For Jews west of the Hudson River, it appears, keeping holy the Sabbath can come to seem more like an embattled defense of a besieged fortress—with councils on strategy, tactics, and even logistics—than a day of rest and contemplation. Grace Goldin, now more or less safely established in New York, explores here some of the dilemmas of Jewish observance in the United States. The translations from the Hebrew in the present article were done by Judah Goldin.

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“Shabbos!” Reuben Saberski sighed, stretching his small feet out on the ottoman after dinner. “To think the goyim don’t even know what day it is!”

That was in August, in Stillwater Falls, when shul was suspended. Ten months of the year Rabbi Saberski had, of course, considerably less shabbos than other folk. As he leaped for the door from our dinner table one Friday night in November he exploded: “The privilege of not attending a late Friday night service is one now being reserved for the righteous in the World to Come!”

“It’s just a short service,” I consoled him.

Rabbi Saberski cast a look about him, at me, at the eight wet blocks to shul, and the white tablecloth still ringed with wine. “Young woman,” he stated, “I’ve said my prayers already, when they’re supposed to be said. I now quit your warm and pleasant home in order to repeat them. And further more”—he turned to make his point—“do you know why it’s such a short service? The rabbis kept it short so you could get it over with, late in the afternoon, and hurry home to the shabbos table where you belonged. Nowadays they keep it short—to make room for their sermons.”

The world was all against him, he was born too late, and lived in the wrong country, to be able to welcome in his Sabbath at a five o’clock service before dinner. At five o’clock Mr. Plost, his president, was just signing the last of the office mail. At five o’clock Mrs. Plost was pouring orange juice on the roast duck. She never would have got to hear the rabbi preach, and Judaism believes in education for women too, doesn’t it? It’s a democratic religion, isn’t it, Rabbi?

“In the World to Come,” Reuben Saberski smiled sadly, “the Ribono Shel Olom’s going to say, ‘All those that were sinners this week, go conduct services!’”

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Our good friends at the State Hospital, I’ll call them Marvin and Bette Berenson, genuinely want not to be sinners. Marvin teaches at the medical school and is somewhat of a curiosity among doctors because he strives to bring his son up in a Jewish home. He keeps kosher, and goes to shul week after week—not just on Yom Kippur to do penance all day, like a handful of his colleagues. He and Bette have been here in Iowa City eleven years; being a department head he’ll likely never leave; but as long as we’ve known them they’ve engaged in a struggle to determine whether this much Judaism, or any Judaism, can in a town like our town long survive. Even their son Daniel understood the issue quite early.

“Let’s be pious, Daddy,” he said suddenly one shabbos afternoon when he was about four years old.

“Ok,” said his daddy. “Let’s start right now. No more turning on lights.”

“No more turning on lights,” agreed Daniel. But half an hour later he needed the light to play Chinese checkers. “Let’s be pious next week, Daddy.”

We frequently visit the Berensons, to condole with one another as friends met in a losing cause. We discuss the late Friday night service, which the Berensons like as little as we, but they too come: it’s this or nothing. We debate the business of whether or not to ride to shul; an academic question: in Iowa City hasidim, the truly pious, are those who ride only to shul on shabbos. One of us cited a big Chicago rabbi who’d recently got himself into very hot water by coming out with a formal statement sanctioning riding to his shul on shabbos. The rabbinic authorities quickly took care of him, but made no further move toward formulating a solution.

“What happens to you,” Marvin complained, “to you, personally, as an observant Jew, is apparently your own business, so long as you don’t mention the Law in the same breath.”

“You know what Rabbi Saberski used to say?” I put in.

“Saberski once again,” my husband murmured.

“What he used to say,” I resumed, “went something like this: ‘I am personally averse to meddling with the Law! The Law on the one hand objects to riding, for reasons of its own. You on the other hand weep: Rabbi, I have to ride! My heart, my feet, my aging mother, eka meka. . . . You know your circumstances best,’ he’d say, ‘and saving of human life naturally takes precedence over shabbos, but who says you have to go to shul? If you want to ride on shabbos you’ll do it without a heksher from me. I can only tell you what the Law says. Make up your mind!’”

—“What’s wrong?” popped up Daniel. He always says, What’s wrong? I wish they’d teach the child to say, What is it?

