Judith Shulevitz
Judith Shulevitz makes the moral case for a day of rest. She is a contributing writer to The Atlantic and author of "The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time." Find her at judithshulevitz.com
Transcript
Judith Shulevitz:
That is a symptom of a society that over valorizes work and reduces non-work to nothingness. You're not doing nothing when you're with other people. You're not doing nothing when you're canvassing. You're not doing nothing when you're in church.
Ted Roosevelt V:
When you're participating, yeah.
Judith Shulevitz:
When you're participating.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Welcome to Good Citizen, a podcast from the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. I'm Ted Roosevelt. My guest today is Judith Shulevitz. Her book is "The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time." It was written over a decade ago, but it is perhaps more relevant and necessary today than it was when she wrote it. In our culture of constantly changing digital connectivity, we often glorify the nonstop hustle and personal achievement above all else. The idea of deliberately stepping away to do nothing can seem certainly unproductive, but even irresponsible. At least, that was my view until I got the chance to sit down and listen to Judith talk about her research and her personal experiences. In this conversation, we explore how the way we structure our time shapes everything, from our relationships to our institutions, to our sense of purpose, and even our morality. I hope you enjoy it.
So just to frame the conversation, I don't think it controversial to say that people feel busier than they've ever felt. They feel more disconnected than they've ever felt. Their mental health is deteriorating, probably related to those two things. And you, in your book, you go backwards at least to the sort of 13th-15th century BC to find the Sabbath, this thing that's been sort of sitting under our noses forever. And I'm curious what led you back to the Sabbath? Why did that all of a sudden come into your vision as sort of a solution to what ails society today?
Judith Shulevitz:
Well, I came to it as a kind of personal journey, as they say, but as I was going back, I had to kind of explain myself to people. Because I was coming from a pretty secular world, so I had to explain why this was not just fulfilling to me personally, but actually a good idea. And there's a scene in the book where I describe trying to explain to my future husband that I wanted to lead this kind of life and he wanted to know why I wanted to lead this kind of life. He was Jewish but very assimilated, and though he belonged to a synagogue, he just didn't understand all the rules and regulations. And I said, not only because I'm Jewish and I want to interact with more Jewish people, but because I think it's a moral way of organizing society's time. And I saw this light go on in his eyes and he said, that's one of the great ideas of Western civilization. And then from there it sort of became a book.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Just for people that haven't read the book, can you describe the sort of central observation that you make about the value of the Sabbath and the rituals associated with the Sabbath?
Judith Shulevitz:
It's a theory of time that sees it as social and collective. So it's a way of organizing time so that societies or communities have to get together. And it struck me that the idea of requiring people to stop working---and note that I don't say to rest, I say to stop working---at the same time every seven days was a radical, radical idea. It was a new idea and that's why my husband said it's one of the great ideas of Western civilization. It was an invention. What was radical about it is, if you read the Bible, on the Sabbath, it says everybody has to rest. You, your family, your servants, the stranger within your gates, and interestingly, your animals. So it was egalitarian, but everybody had the time to not work once a week. That was radical.
Ted Roosevelt V:
One of the first observations I had about your book, that is the necessity for the social component of not working. That it's not simply good enough to sit back for a day and look at your social media and sort of go into your own space, that you actually have to interact with other people and there's actually a way in which you have to interact with other people that's critical. Can you talk about that?
Judith Shulevitz:
That's right. But I want to just qualify it a little bit and say, you don't have to do anything. All you should do is stop working. If you want to spend it by yourself, spend it by yourself. What a social architecture of time does is make it possible for you to get together with the people you want to get together with, you know, your family and your friends, because they're not working too. The reason this is so important is in our day we are losing this idea of collective time, of a collective schedule. The nine to five schedule is an artifact of the past. More people than not still have Saturdays and Sundays off, but that's changing. So the reason the Sabbath has become a radical idea again is that it creates this time, this collective time, this unity that actually can push back against the forces in our society that say you have to be working all the time.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Another thing I realized as I listened to you, even in periods when people are not working, and this is maybe more true for certain types of jobs than others, your attention is on work. I remember when I used to work for a hedge fund, and this is back in the Blackberry days, there was a little red light that would beep when an email came in. And I had to keep that Blackberry around me all the time, just to keep an eye on that little red light. And so while I might not have been at work mentally, I was still at least partially dedicating some of my mind towards the work environment. The rituals of the Sabbath prevent that from happening.
Judith Shulevitz:
The rituals of the Jewish Sabbath, yes.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Of the Jewish Sabbath. Yeah, sorry. Thank you.
Judith Shulevitz:
Something that people forget in the 20th and 21st century, or they used to forget in the 20th century and they now forget in the 21st century, is that more people in absolute numbers kept the Christian Sabbath than the Jewish Sabbath because there were many more Christians, and that the Christian Sabbath was taken incredibly seriously until the beginning of the 20th century in the advent of modernity.
