The Sabbath World (34 page)

I like to think that I share this view with Kafka. At least that’s how I read his famous parable of the leopards:

In one run-on sentence Kafka provides a history of ritual, a definition of God, and a theory of habit.
Ritual
tames the trauma caused by the leopards—the random violence of life—by incorporating them into a routine.
Religion
is the sum of such routines.
God
is what we make of the leopards. After all, the wine in the sacrificial chalices had been set aside for God. If leopards drink the wine again and again, and if that action has become central to a ritual script, then according to that script leopards play the part of God. And if they do that, why then, soon enough, we’re bound to perceive them
as
God, or as gods. And very good gods they make, too: terrifying, beautiful, unpredictable, susceptible to domestication.

God, then, is the ungovernable reality commemorated by ritual. Ritual reflects the highly contingent anthropological, geographical, agricultural, and historical facts that conditioned our neural pathways and tribal behaviors and the forms and customs that became religion, and that even now determine through force of repetition the way things ought to be. Or maybe I’ve just naïvely inflated a random evolutionary outcome—the human predisposition to incarnate memory in custom, and those customs themselves—into an overblown fantasy called God. God, then, is my parents, and my parents’ parents, and all those who came before. God is the ancestors, which is probably how our ancestors saw the matter.

Not long ago, my six-year-old son, Moses, a boy with many reservations about his Jewish-day-school education, informed me, with genuine sorrow, that he didn’t believe in God. “Sometimes,” he said, “I think God is a story someone made up a long time ago and told to his children, and his children told it to his children, and so on, until we all got into the habit of thinking it was true.” Though sometimes, he added, he thinks that he’s wrong, and that God will punish him harshly for daring to think such things.

I realized with chagrin that I am one of Moses’ children, in all the senses of that phrase. I tell the story of God to my children so that they will tell it to their children. I keep the Sabbath more or less the way my parents kept it, and chances are that my children will keep it more or less the same way. Actually, I suspect that my Moses will not
keep it at all, but that, too, is a part of his heritage, a way for him to stay loyal to me. Will the ancestors take revenge on him, as he fears they will? Probably. They did on me. I grapple with them every Saturday.

Freud also thought ritual—which he equated with obsessive-compulsiveness and neurosis—was the revenge of the dead. In
Totem and Taboo
, he gave his Oedipal history of religion: It came into being when a group of brothers killed their father, who had denied them access to women. Instantly, they felt remorse. Their guilt required expiation, so they invented ritual as a form of self-punishment. They also ate the father, an event that becomes the basis for religious festivals, and everything else besides. The totem meal, Freud wrote, was “a repetition and a commemoration of this memorable and criminal deed,” as well as “the beginning of so many things—of social organization, of moral restrictions and of religion.”

The autobiographical moment for which this fantasy is said to have been a screen can be found in
The Interpretation of Dreams
. Here Freud tells a tale that is usually characterized as one of his earliest encounters with anti-Semitism and, therefore, a primal scene that explains his defensively dismissive attitude toward religion. Curiously, it’s also a tale of the Sabbath. When Freud was ten or twelve years old, he went on a walk with his father, Jakob Freud—perhaps a Sabbath walk, since Jakob was known to take them—during which Jakob told a story that was meant to explain to Sigmund that life had improved a great deal for Jews over the course of Jakob’s lifetime. The events described in Jakob’s story, in any case, definitely take place on a Sabbath walk:

“When I was a young man,” said Jakob Freud, “I went for a walk one Saturday in the streets of your birthplace; I was well dressed, and had a new fur cap on my head. A Christian came up to me and with a single blow knocked off my cap into the mud and shouted: ‘Jew! get off the pavement!’”

“And what did you do?” asked young Sigmund.

“I went into the roadway and picked up my cap,” Jakob quietly replied.

The young Freud was dismayed: “This struck me as unheroic conduct on the part of the big, strong man who was holding the little boy by the hand.” Whenever he thought about the incident, he substituted for the disturbing image of his submissive father another that he liked better: a scene in which the Carthaginian general Hannibal’s father “made his boy swear before the household altar to take vengeance on the Romans.”