“Oh,” replied his daddy, “some rabbi in Chicago’s been telling people what they may do on shabbos.”

“What does he say they can do?”

“He says it’s all right to ride on shabbos.”

“Is that all? He should know us!”

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“Daniel’s not been raised the way we were,” said Bette Berenson, “don’t do this, don’t do that, don’t dare do the other. We’ve tried to be reasonable and understanding and cooperative. After all that, you wouldn’t think he’d object to shabbos, but he does. All that’s happened is, we’ve cut the corners, so when it’s his turn to do some trimming he’s ready to cut it altogether.” And she relayed the following conversation with her son:

Daniel: “I don’t see why we have shabbos. We barely get over it one week when here comes another. On shabbos you can’t—”

“Can’t what?” Bette asked politely.

Well, you can’t turn on lights.

We turn on lights.

And you can’t play piano—

Since when do you know how to play the piano?

Drums, then.

You play the drum.

Zeyde wouldn’t like it.

You’re not living with Zeyde.

I don’t know, I just don’t care for shabbos.

“What am I to tell him to do on shabbos?” Bette wailed. “He goes to shul with his daddy in the morning. Good. For an hour. Then what? What should I contrive to amuse him all day, in place of what the Law makes impossible? You may not go on an overnight hike with the Boy Scouts. You may not go to the movies, or the football game, or to the corner drugstore for an ice cream cone. He once shouted at me, when he was about eight, “What can I do, then? There isn’t another person in town who keeps shabbos the way you make me keep it! When I grow up I’ll marry a—Mohammedan!”

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So perhaps last Friday night was inevitable. Daniel Berenson marched with the Junior High Band in the Homecoming parade, playing on a snare drum. His folks urged him for years to take up some instrument, though he wasn’t musical, so he shouldn’t miss out on just such an opportunity: they hadn’t figured on Friday nights.

“How could I forbid it?” Marvin cried. “He gets into enough trouble with his friends as it is, missing the Holidays, and you know he’s not a pushing boy.”

“Well, we didn’t have a shabbos last week—” Bette said.

“But remember the kid’s face!” said Marvin.

The uniform Daniel was given to wear had everything—bas-relief buttons, braid all over the place, epaulettes, white shoulder loop, and the most becoming hat outside of the Air Force. True, it was 100 per cent wool, and cut for a smaller child than Daniel; he had no winter underwear yet, so they were forced to swathe his poor allergic legs all the way up with whatever came handiest, making it even harder to buckle the belt: “Bet I’m wearing everything but your girdle, Mom,” he puffed. He was undeniably committed to the military posture—to bend him would have meant knocking him down flat—and marched sort of sidestep like a dog. His shoes, outgrown ones, were of the peculiar color gained by slapping one thin coat of black polish on brown leather in a tearing hurry. With the first block Daniel’s feet went dead and after that he could have marched all night.

“Don’t think I begrudge it to him,” Bette said, “but you know how it is. By the time I got him dressed and ready to move we were late for assembly with his group. By the time I drove him down we were late for shabbos dinner. By the time we ate we were late for the parade—and no time for benshing. We made the parade a block from the finish—luckily we were just in time to see Daniel’s band pass.

“But he looked glorious,” said Marvin. They’d walked backwards at the curb alongside Daniel the last block of the march, while Daniel stared straight ahead but you could tell in every inch of his body that he saw them. “He stood so straight he looked almost thin, God bless him,” Bette said. “I don’t begrudge him the Homecoming Dance either, but. . . .”

“What could you do?” said Marvin. “May you march, and not dance? He was down-town already. His shiksa, his date, played trumpet in the band.”

“So Marvin drove Daniel to the dance and me home and I did the dinner dishes while Daniel danced and by the time I finished Marvin had to pick up the boy again. . . .”

“It was certainly one time the Sabbath was made for man,” said Marvin.

“I’m happy Daniel had a good time,” Bette said. “He told me he had the best time of his life. But I got to bed without any shabbos to speak of, and I’d been waiting for shabbos all week. I work hard around here. I lay in bed and ached and I said to myself, ‘This has got to stop. But where? . . .’”

“Professor William Pepperell Montague,” I remembered from nowhere, “once remarked to our class—in a different context to be sure—: ‘We are all hurtling, with magnificent unanimity, toward the middle of next week.”’

