Judith Shulevitz, Making Room For The Sabbath

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Judith Shulevitz, Making Room For The Sabbath

TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

We had planned to broadcast an interview today with David Simon and Eric
Overmyer, the creators of the new HBO series "Treme," which premieres next
month. But this morning, we learned that one of the show's writers and
producers, David Mills, passed away suddenly last night in New Orleans, where
"Treme" is set and where the show is filmed.

David Mills and David Simon worked together on a number of shows, including
"The Wire," "Homicide: Life on the Street," and "The Corner," which won an Emmy
for best writing. Mills also wrote for "NYPD Blue" and "ER." It just seemed
inappropriate to play our interview with David Simon and Eric Overmyer today,
so we'll schedule it – we'll reschedule it, for sometime next week. Our
sympathies go out to David Mills' family and his colleagues.

We're going to hear today from Judith Shulevitz, author of the new book "The
Sabbath World." It's in part a history of the ancient day of rest and in part a
memoir about why she started observing the Jewish Sabbath, how she observes it,
and why she's so ambivalent about it. Shulevitz is a literary critic and a
former columnist for the New York Times and Slate.

Judith Shulevitz, welcome to FRESH AIR. Now, my impression is that you wrote
this book about the Sabbath because you're so ambivalent about observing it and
about how to observe it. So why are you ambivalent about observing it?

Ms. JUDITH SHULEVITZ (Author): Well, I'm an American in the 21st century, and I
don't like being told what to do, and I don't like being told how to spend my
time. I would say that's reason number one.

Reason number two – and I should add that the Sabbath is full of rules, the
Jewish Sabbath in particular, but the Christian Sabbath as well. I would say
the second reason, which I explore in great depth in my book, is that it was
actually a rather painful time in my childhood. It was the time when my parents
fought, silently, but they fought over how I was to be raised.

Was I to be raised Jewish, Sabbath-keeping, or was I to be raised in a secular
fashion, where Saturday was just another day to work, go about your business
and so on? And every Saturday there were these incredible tensions in my
household, and it's a painful memory for me.

So a lot of people were quite surprised when I chose to write this book,
because why would I go back to that material? But that's precisely what I was
drawn to.

GROSS: And you observed the Sabbath, so given your ambivalence, given your
distaste for rules, why are you observing the Sabbath?

Ms. SHULEVITZ: Because at a certain point in my life I just felt that
everything had become the same and that nothing was ever different, and there
was no way to escape from the sameness of it all.

And the thing that was most the same was the endless striving to get somewhere
in life. I was a journalist. I was working – I was an editor, to be precise. So
I edited all weekend long, and when I wasn't editing, I was brunching with
people I met in the journalism world and, you know, working by other means, by
networking, bandying ideas around and things like that.

And there was never anything else in my life, and it seemed that something very
deep and very important was missing, and I was trying to figure out what that
was. I suspected it had something to do with religion, but the thing I was most
drawn to was the Sabbath, because it was embodied in everyday life. It was
something you could do.

You didn't have to go to synagogue. You didn't have to make it religious. All
you had to do to make the Sabbath work is take its most basic precept and stop.

So that was an appealing sort of first step toward figuring out how I could get
to this other thing that was missing in my life. It wasn't too scarily
religious. It wasn't too other. It was just, you know, something I could do,
something I'd been brought up doing, ambivalently but doing.

GROSS: Okay, so the Sabbath is a day in which you're actually prohibited from
working, which you describe, obviously, as a good thing because it's a day away
from all of the striving. But you also point out that the old-time Sabbath does
not fit comfortably into our lives.

You say it scowls at our dewy dreams of total relaxation and freedom from
obligation. The goal of the Sabbath may be rest, but it isn't personal liberty
or unfettered leisure.

Ms. SHULEVITZ: That's true. I mean, I should clarify something. I do not keep
the Sabbath as an Orthodox Jew. You know, whenever you enter a religious
community, really any community, there are always going to be people to the
right of you and the left of you. I'm acutely conscious of all the things I
don't do. To people who aren't in the Sabbath-keeping world at all, I seem like
an ardent, passionate, zealous Sabbath-keeper, and to people in the Orthodox
world, who keep it much more strictly than I do, I seem very lax.

So I should say that I don't follow quite a number of the rules of the Jewish
Sabbath, but that said, I was – another thing I was fascinated by were rules. I
sensed that one of the things about my life that I didn't like is that I was
kind of a knee-jerk libertarian. Nobody could tell me what to do. But that's
not how life works in a society. Societies have rules, and we keep them. You
know, we don't object to the ones we all keep because we all keep them
together.

