Lee Camp
[00:00:00] I am Lee C Camp, and this is No Small Endeavor, exploring what it means to live a good life.
Judith Shulevitz
They would encounter a man slumped against a building in obvious trouble.
Lee Camp
That's Judith Shulevitz, author of the book, The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time.
She's describing what has been called the Good Samaritan Study, designed to see why it is that people stop and help others. And what is the number one factor if someone helps someone in distress? Whether they are in a hurry or not.
Judith Shulevitz
If time is compressed, we will be less ethical people.
Lee Camp
So today we look at how our relationship with time shapes the people we are becoming, and why it's so hard to simply stop and rest.
This and more, coming right up.[00:01:00]
I'm Lee C. Camp. This is No Small Endeavor, exploring what it means to live a good life.
In the Jewish and Christian creation story, God created in six days the cosmos, the sun, moon, stars, the seas, the dry land, and placed in it a garden called Eden. After each day of creation, the narrative says God looked and saw that it was good. On the sixth day, God then formed humankind and the narrative says, "God looked at all God had created and saw that it was very good."
Then, relates the creation story, after God had done all this work of creation, God rested on the seventh day. The Hebrew word is 'Shabbat.' Literally, "he rested."
Then, as the narrative unfolds, Shabbat becomes an expectation of God's people. One of the Ten Commandments revealed at Sinai: "You shall [00:02:00] work for six days, but the seventh day shall be a day of rest, holy, under your God."
And, in another account, at the revelation of the law at Sinai, Sabbath becomes a sort of economic principle. Even debt, an accumulation of capital were to be ordered in a sort of Sabbath rhythm. Work and rest became central practices of the community.
Why tell you this story? Well, as a professor who's currently on a sabbatical, the word etymologically deriving from the word 'Sabbath,' I think that the idea of a collective rest and the obvious lack of that in our contemporary world is what fascinates me about my guest today, Judith Shulevitz.
Over a decade ago, Judith wrote a beautiful book on the Sabbath called The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time. And at the core of the discussion we had are two things I really want to point out.
The first is the history of time. Or perhaps more specifically, the history of how [00:03:00] humanity has related to the notion of time, and the fact that in the modern world, we construct and relate to time in a way that's a rather radical departure from earlier notions of time.
Second is this - that even though there are some vestiges in our society of the Sabbath, like the fact that we have weekends at all, nonetheless, business, commerce, work no longer stops. Even if one person or one business stops, everyone doesn't stop. There's no mutually accepted collective time to stop, rest, reflect, delight, and just be together.
So today, my conversation with Judith Shulevitz, discussing Sabbath, community, ritual, and what it might look like to adopt such practices in the modern world.
Judith Shulevitz is a critic and contributing writer to The Atlantic, she was the founding culture editor of Slate, and has been a columnist as well at The New York Times Book Review, The New [00:04:00] Republic, and New York Magazine. Her essays have appeared in countless other publications, including The New Yorker. She's also the author of the book we're discussing today, The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time, described by the Atlantic as "gorgeously written, which is a judgment I would share about this.
But welcome
Judith Shulevitz
Thank you so much, and thank you for the compliment.
Lee Camp
Well, I, I am, uh, currently on sabbatical myself from my day job. And I've learned enough, uh, having done a few of these through the years, to stop trying to cram my Sabbaths full of, you know, all the kinds of projects I've wanted to do in my life, but haven't had the chance to do yet. [Laughs]
And instead, I have taken afternoons-- you know, I've had numerous afternoons where I have literally nothing scheduled and nothing planned to do, and I have found sometimes that it's almost like detoxing. It's like this, kind of, sort of craving to do something, and do something purposive [sic].
And, in the-- kinda in the middle of your book, [00:05:00] you say, "Today the pace of life has quickened even more dramatically. If you want to blame something for the heavy, humiliating sense of time moving above and beyond our control, you should, as you already know, blame clocks." [Laughs]
So tell us, tell us how you think about clocks and how you think about the, kind of adjustment or changes as our experience of time in the contemporary world.
Judith Shulevitz
So, one of the things that I found when I started thinking about this book is that the ordinary person, the person who isn't working on time, doesn't process the idea that time itself has a history. I think of history as being time, but no - time has a history.
So the shift from other kinds of time to clock time was, was really one of the most important shifts in our history. It was when people were able to coordinate things like production, trade, meeting times across, maybe, parts of the [00:06:00] country. And so, suddenly you had a kind of responsibility to the clock.
There's a historian named Eric Hobsbawm who writes about pre-industrial time versus industrial time. That's a really big shift. And, and you can imagine what that is. The time that it takes to complete a task, however long that is, and time that is measured up in seconds, and you know, you, you must complete this work in this period of time, right?
The curious thing about this history of time is that we live with these different kinds of time within our own society. So for example, Hobsbawm talks about the fact that parents function, your child is not on the clock. Your child is on your child's time. You cannot feed your child on the clock.
