Sarada and I have decided to return to our practice of turning off and going offline every Friday to Saturday, and it won’t have escaped your attention that this is very similar to the Jewish Sabbath. This is no coincidence. I’ve doubtless mentioned it on here before, but it’s at the instigation of an organisation with Jewish roots, which actually rather surprises me because it’s actually an outreach programme (that might be the wrong word). Judaism is emphatically not a proselytising faith and many religious or observant Jews would consider it inappropriate for Gentiles to comply with the 613 mitzvot. Nonetheless I’ve previously recognised the spiritual value of sabbatarianism as a Christian, and it makes sense for me to do this, although I do it rather sheepishly.
I didn’t do it “properly”. We did open it with a prayer and ceremony, followed by a meal, and also closed it with prayer followed by a meal, but it wasn’t sunset to sunset. Sunset today is at 9:25 pm BST, which is five minutes before I go to bed due to the possibility of being disturbed at night by my father for whom I care, making it very difficult. It’s notable that at least two Abrahamic faiths have ceremonies which are easier to observe in the region of their origin than much closer to the poles (and for Muslims there’s an additional problem at Mururoa Atoll, which is not, however, my concern). Britain is the northernmost country which is not officially considered Arctic and although we don’t have the midnight Sun here, we do have a six week period around the summer solstice when it doesn’t get completely dark, so currently we have no proper night and in Lerwick sunset can be as late as 10:34 pm, followed by sunrise at 3:39 am. However, it has been suggested that an analogy can be drawn between someone wandering in the desert who has lost track of time and observing the Sabbath within the polar circles, that they should simply count six days and observe one as the Sabbath, and it’s also been said that one should observe it according to the time of one’s usual abode. This would mean that the Sabbath is observed over a different interval depending on where you come from and is also unhelpful for people born near the poles. It’s also said that anyone who is confused as to which day of the week it is should avoid the thirty-nine melachot on every day, which strikes me as impractical. Maybe the answer is to follow Jerusalem time but I haven’t heard this suggested.
It made me uneasy that I didn’t do it “properly”, and I’ll have a dive into that whole thing later. We also can’t say the prayer associated with opening the Sabbath without it feeling culturally appropriative, because we are not the chosen people set apart from all the peoples and we have no tradition of Exodus from Egypt, so there’s that.
On the whole, it was a positive experience. My observation of the Christian Sabbath has long been stricter than average, and probably far stricter than the average liberal Christian, although more recently I’ve wavered a lot. There are various issues with me observing this Sabbath as strictly as I feel drawn to. For example, I simply cannot sleep without something like the radio or a media player on, so I had to do that. It’s difficult enough in the first place to sleep near the summer solstice, and that would’ve made it completely impractical. I don’t know where that leaves me. I also just did turn lights on and off, cooked and so forth, so I did kindle fires. A substantial issue for me here is that I’m a carer, so I can’t see how I could simply not care for my father in this situation and that’s likely to continue for as long as he’s around, and the same presumably applies to parents of younger children. I seem to recall that there’s discussion of this in the Talmud, and it amounts to the work of “women”, which is likely to include caring and parenting, being exempt. This raises all sorts of questions about the nature of work. Is work generally considered to be activity undertaken for the advantage of the worker, for example to receive financial or other material recompense? It seems to me that if that’s so, there’s an argument for that sort of work not being undertaken at all, at any time.
Douglas Adams talks about “the long dark teatime of the soul” as the fundamental problem with Sundays, and was writing at a time when Sunday observance was rather more strictly enforced legally than it is now, though not enormously so in most of these isles, with the exception of Na h-Eileanan an Iar. Adams was an atheist, and to some extent, though perhaps through persuasion, something of a proselytising atheist in the later years of his life, so maybe for him Sundays would indeed seem empty, although I can also relate to that. My experience of yesterday was that it was very much like that of the old Sundays before they liberalised the trading laws, which suggests my life revolves too much around shopping although I don’t actually go that often and ironically I did go yesterday to pick up reading material to plug the gap. This emphasises the importance of preparation. I also wrote a lot, which is one of the melachot, so basically I definitely didn’t do it properly, and I did it better the last few times I did it than I did yesterday.
I think it’s probably harder for someone to do this in isolation, but also easier. I expect one of the benefits is face to face socialising, substantially with the family but also the wider community. This I didn’t get. Due to a combination of caring and the lockdown, I don’t really see many people socially outside the home and, negative though it often is, much of my socialising is via social media. Sarada and our son went off to see my mother, thereby kindling a fire in the car. I did speak to my mother on the ‘phone although I didn’t initiate the call, and I also answered a work ‘phone call but the issue there is that patients have needs, and again we come up against the issue of how one is meant to provide necessary services for people. Isolation would also make it easier because one would not then at least feel the pressure to do things for others, and it would be more like a weekly retreat. However, I always ring my mother on Saturday so that would have to change were I to observe that.
