to file lawsuits objecting to having to close their stores for two days of the week, Saturday and Sunday. In response to those challenges, several states began to make exceptions for Saturday Sabbath-keepers.

The Supreme Court’s decision in
McGowan et al. v. Maryland
(1961) upheld Sunday-closing laws on the grounds that the government’s interest in the well-being of the majority of its citizens overrode whatever burdens Sunday laws imposed on the minority. Justice Felix Frankfurter, recognizing that to the unsympathetic eye the laws looked like what one skeptic later called a “gallimaufry,” or potpourri, insisted that they were not irrational. It was possible to draw a “reasonable line of demarcation” between those activities that “add enjoyment” to Sunday and those that needlessly deprive employees of their day.

But the sense of urgency that held that line of demarcation was ebbing away. McCrossen points out that the success of the labor movement also helped dim Sunday’s luster. In the earlier decades of the twentieth century, activists agitating for shorter hours—with occasional though unreliable support from Sunday Sabbatarian organizations—had managed to shorten the workweek to five days from six
or seven, and the workday to eight hours from ten or twelve. The first five-day workweek was granted in 1908 at a New England mill that employed many Jewish workers. Henry Ford was the first major manufacturer to adopt the five-day week; he grasped that the American people needed more time to shop if they were going to buy his cars. In 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act established the forty-hour workweek and eight-hour day as the norm and gave the ordinary working person so many more free hours that the labor-free Sunday seemed less urgent than before.

The group that really turned Sunday inside out, though, was women. As they poured into the workforce in the 1960s and the 1970s, they had less time to shop during the week. More of women’s traditional domestic duties—cooking, cleaning, child care—had to be outsourced. Divorce became more common, and with it single parents, male as well as female, who had no choice but to shop on weekends.

Businesses quickly perceived the demand for Sunday shopping hours and began lobbying state legislatures to make those hours legal. Not all businesses supported repeal of the Sunday laws. Some department-store owners actually preferred the old way of doing things, in some cases out of personal religious conviction and in some cases because they doubted that opening on Sunday would actually increase sales, rather than spread the same quantity of sales over seven days instead of six. Many small businesses resisted opening on Sunday, too, fearing that the cost of Sunday labor—proportionally greater for them than for larger establishments—would make it harder for them to compete. Some small businesses enjoyed special exemptions that allowed them to stay open on Sunday (which businesses qualified for exemptions varied state by state); these gave mom-and-pop stores an extra weapon in their arsenal in the battle to ward off the chain stores, so they had no interest in changing the status quo.