[Lee laughs]
You cannot breastfeed your child on the clock. You cannot bathe your child on the clock. And you definitely can't get your child dressed on the clock. So, I mean, it's task oriented, right?
So, at the time that he was writing - and this is not untrue now though, less true now - at the time that he was [00:07:00] writing, women were at home taking care of the children, doing household chores, which are also not, you know, tailorized or not rationalized in this way. And men were working on the clock. That was the traditional American family, or in his case it was in Britain. And so you lived within a clock-oriented industrial, now post-industrial society, but there were different people living on different kinds of time.
Lee Camp
Hmm.
So this kind of sets you up for a discussion of what you call the 'social morality of time.' So un-- unpack that for us.
Judith Shulevitz
Well, that's a, that's, you know, my favorite phrase in the book. It's where the book started.
Lee Camp
It's a great-- yeah, it's a great line.
Judith Shulevitz
I know. And it's not mine. [Both laugh] It's so sad. I didn't come up with it. I have to credit my husband for it.
Um, so, my husband and I are, well at that point, my fiance and I, are talking a little bit about what might happen after we get married, and I'm telling him about this idea I've been moving toward, which is [00:08:00] this idea of keeping Shabbat, or the Sabbath. And he then came from a very assimilated but Jewish family, but he hadn't really ever processed the idea of Shabbat as a thing he would do.
He was certainly aware of it. He belonged to a synagogue, but he, you know, just... it seemed as it does to anyone who's not doing it, and to some who are doing it, this kind of weird discipline, unnecessary, pointless set of rules that you take on. Like, why would you do this?
And I was found myself talking to him about the purpose of ritual and the idea that there should be this clear distinction between work and not work.
And I was starting to think about the ways in which, just as clocks coordinate time, so non-work time coordinates time.
Who do you see when you're not working? The other people who are not working right? [Both laugh] Um, and that's sort of one of the key insights about, of the Sabbath. So I was talking about that, I was talking about slowing down, I was talking about [00:09:00] how it makes time for community.
And I was saying, you know, I think it probably makes you a better person, because you have time to think about the things you should be doing. You're not running around thinking about your goals and your professional success or material success or whatever it is you think about. And he said, "Huh, so time has a social morality."
I'm like, okay, yeah, that's a good phrase. I think I'll steal that. And later he, he said, you know, that's a really good idea.
Lee Camp
So this notion of thinking about time this way - you tell this remarkable study that was done at Princeton Theological Seminary around the Good Samaritan parable. Could you share that with us?
Judith Shulevitz
Yes. I, I, so it was done by two psychologists who studied the personality - that was their specialty. And they wanted to know, they wanted to answer the question of, what would make a person stop and help another [00:10:00] person? So it was kind of about, you know, altruism, compassion. They wanted to understand what personality type had more compassion than other personality types. But they wanted to know if it really was a personality type. First, they had to establish that.
So they decided to do a test, and they decided to go to Princeton Theological Seminary because they wanted to prompt or prime their subjects with the story of The Good Samaritan and they figured, you know, who other than seminarians would actually know the story of The Good Samaritan. [Both laugh] I sort of assume that your listeners already know the story of The Good Samaritan, but to give a really truncated version of it, that's, you know, a story in the Gospels where a man is in distress in the road and, you know, people pass him by, and then the Good Samaritan comes along and helps him.
So the test was as follows. Uh, they took these, you know, sub-- test subjects, seminarians, and they broke them into three groups. And they had them either write a sermon based on The Good Samaritan [00:11:00] or based on their career objectives, uh, which is like the opposite, right? And then they gave each of these groups instructions.
And one group was-- they were all to go to this other building and give a sermon, but one group was told they were late. They better rush over there. One group was told they'd have time to get there, but they better not dawdle. And one group was told, oh, well you have tons of time, you're not, you're not talking for another hour, or whatever it was they said.
And then, along the way, between the one building and the next, they would encounter a man slumped against a building in obvious trouble, right? Obviously in need of help. And they wanted to see who would, who would stop. And of course before this, they had, they had analyzed the personality types of, of their subjects, and they wanted to see who would stop.
Was it somebody, you know, who was particularly altruistic or described himself as such? You know, what was it that that made them stop? And they found that the really, the [00:12:00] biggest factor determining whether they would stop is what kind of time window they were in. If they were rushing, they were much less likely to stop.
If they were okay but didn't have a lot of time, they might stop, but then not go so far as to make sure that the, you know, the man in distress got to someone who could actually help him. And, you know, the ones who weren't in a rush were the most likely to stop and spend time with this, this man. And they talked about, you know, that, that, that compassion, altruism really is a function of time.
It's if you have time, you can be more compassionate. But I thought the most interesting finding that they, that they made was that a lot of the people who were in a really big rush didn't even see the guy, right?