We object to the new ones that don't seem familiar to us, and I wanted to get
familiar with these rules because it seemed to me that rules are how society
passes on from one generation to the next moral behavior and moral activity and
its idea of how live should be shaped and life should be led. And I wanted to
get to know what these rules had to say to me.

GROSS: Well, you know, you're talking about the rules. I took the easy way out
here. Instead of going to the Talmud, I went to Wikipedia.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Ms. SHULEVITZ: Good. Hey, listen, Wikipedia is really good, I'll tell you. It
must be said.

GROSS: So they list, under the 39 categories of work that you're not allowed to
do – and I'll preface this by saying that you're not in danger of breaking a
lot of these rules because you don't live in a rural world, you live in a city,
and also, you live in modern times and not ancient times.

So the rules include, according to Wikipedia, so correct me if these are wrong:
no planting, sowing, reaping, binding sheaves, threshing, winnowing, grinding,
sifting, kneading, baking – okay, you could be baking and kneading the same
thing – shearing wool, washing wool, beating wool, dying, spinning, weaving,
sewing at least two threads, trapping, slaughtering, flaying, curing hide,
writing two or more letters – that would be a hard one for you – building,
tearing down something, extinguishing a fire, igniting a fire – I assume that
means, like, for cooking or warmth, as opposed to if your house is burning
down.

Ms. SHULEVITZ: Right.

GROSS: And transferring between domains. So some of these rules are so
irrelevant to your life, and some of them will prevent you from doing things
that are quite relevant to your life, like extinguishing a fire or igniting a
fire. I mean, that's basically cooking.

Ms. SHULEVITZ: Right. Rules that are followed by people who keep the Sabbath in
some strict way are derived from these rules. They are not these rules. I
should say there's, you know, several thousand years of commentary, addenda,
revision that have moved these rules into a realm in which they would be
relevant, so – today, in some cases.

So, for example, there's rules about not mixing, and they govern, you know, how
you can clear your plate, or the rules about lighting a fire. A better example
would be that the rules about lighting a fire or turning of a fire have been
transformed into rules about how to manage electricity. The basic principle...

GROSS: In other words, like, you can't turn things on or off during the
Sabbath.

Ms. SHULEVITZ: Correct, although they can be turned on and off for you, as long
as you're not doing the work. The basic principle uniting all these rules is
that you as a human being should not be exerting mastery over the world. For
one day a week, let the world be as it is, and you be in it, and you're not
trying to dominate it.

That's the basic principle. Now, the form that the rules took when they were
first thought up was agricultural, because they were conceived of in an
agricultural society, and there's something to me very beautiful about this
because not only were the conceived of in an agricultural society, they were
conceived of in a mainly subsistence farming society.

So people were being asked not to bring in the crops. You know, they were being
asked to do basic labors which would have helped them survive, and they had to
transfer that work of surviving to six days a week, and it had to have been
very, very hard because we know how hard it is to survive when you're living
off the land.

And that to me gives me a sense of the seriousness with which it was taken and
the beauty of the idea. Imagine telling people who are struggling to barely
survive that one day a week they must give themselves over to something more
than mere survival. There's something very lovely – and that they have the
right to, even if circumstances dictate otherwise. Those two things are very
beautiful to me.

What you missed by going to Wikipedia rather than the Talmud, not that the
Talmud would have made any sense whatsoever, because I believe it takes years
to even begin to understand the way the Talmud talks - it's a very foreign way
of talking, it's a very foreign body of law. It does not lay out the laws and
then proceed to comment on them. It tends to focus on examples before it
derives principles, and it's just, it's discursive rather than expository.

It's really weird stuff, and I talk about that in the book. But anyway, what
you missed by going to Wikipedia instead of right to the heart of the matter,
rather than sort of winding your way through the paths of history, is all the
discussion in which what these laws mean, how they can be analogized to things
that might be relevant to somebody who lives in an urban society.

Remember, Jews have been living in urban societies for thousands of years now.
So these laws were rather quickly transferred over into another domain.

GROSS: So how do you understand the Sabbath prohibitions now?

Ms. SHULEVITZ: The thing that was most intriguing to me when I was working on
the book and remains most intriguing to me is as a fundamental political idea.
And it's an idea that we've really lost in America today, though I think we've
had it in history, and indeed I try to make the case that we were really one of
the most Sabbaterian nations when we were founded by the Puritans, Sabbaterian
meaning keeping the Sabbath.

