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
They wanted to create these cities on a hill, these ideal communities. And this theology, this attitude towards Sabbath really dominated for a couple hundred years. And only in the 20th century have we lost it. We have stores open on Sunday. We Everything is open. A lot of people are working. Now, I don't want to say that I want to go back to the Sunday closing laws or the blue laws.
But I do think that we have lost something important socially. So now it's even harder to create the space in our lives because everyone around us is working. So it just feels very odd. So...
One of the great writers on the Sabbath is not someone you would have expected to be a big defender of the Sabbath, and he is a Jew, Felix Frankfurter, Supreme Court Justice, who was defending not Saturday, but Sunday, the American Sunday, in a famous 1961 case called McGowan v. Maryland, in which the majority of the court was upholding the legitimacy of Sunday closing laws against a First Amendment challenge.
And Frankfurter wrote a concurring decision, which is really one of the great Sabbatarian texts, in my opinion. And he talked about Sunday and Sunday quietness on the streets, near the stores. He talked about it as a cultural asset of importance, a release from the daily grind, a preserve of mental peace, an opportunity for self-disposition.
And he was saying this because he wanted to make the argument that it may have started as a religious institution, but it became a civic institution. And it made our civitas a better society.
Yes. But note that I was also saying that it's a spatial escape. It is easier to stop shopping and the time in which you are shopping if it is not available to you immediately and if it can't come into your home.
Right. And if there's these social norms, right, that you want to uphold because you perceive yourself as a member of a community. So, yes, that's true. But I do think That one of the things that's happened is the idea of these firm boundaries around time has become an anachronism. It feels old fashioned. It feels really weird.
The idea that you could only buy your books Monday through Saturday, nine to five or whatever it was, that to you would just feel absurd. And it does to me too. Increasingly, the idea of a boundary around time as a boundary around consumption, a boundary around communication, right, outside the home, they just feel bizarre.
The internet, but especially the phone, is softening the boundaries around time. We can constantly... refine our plan to get together. There's nothing hard and fixed about it. And you know what? If I'm going to show up late, I can text you and say, I'm going to be late. Don't worry. I'm going to show up, but I'm going to be late.
Whereas I'm old enough to remember a time when you had to make the plan And unless you could get to a payphone, if you weren't going to make it on time, you were going to suffer the social sanction of being the person who was really late. There was a hard and fixed time when you were supposed to get together.
So I think the very idea of these hard and fast limits between one kind of time and another kind of time, the time of consumption, the time of communication with somebody not in your own space, even the time of work, right? We've lost that. It's something we talk about a lot is this idea that flex time is great, but when you're working at home, you're kind of always working.
It's really hard to figure out when to stop. So I really think just the very idea, it sounds a little abstract, but the very idea of a hard and fast limit. Light the candles at 410 in the winter or 715 in the spring or the summer. That idea is just bizarre. It doesn't even make sense.
Or if you read books on your Kindle, and if increasingly your books are on the Kindle, or even your Jewish texts that you study from, then what do you do about that? That's why I'm not sure that digital Sabbath is really the solution. I do think that Jewish law is constantly updating itself. You do have to make these value distinctions. If you're going to come up with a modern
shabbat right you do have to say okay fine calling mom so that my son can talk to mom driving to synagogue one of the great controversies of the mid-19th century in conservative judaism or in judaism can you drive to synagogue yes you can drive to synagogue but not to the mall you know you have to make these distinctions and hold on to these values and again just to you know flog a horse
You have to be part of a community where these distinctions are being made by other people as well. You know, you know that you're not going to text your friend because that friend may, in fact, read your text, may like you not turn off your phone, but is not going to answer a text unless it pertains to something shabbatistic, as we say. And so you create a set of distinctions.
It's not going to be as good as living within walking distance of your shul. And there are communities that do that. I used to live in Pelham right near New Rochelle, where there was, you know, an Orthodox community. And they did all live within walking distance of their shul. And they paid jacked up real estate prices in order to do that.
But, you know, there is that sort of what I call screen door culture that you get from all living together. But you really have to move into a different world to do that.
So I began in my 20s to just feel like there was something wrong on Saturday, and I didn't quite know what it was. I was doing what people who are out of college and starting their careers do. I was hanging out with the people I work with. I was having brunch. I was schmoozing. I was networking. I was really networking. And those relationships felt very... Provisional, very contingent.
It was not unconditional love. It was very conditional love. And they just didn't feel real to me. They started feeling unreal. And I started getting really depressed on those days. And I was living with a high school friend of mine who, I shouldn't have been so surprised, but I was surprised, was quite Christian. She was the daughter of a minister, so I shouldn't have been surprised.
But she used to go to church on Sunday. And one day I said, Jane, can I go to church with you? And she said, no. You need to go to the synagogue down the street. So I started going to the synagogue and luckily it appealed to my sense of nostalgia, right? It was very old world. And I just would sit there for, I think, a year.
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