Lee Camp
Judith Shulevitz
Because they weren't paying attention. They were paying attention to their deadline.
Lee Camp
Judith Shulevitz
And their cognitive map was actually narrowed by the feeling of being rushed or being late. And I, so I talk about how if we don't have an experience [00:13:00] of not feeling rushed, not feeling under the gun, we're gonna have a hard time having those emotions of compassion. And there's a sort of thinning out-- again, this all goes back to, right, social solidarity - there's a thinning out of the ability to connect with others when people are rushing. And I think that's very dangerous.
Lee Camp
Yeah, that's remarkable. That hurry may be one of the great ethical inhibitions, ethical dilemmas that we might face. And again, points to this beautiful line, 'the social morality of time.'
Judith Shulevitz
Right, exactly. I was just thinking of that. That's, it's really a good illustration of that, that you know, if, if time is compressed, we will be less ethical people.
Lee Camp
Hmm.
So when you think about, then, the purpose of ritual, unpack some of that for us because you do, you, you point to a great number of possible ways of thinking about the purpose of Sabbath.
But for those for whom it would seem merely a [00:14:00] legalistic or rule-based, meaningless ritual, help folks kind of-- invite folks into some of the possibilities there.
Judith Shulevitz
Well, I would think that from a Christian perspective, it-- there's just no question that the Jewish Sabbath does look legalistic and rules-based, and it certainly can be.
But, you know, let's back off from that a little bit and just talk about ritual, which is, you know, let's, let's take the legalistic out of these prescriptions and prescriptions and just say, call them rituals, right? They're what people have done.
Why do we do what people have done? To me, that is the most interesting part of a ritual is that it's this thing that connects you to the past, that connects you to those who have done them before you.
Which is, you know, if you're me, it's this thing that I'm born into. Um, I may not practice it, but there it is, available for me. I have a whole theology based on ritual, uh, which is that it's kind of this idea of being commanded. So what does it mean to be commanded?
There's a whole theology of that in Judaism. My [00:15:00] Judith Shulevitzian theology is that being commanded is something that comes upon you in the form of rituals. So there are these rituals that are there for you to sort of seize onto, and they are passed on. And they, they contain memory. They literally have memory locked into them, so that when you perform them, you become aware of things that they probably were intended to make you aware of, and they, they contain the intent of those who develop them.
And that that is something that you become aware of in the doing. Judaism particularly privileges the doing over the believing, which is not to say the Jews don't believe in God, like, religious Jews believe in God. But they believe in the doing of things that are, you, you are commanded to do, because it is in the doing that you come to understand what they mean.
Another good thing about ritual is it's habitual. It becomes part of your-- the form and shape of your life, [00:16:00] it's something you bring in. I mean, to use just a very banal example, if you have a ritual of going to the gym, it's just so much easier to get out and go to the gym. Like it's just a thing you do. Every morning you're at the gym from 8-9, you know, and you arrange your life around that. So with a Sabbath, if that's your set of rituals - you're probably gonna have others, but let's set that aside - if that's your priority, then you are going to arrange your life around that. It's going to be embedded, right, in your understanding of time.
So that's another thing. Ritual is time-based and it, it, it helps you structure your time.
Lee Camp
You're listening to No Small Endeavor and our conversation with Judith Shulevitz.
I love hearing from you. Tell us what you're reading, who you're paying attention to, or send us feedback about today's episode You can reach me at lee@nosmallendeavor.com.
You can get show notes for this episode in your podcast app or wherever you listen. These notes include links to resources mentioned in this episode and a [00:17:00] PDF of my complete interview notes, including material not found in this episode. And you can also find there a full transcript of the episode.
Coming up, Judith and I discuss what Sabbath does for the good of a community and what it might look like to adopt the practice ourselves.
Social solidarity is another sort of end, I suppose, that you discuss at some length in, in one particular chapter. Describe how you see the ritual of Sabbath or ritual, Jewish ritual as a whole, kind of facilitating social solidarity.
Judith Shulevitz
Wow. Well, there's a couple ways of looking at that. One is boundary-based and one is about building solidarity from within.
So just to talk about calendars, people's calendars define who they are. If I'm on a Sabbath-based calendar, I'm going to organize my time in a way that other people who are like me do, and those are the people I'm probably likely to get to know. Those-- [00:18:00] that's gonna be my group. When the early Christians were meeting, they probably began to shift their Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday, in part to differentiate themselves from the Jews.
So that's one way. So that's the external way. One, once you've adopted your own calendar, you're cutoff from the greater society and you're forming a subculture. So that's one way.
Another way in which - I'm gonna sp-- speak specifically about the Sabbath because it's, this is a theory that's leisure based - so, the way you are able to socialize, to be with people in a way that isn't based on your job, that isn't based on, sort of, this being in the same place in life, like, you know, having young children or just starting out your career or being older, whatever, retired...the way that you make room for this wider community is by carving out the time for it. Right?
