A Post-Modern Meditation on the Sabbath
When I recently typed the word “Sabbath” into a keyword search of the Library of Congress’ online catalogue, I received a list of 4,215 books on the subject. A similar inquiry of the library system at Columbia University, where I teach, brought forth a slightly higher tally of 4,307. And from Amazon.com, evidently a less discriminating filter, there emerged 120,324 hits.
Even disregarding the biography of the heavy metal band Black Sabbath and Philip Roth’s novel Sabbath’s Theater, both of which are theological tracts of a more pagan sort, there remains no doubt that the literary ground of the Sabbath has been planted, plowed and harvested long past the point of exhaustion.
Chaim Grade has rendered it as part of a family memoir. Wendell Berry has dealt with it in verse and essay alike. Christians and Jews, blacks and whites, New Agers and fundamentalists all have had their turn. For contemporary Jewish writers and readers in particular, any book on the subject exists in the long shadow cast by Abraham Joshua Heschel’s classic The Sabbath, which nearly 60 years ago framed his argument, both mystical and practical, for the concept of “sacred time.”
Against such a towering example, amid such an overpopulated landscape, Judith Shulevitz has achieved something nearly impossible. She has written a book about the Sabbath that is truly singular. In fact, The Sabbath World could well become the Heschel-equivalent for a postmodern generation straining to hold on to the Sabbath against the allures of 24-7 technology and ecumenical politesse.
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Samuel Freedman teaches journalism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. He is the author of six nonfiction books, including Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry.
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