The Sabbath World (33 page)

Today’s neo-Sabbatarians, in other words, are the latest in a long line of philosophical and spiritual élites. They give things up in a spirit of protest or in an effort to bring holiness into their lives. But their reforms play out in very limited spheres, often on the margins of society. People suffering from time deprivation or information overload may not be addicted or driven or out of touch with the higher purpose of life. They may be tied to their meetings and computers against their will—by the need to hold on to a job. Individualized Sabbatarianism may change life for the lucky few, but it won’t help the many.

T
HE OTHER WAY
to bring back the Sabbath would be to re-regulate, collectively, the use of our time. Do I mean mean bringing back blue laws? These happen to be underrated, in my opinion. However complicated, unsystematic, and occasionally unjust they may have been, they did succeed in staving off the encroachments of the market and the specter of 24/7 labor—Stalin’s continuous workweek—for quite a long time.

But restricting Sunday commerce makes no sense anymore. For one thing, it places the burden on the people who can least afford to carry it—the women, usually, who are already juggling children, households, and full-time jobs. For another, it’s nonsensical to proscribe activities, such as the purchase of alcohol, that nobody frowns on anymore, especially if everything else is for sale. In any case, it is no longer possible to draw a “reasonable line of demarcation” between shopping and recreation, since shopping has evolved into a kind of entertainment and entertainment has largely devolved into a series of long-form commercials for worldwide celebrity brands.

The emphasis on commerce seems misplaced, anyway. The Fourth Commandment doesn’t explicitly forbid us to shop. It tells us not to work, and not to force others to work. Now, no modern society,
no matter how Sabbatarian—Israel is a good example—can avoid putting some people to work on the Sabbath. Any high-functioning state needs uninterrupted access to hospitals, drugstores, the military, food, water, transportation, and other basic services; indeed, Israel makes all those things available to its citizens on Saturday. Any society with a large secular population will also require a full panoply of recreational and self-care options on its days off, including, I would argue, retail shopping. Israel has plenty of that, too, although owing to inconsistent enforcement of its Sabbath laws it is not entirely clear how much Saturday commerce and labor is legal and how much simply flouts the laws.

Nor does the Fourth Commandment tell us not to work too hard, or too long. Indeed, as the Puritans stressed, we’re
supposed
to work the other six days. The Fourth Commandment tells us to remember to (1) stop working, (2) stop working at the same time, and (3) stop working at regular intervals. The implication is that a society has a right, and perhaps an obligation, to marshal its temporal resources for the benefit of the greatest number, even at the risk of harming the few.

The United States, in the twenty-first century, happens to be particularly oblivious to this particular Bible lesson. We have remarkably few laws governing the use and abuse of workers’ time. Two out of three countries in the world have laws that dictate the maximum number of hours employees can be expected to work (usually between forty-eight and sixty hours a week). The United States is not among them. Employees in most countries are entitled to rest breaks, but American employees are not. America has fewer public holidays than most industrialized nations. American workers have no legal right to take a vacation; vacation policy is determined by the employer. Most European countries require employers to give workers three to six weeks of paid vacation.

America does, of course, have the Fair Labor Standards Act. Adopted at the height of the Great Depression, the FLSA was passed less to protect workers than to fix a broken economy: It was meant to redistribute employment from the few who had it and who worked
long hours (the average workweek was forty-eight hours), to include the many who were out of a job. The history of the FLSA, it should be said, tells a cautionary tale about the unintended consequences of regulating time, for it appears to have fostered the current climate of overwork. In the 1950s, the era of the organization man, working overtime at time and a half became a way to climb from the lower-middle class to the middle-middle class, as well as the obligatory proof of one’s seriousness about one’s job. Because the FLSA exempted executive, administrative, and professional employees (in addition to farmworkers, whose work was assumed to require long hours), it wound up contributing to “the time divide”—the gap in American society between high-earning salaried élites who either drive themselves or are pressured into working much longer than forty hours, and, on the other hand, low-earning workers whose hours are deliberately kept below forty hours a week. Some of these workers may put in more than forty hours, but only by combining part-time jobs. As a result, they don’t get overtime—or health benefits, either.

In any case, a lot has changed since the FLSA was passed. For one thing, in 1938 it was assumed that the forty hours of the workweek would be allocated in even chunks across five days (Monday through Friday). That assumption can no longer be made. Another assumption underlying the forty-hour week is that it represented forty hours of paid work per household, with the same amount of time or more being devoted, usually by a wife, to all the essential unpaid duties. The rise of dual-earning couples, with the increase in single-parent families, means that each household has less time to devote to those activities. The loss of non-work time in these families has made it harder for them to cope with the needs of family members on different schedules, such as schoolchildren and elderly parents; that is why workers are asking for, and receiving, flextime.

This steady stream of small adjustments to the common work schedule is another way in which we are edging closer to Pieper’s specter of “total work.” When American courts and labor arbitrators hear “disputes at the boundaries of time,” as the law professor Todd Rakoff calls them—that is, tugs-of-war between workers and management
over the proper use of workers’ time—their decisions tend to favor companies over individuals, the time of the organizations over the time of families. For instance, a worker who refuses to work overtime has very little legal protection against being fired or disciplined for doing so; the right to refuse overtime is negotiated contract by contract, usually by unions, except in the case of government workers, who enjoy the protections of civil-service law. When an employee
is
fired or disciplined for refusing to work overtime because he or she needed to pick up a child from school or day care—a situation that generates its fair share of labor disputes—judges and arbitrators have generally held that the worker was required to make a “reasonable” effort to come up with some other arrangement before saying no. One such decision featured a carpenter who walked out on a job where he was working overtime because he had to pick up his two young children from a day-care center that was about to close. The arbitrator ruled that he should have left the children at the day-care center. He didn’t need to leave just then, because he knew that the day-care center would have taken care of the children for an extra fee.