So when you are not working together, which is to me the [00:19:00] essence of the Sabbath, and I wanna stress together, right, that not just the not working, but the not working together, you're clearing out room for the formation of community, the formation of social bonds. You're clearing out room for this way of being in the world, which is different from your way of being in the world during the week, and you're connecting with people at a different level.
So that builds these relationships of trust, right? Which-- so when people talk about social solidarity, or they talk about civil society, it's very much based on trust, right?
Lee Camp
Judith Shulevitz
That's really the essence of what's necessary, and what's happening in our country is that the trust is eroding. Civil society, civil institutions are eroding. But trust is the basis of social solidarity.
But also, I argue, just the idea that you're doing or not doing together.
Lee Camp
Yeah. You mentioned the word 'leisure' there and, uh, I noted that you referenced Josef Pieper's book on, on Leisure, which I find a, a fascinating treatment of that [00:20:00] question and the failure that seems so predominant in various circles I see of actually being intentional about asking, 'what's the meaning of life?' Or, 'who, who, who are we seeking to be and what is our community about?'
This is one of the beautiful threads I think that runs throughout your book as well. But what, what did you see then about leisure, or do you wanna unpack that notion of leisure for us a little bit more?
Judith Shulevitz
When you hear the word leisure, I think, right now, you think of the recreation industry.
Lee Camp
Judith Shulevitz
You think of the kind of leisure you consume, right? You consume a trip, or you consume a visit to the mall, or you consume a visit to a theme park with your kids, or whatever it is that you are consuming by way of leisure. So I do think the word itself has been tainted by commercial-- a commercial sense and a, and an industry, right? The leisure industry.
Lee Camp
And may-- maybe, maybe even worse, we imagine the 1970s polyester leisure suit, which was--
[Both
laugh]
Judith Shulevitz
Oh my god, I hadn't-- Oh my-- that's a [00:21:00] good connotation. That, that has not popped into my head, but I love that. I'm gonna add that to the list of things I associate with the word.
But what I'm talking about is something that the great Supreme Court Justice, Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter talked about, uh, at one time when he wrote this decision defending Sunday closings against the First Amendment challenge. He wrote the concurring opinion and he talked about an 'abiding atmosphere of repose.' So that's what I think of in, in an American context, is this idea that you are able to relax. So another way of thinking about it is, it's what isn't work, right? So leisure is whatever you're not doing when you're not working, which is increasingly...never.
Lee Camp
Judith Shulevitz
You know? Increasingly we're working all the time.
Lee Camp
Judith Shulevitz
I think we're moving in that direction.
To go back to social solidarity for a minute - one of the things that the Sabbath does, or this structured period of non-work does, if it's [00:22:00] collective, is it creates a mutual, non-compete clause, right?
So if I am able to close my store on Sunday, you know, according to the old Sunday closing laws, and I know that everyone else is able to close their store, you know, I'm gonna feel a lot better about closing my store. I'm more likely to actually close my store--
Lee Camp
Judith Shulevitz
--and let my employees, you know, have a day off and it'll be the same day off as their family has off. And, you know, everyone can kind of collectively create this atmosphere of repose. Which is something Frankfurter talked about as literally being on the streets, literally being outside in, in the space of your town or your city.
And if I am in a world in which people don't rest on the same day as me, then I'm gonna be very anxious and I'm not gonna be able to close my store.
So the mutual non-compete clause is the everyone agreeing to do this at the same time and not compete against each other and make them feel anxious so that they have to [00:23:00] do whatever it is they're afraid of having business stolen from them.
Lee Camp
Yeah. Yeah.
So let me-- I want to shift to one question that you cite a inscription from D. H. Lawrence at the very beginning, quote from his The Rainbow where he says, "There was some puzzling, tormenting residue of the Sunday world within her, some persistent Sunday self, which insisted upon a relationship with the now shed away vision world. How could one keep up a relationship with that which one denied?"
And from, from that point forward, there's these recurring moments where you seem to express a level of being tormented, or maybe more modestly put, called, driven, lamenting... that, you said at the beginning, you're ravenous for something. Or this picture of you at some point, sitting in the back pew of a synagogue weeping, or the longing [00:24:00] engendered by the Jewish summer camp experience for your longing for community. So it's-- am I hearing that right? That there's a sort of longing, craving?
Judith Shulevitz
Oh...you're hearing better than anyone has ever heard.
Lee Camp
Judith Shulevitz
Nobody has understood. You know, the book itself is called The Sabbath World because of the Sunday world. Right. That is in fact the quote that gives the book its title. I just love that quote.
Lee Camp
Judith Shulevitz
I love everything D. H. Lawrence has written about the Sabbath. He really deeply gets it. And what you've heard better than I've ever heard anyone, uh, talk about this, is the deep ambivalence...at the heart of the book - which I deeply, I profoundly foreground, right?