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I wonder whether Borough Park Jews, bringing up their children strictly and faithfully, can picture what Jewish life is like west of the Hudson River. Our friend Irving built himself a succah. He ate in it happily for a week, then the maid came to him and said, “You folks through with that little outhouse yet? Should I throw it in with the trash?” (Irving told me this story in great glee: “Here’s one for you to make use of some day!”) Irving’s friends wanted him to come to an outdoor barbecue—shish kebab—and had been troubled by remembering Irving and his wife standing around at all their other parties politely smiling and saying they weren’t a bit hungry. So the friends phoned to find out where I buy kosher lamb, and I referred them to a meat market in Denver (overnight and three dollars’ postage away). Irving heard they’d already sent to Denver and quick called up the rabbi there to check on my butcher’s credentials. Thank God, my butcher passed with flying colors; so, for once, Irving took dinner with his friends, to everybody’s satisfaction, and ate from paper plates lamb roasted on twigs and vegetables baked in aluminum foil.

What about a single boy out in our Iowa wilderness, brought up in New York City as an observant Jew, who craves a succah, a shabbos, kosher meat? As I watch students arriving here fresh from all Jewish conveniences, I wonder on their behalf whether the Sabbath was proclaimed as a delight or an endurance contest. Are they to sacrifice Judaism and learn to live in the country; or maintain their Judaism unruffled and return to a big city? They have another alternative—to marry and live as Irving lived.

After two years, however, Irving and his wife moved back to .

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Yet our small town is so very pleasant! Shabbos afternoons in October our neighbors go off to the football game, the streets are very quiet, the sky opens up blue and a dirigible flapping flags circles round the stadium nearby as though they—they, the world—had put on banners for us. My husband walks home on wintry Friday nights through the shadowed snow, looking into lighted, small-town-pretty windows. It’s still, it’s cold; to him the sky looks blue, to me in the kitchen, purple. When he opens the door he’s met by a shabbos spirit of roasting spring chicken, preceded in the world of time by rum cake and chocolate chip cookies. His children shine with health and chicken grease, and on the table wait two challahs—one for “Remember the Sabbath Day,” one for “Observe the Sabbath Day.” The local baker who sold them to me as French twist doesn’t know yet about their shewbread ancestry.

Our mood is set by ours being one of maybe half a dozen shabbosim in town—all six imaginable.

I voted last year in the converted vestry room of an old church too poor for a stained glass window, but which had a brass star tacked up to the brick steeple with a date, 1885. Four voting booths were hung with sprigged flour-sacking. In one corner of the room, coats of the voting authorities had been flung over nails like schoolchildren’s; somebody’s lunchbox stood on a folding chair; spang in the middle of what space there was, two gold-fringed, assembly-hall-size silk flags leaned against one another, like royalty conferring a visit on the farm contingent.

That vestry reminded me of the one in Stillwater Falls, in Temple Brotherly Love: of its visible waterpipes, echoing stairs, and portraits of founders in their 19th-century beards. There was a clean cold smell in that temple you might account for by the fact that Mr. Abraham Bergmann forbade any form of gambling there, even cards. Sisterhood meetings were presided over with pleasant Midwestern dignity by Mrs. Emma Bergmann, pince-nez dangling down her front, and from the Lord’s Prayer to “God Bless America” sounded exactly like Southern Baptist meetings, or Eastern Star meetings, or Daughters of the American Revolution meetings for that matter.

“Ah!” my children’s Bubbie would interrupt me at that point. “See? You begin by saying, How pleasant is this oak; in the next breath already you’re a meshumed!”

What Bubbie says is true—shabbos in a small town is so dreadfully difficult, at times one is tempted to move to Borough Park. And yet we do have a shabbos in Iowa City. We go against the stream, but this gives shabbos here a texture of resistance not at all displeasing: while the whole world is having Saturday, for us alone Saturday’s secret is to be shabbos. In us, because it is shabbos, memories awake; each Jew finds himself with a chain of associations, causing him to do with shabbos whatever he does.

