The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time

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.

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.

When time has disappeared and space is a comfortless ripple of white sand, should you imagine yourself inside the skin of the first man or inside the mind of God? The Talmud gives an answer to this question. It is, the mind of God. To save yourself, you re-create the world.

When time is money, speed equals more of it.

Not long ago, the sociologist Arlie Hochschild studied life at Amerco, an unusually worker-friendly Fortune 500 company. In her 1997 book The Time Bind, she reported that workers had grown so entranced with life in their workplace that they’d started avoiding their less well-tended-to personal lives. To maximize the time spent in the office or on t

This form of time measurement is known as task orientation, and it is the kind of time that is kept in less industrialized societies. Task orientation is also characterized by a tendency not to make overly fine distinctions between “work” (doing chores) and “life” (chatting, eating, relaxing).

Religions evolve through a process of condensation—call it distillation. First there’s some primal spiritual experience, then it’s boiled down to a symbol; when the old symbol threatens to lose its power, we turn up the heat to intensify it.

Why not let everyone run out and grab as much as he can, and store it in case of need? God explains: He wants to test the people. He wants to see whether the Israelites can be taught to follow rules—to “walk in my law, or no.”

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