I, I spend the whole first chapter, right, talking about this thing, 'Sunday Sickness,' which was diagnosed by a psychoanalyst named, uh, Sandor Ferenczi, which I am mispronouncing because it's Hungarian. [Lee laughs]
He diagnosed something called the Sunday Sickness, which was this, you know, anxiety that you would get on the Day of Rest, which he called Sunday, though I unpacked the history of this essay, and I discovered that he had no such patient and he wasn't talking about Sunday. It was a coded way of talking [00:25:00] about Saturday, but he was afraid of anti-Semitism, so he--
Lee Camp
Judith Shulevitz
But anyway, he's, he unpacks this sickness, which really spoke to me, right? It was a time of discomfort, which at first I didn't understand the nature of because I knew there was something missing and I didn't know what it was.
It would not have occurred to me for a very long time that what was missing was a not doing as opposed to a thing I was supposed to go out and do to fix my...whatever it was, my malaise, my depression, my anxiety...and I just, I sort of use that as a metaphor for what we're missing in our society and that we have a kind of a syndrome, whereby we're, we're hungering for something but we don't know what it is.
And I say it's, you know, it's, it's a hungering for rest. But you know, throughout my life I hungered for this and I couldn't get it because it's a very hard thing to do. It's shockingly difficult.
Lee Camp
Judith Shulevitz
Because you have to find a community that does it.
Then you have to be willing to take [00:26:00] orders - you know, as I, I've said, from the past, right, through ritual. You have to buy into the set of practices, which is not easy to do because you really are making a sacrifice, a real sacrifice of time.
So it's very, very difficult and I believe never resolved. And even when you're doing it, I talk about the idea that there's this utopian vision of the Sabbath that is never achieved.
Lee Camp
Judith Shulevitz
You're never gonna get there. There's this thing that gets embedded in you where you're longing for perfect rest. And both the Jewish mystics and the Puritans saw the Sabbath as a foretaste of paradise. And I love that image because it gets at the profound otherness of what you're looking for that you can never quite get to.
And so it's a kind of-- this divided self, I think, was my experience in starting to come back to Judaism via the Sabbath, was my [00:27:00] vehicle in. But I think it's at the heart of religion itself, and I think it goes to the heart of your relationship to the rules, right? It goes to the heart of your ambivalence about ritual, which pushes back against a secular society.
Um, it goes to the heart of everything.
Lee Camp
So I wanna, I wanna talk a little bit more about your, um, the ambivalence that you said is kind of crucial to you, critical to your writing project and to your own self. And I, I want to-- I'd like to explore how that also seems to be integral to the way you narrate your engagement with the Talmud, for example.
I think when a lot of Protestants think about tradition, we think in terms of, it's this set of answers handed down. And it seems to me that one of the things you're describing, that it's a set of questions handed [00:28:00] down, and it's a set of arguments handed down, and it's the, the fact of arguing over particular questions that's the, that's the thing. As opposed to necessarily having a huge set of settled answers.
But, commentary on that or thoughts on that?
Judith Shulevitz
Well, I mean, now you're getting to the heart of why I love Judaism.
Lee Camp
Judith Shulevitz
And when I started studying the Talmud, which is when I was grown and already practicing my profession and had come out of, you know, a comp lit department, uh, in college, where I was trained to, as they say, interrogate texts.
So I was very simpatico with, with that practice. And later I discovered that some of my professors - I was at school during the high, the heyday of deconstruction - some of those people were in fact, you know, trained Talmudists, as, by the way, probably was Sigmund Freud, which I talk about a little bit in the book. Also a very important influence on my critical thinking.
So it just, it felt natural, and it felt natural in part because in a way Judaism [00:29:00] had passed that on to the critical tradition.
But I just, I don't think there are answers. I agree that there are just questions. There are, there are rules. You can ask questions, but they have to be put a certain way. There are certain things that must be presumed, like precedent, so there's a discursive style that you have to buy into.
But yeah, it is-- you know, people think the Talmud is a law book. It's not a law book. I mean, except insofar as a law book is like a set of questions that are constantly asked. It's not that you learn-- the law is not handed down.
That's why Jews love to study - or are commanded to study, maybe some don't love it, I don't know - but are commanded to study, because they have to learn the questions and they have to engage with the texts to which they pose the questions.
I remember when my son was six or seven and he said to me, "Mom, I don't think I'm a Jew 'cause I don't believe in God."
I'm like, what, what on Earth does that have to do with [00:30:00] anything? [Both laugh] How many Jews do you know believe in God? I mean, lots of Jews believes in God, but you know, believing in God is not the point. You don't have to take something in. You have to, you know, you have to put out the questions, you have to engage with the text.
