
If you want to conjure up the release Frankfurter was talking about, think of Christmas Day or New Year's morning, when even convenience stores are shuttered and streets are silent, and the few passers-by amble or dawdle. Twice a year is about as often as we now manage to achieve the stillness we need to feel OK about being unproductive.
It is objectively harder to stop working now than in Frankfurter's day. The pace and rhythms of work have quickened, and each pause costs more than it used to. Globalization, just-in-time manufacturing and electronic networks, among other things, have made it possible to synchronize production and communication around the globe, but they have also made it necessary to operate on a 24/7 schedule. This creates, in effect, something that Josef Stalin once admiringly called the continuous workweek. Meanwhile, mobile devices have annulled the rules that used to prompt us to stop working at regular times (5 p.m., say) and pushed us into a zone of frictionless activity without temporal boundaries.
You may wonder what the sabbath can do to help us counter these enormous social, technological and economic forces. The answer is, very little - but a little can be a lot. We are not likely to bring back blue laws, and that is, on the whole, a good thing.
But the sabbath is not just a day off. It is also an idea. We can simply think hard about it, trying to puzzle out all that this very old and once-venerable human institution has to teach us about work, rest, time, sanity and the good life. What we might come up with if we figured that out remains a tantalizing mystery.
Judith Shulevitz is the author of "The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time." She wrote this for The Los Angeles Times.
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