So there were groups of Christians who didn't use certain things or do certain things on the Sabbath, but whether or not they went to church, whether or not----you know, the Puritans didn't light fires and sat there in the cold---whether or not they went that far, they didn't have to work because society was organized such that Sunday was, if not a day of God, at least a day of leisure. I like the dimension of the Jewish Sabbath that forces you to turn things off, but it can be onerous unless you actually are deeply embedded in a Jewish community because everyone around you is not turning things off.
So, you have to be embedded in a community for these things to make sense. The more important part is to create context and an expectation that people will not be working rather than the specific rules, because the rules only work if they work for everyone else in your life too.
Ted Roosevelt V:
One of the four tenants you talk about is being festive. Talk about the importance of that festive component of the Sabbath.
Judith Shulevitz:
Yeah, well, you talked about my four principles and I'll say what they are. So the four principles, I say this is like software for creating community, right? First you'd have to have a rule or a law that you would limit work time, that there's this concept that it should not be this fluid thing that takes over your whole life, that there is a hard break. So if you do that, it makes room for other kinds of time, like rest time, recreational time, family time, reading time. So that would be step one.
Step two is you would pick a certain time---you could say a day---when it was everybody's day off. So that creates synchronicity, right? That synchronizes the schedule, that synchronizes the calendar, so everybody's doing it at the same time. And not only is everybody doing it at the same time, but people of different social classes are doing it at the same time. So that's sort of--- in a way, that's the democratizing or the egalitarian quality of the Sabbath.
Step number three would be that it is regular. You do it at the same time every week once a month. You create a rhythm. It's about a habit. And then step four is to fill that time with something fun or festive.
I talk about the religious function of wine, how it's really striking that every religion has some wine in it or some alcohol in it because that is a religious feeling---if it's done in moderation, obviously---is to get a little tipsy and to sort of lubricate your social abilities. And that is how you make it a happy time as opposed to an oppressive time, is you make it kind of fun. So yeah, those are the four principles.
Ted Roosevelt V:
What is the role of God and the belief in God play in the Sabbath, whether it's a Christian or a Jewish Sabbath? Do you feel like that is critical or is the sort of structure sufficient?
Judith Shulevitz:
So one way of looking at God is God is the enforcer. God is the being or force that you look to create a sense of obligation and create a sense of fear that if you don't do it, something bad will happen. In Judaism, faith in God, whilst very important, is not the final criterion of being religious. What makes you a good Jew is doing what God commanded you to do because quite honestly, I don't do well with faith. I don't quite know what it means. It's like the word "spirituality," I don't know what that means. I'm not required to have faith to be a religious person in my religion.
One thing I like about Judaism is you're not a bad Jew for not having faith. You don't have to leave Judaism for not having faith. You might want to leave Judaism because there's a lot about it you don't want to do or you don't buy necessarily as a good thing, but it's not because you lack faith.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I definitely believe in a---there's something bigger and greater than us, and at the same time I find organized religions can sometimes lead us in ways that I'm not particularly comfortable with. And definitely as an American, the idea of individualism is a core and central value to being an American. And it seemed to be manageable in our society because of the role that religion played in our society. And as the role of religion declines in our society, we're just left with the individual side of things, the individualism side of things. And I think we're in a moment where we're really struggling with like, okay, well then how do we interact as a collective?
Judith Shulevitz:
I want to go back to this idea of, do I believe in God? I would say I do believe in miracles. I think certain things are miracles. I think coming up with ideas like the Sabbath is a miracle. Writing a poem is a miracle. Where does that even come from? Isn't that something of the divine in us that we can create? So I definitely see that God is a kind of mysterious mystical force in our lives, but I don't think God is the only thing ensuring that we act collectively.
You know what else is declining as religion declines? The institutions that we believed in and that we each individually tried to contribute to and strengthen. We live in a time where institutions exist to be disrupted and transformed and I would say torn down---institutions like the public school system, which is a crucial institution for local communities, which is what we all live in, after all, is a local community. Institutions like local government---all these institutions that require our support, they're all declining in one way or another. And that in addition to the decline of churches and synagogues, leaves us fragmented and alone. It's a very grim and thin idea of freedom.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I'll say it's less clear to me today what the central values of our country are than it was when I was growing up. Do you find that to be true? I mean, do you feel like there's less a sense of shared values in our country that they're not nearly as explicit as they were when you were growing up?
