
The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time

But what was the labor movement’s fight for shorter days and workweeks about, if not the social morality of time? And how about the way we’re always recalibrating our feelings for our friends, or our sense of how they feel about us, with the neurotic precision of a Larry David, based on how many minutes they’ve kept us waiting? If other people’s
... See moreJudith Shulevitz • The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time
We were above all those books that promised success through effective time management, but whenever we could we sneaked peeks at them in the bookstore.
Judith Shulevitz • The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time
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
... See moreJudith Shulevitz • The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time
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
... See moreJudith Shulevitz • The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time
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.
Judith Shulevitz • The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time
The study made it hard not to conclude, said Darley and Batson, “that ethics becomes a luxury as the speed of our daily lives increases.”
Judith Shulevitz • The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time
Linder’s theory was that as labor becomes more specialized and productivity increases, two things happen. First, each hour of work increases in value, which jacks up the value of hours spent not working. Non-work time has a higher “opportunity cost”—each minute not spent completing one’s work assignments equals more money squandered. Second, there
... See moreJudith Shulevitz • The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time
To be a Puritan was to live in a perpetual state of unfulfilled and unfulfillable expectation, for to the Calvinist death was certain, but redemption could never be.
Judith Shulevitz • The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time
Nevertheless, when you dissolve the old structures and boundaries of time—the calendar of holidays and festivals, the geographical distances, the chronobiological cycles—you remove the brakes that slow down the perpetual motion machine of postindustrial capitalism.