Judith Shulevitz
Appearances
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
Because I simply cannot stress this enough. If it's not happening collectively, it's not going to happen.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
So he came up with that phrase, the social morality of time, that you can have morality embedded in time.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
But if you want that rich textured experience, it's going to wind up heading in that general direction.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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 Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
I mean, if you have a fabulous Jewish or Christian education, maybe you do know what you're supposed to feel, but you might not feel it for a long time. It might be alien to you. It's by doing that we learn. It's by doing that the meaning sort of yields itself up to us.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
But if we have preconceived notions about what it means to go to services, what kind of person that makes you, if we have preconceived notions about how far we are from this tradition, then the words will be alien and repugnant, I think, to us. So I think the hardest thing is having patience.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
tolerating the alien and the somewhat alienating experience of going to a place that you're not familiar with, you feel like an outsider, you don't know the words, you don't know Hebrew, you don't know the tune of the hymns, if it's a church, and just saying, okay, this is okay. And maybe if I do it a few times, it will start to become more familiar.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
Or maybe first the social piece will come, and then I'll keep doing it, and it will start to feel more familiar. One of the things the Sabbath does is make time for study and maybe you'll learn more about what these things mean. But, you know, you're never going to get to this place of total meaning. You're never really going to get there. It's impossible.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
So the first time I ever wrote about this, the only thing that came to mind was a line from The Cat in the Hat, which is, it's fun to have fun, but you have to know how. You can't get what you need from a Sabbath if you don't prepare for it. If you want more than the normal mysticism...
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
You need to elaborately prepare the meal, but you need to prepare it in advance so that you can relax and enjoy it. I mean, that's the sort of utilitarian notion of it. The more religious notion would be that you are doing it because God commanded you to do it. You don't necessarily always know why, but God commanded it. But, you know, you have to shop. You have to cook.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
You might want to make plans with someone in advance. You invite people over. You have to make a challah. It's a Jewish Shabbat. And you have to do the preparation, which is also a preparation. You're preparing yourself to have this experience. You're not going to have the experience if you don't make it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
You are part of a community that's doing it, but it's not that the community gives you the meal. It's not that the community gives you the bath. So a Shabbos bath is very important. The mystics made a really big deal of this. In fact, one of the Kabbalists had a theory that your fingernails and your toenails were emanations of God.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
So you should always pair your fingernails and toenails and keep the pairings and bury them, not throw them away. But this is this idea of preparing your body, preparing your meal, preparing your home. You're supposed to clean your home. This one way in which the Puritans were very Jewish. They believed in having a full larder, taking a bath and cleaning the home before their Sabbath.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
And they understood this idea that it's just not going to have that special quality unless you prepare for it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
Well, who doesn't? So if you were an ultra-Orthodox Jew, I think there would be aspects of it that you would chafe under, right? Yeah. Everybody chafes under rules and regulations.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
Another reason I wrote this book is that I wanted to write about the Sabbath from the point of view of an American who innately is suspicious of rules and regulations, who fiercely wants to defend her individuality, who wants to be part of American society, didn't want to be separated from it. But there are these contradictions. There's always going to be these conflicting impulses.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
And I write about how I'm fundamentally ambivalent toward the Sabbath because there's a lot of times I don't want to do it. And it can be as negative an experience as it can be a positive one. But it's like anything else. It's like writing, for example. You know, you sit down, you don't want to write, but you got to write. And there will be three hours when it's a slog.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
And that one hour when your mind opens up and you're in the flow and you get it, you
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
get well you've created the schedule where you have to sit at your desk from nine to one or whatever it is as unpleasant as that may be as many conflicts as there may be and nothing good is easy you have to kind of work for it you have to work not to work in this case you have to work to get to the experience of flow to get the experience to the experience of god to that get to that sort of what emile durkheim the sociologist who by the way came from a family of rabbis
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
called effervescence, which is that sort of collective joy, you're not always going to like it. Now, if you can't ever like it, you're not going to do it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
Absolutely. I find it to be true. And I find it to be particularly true in New York.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
Because there's always this hubbub. There's always noise. People are always going somewhere. So the only time I've really found it to be a kind of natural experience was in Israel, where they really do have these Saturday closing laws, and there are fewer cars on the road, and there's less public transportation. And, you know, it's changing. But there is this kind of quietness in the street.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
So you don't feel like you're fighting against society in the same way. And I think you are here. We have essentially lost this idea. Now, you have to remember that America is fundamentally a Sabbatarian nation. The Puritans founded this country in part so that they could keep their very strict Sabbaths as they wanted to and as they felt they were unable to in England.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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...
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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 Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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 Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
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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.
The Ezra Klein Show
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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.
The Ezra Klein Show
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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.
The Ezra Klein Show
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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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
I'm going to challenge the idea of control.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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...
The Ezra Klein Show
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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.
The Ezra Klein Show
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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.
The Ezra Klein Show
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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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
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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.
The Ezra Klein Show
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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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
But when they have children, they'll do it too.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
Well, I was going to recommend Heschel, but I am going to skip that because we've talked about it a lot.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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?
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
So Zerubbabel sort of rigorously lays it out for you, the history of these temporal structures that make up a week and how they affect you. And the third book I would recommend is by a young journalist named Emily Gwendalsberger, and it's called On the Clock, What Low-Age Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
So what she did is she took jobs at an Amazon warehouse, a call center, and a McDonald's, and she discovered what these jobs take out of you. And one of the things she discovers, it's not the main focus of her book, but it's a big part of it, is what it's like to work these on-demand jobs, work on these on-demand schedules.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
For example, when she was filling out her application to Amazon, they told her on this form she had to be willing to work nights, weekends, holidays, and overtime on immediate demand with no notice. And she talks about families that never see one another, husband and wife who work different shifts, who maybe pass each other on a Monday night, you know.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
So I think it's a really good portrait of what the decalibrated nature of our just-in-time economy does to people.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
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Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
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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?
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Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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
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Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
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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.
The Ezra Klein Show
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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.
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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?
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.
The Ezra Klein Show
Best Of: Sabbath and the Art of Rest
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.