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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I would just sit there and I would listen to these tunes that I was familiar with, but couldn't remember the words of the tunes. And I would be really sad. And sometimes I would cry, you know. And there was something real about feeling that sadness. With psychoanalysis, when you're feeling a sadness, suddenly you get to feel it. A space has been created to feel it.
And only after quite a long period of time did I sort of send out the signals that I was someone you could invite home, you know. And people started inviting me home to lunch after shul or if I went on Friday to Shabbos dinner. And I got to know a lot of people who were very different from me, though in some ways the same in that they were Jewish, but they were older.
They were married couples with kids, which I didn't have, and I didn't know that many people who did. There were refugees from Orthodoxy, a number of women in this particular shul who were refugees from Orthodoxy. There were settled-down gay and lesbian couples, which was at the time not the norm, you know, to sort of have an effective gay or lesbian marriage.
You know, I would have these moments of thinking, what am I doing? Like, I've become middle-aged before I'm middle-aged. Like, I don't even know what I'm doing here. But I really appreciated this idea that I was with a group of people who were forming a community based around something they did together, which is searching for this quality of a real person.
community, real experiences that were not work by other means, which is what my social life really was at the time. And there were these meals together. There was study, which I discovered I loved, but it took me a long time.
I'm going to challenge the idea of control.
Because you're creating a space. You're creating an agenda, right? There's going to be a meal. Maybe there's going to be services. But you're not going to have control over it. In fact, control is what you're giving up, right? That's what the whole point of these laws about work and not work are. So you are coming to people where they are, including your own children. And...
Yeah, it's a lot of work to find things to do with these kids. Say you do turn things off, right? Say you don't drive to wherever it is that the playground is, right? I live in a city, you know, you can walk to the playground, but not always, right? So maybe you're stuck in a house. What do you do with these kids? Well, you just get through it the way that, you know, parents have for millennia.
You know, the Orthodox come up with these toys that you can play with that aren't beeping and loud, right? That, you know, are Legos, for example, magnetiles. If you go to services, for me, there were five years in which I was not in services. You know, I was there for the meal they serve after called a kiddish because I couldn't be in services. Eventually there was a baby.
I found one that had a babysitter and so I could go in, but it didn't, you know, when they were really little, it didn't work. But you are not necessarily resting, which is why I think the idea of minukah should be expanded to include something that can be very chaotic, like being with your kids. But think about the fact that you are with your kids. Your child is not playing on his device.
His attention, even if he's bored, I personally think being bored is a good thing for children to be. His attention is going to be on you. Oh my God, what a burden, right? That's terrible. Like, why do I have to entertain this child, you know, 24-7? Well, after a while, he will learn to entertain himself in a different way, in a way that isn't programmed to addict him to it.
Maybe you'll spend a lot more time reading. Maybe they'll go to services and they'll come in contact with people who aren't like you, but have things to teach them. And you're doing it for the future. You're doing it to implant the seed that maybe they will forget when they go to college or get to high school and go to college and enter the workforce.
But when they have children, they'll do it too.
Well, I was going to recommend Heschel, but I am going to skip that because we've talked about it a lot.
You should all check that out. Yeah, the Sabbath. I mean, you talked about him being a prophet. When I say that, I mean he had the language, he had the poetry to address people like you and me. Not, you know, the already observant, not the converted, but the people who need to hear what he has to say. So I would say that the first book I recommend is by George Eliot.
So that's The Gnome de Plume of Marianne Evans. And her most famous novel, you've probably heard of it, is Middlemarch. But her first novel was called Adam B. And it's from 1859. And it's an incredible novel with what we would now call a feminist plot. But it's also set in an English village in the turn of the 19th century, which is important because it's pre-industrial.
So she devotes an entire chapter to describing a pre-industrial Sabbath in a small English village. And it's just gorgeous. And you really get a sense of why people would do this. and what they did.
I want to say that I really think it's important to remember that the Christian Sabbath was numerically more people observed the Christian Sabbath than the Jewish Sabbath because there were more Christians in the world. Another thing that's really great about this book is almost everything that matters that happens in the book happens on Sunday. Because why?
That's when life happens, you know, among people. So that's the first book. The second book I would recommend is called The Seven Day Circle, and it's by a sociologist who actually invented something I draw on heavily in my book called The Sociology of Time. His name is Eviatar Zerubbabel. He's American, though. He has an Israeli name. He did grow up in Israel, and he talks about
experiencing these pauses for Jewish holidays and for the Sabbath. And it's what led him to sociology of time. But the seven-day circle is the definitive history of the week. You know, Heschel talks about there being an architecture of time, but he doesn't really flesh that out because he's really writing poetry.
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