But what you do have to know is you have to know what you're rejecting. You wanna reject Judaism, fine. But I'm giving you a Jewish education so you can reject it. You know, you know what you're rejecting before you reject it. It's this idea of back and forth.
Lee Camp
Judith Shulevitz
A back and forth rather than a, rather than an obeying.
I don't mean to imply that the Christian tradition doesn't have that, because it definitely does.
Lee Camp
Judith Shulevitz
But it's not a thing that is emphasized when you're a child, I would say.
Lee Camp
Yeah. Right. Yeah.
This was also in the introduction - you said, "To be transformed by a religious experience rather than to merely appreciate it, you had to become that dreadful thing, a religious person."
Which I thought was a, was a compelling line. And, and then later you're talking about, uh, one particular group and their [00:31:00] Sabbath practices and other ritual practices, and you said, "One might look at them and consider them mad men, and then you said
Judith Shulevitz
I mean, you're describing-- this brings up a memory of a review I got from a woman who's become my friend, who is, you know, a lapsed Orthodox Jew, and she, she described that scene exactly, where I-- what I'm talking about in that scene is the Kabbalists in the 17th century in Israel - Safed, Tzfat.
And you know, they really, you know, I'm not gonna go through and describe in detail the rituals 'cause we'd be here all day. And besides, they are in fact extremely bizarre. And I talk about how, I think on one hand - you know, I'm of divided mind at all times - on the one hand, it, I'm just, I am jealous [00:32:00] of their passion. But more importantly, he sense they had that they were enacting a cosmic drama.
One of the definitions of mysticism is that it's theurgical, or it, it's the idea that through your mystical practices, you can actually change the nature of the world, the nature of God, you know, you can change the cosmos in, in some profound way.
And so their, their life is imbued with the ultimate kind of meaning. They really believe that what they're doing is, is, is, is, you know, purposive, purposeful. But in, uh, you know, through following these rituals of not working, to come back to the Sabbath. So that is what I was envious of, was this, this sense of being caught up in this enormous cosmic drama, which they could enact through their practices.
You know, I, I, in one case, I talk about-- preparation is important for this, for the Jewish Sabbath, and they believe that one should really cleanse [00:33:00] one's body down to clipping one's toenails and fingernails and-- 'cause those were emanations of God, and then saving them, not throwing them out, and burying them, because after all they're emanations of God. The way you bury a seder.
So, you know-- and there were other ones that dictated [laughs] you know, you're supposed to have sex on the Sabbath with your spouse if, if you're married, and they had a lot of rules about which way you had to face, you know? [Laughs]
Lee Camp
Judith Shulevitz
So that your body could be a vessel for these various emanations of God, right?
And, you know, I mean, it's nutty. It's completely outta context. And it was outta context then. But in context of their, with their, sort of, in their, in their little sect, right?
But I am envious of this idea of enacting a cosmo-- I mean, like, what is, what will charge your life with meaning more than that...right? There's no way.
Anyway, so this reviewer was like, you know-- I just, you know, I, I wasn't gonna go with her there. [Both laugh] I am not envious. I've lived that life. I mean, she didn't live a Kabbalist life, but she lived a very, you know, Orthodox Jewish life, and she's like, I've lived that life, yeah. [00:34:00] She's, she's, she's buying in it too, too much.
And I'm like, okay, fine. Because I haven't lived that life.
Lee Camp
Judith Shulevitz
I did not grow up Orthodox. I grew up in a very complicated-- as most Jews in America, most Jews in the world have, right? It's never a, a perfectly aligned community. There's always like tensions about how observant you're gonna be, you know?
So I didn't have that perfect union with my community that the Kabbalists have, so I'm jealous of it.
Lee Camp
We're going to take a short break, but coming right up, more on the goods of Sabbath, as well as commentary on the hindrance posed to our ability to rest by an increasing dependence on technology. And, what happened when the Soviet Union got rid of the weekend.
As people who listen to this show regularly know, you know, I, I stopped using a mobile [00:35:00] phone, I don't know, six years ago or so, and, um, I can text on my computer, but I don't, I don't use a, I don't use a mobile phone. And, uh, it certainly has been transformative experience for me.
And I didn't get into it with any sort of pi-- for any sort of pious reason. It just-- I broke my phone and then it took three times, I tried three times to get it fixed and it wasn't working. And so that-- by that point I was a month into the experiment and I thought, I'm just gonna keep trying this for a while. And, um, uh, it was a, it was a full year after I stopped using a mobile phone that I had my last phantom buzz in my pocket from, from the phone.
Judith Shulevitz
Oh my God, I love that. A phantom buzz.
Lee Camp
Yeah. And, and you know, I, I have to-- it's still very troublesome sometimes, especially when I travel, and sometimes I think I-- this is crazy. I've gotta get a mobile phone. But I, I keep thinking of the trouble that I sometimes encounter as kind of my, my rest tax, if you will, that I have to pay for not having a mobile phone. Um--
Judith Shulevitz
Right. It's, it's, you're sitting out the, the square [00:36:00] dancing.
