A Time to Not Work

Cover via Amazon

Judith Shulevitz’s Sabbath World is a beautify book.  Not simply because it is beautifully written (though it is certainly that) but because of its subject matter which to me is as much time as it is the Sabbath.  There has to be a time, she argues, for collective non-work; for “time spent doing things that have to be done if society is to thrive, and done regularly and collectively.”  Without such a time (and here it must be said that for Schulevitz Sabbath is as much a “space” as time), we suffer the time sickness that beset our world: our time is fragmented; the endless possibilities before us mean that we always feel that we should be doing something else; we spend less time with our families and friends (we’re too busy texting the whole world); indeed, as at least one psychological experiment showed, we are often too much in a hurry to even notice that someone needs our help. 

This is not to say that Schulevitz does not romanticize keeping the Sabbath–her proposed cure and one she admits she herself has a hard time following.  The Sabbath (getting dressed up, ‘unplugging’ for twenty five hours, and spending that time with family and friends) sounds great, even ideal but it’s hard work.  Judith and her husband spend the whole week preparing for a Sabbath they keep very imperfectly; how much more work is it then to keep the Sabbath the way it is supposed to be kept?  And Shulevitz herself admits that “any high-functioning state needs uninterrupted access to hospitals, drugstores, the military, food, water, transportation, and other basic services.”  And making those things available means that some people will have to work on the Sabbath.  And if we force some people to work but mandate that others not work, are we not hypocrites?  Perhaps.

Nonetheless, having read Judith’s book I am also struck by how right the core of her argument is: when the United States kept the Sabbath (and not so long ago, the US was the most Sabbatarian nation in the world)—“the country honored life beyond duty and the imperatives of the marketplace.  For twenty-four hours we stayed home and ate huge family dinners, or went to church, or set off on afternoon drives.  And we not only did these things with members of our inner circle; we did them with the knowledge that everyone else was doing them, too.  That gave us permission not to work, too, along with the rest of the nation.” 

Perhaps it is, indeed, impossible to bring this time of non-work back.  But I can’t help feeling that if we manage it, we will be stronger for it—stronger as a nation, as a society and as individuals.