Probably the hardest thing of all was the absence of music. When I first left home for university, in an attempt to be minimalist I took a radio and no other means of listening to music. After six weeks I was crawling the walls for that and other reasons, and it’s so hard to cope without music generally. There was some music yesterday, furnished by our son’s excellent guitar playing, and I even sang along to it, but not enough. But no radio of any kind was very difficult, perhaps the hardest part of the day.
There is also an issue with how I’ve been attempting to approach reading recently. A few years ago I decided to give away all the books which were out of copyright and could be easily found in electronic form, and my main purchases of reading material since then have been in ebook form. All of these became unavailable to me, and this was also rather hard to handle. It meant, for example, that I couldn’t even read the Talmud, although the Tanakh was available to me. It seems a bit absurd not to have the central sacred texts available on a holy day because you have to break a mitzvah to read them. However, looking online in advance for copies of the complete Babylonian Talmud in print form and you’re talking hundreds to thousands of pounds. It’s like buying the Encyclopædia Britannica. So that’s not happening.
At this point you may be thinking, why am I interested in attempting to observe the whole thing properly when I’m not even Jewish and when only Orthodox Jews would go that far? The answer is that it doesn’t feel like enough when I don’t. I think I have inherited traits which incline me towards obsessive-compulsive behaviour, and I need to go further into that to explain why this claim is not offensive. In terms of personality disorders, using the classic cluster-based approach I score more highly on the obsessive-compulsive side than any of the others, and a psychiatric assessment led to the conclusion by said psychiatrist that I was in fact obsessive-compulsive. This is not a claim I wish to bandy about as a kind of attention-seeking “identity” issue, and in fact I would wish to defuse the whole idea that it’s problematic in my case. I have a few genes at the end of one of my chromosomes which would predispose me to this, and these genes are also commonly found in persons of Jewish descent. However, they’re not “Jewish genes”. They just happen to be there in my thoroughly Gentile genome, just as they happen to be there in a lot of Jewish people. I think that the observance of the mitzvot is a means of sanctifying, in a positive way, what others might see as obsessive-compulsive. In fact, when behaviour more classically diagnosable as obsessive-compulsive does turn up in Orthodox Jews, it makes it easier for them to follow some mitzvot but harder for them to follow others, because they may be too focussed on something like trying to ensure there are no insects in their food and neglect some of the rest. Right now I’m tending to think that obsessive-compulsive behaviour may sometimes be the result of not having a spiritual outlet for that aspect of one’s obsession, so it’s inappropriate to consider Orthodox Judaism as pathological in that respect, mainly because it’s deeply offensive to do so, and in fact this can be turned around to say that a spiritual gap in people’s lives might lead them to become obsessive-compulsive. That said, this seems just as offensive to non-religious people, so what can you do?
The Noachic Covenant (and no, the Flood didn’t literally happen and so on but bear with me okay?) is seen as governing the whole human race, and has only seven mitzvot. Some of those I find questionable, such as the sexual immorality mitzvah which I think must surely be inevitably sexist and homophobic. However, I also have the impression that there aren’t enough of them. It feels like one is not doing something properly if one is governed by only seven principles. Six hundred and thirteen seems like a more sensible number, which would give life some kind of structure and recommend what to do in most given circumstances.
But many people would say I shouldn’t be doing this at all, because I’m not Jewish and am practicing cultural appropriation, and because Gentiles are specifically excluded from following this kind of thing. The problem here is that I’m kind of left in the wilderness if I don’t. I am quite thoroughly theist and in the Abrahamic tradition, but I don’t now believe that Jesus was God in human form. If you take that away from the Christian Bible you’re left with the Tanakh, and a long story about the relationship between God and humanity, mainly the Jews. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with my spiritual tradition now it’s been “beheaded” in this way. Sympathetic though I am to Islam to a certain extent, which does apply the whole human race, liberal Islam is either something I haven’t heard about or which is in a very small minority, and I can’t go along with a largely sexist and homophobic religion. That’s a no-brainer. It is of course also true that there’s a lot of sexism and homophobia in the Jewish religious tradition, but in that case there’s also a lot more on the liberal side. In the absence of knowing what to do, I do this, with a certain sense of unease about cultural appropriation, but it seems to me that it’s efficacious to spiritual development in a similar way to something like Yoga, and that it works well for the human race generally to do this kind of weekly detox. It also benefits others to be more spiritually developed. So I do it.
A Box Of Chocolates 