Lee Camp
Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. But this one gives me a little more joy than sitting out square dancing did. [Laughs]
Judith Shulevitz
That's so true. There you go. There you go.
Lee Camp
But, but, uh, commentary on what you're seeing about technology, the current state of our culture with regard to its incessant intrusion into our lives?
Judith Shulevitz
Yeah. I mean, it's funny, I, I lost my phone. Possibly it was stolen, it's not clear. And it did take me about a week to get it replaced, and I, I, I was a little slow filing my insurance claim and getting my replacement phone because I was like, oh, I kind of like this.
Lee Camp
Judith Shulevitz
Um, so I, I know what you mean. Now I'm-- you make me think I should really do what you're doing.
You know, I mean, literally the phantom buzz, you're talking about a limb, right? It's, it's something we now wear on our body.
Lee Camp
Judith Shulevitz
And as part, it's almost part of our body. And I do think that, I mean, I think that you don't have to talk about this Sabbath to be talking about this, and a lot of people talk about this now.
I do think [00:37:00] that there's a quality of attention that is very hard to get to when you're sort of surrounded by these devices. And now social media, which is of course designed to reward you for staying engaged with social media and to get addicted to these little, you know, bits of dopamine that you get when, you know, your Instagram post is liked, right?
So I, I just, I, I think that the quality of attention, which so many of these rituals and this collective non-work are designed - designed is a, is a weird word, right, 'cause they evolve - let's say they evolve to promote. And that's their own reward in a sense, their reward system. So I, I do think that that's getting just harder to get to.
And I talk in the book about the softening of the boundaries of time, which is actually, I wish I had come up with that, but there's a whole bunch of sociologists who work on our relationship to technology and others who work on our [00:38:00] relationship to time. And this is something they talk about. Which is that the, um, the, time is rarely hard and fast.
So I'm old enough and, I don't know, maybe you're old enough, maybe not, to remember when, you know, we didn't have phones and we made dates and they were real and hard. And, and if you wanted to--
Lee Camp
Judith Shulevitz
--get in touch with someone the day of, you probably couldn't, you know, you couldn't count on it. So you better keep that date.
And that's just harder and harder because now we can infinitely negotiate, renegotiate any, any, you know, meet up, or, you know, any deadline. I mean, not always, but, but often. So I think that the idea that you put boundaries of time around a certain period of time, that you put boundaries-- you, you, you stop at a certain time and you don't start again till some other time.
I just think that's a harder thought to think.
Lee Camp
Judith Shulevitz
And I talk about, in the book about how that makes, you know, the idea of keeping the [00:39:00] Sabbath even more remote from modern people...
Lee Camp
Judith Shulevitz
...secular people, because it's just-- they, they think about time in a different way and it, it just seems even weirder than it used to.
Lee Camp
Yeah. Uh, in that section you also talk about this notion of attunement and the physiological realities that occur when we're face-to-face. Would you describe that for us?
Judith Shulevitz
It's so funny, 'cause I wrote this a while ago. So I was writing this during the aughts, or I was researching it during the aughts, and I could never have imagined the Zoom society.
Lee Camp
Judith Shulevitz
I mean, people talked about it, but it was like not at all real, right?
Lee Camp
Judith Shulevitz
And now thi-- this is the world we live in.
But there is a, an effect. A soothing effect, a bonding effect, probably, almost certainly a hormonal effect - no, definitely a hormonal effect - to what, you know, the sociologists call co-presence, which is like, you know, uh, being face-to-face. Meet time, as some people call it. Being in the real world with somebody else.
And it's [00:40:00] just... bodies and space matter. And when we sort of etherealize that and turn ourselves into, you know, digital entities, then, then you lose that, and it's a, it's, you know-- I, I'm always looking for joy. You know, it's a source of joy to be with, physically, someone else. But it's not easy, right?
And so you look at all these people - to go back to technology - you know, you look at all these people in the restaurant sitting there together on their phones. You know, you look at all-- like, like, you know, my teenage-- no long-- they're almost entirely no longer teenage, but you know, my teenage kids whose play dates consisted of sitting around either playing video games, you know, in, in such a way that they're like lined up in front of a screen or collectively on their phones, and you just think, how, how do they learn to interact? You know?
Lee Camp
Judith Shulevitz
How do they learn to deal with the problem of someone else's emotions in real time, which you feel so much more intensely when you're with them.
[00:41:00] So that's kind of, that's kind of what I was talking about.
Lee Camp
Yeah.
In that particular chapter, you also discuss, you raise the question, can we know what it's like when there's this sort of ultimate social failure to have any sort of attention to the sorts of things Sabbath is pointing us towards? And you say, yes, actually we can, from this experiment that was done in the Soviet Union with the work week, which is just a bizarre story that I, I only came across probably in the last year or so.