Some background is required to understand all this. Jakob Freud was raised in a Hasidic family and well trained in Jewish literature and ritual; indeed, there is evidence that he homeschooled Sigmund until he was seven and taught him Hebrew, Torah, and Talmud, even though Freud sometimes denied having had enough Jewish education to distinguish Yiddish from Hebrew. Given Jakob’s upbringing, it seems distinctly possible that the hat that was knocked off his head was a
shtreimel
, a round, flat ring of fur worn by Hasidic men on the Sabbath and on Jewish holidays. The
shtreimel
, if that’s what Jakob Freud was wearing, was a flagrant display of ritual headgear; and if that is not what he was wearing, Jakob was still obviously dressed up for the Sabbath, a fact that would not have escaped his son.

This story, then, gives us another way to imagine the relationship between ritual and trauma, especially as Freud saw it. Ritual is not only an expiation for, or a defense against, trauma, as per
Totem and Taboo
. Ritual itself traumatizes. The singular Jewishness of Jakob Freud’s Sabbath hat singled him out for violence. On six days he passed as a regular German (the incident took place in Freiburg, a town in what is now the Czech Republic, which is where the Freud family lived before they moved to Vienna); on the seventh day he was a Jew, and assaulted as such. What the story comes to teach us is that if ritual is born of trauma the aversion to ritual is also born of trauma—the trauma of ritual. Keeping the Sabbath as our forefathers did strait-jackets us in an identity that we did not choose and for which we may not want to take the consequences. It goes against our yearning for a world of infinite possibility. It exposes us to violence, ridicule, prejudice, ostracism.

On the other hand, we are often as irrationally opposed to ritual
as ritual is irrational in its demands upon us. Freud’s marriage to his much-beloved Martha, who had been raised in a deeply observant Jewish home, nearly failed to take place because he refused to participate in a Jewish ceremony. Shortly thereafter, he forbade Martha to light the Sabbath candles, a bit of marital high-handedness that she remained bitter about throughout their otherwise apparently happy marriage. (She began lighting candles again after he died.)

Rituals are not just idealized visions of how things can be. They are also artifacts of history. Why choose Sunday as the American day of rest? Because that is what it has always been, and tradition has its virtues. Or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe what the choice of Sunday commemorates is the rage and insecurity at the heart of Christianity about Jews and their Sabbath, feelings that had homicidal and even genocidal consequences. Maybe we ought not to honor so ignoble a history. Or maybe it is more honest to let Sunday continue to remind us of its problematic origins. The philosopher Jürgen Habermas once argued that one of the advantages of secular societies is that they substitute rational discourse or speech for the manipulatively symbolic communications of ritual. If you can discuss the way things should be, rather than simply enact your vision of them or let them impose their history on you, you have a hope of arriving at a reasoned, reflective consensus about the good life. Should we rest on Sunday or Saturday, or any day in seven? Let us hold a conference on the subject.

The problem with Habermas’s Platonic reasonableness is that it would banish the poets, along with their poetry. The Sabbath may have defensible social value, in that it offers excellent ideas about time and society, but it also bears testimony to that which can’t be defended, only re-experienced: men and women mute with the disjunctions of exile and the awkwardness of living in a time that does not feel like theirs and mournful with the wish to find a home, if not in space, then in time. And because the Sabbath, Sunday as well as Saturday, is a day those men and women kept, and not a conversation they had, the men and women who came after them remembered it. And when they, too, felt discomfited by their world, they were able to do something about that feeling and assuage their pain a bit. Or
maybe they didn’t do what they had been taught to do, because it no longer gave them comfort, but not doing while feeling uncomfortable about it is also a way of remembering.