But this is an idea that we have really moved radically away from, and the idea
is this, that as a society we have the right to collectively regulate our time
and that everyone has the right not to work at least one day a week, which you
have to imagine the world in which this idea was conceived of and codified.
This had never been said before.

Certainly there were classes that never worked, and then there were classes of
people who always worked. There were slaves and there were laborers and there
were the, you know, ancient world equivalent of serfs, and no one had ever said
everyone.

And the Fourth Commandment says, you know, you, your wife, your son, your
daughter, your servant, your male servant, your female servant, this stranger
who happens to be within your gates, and moreover, in a bit of radical animal
rights philosophy here that, you know, I haven't seen taken up, though it
should be, the beast in your field should not work one day a week. That is a
radical proposition.

GROSS: Well, you know, what I'm thinking is for people who work outside the
home, the weekend is the days of catch-up at home. It's a day of rest from the
office, maybe, or from whatever your workplace is, but it's the days when you
shop, you do your laundry, you clean. If you have children, you're driving them
from one place to another, most likely.

It's a day when you do all the things that you didn't have time to do during
the week because you were working on the job, and it's, I think for most
people, kind of impossible to really refrain from home work on the weekend if
you expect to keep all the balls in the air.

Ms. SHULEVITZ: Yeah, it's impossible. It's really hard. I mean, one of the
things about the Sabbath that I realized: A) it's impossible, and I talk about
that in the book, because I never manage to keep it the way I, you know, deep
in my heart believe it should be kept; and B) it's, you know, impossibly
necessary. We can't do without it. So it's a paradox.

But I would say yes, it's really hard, although it, you know, it can be done.
People do do it. But I agree that it's really hard. I mean, we're lucky that we
live in a world where we have two days instead of one so that we can, in fact,
divide the work we do to maintain ourselves from the things that are important
to us as, you know, were we to become Sabbaterians.

I don't believe anybody reading this book is going to go out and say: I'm going
to be an Orthodox Jew right now. I do...

GROSS: You're not an Orthodox Jew.

Ms. SHULEVITZ: I'm not an Orthodox Jew. I'm never going to be one. It's
something that I sort of realized with regret by the end of the book. I think
it's very beautiful. I think these laws are this extraordinary repository of
knowledge, and I'm never going to really put most of them into practice. It's
just the truth about me.

But what I want people to take from these ideas is the idea that even on your
days off, even though you do need to do the work of home maintenance, self
maintenance, family maintenance, you know, you have to take care. Taking care
is a wonderful and important part of life. You also need time for just being
together and time for not exerting mastery of the world, not using time in a
utilitarian way but just pleasure.

But the central idea of the Sabbath is, I think, it's not just resting. It's
this idea – this is where the collective part comes in – it's this idea of
resting together. We have to arrange things so that we can not work together.
We can be together.

And one of the problems with the modern American weekend, as I've experienced
it, and I have two small children, and I know what this is like, and they play
soccer and, you know, they want to have play dates, and they want to be driven
here and there, and you know, my husband has weekend work, and I have weekend
work, and we have the same. We live a modern life.

What I have discovered is it's extremely possible to be as cut off from one
another on the weekend as it is during the week. If you don’t sort of pay
attention to actually setting aside time to be together, you very possibly
won't.

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Judith Shulevitz. Her new book is
called "The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time." Let's take a
short break here, and then we'll talk some more. This is FRESH AIR.

If you're just joining us, my guest is Judith Shulevitz, and she's written a
new book called "The Sabbath World." It's in part a history of the Sabbath, and
it's in part a memoir about how she came to observe the Jewish Sabbath, why
she's ambivalent about observing it and why she observes it anyways. And she's
the former culture editor of Slate, the online magazine, and former columnist
for the New York Times Sunday Book Review.

GROSS: So we've been talking a lot about the Sabbath, but we haven't yet heard
how you observe it. So tell us about your observance of the Sabbath, what you
do, what you abstain from doing.

Ms. SHULEVITZ: Well, it's evolved over time, although it hasn't changed as much
as I once dreamed of it changing. I think I initially imagined it would take me
to some sort of magical land of, you know, religious togetherness or wholeness,
and it hasn't. It's partial.

But what we do basically is we have Friday night dinner, which is a sort of
prescribed ritual. It looks like a traditional Friday night dinner. There are
candles. There is challah. There is wine, a lot of emphasis on the wine.

My husband and I both love to cook. So we spend, you know, at least two days
beforehand scouring farmer's markets and thinking about what we're going to
cook. We always have friends over.