Rakoff suggests three possible reasons for the law’s reluctance to protect non-work time. One is the imbalance of power between workers and management. Another is the outmoded assumption that workers have someone at home who can take care of such things. Both reasons seem true but remediable. Rakoff’s third explanation lays the blame on a more intractable, because more elusive, condition: “cultural blindness” about time. That is, we have a hard time seeing non-work time as anything but formless leisure, rather than time spent doing things that have to be done if society is to thrive, and done regularly and collectively.

What might neo-Sabbatarian laws—laws that protect coordinated, rhythmic social time—look like? We have dedicated so few brain cells to the problem during the past half century that it’s hard to envision the exact dimensions of a solution. Who knows what a team of crack labor-policy wonks might come up with? But if we do make the collective decision that this kind of time is worth protecting, two things should become apparent: one, that the market is unlikely to
protect it for us, and two, that we have more tools at our disposal than simple legal proscriptions.

We could start by tackling overwork. We could adopt European Union vacation policies (a minimum of four weeks), shorter workweeks (thirty-five hours, say), paid parental leave, and limits on overtime. We could emulate Germany and the Netherlands and give workers the right to reduce their hours and their pay, unless companies can prove that this would constitute a hardship.

But while such reforms would help Americans balance work and family life, and might even generate jobs in this age of underemployment, they don’t address the problem of
coordinating
social time. It would be impossible, and probably undesirable, to forbid people to work at night or on weekends. But we could create a web of incentives and disincentives that might make it easier on those who do, and also remedy the harm done to society. We could tax off-hours labor and use the money to bolster the civic institutions weakened by the diminution of the pool of available volunteers. We could mandate higher pay or graduated bonuses for protracted or irregular schedules that reflect the hidden social and personal costs of staggered hours. We could strengthen a worker’s right to refuse overtime or a job reassignment that entailed working non-standard hours.

Each of these measures might have negative and unforeseen consequences, and we should instruct our labor-policy wonks to model all possible outcomes. And we should concede that a full day of rest in the global era is probably a fantasy. But Henry Ward Beecher was right: The idea does have uplift. Who thinks in terms of preserving public culture anymore? Everybody talks about popular culture, but pop culture is a creature of segmented markets, not common ones. Sunday once gave Americans an experience that was national in scope, personal in character, and religiously neutral. As soon as religion was disestablished, no one had to go to church—or anywhere else, for that matter.

As for the common day of rest falling on Sunday, Frankfurter, in
McGowan et al. v. Maryland
, pointed out that to share a day of rest, you had to pick one, and it might as well be the one that most people already
observed. The secular Sunday was implicitly a national holiday. One day a week—it is worth remembering—the country honored life beyond duty and the imperatives of the marketplace. For twenty-four hours, we stayed home and ate huge family dinners, or went to church, or set off on afternoon drives. And we not only did these things with members of our inner circle; we did them with the knowledge that everyone else was doing them, too. That gave us permission not to work, too, along with the rest of the nation. We had fewer choices, but that lack of choice, in retrospect, was liberating, because our inexhaustible options trail behind them the realization that we’re not doing everything we could be doing. We embraced laziness, goofiness, random reading, desultory conversation, neighbors and relatives both pleasant and unpleasant—the kinds of things that knit us together even as they made us more ourselves.

T
HE CONVENTIONS
of spiritual autobiography require me to conclude by telling you how I keep the Sabbath now, as opposed to when I began this book. The answer is, I have not changed all that much, and everything has changed for me. I keep the Sabbath, but only halfway—by strict Jewish standards, at least—which sometimes feels fine and sometimes feels shameful but has come to feel inevitable.

My husband and I work hard at the celebratory aspects of the Sabbath. We spend the week scouring farmers’ markets for fresh fruits and vegetables, and on Friday mornings and afternoons we make an elaborate dinner, and sometimes, if we get home in time, take baths and dress up, and we invite friends over or we go to their homes, and we light the candles, and we bless the children, the wine, the challah, and the washing of our hands. As for the negative proscriptions—the “do nots”—we observe those largely by keeping our electronic devices off, including cell phones. These we use only if we
really, really
need to. We put our wallets away, with the same resolution about money, which is not to be handled on the Sabbath.

But we live in New York City, and amid the many temptations it’s
easy to confuse need with desire. We no longer drive to synagogue, but sometimes the children’s whining about the thirteen-block walk forces us into a cab, which entails driving
and
handling money. The period after services poses a problem, and on those winter days when we have failed to wangle an invitation to someone’s home for lunch or lack the energy to put on a spread ourselves, when the seconds tick slowly and the children grow restless, we go to a museum. In that case, we may not have to pay—we can usually go to the ones at which we can flash membership cards—but we’re sure to take our wallets back out when it comes to buying food, drink, maybe even toys. I recently confronted the specter of Saturday-morning soccer practice, and was defeated by it. My son now plays soccer instead of going to synagogue, and my husband goes with him.

I feel guilty about not building better fences around the day, but apparently not guilty enough. Partly, it’s because each step up in observance paralyzes me with indecision. Why follow this rule and not that one? Where to begin? But also, I think, it’s because my religious commitments remain too abstract to overcome the inconvenience of making them. Probably the only way for me to trick myself into being
shomer Shabbat
would be to restrict myself to circles where such behavior is the norm, not subject to constant question.

Anyway, I still like the idea of the fully observed Sabbath more than I like observing it. I like the idea of being commanded, too, in the same ambivalent way, because I believe that I am. Being commanded strikes me as a succinct way of saying “being born into the world.” Being commanded means that customs come upon us from the outside, like the language that we learn from our parents, and from the inside, like the still small voice of conscience. What others call God, I call ritual.