But would you share that story?
Judith Shulevitz
In the '20s and '30s, the Soviet Union was rushing to keep up with, or to, to project itself into the first rank of industrial nations. And it was not an industrialized society. So they were working really fast to build factories, to jumpstart their economy. Trade, you know, with other nations was, was difficult, 'cause they were a communist country.
So, there was this, you know, incredible emphasis on productivity, [00:42:00] on keeping the machines running 24/7.... And, you know, the weekend was a real problem because, you know, everything stopped. They weren't, they weren't in the 24/7 economy yet. So, you know, the Central Committee and Stalin had this idea that they were gonna lop off the week, uh, lop Saturday and Sunday off the week, and have a five day week.
And... so that the machines could keep running, so that there was not a time when everybody was resting at the same time, they would divide the working population into five groups and they would assign people to these groups by giving them slips of colored paper. And they didn't necessarily have great respect for the family. They would often break up families into different, you know, groups.
Lee Camp
Judith Shulevitz
And it was a huge failure. People utterly hated it. It really is an illustration in the idea that rest works only [00:43:00] collectively, you know, to-- you can't do Sabbath by yourself.
Because people wouldn't have any way to socialize with the people they wanted to socialize. They couldn't be together with their families. They may or may not have time for their friends. And, you know, they, there were, there were slow-- work slowdowns, machines were getting broken...
Lee Camp
Judith Shulevitz
It was counterproductive. So they did get rid of it after a couple years. But it wasn't until World War II, actually, that they restored the week to a seven day week.
I've written a few other pieces about this and, and unpacked it a little bit because I think we're moving in that direction, right? I think that we don't have synchronized rest times or non-work times anymore. We don't have the 9-5 schedule. Which, you know, doesn't have to be 9-5, but it's this idea of a block of time where most people are working.
We bring our work home and we're task oriented again, in a certain sense.
Lee Camp
Judith Shulevitz
But we're not synchronized. I think we're headed in that direction and it's very lonely making. [00:44:00] It's very isolating. And I think it's kind of sad.
Lee Camp
Yeah. But Judith, it's-- yes, you noted it's been a while since you've written this book.
Any, uh, in the last minute or two that we have left, in the-- since you've written the book that has deepened in your, your sense of conviction, or things that you've, uh, learned in you that point toward the importance of these sorts of practices?
Judith Shulevitz
Well, I would say that at the time I saw this and I have only become more convinced of it, which is that we miss, we're missing something.
We're losing something. And there is a, an unhappiness. People are looking for something. This is why you have meditation and a mindfulness practice. This is, there are, there is something called the Digital Sabbath. I actually don't think this is a particularly significant, numerically, phenomenon, but people are talking about-- well, you, you're taking a digital Sabbath in a way.
People saying, we need to find a way to give up these devices so that we can have that experience of co-presence. Not that they use that language. I think that the hunger is just getting [00:45:00] worse, and I think that the inability to stop is getting worse.
I also think, you know, we see a big rise in, in, in faith and in religious communities, and I, I ask myself how much this has to do with it - this, this experience of never having a different kind of experience, but always being immersed in work. I don't know. I mean, I don't know-- I'm not aware of any studies that, that talk about the relationship between keeping the Sabbath or going to church, and you know, sort of the rise of religion.
So I, I just think the trends I noticed are, are deepening and... the pace of time, which has to do with like what your time horizons are, right, they're shortening, which makes it harder to stop because you give up more.
When, when you do more, and in the same period of time, or you think you do more in the same-- in a, in a shortened period of time, then the opportunity cost of not doing [00:46:00] it just gets higher.
Lee Camp
Judith Shulevitz
So I, I think we're just moving in in that direction.
Lee Camp
Yeah.
We've been talking to Judith Shulevitz, author of The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time.
Judith, thank, thanks so much for your generosity with your time with us and, uh, the, the beauty, the beauty of your book.
Judith Shulevitz
Well, thank you so much, Lee, for having me on this program and, uh, thanks for such good questions.
Lee Camp
You've been listening to No Small Endeavor, and our interview with Judith Shulevitz, author of The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time.
We gratefully acknowledge the support of Lilly Endowment Incorporated, a [00:47:00] private philanthropic foundation supporting the causes of community development, education, and religion, and the support of the John Templeton Foundation, whose vision is to become a global catalyst for discoveries that contribute to human flourishing.
Our thanks to all the stellar team that makes this show possible. Christie Bragg, Jakob Lewis, Sophie Byard, Tom Anderson, Kate Hays Mary Eveleen Brown, Cariad Harmon, Jason Sheesley, Ellis Osburn, and Tim Lauer.
Thanks for listening, and let's keep exploring what it means to live a good life together.
No Small Endeavor is a production of Tokens Media, LLC and Great Feeling Studios.