The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time

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).

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.

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.

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.

To be transformed by a religious experience, rather than merely to appreciate it, to drop an anchor into the depths of the past and keep your life from drifting away, you have to be willing, I thought, to give yourself over to a different way of living, one that seems antiquated and foreign and extinguishing unless you’re already immersed in it. Yo

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 us

The rabbis demystified holiness; they democratized it, making it less a function of spiritual genius than of personal self-discipline.

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

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