In the morning, we sometimes go to synagogue, sometimes go for a hike, and in
the afternoon we sometimes go for a hike, sometimes stay home and read,
sometimes go for long, leisurely, often quite drunken Sabbath afternoon
luncheons with friends, which in the community in which we live is a tradition.

I'd say most of the people at the synagogue to which we go are more observant
than we are, and they are very accustomed to the rhythm of a real, what's
called in the Jewish world (speaking foreign language) or Sabbath, and they
really don't work, and they really don't walk long distances, and they don't
drive, and they just have people over and have these long, leisurely meals.

When I was single, I used to go to, and I was first trying this out, I used to
go to something called the Seudah Shlishit, which is the third meal at the end
of the day. Often there will be some Torah study there, and we'd, you know,
study.

GROSS: So do you go to synagogue on Saturday?

Ms. SHULEVITZ: So we do, yeah, we do. I don't pray. I don't know how to pray.
What I like about synagogue, frankly, is learning Torah, because I'm a literary
critic, and I think the, you know, the – every week in a synagogue, some
portion of the five books of Moses is read and then commented upon, and I love
that. I simply love that.

I love hearing it read. I love hearing it chanted. The language is beautiful,
and I love hearing – in our synagogue we don't have a rabbi. We have actually
several rabbis in the congregation, and I love hearing what different people
have to say about the piece of Torah, of story that we just read.

GROSS: What do you mean when you say you don't know how to pray?

Ms. SHULEVITZ: I have a notional idea of what prayer should be, but I think I
don't really have a very clear idea of who I would be addressing it to. So it
becomes very abstract. Prayer is a way of speaking a very old piece of text,
usually, that brings me a message from the past, and that's the best I can do
with it. And then it for me is a way of orienting myself to the past.

If I believed in God, I guess that would be a way of orienting myself to God,
but I don't really, so I don't. As a result, the whole exercise is kind of
formal rather than sort of deeply felt. What is deeply felt for me is the love
of hearing stories told.

GROSS: So just to get this straight, you don't believe in God, but you do
observe the Sabbath and go to synagogue on Saturdays.

Ms. SHULEVITZ: That is correct.

GROSS: That will make no sense to a lot of people.

Ms. SHULEVITZ: I know, I know. Let's see. I like the tunes. I like the – I love
the music. I love the text. I love thinking about the question of whether God
exists. I just like entertaining the questions raised in prayers. I like being
together with this community that is not my work community. I like – and it's a
wonderful, warm community. And I like the tradition.

And in the book I talk about how, you know, the best I can do with the idea of
God is God is tradition, God is in ritual. God is this idea that we can be
connected to the past and to our ancestors through these extraordinary gifts
that get passed on, which are rituals, which are ways of shaping, you know,
time and space and that have stories embedded in them that in the doing we come
to understand.

GROSS: My guest, Judith Shulevitz, will be back in the second half of the show.
Her new book is called "The Sabbath World." I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH
AIR.

Here's a version of the traditional Passover song "Ma Nishtanah," performed and
arranged by Steven Bernstein – or maybe it's Bernstein. I can't really remember
which.

(Soundbite of song, "Ma Nishtanah")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross, back with Judith Shulevitz, author
of the new book "The Sabbath World."

She started taking a passionate interest in the Sabbath about a decade ago. Her
book is, in part, a history of the ancient day of rest and, in part, a memoir
about why she started observing the Jewish Sabbath, how she observes it, and
why she's so ambivalent about it. Shulevitz is a literary critic, a former
columnist for the New York Times, and was the founding culture editor of the
online magazine Slate.

The Sabbath is filled with so many restrictive laws, the things that you're not
supposed to do during the Sabbath, and there's a lot of ways of getting around
it. You know, there's Shabbos goy.

Ms. SHULEVITZ: The Shabbos goy, the Shabbos elevator.

GROSS: Yeah, and so the Shabbos goy is the person who isn't Jewish and who
will, yeah, who will turn the light switch on and off for you or do other
things that you're not allowed to do. He'll do it for you. There's all these
devices now.

There's, like, Sabbath ovens that turn themselves on and off so you don't have
to. There's Sabbath timers to help you turn – to help your electronic devices
turn on and off without you having to do it, and that seems so much like
cheating, you know, so much like, well, acting like you're being observant but
just kind of sneakily breaking all the rules. And I wonder what your position
is on that.

Ms. SHULEVITZ: Well, I – first of all, the whole Shabbos goy question is very
complicated, and actually, you're not really supposed to use a Shabbos goy, or
if you must, there are very strict laws about how you can and cannot, so that
the spirit of the thing is maintained.

