On Shabbat, I do not turn on the lights. This is a recent development: I tell my mother it is because I want to experience time diurnally and, because she is my mother, she understands immediately. Some Friday nights, I sit by the window and read as the sunlight gradually fades, the words becoming harder and harder to make out. I commit myself to it: today, I tell myself, I do not work. It is a difficult promise. It is one I am trying to keep.
When Abraham Joshua Heschel talks about Shabbat in The Sabbath, he calls it a “palace in time”: a sacred Jewish architecture that celebrates holiness in time, giving us a taste of eternity. Where the week is focused on the world of things and commerce, Shabbat abides in the world of time; where the week is mundane, Shabbat is sacred.
When the sun rises on Saturday mornings, I am at once anxious and relieved — today, I do not have a to-do list or any emails to return. It is Shabbat and time is boundless. I lie outside in the sun for hours; I call my parents; I read a book for nothing but the pleasure of it. I build, brick by brick, stone by stone, a palace in time.
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We haven’t always used clocks. In Europe, it started in part with the monasteries, who would ring the bell at set times of day to call the monks to prayer. The first fully mechanical clocks emerged in the thirteenth century; in the fourteenth century, springs were introduced, then pendulums. In the nineteenth century, time became increasingly standard, uniform and synchronized—trains ran along previously unimagined distances and required intensive scheduling. The industrial revolution was here and with it, a complete transformation in how the West ordered and conceptualized time.
Suddenly, clock-time became critical: more and more often, workers were paid by the clock, with wages based on how many hours they had worked, as opposed to a task-oriented piece wage. In a Marxist theory of economics, a commodity’s value is a representation of the congealed labor, as measured in hours, associated with its production. Under nineteenth century systems of manufacture, workers’ wages were determined by time worked and are designed to maximize profit at the expense of workers. Capitalists obtained surplus value through the exploitation of worker time. At the same time that this shift in manufacture was occuring, clocks and watches were becoming increasingly accurate and being produced en masse. Public, synchronized clock-time was a fact of life and a colonial tool to ensure cohesion with imperial capitalism.
In this system of industry, it matters that a worker shows up at a particular time; it means something to be ten minutes late. As Raj Patel and Jason Moore argue in their 2018 book, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, “policing time was [and is] central to capitalism’s ecology”.
This new mode of time discipline created a universal schedule that was defined by industrial capitalism. Clock-time regulates behavior, particularly in the workplace: for the sake of production, time now has to be uniform, synchronized, exact. Everyone has to know what you mean when you say eight o’clock, or nine. The clock becomes “a disciplining device” that legislates productivity and punctuality.
In 1967, E.P. Thompson published “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism”. This seminal article popularized the notion of “time discipline”, the social and cultural rules that legislate the measurement of time. Thompson argues that this new clock time was a direct result of the industrial revolution, imposing capitalist interests onto the populace in place of previous more communal perceptions of time. Under time discipline, time becomes a commodity, a currency—as Thompson says, “time is money”.
But not all time is for sale. Even under industrial capitalism, there is still Shabbat. There are still 25 hours of the week where time holds still, makes room for something quiet and eternal. It is, by its very nature, a world designed to exist outside of capital. In Heschel’s words, “He who wants to enter the holiness of the day must first lay down the profanity of clattering commerce, of being yoked to toil… He must say farewell to manual work”. Shabbat time and industrial time discipline are therefore entirely distinct; they cannot exist simultaneously. Still, Jews live under both of them.
What, then, does it mean to live in a world dictated by the rhythms of industrial time discipline while remaining faithful to the rhythms of Shabbat time? How do we negotiate these two overlapping timescapes, step delicately between the days?
Shabbat is a weekly reminder that there is a world beyond, outside of, and surpassing the world of industrial capitalism. There is a place where time is made holy and eternal by the refusal to work: “Six days a week we wrestle with the world, wringing profit from the earth,” writes Heschel. “On the Sabbath we especially care for the seed·of eternity planted in the soul. The world has our hands, but our soul belongs to Someone Else.” Shabbat establishes difference between us and the capitalist timescape: it “[overrides] all other existing calendars”. While industrial time discipline treats time as a commodity to be exchanged, Shabbat sanctifies time. The day is no longer a collection of hours to be negotiated or traded away, but a temple worth dwelling inside.
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Theoretically, we have weekends off. This is a direct result of years of struggle by labor organizers and movements for worker’s rights.
For most of the 18th century, Sunday—Christianity’s “Lord’s Day”—was the only day of the week that workers would have off. Most workers in the US and England spent this day revelling, gambling, and enjoying themselves. This led to a phenomenon called “Saint Mondayism”: the then-common practice of ditching work on Mondays after acquiring late-nights and hangovers the day before. To remedy this practice, and provide more time for Christian prayer on Sundays, employers began granting time off Saturday afternoons. It is here, in the late 19th century, that the modern concept of the “weekend” emerged.
However, this early form of the weekend offered no answers for Jewish factory workers. This era was marked by significant anti-union violence and repeated violations of workers’ rights—victories on the part of labor were hard-fought and hard-won. An answer for question of Shabbat wouldn’t come until 1908, when a New England mill implemented a five-day work week. It was the first recorded American factory to do so. This two-day weekend, stretching from Friday night through Sunday, was designed to allow Jewish workers to observe Shabbat without having to make up any time on Sundays. Two-day weekends caught on in other mills and factories, gaining substantial popularity among workers. In 1929, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America Union—a union headed by Jewish immigrant Sidney Hillman and known for championing social unionist and progressive political causes—became the first union to successfully demand a national five-day workweek. The practice continued to grow across the country and was nationally established by a provision of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, which required a maximum 40-hour workweek with a two-day weekend.