My rest on shabbos is quite /?/ the rest I get Sunday. I want of shabbos something more than a bed, a pillow, a fat nest of newspapers and to be left alone. Something in me demands a white tablecloth, challah, and candles, symbols which to my ancestors expressed the Sabbath’s additional soul. Perhaps the memory of what my parents used to do drives me to return to their symbols. Perhaps they were remembering their parents; but if so, by what a tenuous rope ladder of candles, twists, and a tablecloth might one trace shabbos back to the first week of Creation—or, if that seems too far, to the exodus from Egypt! I shudder and I sigh to think that my present, my Friday night this week, is my children’s past: I am now the mother they’ll dimly remember. And I deliberately order their memories, too: placing in their minds a candle here, a challah there on the white tablecloth.

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When my grandfather moved to Tulsa¹ in its earliest days, he built his own shul, his own succah the size of a master dining room, his own island of Judaism in the prairie, to which he lugged the varied provisions of his learning and ritual like Robinson Crusoe salvaging necessities from the wreck. On shabbos we children used to play football across his great green lawn, from the two front doors of the shul to a square goldfish pond at the wisteria arbor. One law of life was not to torment the goldfish. Another was that all rewards of games be taken out in terms of my grandfather’s health. “What’d you wish?” “I can’t tell you—or it won’t come true!” Generously, though without success, we invested every evening star, new moon, or wishbone in Popsie’s recovery.

I recall being alone with my grandfather only once. He drew my arm through his and walked me twice about the tennis court, expounding the Hebrew word shomayim, heaven. Shorn, there. Mayim, waters. He laid hold of the lines of rain and pulled heaven down.

In Iowa City one man has created an island of Orthodoxy for himself—is, rather, that /?/ singlehanded. We have a new Orthodox shul, a brand new building, and the shul has one Orthodox member, old Mr. Worton. Jews in this town yearn after his tiny figure—going on eighty-seven—his rosy face made sizeable and symbolic by a good white beard, his blue eyes set off so well by the new blue plaster as he stands to one side of the Ark. Because of Old Man Worton, Iowa City has a minyan every shabbos; Mr. Worton phones them himself (the telephone is his Achilles heel). He calls up nine men and tells each one, in Yiddish, “Now you have the building will you quit coming to shul on shabbos morning? What’s the shul for? So you’re in conference. So walk out on the conference. An hour of davening will make your business lucky. Anyway we’ve got to have you—you’re the tenth man.”

Who will call and who will come when Mr. Worton dies?

My grandmother kept our private shul going with much the same tactics. She had Daddy do the phoning for her. It was a desperate job. “Momsie love, what’s the use of phoning him? He just won’t come. He can’t come today. He’s at the office!” “Nonsense,” she replied with stubborn serenity, and Daddy returned to the telephone.

The shul moved over to our sun parlor after my grandfather died. It came to our house piecemeal, like the limbs of the Egyptian god Osiris when his jealous brother Set got through with him. Under the oak and absolutely out of context perched two gilded candelabras, craning their many necks at one another. On the cement driveway squatted the shulchan; three little lecterns leaned against a butterfly bush. High in the middle of all, presiding over them like a prominent clergyman, stood the unbelievably heavy, bulkily gold chupah. Room was found for everything but the chupah in our sun room. That sulked in the cellar till I was married under it.

My bed was on a sleeping porch directly above the shul. Saturday mornings I’d wake to hear a Mi Komocho going on full blast under my stomach. I recognized the special chant of every man and could count who’d come already; our service was intersected by late cousins running up the front porch steps and slamming the screen door. I knew my grandmother was sitting down there already, and if I wanted to be cooperative I dressed and joined her.

Momsie was our treasure. The shul was called into being for her, as an esrog box is for its esrog. She wasn’t going to be wheeled through the streets of Tulsa to the new shul. She’d be seen dead first. She wasn’t going to let anybody ship off her shul furnishings to some big city “where they’ll really get some use.” You could do as you pleased after she died; and when she did, Daddy shipped off all but two Torahs to the shul of the Jewish Theological Seminary, because he had been Bar Mitzvah there. Daddy and Mama had an Ark built into the east wall of their new living room. Every night, the last thing one sees is Daddy in yarmelke and striped pajamas, saying his night prayers by the light of the Torahs.

While Momsie was alive, however, she expected a shul and expected it to function professionally as a shul. It generally did.

My husband still marvels at his first sight of my grandmother—in Oklahoma!—rocking and reading Michal, an early modern Hebrew poet. I was glad to bring him to the house. “Momsie,” I exclaimed, “you’ve been after us for years to study Hebrew. I finally brought you somebody who can answer back. Why won’t you talk Hebrew to him?”