But when it comes to devices, the attitude is anything goes, and the reason is
this: The Sabbath is not just a choreography of the world, of the physical
world. It's also about a change in attitude in you. You are not to set off a
chain of events which will cause you to use the world instrumentally and
dominate the world.

So it's this deep philosophical idea about not just resting yourself but sort
of letting the world rest too. However, if you can sort of pre-rig the chain of
events such that you don't have to yourself set it off, then it is okay.

It's all about not performing the act yourself. If the act is going to be
performed anyway, then – and you are not responsible for it, then it is okay.

I mean, I think it's one of those inside-outside distinctions. It makes perfect
sense if you're inside the system and you understand the basic premise of the
thing, which is making sure you don't do any work and that you are transformed
through this not-doing of work, and it makes sense to you. And if you're
outside, you think - what the heck is that? Now, why would that work? And the
reason is, it's really about an internal transformation as much as anything
else.

GROSS: Let me quote something from your book, a couple of things, actually. You
quote Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel as describing the Sabbath as a cathedral in
time. And then you write: Sabbath takes you out of mundane time and forces you
into what might be called sacred time. That's really nice.

Ms. SHULEVITZ: Yeah.

GROSS: So I want you to elaborate on that.

Ms. SHULEVITZ: Well, I struggle with this idea. And actually, the best I can do
with it is to think about the psychoanalytic hour. This is because - and as I
say in the book, I'm in psychoanalysis myself. And as I am with Sabbath rules,
I adhere to them, and I'm sometimes quite grumpy about them. But in this
psychoanalytic hour, you must show up on time. You leave on time. And in that
time, there's a kind of openness and inchoateness and a boundary-less-ness(ph)
where you can explore. And then time is up, and you go back to being your
normal person, your normal self and, you know, you sort of go about your
business.

That time, that openness is, to me, the best I can do with the idea of sacred
time. It's other time. It's time where you are not what you are. You are
something else, and you are open to something else.

GROSS: Now, your husband isn't observant, and you have two children who are how
old?

Ms. SHULEVITZ: Six and seven.

GROSS: Okay. So, when you were young, your parents disagreed about whether you
should be raised in the Jewish tradition or not and, you know, how observant
you should be, whether you should go to Hebrew school and synagogue, observe
the Sabbath, all that. So are you ever worried that your difference with your
husband - he being more secular, you being more observant - will somehow be
problematic for your children, that it will get expressed as tension or
conflict to your children?

Ms. SHULEVITZ: Yes. I do worry about that. I'm afraid of that. But what I've
come to understand is that's pretty much inevitable. I mean, somehow I managed
to marry a man who was religiously in the same place as my father - though I
should say, to my husband's credit, this book was his idea. And second of all,
he loves Judaism and is moving ever more toward it, and he loves the Sabbath.
He absolutely loves the Sabbath.

It took him longer than it took me to do things like turn off the computer, not
talk on the phone, and he's still struggling with that, but he loves it. So
they don't get - luckily, they don't get the hostility that sort of percolated
between my parents. Although I should say, in my parent's a defense, they
didn't fight openly. They simply resented each other and fought silently in
ways that children see, you know, that maybe outsiders wouldn't hear.

But I don't have that in my family, though we do have very inconsistent
practice. You know, dad does one thing, mom does another. You know what? The
children are just going to have to recognize that life is not perfect and that
rules are not followed perfectly and these sorts of things. Religion is
something everybody is kind of working out for themselves.

GROSS: How do your children feel about Sabbath? Not doing anything is
incredibly boring to children, and it's not like children have, like, jobs. I
mean, they have to go to school, but they don't have to - they're already
liberated from that on the weekend. The weekend is a time for fun.

Ms. SHULEVITZ: Right.

GROSS: And a lot of the fun things are also things that are prohibited on the
Sabbath, like I don't think they can turn on their computers and play their
video games and all that. So how do your children feel about observing the
Sabbath, and what's your position on whether you should make them observe it or
not?

Ms. SHULEVITZ: Well, they love going to synagogue because all their friends go.
They go to a Jewish school, so a lot of kids from that school go to the
synagogue. So, for them, being in synagogue is a chance to run around. And I
should say that in real serious, old-school Orthodox synagogues, there is
somebody who walks around called the candy man, handing out candy to children.

GROSS: Really?

(Soundbite of laughter)

Ms. SHULEVITZ: There's a - yeah. It's great. You know, and I actually sometimes
am the candy man, and I sometimes have to bribe my children if I want to go - I
go to a complicated synagogue with many different little groups, and sometimes
I want to go hear someone in another group, and my children don't want to go.
And I bribe them with candy. You stay here and play with your friends. I'm
going over there. And then people joke that I've become the candy man.

