The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time

Too busy to attend to our own needs, we lack sympathy for the needs of people who seem less busy than we are.

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.

Grown-up time, Rousseau declared, is absent from itself. We fall into it as we fell from Eden, yet we never occupy it. We dwell in the past and the future but never in the present. At no one moment of existence is there anything “solid enough for the heart to attach itself to.” But now, as he sat at the Lake of Bienne, sometimes rocking in a boat,

In return, God expects the self-restraint without which collective life would be impossible. As God gives to them, so they should give to him; and as God shares his bounty with them, so should they share it with one another, distributing it justly.

You refrain from melachah to free your mind from the mental work of getting things done.

If you view the stuff of everyday life as the raw material of Judaism, and its rules as a framing device, then you will grasp something essential about the Sabbath: It is meant to turn the ordinary into the singular.

To the mundane satisfaction that comes from cultivating good habits—cleanliness, organization, family togetherness—is added the sublime sense of rightness that comes from following God’s commandments.

If you wanted to identify the remains of a Sabbatarian sensibility in our view of the weekend today, you might start with the sense that we are obliged to use it to better our condition. We think of Saturday and Sunday as time not merely for resting but for trying to become the kind of people that work prevents us from being.

Homo faber—Arendt’s term for man the fabricator—thinks, she says, in terms of ends and means, of “in order to” rather than “for the sake of.” In this way, he deprives himself of the capacity to see things as they are, for the sake of themselves.