The (Sabbath) Week as a Bulwark Against Tyranny

This is a short post to shamelessly plug an essay I just published entitled on Lehrhaus entitled “Why is Tabernacle Construction the Foundation of Shabbat?

(We toyed with various titles; the title of this post is one of the alternates. Essentially, the question that’s the title of the essay is the puzzle that animates the essay and the title of this post is the answer.)

A few more notes:

I was originally hoping to finish my book, The First Week, during my sabbatical year of 2022. It’s not 2022 anymore, is it? Which is disappointing in the first instance. On the other hand, I am very pleased with how the project has developed during this period, and this essay is one of the main reasons. In a nutshell, I had not realized until about a year ago (with growing appreciation based on the research I was doing) the far-reaching political message that is embedded in the invention of the seven-day week (as the sabbath cycle).

The essay comes at this idea via a route that will make more sense for Shabbat-observant Jews. In short, if we accept (as traditional Jews do) that the parameters for Shabbat originate in the breaks that were mandated during the construction of the Tabernacle, this begs the question of the underlying logic for this. Here’s the way I frame the puzzle:

Say you were God and you were intent on establishing the Shabbat cycle as a perpetual institution when, prior to this, there had been no such institution– no continuous, globally synchronous, cycle of days, let alone one that pivots on a day in which ‘creative labor’ is forbidden. There were many ways you could distinguish such labor from other activities. What would make you choose Tabernacle construction for this purpose rather than any other productive activity?

There are two additional, complementary ways of framing the puzzle. One way, which appears in a joint paper written last year with the philosopher Sam Lebens (and is based on our dialogue with the philosopher Tyron Goldschmidt) is to consider the possibility that the week might have been invented by a tyrannical, powerful king to suit his interests. A problem for this conjecture is that there is no evidence of any king doing such a thing. But why is that? Here’s the heart of the essay’s answer:

In short, the Shabbat emerges as what modern game theorists call a “commitment device.” This is when a “player” who has multiple options for action chooses to give up one of those options in a way that thereby reduces his power and makes it harder for him to realize his ostensible goals. We should therefore not be surprised that there is no evidence in world history of a king instituting a general rest day for the entire populace, certainly not one that applies even during a corvée (or during high agricultural season, when large landowners and traders will be especially impatient). The issue is not merely that such a king will constrain the amount of labor time he can extract (and thereby suffer the inefficiencies of low “capacity utilization”). It is also that (as the midrash on Exodus 5 suggests), regular universal breaks increase the risks of rebellion.

Finally, there is a third way to come at it, based on a thought experiment I develop in the book. The idea is to consider the tragic counterfactual in which the week had developed in Israelite/Judean/Samaritan society (as it did, through the 2nd century BCE or thereabouts) and then spread to the rest of the world (as it did, via southern Italy first and foremost); but that sometime after it began to get traction among non-Judeans and non-Samaritans and eventually spread around the world, the Judean and Samaritan communities were wiped out and their cultures forgotten— much as say, all traces of Babylon were wiped out but we still practice the division of time into 60 minutes and 60 seconds.

Next, suppose that we had come to appreciate (as I will argue in my book) that the institution of the week is extremely hard to launch, and that this explains why it is such a rare event in world history for a cycle like the week (i.e., one that is decoupled from celestial cycles and ‘globally synchronous’) to emerge— it indeed happened only once.¹ In fact, given how unimaginable and infeasible the week seems to be before it has gotten traction in a community, it’s not clear how it was invented even once. Why and how could you convince fellow members of a community to begin living by the (sabbath) week before it was already embedded in their lives?

To be clear, the puzzle of the week’s emergence is not widely appreciated today; to the contrary, we take the week for granted as a relatively trivial fact of life. But if we did come to appreciate it, and then we discovered a corpus of texts from a lost civilization that described the emergence of the week (suppose e.g., this corpus was found in some caves in the Judean desert), we should then be keenly interested in what that corpus had to say about the origin of the week. Mind you, given that this corpus was composed before the genre of history emerged on the stage, we wouldn’t necessarily expect this corpus to give us reliable information about the who, where, or when of the week’s emergence. But this wouldn’t be our question anyway. Having come to appreciate that the week is very hard to launch, we’d be interested to know what the corpus has to say about that.

And indeed, I will argue in my book that the Hebrew Bible, and the Pentateuch or Torah in particular, is deeply insightful about the nature of these challenges. In effect, and quite ironically, the idea is that the ‘good book’ is a good book for doing better science (Ok, that works only if like me, you believe social science is a science…)

I’ve been discussing this from various angles in the various essays I’ve published on Lehrhaus since 2017. Today’s essay adds a new angle. I’ll conclude with two quotes from the essay that summarize key points:

The deep point here is clear: a king – or large-scale employer such as the 19th century commodity capitalist – who in his bid for control has so distorted the system of production such that it has become a system of pure subjugation – cannot afford to give the workers any extended time off. And he certainly cannot give his effective slaves off at the very same time, such that they have the capacity to engage in their own civil society’s activities and culture. They will soon come to conspire against the tyrant, won’t they? Such a tyrant may even see threats in the people’s engagement in diversions and cultural activities. Give them an inch and they will take a foot.

The Shabbat is thus a remarkable commitment device instituted in the name of a benevolent and far-seeing divine sovereign, one who realizes that a better social order can be built if they constrain their human agents and their successors from using all of their power to control and exploit the people. Indeed, as Berman suggests, the king in such a system has relatively limited capacity to use his discretion to reward workers with “release” for exhibiting the behavior he deems desirable (and which may not be in the public interests). But such constraints commit the king to granting a societal schedule that allows the people to regularly gather outside the king’s control. And it thereby redirects them to renew their culture and creative energy towards the public welfare.

Shabbat Shalom/Happy weekend!

1. By contrast, many societies divided up the day and subdivisions of the day, as the Babylonians did.