But we don't keep the Sabbath such that we don't turn on lights. We do turn on
lights. We do drive. We do go out. We do have adventures. We do do things
together. But they are going to be days when you don't do those things and
you're just hanging around the house, and what are you going to do? What they
don't do is they don't turn on anything electronic. We keep an electronic
Sabbath.

Certainly, there are times when they complain about this and there are
differences between them. My son complains more, and my daughter - who is, I
think, going to be very religious - gets why it's a good idea. And she says,
well, we just have to come up with something else to do - you know, and being a
little bit of a goody-two-shoes, trying to annoy her brother who says, oh, but
it's boring.

I force them outside. I go outside with them. We read a lot. We play a lot of
board games. I think it's incredibly useful, because my children know that they
can turn off the Nintendo DS. They can turn off the television, and they will
survive. There are other things that they can do. And I have to say, I've met
kids who don't know that, and it can be a scary sight.

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Judith Shulevitz. Her new book is
called "The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time."

Let's take a short break here, and then we'll talk some more.

This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Judith Shulevitz. She's the
author of the new book "The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of
Time." And it's, in part, a history of the Sabbath, and it's, in part, a memoir
about her ambivalence about observing the Sabbath and why she observes it
anyways, and how she came to observe it.

And this was in the 1980s, after you graduated from college, your mother, who I
think had not been a working woman before that...

Ms. SHULEVITZ: Yeah.

GROSS: ...decided that she wanted to go to Jewish Theological Seminary and get
her PhD. And then in 1984, after the conservative Jewish movement agreed to
ordain women, she decided to go to rabbinical school, and she was ordained as a
rabbi. What was your reaction when your mother told you that she wanted to
become a rabbi?

Ms. SHULEVITZ: I was in shock. Well, I should say, I was in shock and I was not
surprised. My mother had always wanted to be a rabbi. She had this tremendous
hunger - which I think I inherited from her - for something more in her life.
But I was still in shock. The whole idea at the time of women becoming rabbis
was incredibly new and weird. And I reacted to that as I react to most things.
This is a book about ambivalence, and I was ambivalent.

I thought of myself as a feminist, and so I was, of course, very supportive.
But at the same time, I thought: Why would you want to join a religion that
doesn't want you as a leader? Like, how - like why go back to that? You know,
if you want to go out in the workplace and be a free, modern woman, be one.
Don't try to force yourself upon these people who don't really want you.

So I tell the story in the book of coming upon her one day, and she's doing an
activity - it's called in Yiddish, or sort of in Jewish parlance, laying
tefillin. That's putting on her body these strips of leather that men -
Orthodox men - wrap around their arms with little boxes on them, and they also
wrap around their heads, and the boxes stand up from their forehead. And I had
gone to a Jewish summer camp in which I saw this done by the boys in the camp,
though I did not learn to do it. And when I walked in on her, it was as though
I'd walked in on my mother dressed in drag.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Ms. SHULEVITZ: I completely freaked out. I just - it's like I got out of there
as fast as I can. And to this day, I don't - well, now she knows, because she's
read the book. But I don't think she even saw me, and I don't think she knew,
you know, that I saw her and had this reaction. But, you know, this is - women
were starting to take back or take on, for the first time, aspects of the
tradition that they had been excluded from until that point, and she was one of
them. And now I'm, of course, enormously proud of her. And she did become a
rabbi. She had to become a chaplain. She wasn't accepted as a rabbi, you know,
by the sort of high-end synagogues in New York, so she had to become a
chaplain. But she got ordained, and she works as a rabbi.

GROSS: So you were shocked that your mother wanted to become a rabbi because
you thought, well, why would you want to join a group that didn't want you? But
wouldn't you say the same about yourself, just in terms of being a feminist in
traditional Judaism? I mean, in traditional Judaism, women - in real
traditional Judaism, women are home, women are raising the children, lots of
them. Women don't study the Torah. The men study the Torah.

Ms. SHULEVITZ: It's interesting, because in - that's true. Although, it's not
as true as it is in some other traditions that women are home raising the
children. It's true that there's a kind of culture now - and I think of this as
a post-Holocaust culture of repopulating the Earth with Jews and having a lot
of babies. But this is kind of new in Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Judaism.

In traditional Judaism, women worked, and they were out in the world supporting
the men who studied. Now the way status was set up in these societies, it was
higher status to not work and to study and to become a scholar, and the women
had the lower status position. But it's ironic that, by the likes of the wider
society, the women often seemed more accomplished than the men because they can
get advanced degrees in everything but Jewish studies. They run businesses.
They are brokers. They are lawyers, so on and so forth. So I just want to
correct that misimpression.

