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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And they concluded that it wasn't a factor of personality. It wasn't a factor of cultural conditioning, right? It wasn't that they knew the Good Samaritan story. It was the situation they found themselves in, how fast they felt they had to go. And they came to the conclusion that ethics becomes a luxury. This is a quote. Ethics becomes a luxury as the speed of our daily life increases.
They also found that some students hadn't even seen the guy. They just hadn't even noticed that he was there. And their conclusion, it's just a line I really like, time quickening narrows the cognitive map, meaning that your ability to perceive things sort of shuts down because you're so focused on getting done what you have to get done by the deadline.
Well, I do think that the experiment answers that question. It means that you would be open to a different quality of interaction with yourself and with others. You know, on the speeding up of time, it's interesting. Time use studies show that we actually aren't working that much longer than we used to, but we use social media more. We use media more. We can spend more time consuming.
Now, the time use studies I'm talking about are a little older and they don't. It's very hard to tease out what is work and what isn't work in social media. But definitely time has grown faster and also, I would say, shallower through multitasking. And
If you were able to turn off your devices and go to the playground or go to the soccer game and interact with the other parents, for example, while you're watching your child, you would be building these friendships. You would be building these bonds with your neighborhood. I mean, one of the wonderful things about playgrounds
is that there are these spaces that are connected to your neighborhood. So you're actually getting to know your neighbors. We live in a society where because of social media and because of email, it's very easy to form these friendships that aren't geographically based. But when you're at the playground, you're actually in your neighborhood.
And if you could keep your device turned off, then you would get to know the people in your neighborhood. and form friendships that might actually help your children, right? Because you might go home with one of these families and then your child would have a new friend.
So one of the things that's very odd and problematic about the Sabbath is that it does try to rip a hole in this glimmering technological web that we live in. And I think that one of the things that keeps us from keeping the Sabbath is that that hole feels extremely uncomfortable for a really long time until we fill it with other things. And because it's not at our pace.
If you find a social context in which it is possible for you to turn that off, in which you're not thinking, oh my God, I totally forgot to answer that email and it's really important that I do right now. So let me just turn that back on right now. If you simply find... a world in which it makes sense to turn it off, you will be able to turn it off.
If you're simply trying to do it as a sort of discipline of the self, as a form of self-improvement, I think it just becomes another thing like dieting, something to beat yourself up with. If you can set a boundary around your time and say, this is a time in which I'm going to do childcare, right? I'm going to interact with my child. I'm going to read my child a story. I'm going to
enter into his imaginative world and play a game with him, or even I'm going to take pleasure in just cleaning these dishes, which sounds nutty, but I actually have found a way to meditate while cleaning dishes, and you fill it with something active rather than something negative, then I think it becomes more possible.
Right now, in our moment in history, stopping our technological addiction is probably the hardest thing that we can do. And it is the biggest obstacle to living your life according to the lessons of Sabbath.
So I don't have a problem with people coming to this notion of the Sabbath in a secular way. I think that once you do it, though, you begin in a way to replicate what the religion meant for you to do. My experience with the sort of secular Sabbath experiments has been they happen around a dinner. They happen around some kind of social event. So you're doing the gathering. You are
doing what in part Shabbat meant you to do or the Christian Sabbath meant you to do, which is to be together. And that might lead somewhere or it might not. But if you become what I call a Sabbatarian, you're going to wind up finding your way to a community that makes it part of their life. And that's probably going to be a religious community. It doesn't have to be.
But if you want that rich textured experience, it's going to wind up heading in that general direction.
One thing I would say about holiness is it means setting apart and perceiving as special. Certainly in the Jewish tradition, it is literally conceived as that which is set apart. So we've already talked about creating these boundaries around time and setting it apart.
One of the things that fascinates me, and in a way it's why I called the book The Sabbath World, is that it's a sort of enclosed world that we can never reach. And holiness is a little bit like that. It's this thing that's sort of beyond us. It partakes of a different order of being. It's God's order of being. We're never going to get there.
The Sabbath sort of has nostalgia for the pure Sabbath we can never achieve built into it. And this is constant throughout the rabbinical legends. There's a wonderful legend about a Sabbath river that lies beyond our world. It's always going to be just beyond our reach, the perfect Shabbat, the perfect Sabbath. We're never going to attain it.
So, yes, I started going back to synagogue and the words felt meaningless to me. I struggle with prayer. I still struggle with prayer. When I go to services, really the only thing I really like is the Torah service because I love reading texts and sitting there and reading the portion of the Torah we're reading and thinking about it in a new way.
What can I do? That's who I am. And I mean, for me, the words start to have meaning when I realize where they come from in the Jewish tradition, what text they come from. But a ritual is something you inherit. It sort of comes upon you from the past and dictates what you do. And you don't necessarily know what it means.
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