Judith Shulevitz
speaker
125 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Judith Shulevitz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here.
I would argue that they're trying to create meaning. I think of all the rules around the Sabbath sort of telling you to stop doing things, which are the should nots, as creating a kind of frame. If you think of it in space rather than in time, or you think of a frame in time rather than in space, or you could think of it as a proscenium around a stage.
Or you could think of it as a break after a line of poetry. These are things that create meaning. They sort of bound time and say, this is going to be special. Now we're going to make something extraordinary out of the ordinary. Because the ordinary stuff of the Sabbath isn't that extraordinary, right? You're supposed to have a meal. The Jewish Sabbath has a big Friday night meal.
Sometimes it's a big lunch after synagogue. The Christian Sabbath had a big old Sunday lunch. The Black Church is famous for its fabulous lunches. Could be a dinner party, right? But it's something else, right? You are supposed to come together. You know, in a Christian idiom, I'd say you're supposed to break bread. So you're supposed to be collective.
You are supposed to let your mind wander, wool gather, have a moment of just letting go. Not all the time, some of the time. But these are the positive things that the frame gives a special gloss to the way it does a work of art. It says this space here, it's meaning. Makes sense of it.
So there's a lot of different ways of thinking about that. The typical rabbinic way of explaining that is that there are these set of rules, set of a kind of work that you don't do because that kind of work is acting on the world. And the Sabbath is a time when you're supposed to stop acting on the world. You're supposed to stop doing things to make things.
You're supposed to let the world rest as well as you. So this is the sort of environmental dimension of the Sabbath. But pre the environmental movement, there was a great rabbi in Germany, and he said, what is there to safeguard the world from man? And that's the Sabbath.
So these rules, you could almost say these rules are to safeguard the world from man, but also to safeguard you from being an eternal slave. Today, we would say of the clock. In the deep past, we might have said from the struggle to survive. Another way of thinking of the rules is as a giant neutral non-compete clause or a solution to the problem of collective action.
So let's take it in the modern world. If I run a store and everyone else is going to keep their store open on Saturday or on Sunday, it's very hard for me to shut my store down. I'm not going to be able to compete. I'm going to lose business to someone else. But if everyone's shutting their store down, then I'm cool, I'm good.
I can just go do my thing, whatever it is, go to church or stay home with my stack of books or just hang out with my family, whatever it is. So those are some of the things that I think the rules are meant to create or prevent.
So there's this puzzle in the first creation story. Remember that the book of Genesis has two creation stories, right? There's the one where God says, let there be light and there is light. And the one where God creates Eve out of Adam. So let's take the first one. So on each of six days, God creates something. Material, tangible, creates day.
Well, I guess maybe day and night are not so tangible, but they're certainly experiential. Creates vegetation, creates the stars and the moon, creates animals, and on the sixth day creates man and woman, which, by the way, God creates equally on the sixth day. And then on the seventh day, God rests. But God doesn't just rest. He makes rest, which seems like a contradiction in terms.
God is making something. God is making rest. So the rabbis say, well, how can that be? And how can God be making something that isn't? And the answer is God was creating this system of meaning, which is based on stopping and And looking back over what God had created to say, is that good? And it turns out it was good.
Yeah. Well, I would say I don't see that much of a distinction between these two things. I would say both are active processes, first of all, because you have to create the space beforehand. So that's one thing. And the second is that you rest, you try to have repose like every evening, right? What's the difference? How do you make that?
Well, maybe you don't. In our 24-7 economy, which you are deeply enmeshed in, maybe you don't. But there's a rabbi named Gineba who talks about
what this sabbath feeling should be as opposed to a nothing or a not doing or a thing to go back to the creation story that has to be created and he says it may be compared to a king who made a bridal chamber which he plastered painted and adorned but what did the bridal chamber lack a bride similarly what did the world lack the sabbath
It's bringing something in that is different, that is special. And in order to do that, you have to create the space for it.
Yes.
I would say that I actually don't agree with Heschel there because he frames it in an individualist perspective, right? It's on you, Ezra. You have to stop working. And if you don't, you feel bad. And even the things that you are doing feel like work by other means.
I mean, I'm a book critic and I did have a fact checker on a story I wrote about this say to me, I write about, you know, reading novels on Shabbat. And he said, isn't that what you get paid to do? And I'm like, yeah, it's permitted. So there isn't any way you're going to get to this kind of rest by yourself. That's the fundamental message of my book.
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