But I do not mean to say, by any means, that women are treated, you know, as
equal citizens in, you know, very traditional Judaism. They are not. They are
excluded from the thing that sort of must matter to - that matters to everyone
most, which is scholarship and study of the Torah and practice of Judaism,
though they have their, you know, home domain and so on. And that's part of the
reason it's not for me.

GROSS: Oh, you mean being more religious is not for you.

Ms. SHULEVITZ: Right.

GROSS: Yeah. You've been in psychoanalysis for a long time.

Ms. SHULEVITZ: Uh-huh.

GROSS: And you're also, like, partially observant, very interested in the
Sabbath. You've been studying the Sabbath, studying Torah. So they both speak
very deeply to you, to who you are, to your place in the world. What's the
difference in the way that psychoanalysis speaks to you and the way that
Judaism speaks to you?

Ms. SHULEVITZ: Wow. Judaism speaks to me out of the past. That's what I love
about it. It's as if - and the reason I love ritual is it's embodied. It's in
bodies. Bodies do it, and it speaks to me out of those bodies. And it's almost
as if when I do something, when I perform a ritual - which I know was performed
possibly somewhat differently, but basically in the same way thousands of years
ago - I feel as though somehow it's almost as if I'm touching the chain of
tradition. I'm touching the ancestors and the chain of tradition, and they're
coming into my body. I'm almost psychically possessed. That is the power of it.
And the language is the same way.

Now psychoanalysis, you know, when you put it that way, no one's ever asked the
question that way. I mean, I think that there's something rather similar,
because it's about opening yourself up to language in the presence of this
person who creates a safe space for you to do so, whose meaning you don't know,
but you want to come to learn. And then you're opening yourself up also to
feelings. And, you know, the more I talk, the more I think they're really the
same thing.

It's just about putting myself in a ritual situation - which is after all, what
the psychoanalytical situation is - in which I can come to hear words and
actions in a new way. So I would end by saying they're the same thing for me.

GROSS: Let me suggest a difference. In religion you are one of many. You're a
part of this tradition. You are practicing what has been passed on through
generation to generation. And I think in psychoanalysis, maybe you're alone.
It's - I mean, it's about you. It's about the very inside of you that is maybe
different, or at least slightly different from the very inside of everybody
else.

Ms. SHULEVITZ: I would disagree. I would actually say the more you open up to
what's inside you, the less it is your own. And the more you see that you are a
product of all these people and these words that have been put into you and you
begin to parse them and to realize that you is actually a crowd - so, I mean,
that's been my experience in psychoanalysis, is I am much less alone and much
less just solitarily me than I thought I was.

GROSS: At the beginning of the interview you said that one of the main reasons
why you started to observe the Sabbath is that you wanted something more from
life.

Ms. SHULEVITZ: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

GROSS: And you thought that, you know, finding rituals like the Sabbath would
help you find that more in life. Has it done that? Has it succeeded?

Ms. SHULEVITZ: Yes, it has, sort of beyond my wildest dreams. It's because it
brought me in touch with this community of people that are wonderful and have
become my whole life, really. It put me in touch with a series of texts and a
series of ideas that I felt could be found nowhere else. And, of course, it led
to this book, so it has really become my whole life.

GROSS: Judith Shulevitz, it's really been a pleasure to talk with you. Thank
you very much.

Ms. SHULEVITZ: Thank you, Terry.

GROSS: Judith Shulevitz is the author of "The Sabbath World." You can read a
chapter from the book on our Web site, freshair.npr.org, where you can also
download podcasts of our show.

Coming up, Lloyd Schwartz reviews a new DVD box set collecting rare, short
music films from the '30s and '40s featuring famous and obscure jazz and pop
musicians, tap dancers and Vaudevillians.

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Pre-MTV: 'Big Band, Jazz And Swing' Music Videos

TERRY GROSS, host:

Our music critic Lloyd Schwartz has been spending a lot of time recently
watching short musical films from the '30s and '40s. These films were once
shown in theaters, along with the feature. Now 63 of them are collected in a
new series of DVDs from the vaults of Warner Brothers.

(Soundbite of music)

LLOYD SCHWARTZ: Music videos are not a recent phenomenon. They have an ancestor
in short musical films that actually predate feature-length sound movies.