She shook her head—and blushed.

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He Who never saw my grandmother Friday at sunset descending the stairs to go to shul, has never in his life beheld a stately creature. The carpeting was blue, her dress blue lace; her hair being white mounted her lovely head in waves, with little brown ringlets at the nape. When she was thirty or so, she swept into a relative’s apartment in her royal blue cape: beautiful, so beautiful, I’m told, a little great-aunt of mine hid under the parlor table. It took eighty years to drain the good looks from my grandmother; she kept to the last a wrinkled silk skin, smelling like ripe persimmons. On birthdays and Mother’s Days her many children used to present her with fully equipped cosmetic cases. Loving all presents, she adored these—cold cream, hot cream, day cream, night cream, evanescence cream, rejuvenescence cream, gland-food cream: “Momsie,” I inquired, “how do you keep your skin so white and smooth?” “Glycerine and rose water,” she laughed.

We took such good care of her. We even lied to her. “Momsie, you look beautiful tonight,” we told her when she was past eighty, and nurse had parted her hair and strained it back into two thin white braids, and tucked over her shoulders the cobalt feathered scarf. Momsie wasn’t taken in. “Nonsense,” she whispered. In the last years her singing voice, the gay little laugh, forsook her; it was a task for her to speak. In some ways she reminds me of shabbos, the shabbos we find it so hard to observe. “Dear Queen,” we cry, “it’s ridiculous for you to expect us to abide by your regulations—not to ride, go to the movies, go picnicking, go weekending, go somewhere. .. . What’s a day of rest for, if you can’t amuse yourself?”

“Nonsense,” she replies serenely.

Then we try flattery. “O Queen,” we murmur, “you are more beautiful than ever. That new Adon Olom, based on the folk song that goes ‘Around the corner, And under a tree, A handsome major. . . .’: it has made you so popular; Lcho Dodi goes terribly well with the color of your eyes. You haven’t aged a bit, beloved Queen!”

“Nonsense!” she answers, and that’s all. We can’t get another word out of her.

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Momsie’s religious influence on me was at best oblique and deferred (of the practice of charity, her finest art, she never let drop a word). I’d go to shul when I felt like it, stand next to her, exchange an affectionate smile, slip my hand under her soft wide arm and share the Siddur she held with a flat-pressed, clean-boned thumb. My mind sifted away from her honest devotions. I’d come under the influence of cousin Irma, four years older than I, who retired from the Jewish faith to read, study, and preach something called theosophy. At the same time and to the lasting confusion of her family she changed her name to Irena, for astrological reasons. Her new religion was a way of life, she vowed, for all true souls, not just for Jews; and she quoted doctrine devotedly from a little black bible entitled Theosophy, or the Path of the Mystic.

At fourteen I read The Prophet behind my Siddur in shul, to induce—by whatever desperate, artificial means—the worshipful state of being a Hebrew service failed to engender, while the cantor sang:

With an eternal love Thou hast loved Thy
    people,
the house of Israel.
Torah and commandments, statutes and
    judgments
hast Thou taught us.

Therefore, Lord our God,
lying down and rising up we talk of Thy
    statutes. . . .

A thunderstorm broke on us late one Friday afternoon: to me a God-given opportunity to find out just how far I could aspire in religious speculation. Lower than the clouds, the sky was green; a maple blew from green to silver and back again. Everywhere green: auspicious color. Heavy raindrops parted the grass blades, as I dug my thought down eagerly into the wet earth among the worms. In our bushes I managed to start a couple of prehistoric gods, while a long way beyond me the cantor sang:

As for Thy love
never never take it away from us!

That evening I quite succeeded in generating in my mind some of the superstitious awe a cave man felt toward lightning. And for ten years—nothing more. Oh, I’d a vague desire to Do Something for the Jews, I didn’t know what: learn Yiddish, or write verses, help aging Jewish mamas across the street, or force myself to listen to a High Holiday sermon all the way through. I never achieved that last. When a public address begins, how much more so a sermon, my mind pops off automatically the way you’d snap a radio off during the commercial—and switches on again at the benediction. During services proper I often sink into a kind of abstraction that registers no meaning along with its word; significance darts in and out of prayers, as around trees, catching on the branch of some apt conceit. I can seek, and find, refuge in other things—browse on talleisim, people’s noses, candlesticks, and embroidered lions, the seven “nots” of the Torah and the mere act of bowing westward:

Come, O Bride, come, O Bride,
The Sabbath Queen at eventide!