Judith Shulevitz:
Yeah, I would say so. It kind of goes without saying, nobody can miss this, that we live in an unbelievably divided, polarized society. So is that alienating? It can be. I think maybe it shouldn't be so alienating. We should be able to talk across these divides, but it is harder. The idea of even talking across divides is slipping away. Another thing I think is really missing is a shared understanding of the value of local community and local politics and working for your immediate community. Your local institutions are really the most important institutions in your life, and they're just not valorized. In the last two elections, I have canvassed---I vote upstate, I live halftime in New York and halftime upstate and I vote upstate---and so we really go door to door, which is something that's less common I think, in the city. And I really talk to people and I try to explain why your state senator can really change your life. They can change the kind of food that's in your kids' schools. They can change the level of emergency services you get. And so these are things that touch you directly. And I don't know if people know that.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I'm curious if the lessons from your book impact local politics. It seems like these are very congruent threads here.
Judith Shulevitz:
Yes, they are actually. Because how do you make sure that people have time to do local civic work, right? Half the population---and I am not going to say I have the right number, because I don't exactly know what it is right now, but---at one point it was, when I looked at it in 2019, it was one third, is working irregular hours or working extremely long hours. Then, these people are not going to be available to do civic work.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I really resonated with your distinction about the nature of work because I believe hard work when focused on meaningful things is really valuable. It provides purpose. But as a society, we seem busier than ever without necessarily working harder or more effectively. What I mean by that is our time gets consumed by distractions---emails, social media and news---and I'm wondering if you think that there's been a fundamental shift that our relationship with work has changed in a way that makes it busier but less fulfilling?
Judith Shulevitz:
Yes, and I don't really know exactly why, but I would say that status is bound up in our jobs more than I think it ever has been before. Let's just say that that might have something to do with the decline of local community, right? Because if you have status in your community and you're known to be a good man, a good woman, somebody people can rely on, you're respected by the people, by your church, by your PTA, your whatever it is---then somehow getting your validation from your job and your job title and your position within the work hierarchy becomes less urgent. One thing that the idea of a synchronized collective pause in work does is allow that community to form from which you could get a different kind of validation. That's why a lot of people seek out religious communities, go to church, go to synagogue. They meet people in a different way, and they are judged in a different way that has to do with how much they give and what they give to the community, which I think probably traditionally was more of a force in people's lives.
Ted Roosevelt V:
And you talk about in your book the Princeton Theological Seminary's study on the value of time and connectivity. Can you talk about that?
Judith Shulevitz:
So this is actually called the Good Samaritan Experiment. The Good Samaritan--- it's in the Gospels. Somebody was robbed and wounded and fallen, and a priest came by and walked by. And then, a Levite came by and walked by. But a Samaritan came up to the man and when he saw him, he had compassion for him and bound up his wounds and set him on his way in better shape than he had been.
So these two social psychologists decided they were going to test, what makes good Samaritans stop and help others? And they thought they should run this test on people who had read the Good Samaritan and had assimilated the value of the Good Samaritan. So they went to the Princeton Theological Seminary, ran their test on divinity students. They told all of the people that they were going to go somewhere and participate in a talk or a conversation. As they left the building, about a third of them were told they'd better hurry up because they're late. About a third of them were told they were just on time, but they shouldn't dawdle. And a third of them were told they had plenty of time. And as they walked to this other place that they were going, they walked by an actor who was hired to act like a sick man slumped against a building.
And this was actually the real test. Obviously this guy, obviously in need of help---the question that the researchers wanted to answer is who stops and why? Whether or not they had the Good Samaritan on their mind. So what made the difference was whether or not they were in a hurry. They came to this conclusion that morality is a luxury that disappears as time speeds up.
And even more interestingly, they discovered that the students who felt really rushed didn't even notice the guy. Time pressure had narrowed their cognitive map. So they had seen without understanding or taking it in, seen without perceiving. And I thought that was an enormously important study, and it's really in some ways the core of my book, that if you can't stop and you can't help someone, then you've lost some fundamental humanity that a regular and collective pause can give you. At least once a week, you can stop and you can be with others and maybe help them, or help them just by being with them. So you actually help build society when you stop, and that is a moral thing to do.
Ted Roosevelt V:
What's so interesting and just listening to you talk about that as I realize that I equate productivity with value for myself and the idea that having time actually creates a social benefit---to me, it's a radical idea. It is not the way that I have structured or lived my life. Maybe you've said this already, but was that kind of a key unlock for you? Was this idea that open time in itself is not bad, but it is critically--- it's good and it's critical.
Judith Shulevitz:
Right. But open isn't enough. It has to be structured. And those two things seem like a paradox, especially if you're American. Time at your disposal is a thing that you cherish, and of course you do. But if you have nothing but time at your disposal when you're not working, then it can be very lonely. And one of the things that is associated with the Sabbath pretty much in every community that in any way keeps it, whether Christian or Jewish or Muslim, is a meal.
