Judith Shulevitz, author of the new book “The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time,” wrote in the April 16 Washington Post’s “On Faith” column that people have largely rejected the Sabbath because “there’s a light Sabbath and a dark Sabbath.”:
“The light Sabbath features community and festivity and what a famous professor of psychology once called ‘freedom from all slavery to the clock.’ The dark Sabbath bristles with rules and regulations, and at the extreme, fanaticism…Americans may recall the light Sabbath with a certain fondness, at least if they hanker after a calmer way of life. But they are mostly thrilled that over the past 50 years we’ve done away with the dark, coercive one.”
“But what if I told you that we could have some of the light Sabbath back, if we’d accept just a little bit of the dark one? We could have something to which we’d probably say yes–namely, more time for self and family and neighborhood–and all we’d have to do is let ourselves be governed by a few nos, a few rules about not working at a pre-arranged time. Conversely, if we don’t accept a no or two, then the kind of time that used to be protected by the Sabbath–time during which everyone leaves the office or factory and turns to one another for entertainment and sustenance–is in danger of disappearing.
Am I calling for a return to blue laws? Not exactly, if by that you mean the laws that forbid us to buy liquor on Sunday, as well as (depending on the state) to wrestle, box, race cars, play bingo, or go oyster-fishing. What I am saying is that we could learn from the Sabbath how to protect our time against the two grand addictions of the age–work and the Internet. What we’d learn is the immense usefulness, to society, of a structured period of non-productivity, as well as the need to enforce that pause. Putting teeth into a neo-Sabbath might involve legislation–tougher laws restricting off-hours and weekend work, or compensating it at a higher rate. Or it might involve the voluntary revival of old customs, such as the list of non-activities recommended by the just-launched Sabbath Manifesto Project: ‘Avoid technology.’ ‘Get outside.’ ‘Drink wine.'”
“The problem many Americans have with the Sabbath is that it smacks of religiosity. If the Sabbath is a strictly clerical institution, then any laws that help us to keep it breach the wall between church and state, right? Wrong. A mere half-century ago, in 1961, the Supreme Court upheld Sunday-closing laws on the grounds that they did not violate the constitutional rule against state sponsorship of religion. Justice Felix Frankfurter argued that though the Sabbath was first taught in the Bible, the American Sunday had evolved into a secular institution, a civic good, ‘a cultural asset of importance: a release from the daily grind, a preserve of mental peace, an opportunity for self-disposition.'”