Oh, do come!

It’s not as though prayer wasn’t available to me all my life. I learned the words for piety early: “Blessed be His name whose glorious sovereignty is for ever and ever.” The notion that these words were once uttered for the first time, comes with somewhat the same shock as a realization that Alexander Pope dreamed up “Hope springs eternal in the human breast” out of his own little head. Let a twelve-year-old listen to frequent enough sermons on sin—my Uncle Sam was a fairly frequent preacher—and if her talent be irreligion she’ll grow up believing in no such thing.

“You have no sense of sin?” my friend George exclaimed, sincerely shocked. “What do you do for a sense of grace?”

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At the best of services, the one at home, there was always the difficulty about being religious: what shall I say of supplementary readings I have met with since, whose phrases stick to the jaws like bubblegum? “Almighty and eternal God! . . . Stimulate every impulse that makes for sanctified and righteous striving. Give us thy divine discernment that we may see the best in all people and that we may acknowledge all men as Thy children, respecting their rights and personalities, encouraging and developing their worthy aspirations and talents. Implant within us. . . .”

I have sat under a rabbi who could only express himself in groups of threes. “Ascend, young Candidate,” he’d invoke the Bar Mitzvah boy in a voice of thunder. “Kindly mount to the bimah, the platform, the podium!” With such effluvia he muddied those wells about which the havdalh prayer sings delightfully: “Therefore with joy shall ye draw waters out of the wells of salvation,” saith my translation, but I like Sir Walter Raleigh’s involuntary version best:

—At the clear wells
Where sweetness dwells
Drawn up by saints in crystal buckets!

I believe the stuff to woo us back to Judaism is there, locked up in a Hebrew Siddur, a far cry from the archaic English gobbledygook American congregations rise to recite responsively, looking sheepish while they do so. Who’d think the classic shabbos Siddur contains this—

O God, God of our fathers,
delight in our rest.
Make us holy with Thy commandments,
and set our portion in Thy Torah.
From out of Thy goodness, fill us with
    plenty,
in Thy salvation make us rejoice,
and purify our hearts to serve Thee in truth.
And for our heritage, Lord our God,
give us Thy holy Sabbath
in love and favor.
May Israel have rest in it
who sanctify Thy name.
Blessed is the Lord
who sanctifies the Sabbath.

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When I informed Rabbi Saberski I wanted to publish something about shabbos and what would he advise, he wrote back, “Go ahead. Go right ahead. We’ll survive your approach too. It’s the Englishman’s approach to the Arabs.”

But of Marvin Berenson, Rabbi Saberski would approve. Marvin’s knowledge of otolaryngology is complicated and precise, but his joy in the Sabbath is a simple thing. Shabbos rises freely for him out of the Siddur, out of an ordered and a flowing service. “Spring up, O well—sing ye unto it!” He wants his melodies beautiful and his silver and satin to shine, but you can’t lure him with translation—all words look alike to him. He wants to daven in a minyan among other Jews; hates to be bored and hates to be rushed and have you gobble prayers away from him; loves to move with you tranquilly from section to section, from Shochen Ad to Adon Olom, chant to response, skipping nothing, adapting nothing, singing all he can, and extending the order of the service throughout his universe. While his mouth recites syllables, while his heart sings praises, his mind is swinging freely five and a half feet above the floor, busily filling prayer after prayer with whatever meanings he may need today. He is improvising every minute.

My friend Max Kadushin goes a step further. Max not only davens with attentiveness, he praises the Lord with his very philosophy. “Bread!” he once exclaimed to me. “What a miracle! What a constant miracle! You know perfectly well somebody sowed and reaped, threshed and ground and mixed and baked to make bread. Yet when you make a motzi, when you recite the benediction, you thank God as though bread simply sprouted with leaves and a stalk: ‘Blessed be He who caused bread to come forth out of the earth!’ Farming and milling and baking, commonplace activities, fall into insignificance before the midat ha-rachamim, this Divine love so mixed with mercy that He nourishes us. ‘More grave,’ our rabbis declare, ‘is the miracle of sustenance than that of the breaking of the Red Sea.’”