So why remember the Sabbath? Because the Sabbath comes to us out of the past—out of the bodies of our mothers and fathers, out of the churches on our streets, out of our own dreams—to train us to pay attention to it. And why do we need to be trained? Consider the mystery surrounding God’s first Sabbath. Why
did
God stop, anyway? In the eighteenth century, Rabbi Elijah of Vilna (the Vilna Gaon) ventured this explanation: God stopped to show us that what we create becomes meaningful only once we stop creating it and start remembering why it was worth creating in the first place. Or—if this is the thought to which our critical impulses lead us—why it
wasn’t
worth creating, why it isn’t up to snuff and should be created anew. After all, God, contemplating his first Creation, decided to destroy it in a flood. We could let the world wind us up and set us to working, like dolls that go until they fall over because they have no way of stopping. But that would make us less than human. We have to remember to stop because we have to stop to remember.

“is perfectly
sui generis
and irreducible”: Rudolf Otto,
The Idea of the Holy
, translated by John W. Harvey (New York, London: Oxford University Press, 1923), p. 7.

The Law, the legal theorist: Robert Cover, “Nomos and Narrative,”
Harvard Law Review
97, no. 1 (November 1983): 4–
69
.

“Holy days, rituals, liturgies”: Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi,
Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory
(Seattle: University of Washington Press for Jewish Publication Society of America, 1982), pp. 42–43.

“Because of the river Sambatyon”: Sanhedrin 65b; Genesis Rabbah 11:5.

“for they have no manservants”: Elkan Nathan Adler,
ed., Jewish Travellers
(London: George Routledge & Sons, 1930), p. 13.

“Sunday comes, and brings”: Charles Dickens,
Sunday, Under Three Heads
(London: J. W. Jarvis, 1836), p. 29.

“In the Universe of Shabbat”: Dov Peretz Elkins, ed.,
A Shabbat Reader: Universe of Cosmic Joy
(New York: UAHC Press, 1998), p. xv.

“the most brilliant creation”: Quoted in Yedidia D. Stern, “From a Shabbat of Work to a Shabbat of Rest,” Israeli Democracy Institute website, February 26, 2007,
http://www.idi.org.il/sites/english/ResearchAndPrograms/
ReligionandState/Pages/ReligionandStateArticle2FromaShabbat
.aspx
.

“religious behaviorism”: Abraham Joshua Heschel,
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996), pp. 104–5.

“a knight of faith”: Søren Kierkegaard,
Fear and Trembling: Dialectical Lyric by Johannes de Silentio
, translated by Alastair Hannay (New York: Penguin, 1985), pp. 68 ff.

“necessarily associated with”: Max Kadushin,
The Rabbinic Mind
(Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1952), p. 169.

“the ordinary man”: Franz Kafka,
Letters to Friends, Family and Editors
, translated by Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Schocken Books, 1977), p. 285.

“would be ready to fulfill”: Franz Kafka,
Parables and Paradoxes
, in German and English, edited by Nahum H. Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1961 [1935]), pp. 42–43.

“The Sabbath was made”: Mark 2:27.

“When the time for Jumu’ah”: Abdullah Yusuf Ali,
The Meaning of the Holy Qur’an
(Brentwood, Md.: Amana Publications, 1999), p. 1469, footnote 5462.

“There are one hundred and fifty-seven”: Haim Nachman Bialik,
Halacha and Agada
(London: Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland, 1944), p. 12, cited in Yosef Yitzhak Lifshitz, “Secrets of the Sabbath,”
Azure
, no. 10 (Winter 2001): 86.

“Only from the inside”: Alice Munro,
The View from Castle Rock: Stories
(New York: Random House, 2007), p. 17.

“from sunset”: Babylonian Talmud,
Shabbat
34b.

The story is told:
Pirkei Avot
, 5:8.

Is it still twilight?: Babylonian Talmud,
Shabbat
34b.

The Talmud asks: Babylonian Talmud,
Shabbat
69b.

“mostly
headaches
or
stomach disturbances
”
:
Sándor Ferenczi,
Further Contributions to the Theory and Technique of Psychoanalysis
, translated by Jane Isabel Suttie and others (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1927), pp. 174–77.

“So long as man marked”: Daniel Boorstin,
The Discoverers: A History of Man’s Search to Know His World and Himself
(New York: Random House, 1983), p. 12.