Supposedly, then, the workweek shouldn’t interfere with Shabbat. But the reality is that today only American employees work an average of nearly six hours on weekend days, while only 42% of American employees work 40-hour weeks. Many workers far exceed the standard workweek, taking on multiple jobs or gigs in order to make ends meet. Most stores and restaurants are open on Saturday, and often Sundays too, meaning that the average service industry or shift worker is scheduled to work on Shabbat. In the absence of a written contract stating otherwise, an employer can require any employee to work weekends; refusal can be deemed insubordination and grounds for termination.
At businesses that provide an hourly wage, each hour is a commodity; it represents a tangible amount. To forgo a shift on a Saturday is to give up a literal sum of money that many can’t afford to lose. Meanwhile, more and more people are working on independent schedules or working from home, causing work to spill over into the weekend. The digital economy means that workers are often expected to be available at any time, constantly partially on the clock. So, practically speaking, a lot of people do end up expected to work on Shabbat: to celebrate Shabbat in this modern context is, therefore, to extricate yourself from the workplace, to visibly mark the difference between yourself and capitalist economy.
But even if no one worked weekends, Shabbat would still construct difference between Jews and the timescape of industrial capitalism. The rules of time discipline means that industrial capitalism is meant to dictate time even outside of the workplace—even on days off, we rely on the same clock that tells us when we’re late, the same clock that dictates when a shift is over.
Shabbat is different. Time is marked by the sunset, by the presence of three stars in the sky. You can, theoretically, go the whole twenty five hours without looking at a clock. By mandating abstention from work, Shabbat pulls us out of the world of industrial time discipline and into a space wholly new.
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Contemporary Jews continue to struggle with how to make sense of Shabbat under capitalism. When I talk to my friend Kaia Berman-Peters, a sophomore at the New England Conservatory, she isn’t sure where to start.
“It’s hard to relate Shabbos and capitalism at all because they’re part of two such different worlds,” she says. “It’s hard to conceptualize Judaism and capitalism in even the same category.”
Ana Levy-Lyons, the senior minister of the First Unitarian Congregational Society in Brooklyn and the author of No Other G-ds: The Politics of the Ten Commandments, recounts a persistent feeling of anxiety around Shabbat—it is, for her, an “anxiety [that] never really goes away… it always feels like we don’t really have time.”
“[Keeping Shabbat] seems like a dangerous thing to do in our culture,” she says, adding, “Can you really stop? is it okay to stop?” Levy-Lyons remembers feeling “a battle in [her] own heart—who does this time really belong to? [Is it] really owned by my boss and my peers?”
“Technology has created even more pressure,” she adds. She recalls the first electric tractor. It had, she tells me, lights, enabling farmers to work after dark. “You have to just keep going.”
21st century technology is no exception. Workers are expected to be constantly available; emails and Slack messages are meant to be returned, even when one is off the clock. Productivity is assumed to be near-constant, eroding the barrier between work-time and free-time.
For Levy-Lyons, one way to deal with this anxiety around workplace productivity is by thinking of Shabbat as “G-d’s time”—something that is outside the bounds of human control.
Rabbi Aryeh Bernstein, a national educator with the Jewish social justice nonprofit Avodah, agrees: “One of the main functions of Shabbat is the human relinquishing of control over time,” he says. “Industrialism has tried to homogenize all time and all weather… [but Shabbat] is stable, it is external, it is prior to human intervention. It changes with the seasons and you have to adjust your schedule.”
“There is something really profound, something freeing, about that relinquishing,” he adds. “We are not in control.”
Levy-Lyons describes Shabbat in fundamental opposition to capitalism. Where capitalism is based around the idea that “you never have enough” and marked by a “bottomless need, Shabbat dictates that whatever you have is sufficient.”
“If you want to be free from that—if you want to even have the slightest hope of getting free—” she says, “you have to make the decision.”
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In her forward to “The Sabbath”, Susannah Heschel writes, “For [these American Jews], the Sabbath interfered with jobs,·socializing, shopping, and simply being American.”
But this interference is a feature, not a bug. When we abstain from our own work, from the commerce that relies on the work of others, we step outside of the world of American capitalism. Shabbat places us in an alternate timescape from the rest of America and, therefore, it marks us as Other: we may inhabit the world of industrial capitalism during the week, but it does not have to be what we are. Shabbat, then, is a means of defiance. It reminds us that we can be separate from the machinery of empire. We are loyal to our communities and to G-d, rather than the missions of capitalism and imperialism.
Shabbat forcibly wrenches us from the timescape of capital and accumulation. In doing so, it allows us to escape from industrial time discipline and create alternatives to it. We get, for one day, mei’ein olam habah, a taste of the world to come: a radical possible future that is not limited by industrial capitalism or greed.
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If Shabbat is a palace in time, it is a palace that offers refuge from the rhythms of the workweek, from exploitation, from systems of capitalist hierarchy. It is a palace with no clock. It is a palace where, together, we are able to create entirely new ways of being.
Industrial time discipline transforms time from a subjective experience to a limited object: as Dale Southerton writes in “The Rise of the Clock: Time Discipline and Consumer Culture”,
“As an objective unit, time became commodified—a resource to be valued and exchanged or negotiated over.” Hours are a “conceivable object of commerce”. They have a set, material value and a clear commercial worth.
But what capitalism makes commodity, Shabbat makes holy. “Judaism,” writes Heschel, “is a religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time… to the Bible it is holiness in time, the Sabbath, which comes first.” Shabbat allows us to rejoice in the holiness of time, recognizing the eternal in each moment. It’s an opportunity to re-sanctify and renew.
Ezra Lebovitz was a 2021 Resilient Writing Fellow with New Voices and the Institute for Jewish Spirituality.
