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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Appearances
My book was written in part to look at the Sabbath from the point of view not of a great prophet, which Abraham Joshua Heschel absolutely was, a great rabbi, a great prophet, a great master of poetry and theology, but from the perspective of an ignorant, flawed human being, right? And the great lesson I learned from writing this book was I don't have to yell at myself for not doing it.
I can't do it until I become part of a community that does it. that makes rest something pleasurable, that makes it festive. So one of the ways I like to define Shabbat or the Sabbath, really, because this is true of the Christian Sabbath and the civic Sabbath as well, is that it's a four-step program for creating community and social cohesion, right?
So the four steps would be write laws to limit work time, make sure the schedules are coordinated, make it a regular habit so that it becomes a regular norm, and then The fourth is really the most important. Make it festive. Make it fun. Fill it with things. Fill it with meals. Fill it with long walks.
Fill it with what they call Shabbos Shluff, which is a Shabbos nap, sometimes with mandated sexual activity if you're married. That's the Jewish Shabbat. The Puritan Sabbath, which is another one we think of maybe not so pleasurable, but they found what they were doing to be pleasurable, which is sort of attempting to reenact a biblical Sabbath.
And always, always, always being together because you just can't do this by yourself. Like I said, in part, it's like a mutual non-compete clause. So if other people are running around you being crazy, there's nothing restful about that. You need the atmosphere of repose.
Time... It's an architecture, as Heschel says, and it shapes what we do with our lives. So you have a family. Each member of it probably does something else. One of your children goes to school. One of them seems like maybe doesn't. I've heard you talk about your family.
Your wife does one thing. You do another thing. Your friends do yet more different things. So if there isn't a rhythm to the week, If there isn't time set aside for everyone to stop working, everyone in your family, everyone in your friend group, everyone on your block, right? So this is positing this sort of fantasy of a society that is totally homogeneous.
But if there isn't a general atmosphere of stopping, then there won't be a feeling of repose or menucha. There will be a kind of a loneliness and you're sort of looking around and everyone else is running around. So it is the social structure of time. So when I talk about the Sabbath, I say it's not just non-work or non-productivity. It's absolutely collective non-work and non-productivity.
Because I simply cannot stress this enough. If it's not happening collectively, it's not going to happen.
Mm-hmm.
Yes. I happen to be married to one of these people who is able to sort of enter the things that you say and make them more interesting than they were when you said them. And so when I was telling him right before we got married that I wanted our life to be organized in this way, not that it necessarily would be, but that was what I wanted and we were going to work toward it.
He was just taken aback. What are you even talking about? He was at the time assimilated. He's now in some ways even more Jewish than I am, but he came from a very assimilated family and he just really hadn't thought about Shabbat as anything other than a sort of, you know, day when you turn everything off and are kind of bored.
And I was explaining that the rabbis saw Shabbat as a time when you were able to stop living to produce, stop living to be somebody successful, stop living to make money for your family, and start living for yourself. And when you live for yourself, To be not for yourself in a selfish sense, but in order just to be.
And when you shed that sort of professional identity or that work identity, you are able to be together. You are able to think of others. You are able to sort of achieve that flowing outward towards others that Martin Buber talks about in his book, I Thou. And you are able to become a better member of your community and incidentally, a better person.
So he came up with that phrase, the social morality of time, that you can have morality embedded in time.
So in 1973, two social psychologists wanted to answer the question, what makes someone stop when passing by a stranger who is in obvious distress, let's just say on the street? They wanted to know which of three attributes would make them stop. Innate personality, cultural conditioning or how they were raised, or something more situational.
And they went to Princeton Theological Seminary because they wanted to work with people who were familiar with a parable from the Gospels in which Jesus tells the story. Someone is lying on the ground, is in obvious distress. Different kinds of people go by. Finally, the Good Samaritan stops and helps the man up, gives him food to eat. Water to drink takes him to shelter.
So they took these students and they wanted to reawaken the story of the Good Samaritan in their heads. And they asked some of them to write a sermon about it. And they asked some of them to write an essay on their job prospects. And then they sent them over to another building to give a sermon.
And they divided the students in third and they told one third of students to get to the building really fast because they were late. They told one third of the students that they weren't late, but they better not dawdle. And they told one third of students they had plenty of time to get to the building.
And along the way, as they were going to the building, they passed someone slumped against a wall in very obvious distress. And they wanted to know who would stop. And what they found is the people who would stop were the ones who had plenty of time. Some of the ones who were on time but shouldn't dawdle did stop. Some didn't. The ones who were in a rush did not stop.
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