The Vitaphone Company, a subsidiary of Warner Brothers, brought synchronized
sound into film in 1926 by filming some famous classical musicians, with
parallel recorded soundtracks. All through the 1930s and '40s, Vitaphone
continued to release musical shorts, especially with swing and jazz bands.

Like newsreels, cartoons and coming attractions, these 10 or 20-minute shorts
were shown with feature films. Warner has just released a set of 63 of these,
and it's a wide-ranging collection, embracing musicians as different as nerdy,
all-American Ozzie Nelson, bongo-pounding Cuban matinee idol Desi Arnaz, and
the hilarious Borrah Minevitch and his Harmonica Rascals.

Some of the earliest stars of these musical shorts are major black
entertainers. Bandleaders Cab Calloway and Eubie Blake, singers Ethel Waters
and Nina Mae McKinney, and legendary tap dancer Bill Bojangles Robinson in
their thrilling prime, appear alongside such child prodigies as the Nicholas
Brothers and Sammy Davis, Jr.

Yet these dazzling performers are also the objects of pervasive racial
stereotyping, an amused condescension that's painful to watch. Indirectly,
these films are important reminders of how casually and automatically racist
this country has been. But we also have to be grateful for the invaluable
documentation of such memorable performances.

In "Rufus for President," eight-year-old Sammy Davis, Jr. is attacked by
bullies and comes running to his mammy, Ethel Waters. She comforts him by
telling him that he could be president, maybe even more ironic today than it
was in 1933, when Sammy's successful presidential campaign is only a dream.

(Soundbite of movie, "Rufus for President")

(Soundbite of boy crying)

Ms. ETHEL WATERS (Actress, singer): (as Rufus' Mother) Oh, come inside. I sure
will be glad when they rid the neighborhood of such as him. Don't you worry,
honey. Ole Sinbad Johnson sure is going to be sorry when he find out what a
great man you is.

Mr. SAMMY DAVIS (Actor, dancer, singer): (as Rufus Jones) Is I going to be a
great man, Mammy?

Ms. WATERS: (as Rufus' Mother) You sure is. You going to be president.

Mr. DAVIS: (as Rufus Jones) Me?

Ms. WATERS: (as Rufus' Mother) Sure. They has kings your age. I don't see no
reason why they can't have a president. Besides, the book says anybody born
here can be a president.

Mr. DAVIS: (as Rufus Jones) Ain't that something?

SCHWARTZ: Most of these shorts are pretty generic. They often start with a
bandleader - Louis Prima, Woody Herman, or the lesser-known Jimmie Lunceford or
Larry Clinton - introducing a number. Then there'll be a song by, say, Helen
Forrest or June Christy, and some exciting dancing. Eighteen-year-old Betty
Hutton is billed as America's number one jitterbug.

There might even be a wisp of plot. Rita Rio, one of the two women bandleaders
in this collection, is so crazy about swing, she's threatened with being
committed to a mental institution, though when her doctor learns how much money
she's making, he decides that he's the crazy one.

Since the jazz is hot, some of the films actually take place in hell. On the
other hand, there's the cool pianist/bandleader Eddy Duchin - Tyrone Power
played him in the 1956 tearjerker "The Eddy Duchin Story" - who is famous for
appearing at the Central Park Casino, an elegant nightclub. In the Duchin
short, he and his band and their entire audience are on roller skates, and he
accompanies a phenomenal roller-skating specialty act.

The only director to have a significant career beyond these shorts is Jean
Negulesco, who went on to direct the film-noir classic "Road House," the
romantic "Three Coins in the Fountain," and the Marilyn Monroe Cinemascope
comedy "How to Marry a Millionaire."

But some of the other directors - especially Roy Mack and Joseph Henabery - are
also remarkably inventive. Here's clarinetist Artie Shaw in Arthur Schwartz's
haunting "Alone Together," which opens Henabery's hallucinatory "Symphony of
Swing."

(Soundbite of song, "Alone Together")

SCHWARTZ: There's one pure jazz film, "Jammin' the Blues," from 1944. It's the
only film ever directed by the famous Life magazine photographer Gjon Mili,
with great sax players Lester Young and Illinois Jacquet igniting the moody jam
session.

(Soundbite of music)

SCHWARTZ: You probably wouldn't choose to watch more than two or three of these
films at a time, but the whole six-DVD set makes one of the most entertaining
history lessons I know - history of popular music, as well as American cultural
history. Now I'm waiting for Warner to release the landmark 1926 classical
shorts.

GROSS: Lloyd Schwartz is classical music editor of the Boston Phoenix. He
teaches English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He reviewed
Warner's new six-DVD collection, "Big Bands, Jazz and Swing."
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