What is more social than breaking bread together? Nothing. Dinner is like a machine for building community. Food is what it's all about. Sometimes when I would go to synagogues after this book came out, and I would say...they would ask me, what do we do to start keeping the Sabbath more than we do? I would say meals. Serve lunch, have Shabbos dinners. More important than Shabbos services on Friday night services, is Friday night dinner. So I ran a Friday night dinner program in my synagogue for a couple of years. I look forward to that so much. You have to find a way to fill it with something fulfilling or you're just going to avoid it.
Ted Roosevelt V:
So it's been 15 years since you wrote this book. Have there been observations or changes or if you were to go back and if you were to write this book again, would it change? How would it change?
Judith Shulevitz:
God, help me. I don't want to write this book again. [laughter] It was a hard book to write. I'm not writing anything like this again because it was so nebulous. But I do feel like there are more people who are conscious of the political dimension of this.
It's interesting. One of the biggest fights when people were unionizing in the 19th century and early 20th century was not more money, but less time at work. The work week, reducing the length of the work week. I mean it was 80 hours for some people, and getting it down to 40 was an unbelievable miracle. Then we forgot that in a weird sort of way, as the expectation became more and more common that you would work this irregular schedule. And I think people are becoming more aware of that. There's a movement to create predictive scheduling laws, and they're enforced in Oregon and they're enforced in various cities. No other state has adopted them. And those are rules saying you must tell your workers a certain time in advance what the schedule's going to be. You have to make sure that there are breaks between one shift and another shift, which sometimes there haven't been. So I feel like the political consciousness that I think is also a central part of the Sabbath idea is kind of starting to catch on.
Ted Roosevelt V:
So I guess sort of inherent in the comment that your book has become increasingly relevant is that the problem is getting worse, that it's becoming more and more of an issue in this country. Is there anything other than maybe kind of greater awareness of this that you have identified that might cause a change in behavior?
Judith Shulevitz:
As our national institutions fall apart and people become more aware of the importance of community, perhaps they will remember the idea that they want to actually gather together.
And I do think that these predictive schedule laws or fair workweek laws are a very good sign. I would like to see time more on the agenda for unions, and I think it probably is, people talk about it more. Care has become more of an issue. And one of the interesting things about care is that it doesn't care about your work schedule. If you're taking care of a child, if you're taking care of an elderly person, if you're taking care of a sick person, the rhythms of their needs are not the rhythms of your boss's needs, and they're just simply never going to coincide. So this idea that there should be a pushback to the workplace and the workforce and the expectations of work, I think is sort of rising more to the fore. The fight for the 30 hour work week, which is not only good, I think for our emotional and social health, but also probably promotes equality in the sense that it shares the available jobs better than an indefinite workweek. I find that very promising.
Ted Roosevelt V:
And I think it's important because you said this at the very beginning, and I was going to circle back to it, but not working is not the same thing as doing nothing.
Judith Shulevitz:
Correct.
Ted Roosevelt V:
And I think that is sort of a leap that a lot of people take when they think, well, I'm not working. I'm therefore sitting on my tush, not doing anything productive. I'm, like, watching TV or something. And that's not what you're calling for by any stretch of the imagination or talking about.
Judith Shulevitz:
No, it's not. I mean, that is a symptom of a society that over-valorizes work and reduces non-work to nothingness. You're not doing nothing when you're with other people. You're not doing nothing when you're volunteering at your school, you're not doing nothing when you're canvassing. You're not doing nothing when you're in church. You're not doing nothing when you're going to your kid's soccer game.
Ted Roosevelt V:
When you're participating, yeah.
Judith Shulevitz:
When you're participating.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Judith, we ask everybody on this podcast the same question, and I'm going to be very curious by your response. It is: what is it to be a good citizen?
Judith Shulevitz:
I actually more and more think it is to be active in your community.
I don't think that good citizens can function at an abstract or national level all the time. You have to practice good citizenship and you practice it by giving to your community, by which I don't mean money, and it could just be going to the town council meetings, running for town council, canvassing for the town council candidate. These little simple things that I feel that we no longer value as much as we should. That is being a good citizen. That is where it starts. Maybe you go from there to something bigger, but I don't know if the thing that is bigger is really bigger or better. That's what I think citizenship requires and citizenship starts with.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me today. We covered a lot of ground, so I very much appreciated it.
Judith Shulevitz:
It was fun. I wonder how you'll tie it all together.
Ted Roosevelt V:
This was new territory for me to explore and consider, Judith, and I'm grateful for the time you took to discuss it with me. Listeners, please pick up "The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of time." It's a beautiful blend of personal reflection, religious exploration, and a cultural critique, and it may just spark a change in your weekly life.
Good Citizen is produced by the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in collaboration with the Future of StoryTelling and Charts & Leisure. You can learn more about TR's upcoming presidential library at trlibrary.com.
