The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time

What the story comes to teach us is that if ritual is born of trauma the aversion to ritual is also born of trauma—the trauma of ritual.

God, then, is the ungovernable reality commemorated by ritual. Ritual reflects the highly contingent anthropological, geographical, agricultural, and historical facts that conditioned our neural pathways and tribal behaviors and the forms and customs that became religion, and that even now determine through force of repetition the way things ought

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.

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

This sea change isn’t as complete as it may yet become. The large temporal frameworks of our lives remain fairly firm. We still work comparatively standard hours or go to school from morning till afternoon, fall through spring. But to the degree that electronics take over our activities and our interactions, personal time becomes more fungible.

David Levy, a professor at the Information School at the University of Washington, has updated both the utilitarian and the humanistic arguments for the networked age by calling for a new “informational environmentalism.” Just as we fight to save marsh lands and old-growth forests from development and pollution, he says, so we need to fight to save

Cell-phone and text-messaging and social-networking technologies have begun to wash away at adamantine “mechanical time,” the unyielding time of clocks, and to suspend us within “mobile time,” which can be made to flow whichever way we want.

In its celebration of self-discipline, secular Sabbatarianism has a surface resemblance to the Orthodox and Puritan Sabbaths, but it has a deeper affinity to other, recent movements in which Americans take themselves off the grid: the voluntary simplicity movement, the green or sustainability movement, the frugality movement.

The problem with substituting cultural consumption and active leisure for rest is that one person’s recreation is another person’s work. If museums, libraries, and baseball stadiums are to stay open, then security guards and librarians have to work, and baseball players have to play.