“Golly!” I said.

“A blessing doesn’t change things,” Max went on happily. “It changes you to see things, just as a poem does. What does your motzi do? Acting as a poem acts, it brings to life this piece of bread and by the bread revives your sense of wonder. How can a piece of bread have meaning? It’s a great, great secret. There can be no reclaiming of the commonplace unless it really isn’t commonplace at all, unless it’s commonplace only to the secular eye. When you bless the shabbos candles, you don’t make of them something extraordinary. They remain tallow and wick and fire, you see them at the time as such. Your mind remains closely focused on the objective quality of the world—it’s you that’s holy.”

“Me?”

“Holiness,” he explained, “is only the attempt to make of personal conduct something remarkable. But now, look what’s happened,” he pursued. “Saying the blessing waked you up to look at light. The law which governs lighting of the candles sees to it you are waked up every week and your eyes renewed. So the Halachah, the law governing the times for daily prayer, regularly calls a man’s attention to God’s world—to the sunrise, to the lengthening shadows after noon, to twilight, to stars. Halachah is the means by which great and sensitive souls lifted up ordinary things and transmuted them. Each blessing takes the insights of great men and informs with them the eyes of ordinary persons.”

“What about shabbos, Max?”

“Shabbos, ah, think of it!” he cried. “Shabbos is the incredible attempt, by very brave rabbis or that extraordinary man Moses, to make one whole day holy for a Jew—to keep a Jew holy for twenty-four hours without a break, week in, week out. What an ambition! What an attempt!—to overcome the sporadic nature of significance, by the use of Law, by an ordered and minute ritual.”

_____________

Something of the sort Rabbi Saberski must have had in mind, when he spoke of shabbos as a mistress of men. “Remember,” he’d caution, “she lays down the law. Just as you don’t pay court to your fair one with an eye on the expense account, so you don’t come before milady shabbos wondering what’ll it cost you. You’re the one that’s courting shabbos, she’s not running after you. You need her. She can afford to sit it out.

“The trouble nowadays,” he would complain, “is that members of a shul know the service will adapt itself to their needs. ‘You don’t like the service?—we’ll cut it—there!—there!—there! See, now it’s just like the things you believe in.’ But you can’t go out to save this lady, she’s going to save you!” he’d cry. “You think this beautiful lady will adapt herself to you? She has all the beaux she needs. She loves you and is trying to make your life worth living!”

By dint of a peculiar education, Saberski was more thoroughly committed to Judaism than I’ll ever be, but he meanwhile absorbed sufficient antitoxin to inoculate him forever against what he called the Buber-meises of the neo-Orthodox. “Read very carefully: don’t get taken in!” He brought starry-eyed third-generation revenants in his congregation to admit that there were aspects of ghetto life they wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole, and spoke astringently of such writers as Bella Chagall, whose Burning Lights was a good deal too poignant for his taste—was it because she’d been ill? Perhaps on the frail child colors, sounds, and ritual did strike too raucous a note; or possibly—Saberski would suggest—as a cultured world-citizen much distracted from Judaism, she sought by italicizing childhood to atone. From her account, seductive in many ways, you get the uneasy impression Judaism won’t do for the present generation, whatever it may have meant to the past; or for a mature mind, however one yielded to such impressions as a child. She—like others—holds herself curiously exempt from laws our ancestors took for granted, saying in effect, “Zeyde dear, on you it’s becoming.”

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Rabbi Saberski warmed to his subject—you could count on him to warm to this subject. With the Law, he pleaded, with the Law first of all we must come to terms. And he likened shabbos prohibitions to a cactus fence such as grow in our Southwest: stubborn, impenetrable, yet alive and practically ineradicable. Inside the fence, he’d say, is shabbos, like a guarded pasture. Or, he once told us, shabbos is a knife—a knife with which we are to cut at one stroke through six thicknesses of the everyday. We must keep our knife sharp—with what? With the shabbos laws. They give the day an edge. They clear a space between day and night, business and home, profane and holy, the category of everyday and the category of significance. On shabbos the good intention flourishes, though it remain only an intention. In the quiet of shabbos perhaps there will be time to root out the bad intention like a weed.

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¹ See the author's “I Remember Tulsa” in the March 1948 number of COMMENTARY.