Balance in Our Lives..thoughts about Passover

The twilight before the Sabbath is an exception to the time-bound nature of most Jewish obligations, and, like most exceptions, it underscores the rule. Jewish law is like musical notation; it gives meaning to the stuff of life by regulating it in time. The Sabbath is its most sacred interval. That I can’t subsume my schedule to its sterner rhythms testifies, I feel, to a flaw in my character. But it also says something about how hard it is for a twenty-first-century American to accept being governed by a calendar so firmly bolted down to the ground that she doesn’t get to move it around, adjust it by an hour here, an hour there. A rabbi who no longer works at the synagogue in the small suburban town where I no longer live once horrified its congregants by insisting that if they couldn’t get home to light the candles on time they shouldn’t light them at all. This struck everyone as harsh, not to mention impolitic, since a large part of the modern rabbi’s job is to woo apostates back into the fold.

According to sociologists, modern life is complex. Indeed, to them, the word modern implies complexity. Our lives get their feeling of disjointedness from the fact that our social networks — family, profession, church, neighborhood — don’t fit neatly inside one another like Chinese boxes, as, supposedly, they did in premodern times. That means we often play several mutually conflicting roles, navigate among thousands of cross-cultural expectations, employ hundreds of thousands of systems of communication, from linguistic and gestural and sartorial to electronic and financial, in the course of a single day. On the other hand, I can’t imagine that life in the ancient world was much simpler. True, biblical man and woman had a more fixed place in the world. Their social circles were less segmented and contrapuntal. But men and women still had to feed and clothe and shelter themselves and their children. They had to get along with relatives and neighbors and authority figures; they had to contend with strangers and foreign aggressors. They had to achieve competence in all the social strategies required to secure status and resources and pass those on to their children. They lived in the world, not in the Garden of Eden.

The rabbis say that the Sabbath is a taste of the world to come. Me, I think it’s an aftertaste of infancy. It’s a fantasy of perfect wholeness. If adult life is divided, the Sabbath is when we become one — with our family, with our community, with God. The Kabbalists say that on the Sabbath each of us is granted an additional soul, a neshama yetera.

Excerpted from “The Sabbath World” by Judith Shulevitz
Diane Fausel