The dark side of journalism …
A new book puts this incident in grim historical context. Go get The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times’s Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History. It shows how reporters for the New York Times have been actively changing history by manipulating stories for over a century. They could have done it again in the fall of 2019. Except that Hemingway prevented it. She saved a sitting Supreme Court justice from getting destroyed by slander.
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Wall Street Journal Saturday Essay: What We’ve Lost in Rejecting the Sabbath, by Sohrab Ahmari (Author, The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos (2021)):
Setting aside one day a week for rest and prayer used to be an American tradition. In an age of constant activity, we need it more than ever.
The share of Americans who don’t identify with any religion continues to grow, and even many believers reject the concept of the Sabbath as a divinely ordained day of rest. Instead, we are encouraged to pursue lives of constant action and purpose, and we do. Smart devices allow white-collar professionals to freely mingle work and play. The gig economy and the Covid-19 work-from-home trend have further blurred the line between the two. The Sabbath doesn’t fit into the rhythm of our lives. It feels like an imposition—it is an imposition.
Americans’ turn away from the Sabbath has been going on for a long time. In the mid-20th century, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, one of America’s foremost Jewish thinkers, wrote about the Sabbath in terms of “the realm of time” and “the realm of space.” Modern life is all about conquering space: winning geopolitical territory, growing and prospering economically. But “the danger begins,” Heschel worried, “when in gaining power in the realm of space we forfeit all aspirations in the realm of time.” In that realm, “the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord.”
Many of his American coreligionists in those days saw the ritual as an impediment to freedom: the freedom to shop, work and socialize as much as they wanted. For Heschel, this brand of freedom was missing something profound. It barred entry to an entire dimension of existence: namely, time, whose passage reminds us that everything is contingent, everything passes away—everything, that is, except God. The Sabbath, Heschel thought, is the guarantor of our “inner liberty,” while restless, Sabbath-less societies could easily descend into tyranny and barbarism. ...
The goal of a philosophy of religion, Heschel argued, shouldn’t be to understand “God” as an ancient idea or symbol, still less a disturbance in the ancient mind, but to understand human beings as the living God’s project and as partakers in the divine “pathos.”
This God-centric understanding, he came to believe, was the only sure guarantee of human dignity. Without an absolute standard that reflected the will of a supreme being, people could countenance any evil; everything could be relativized. And it wasn’t enough merely to contemplate this supreme being. Rather, the God-centric vision had to be nurtured in a life of prayer and ritual—that is to say, in the dimension of time. In the Sabbath. ...
Before Heschel denounced the injustices that disfigured America, he deplored the commercialized, technocratic way of life that denied time to the Sabbath. What his industrious fellow Americans might have mistaken for “wasted time” was, in fact, an absolutely necessary act. In biblical logic, holiness always requires sacrificial abandonment: Something must be handed over to God. This logic of sacrifice is at work in an especially tangible way in the Sabbath. As Heschel wrote, “he who wants to enter the holiness of the day must first lay down the profanity of clattering commerce, of being yoked to toil.”
It is difficult to imagine just how revolutionary the Sabbath vision must have appeared in the ancient world, where vast multitudes of people were slaves. Into such a world, there appeared a religion that told slaves they had an identity separate from their labor, that their nonwork was sacred. Judaism taught men and women to find inner liberty by freeing themselves from “domination of things as well as from domination of people,” as Heschel observed.
Judaism, Christianity and Islam all appreciated the bond between Sabbath restrictions and human freedom, even as they designated different days to be holy. Across the West today, however, the drive toward maximal market liberty has squeezed out the liberty of the Sabbath. We have banished it in the name of “choice.” And some choice we have: Working-class families are denied even a half-day of rest together, yet we are puzzled by astronomical divorce rates, abysmally low rates of family formation, alienation and drug abuse. We have cashiered the Sabbath for algorithmic human-resources scheduling—computer code designed to minimize labor costs, regardless of the impact on families and communities.
For professionals, the Sabbath’s demise means barrages of emails to be answered during sleepless nights spent by the ghostly blue glow of the smartphone. For other workers, the Sabbath’s defeat means missed children’s baseball games, lunches wolfed down on impossibly short breaks and bladders relieved in bottles in the vast warehouses of endless consumer choice.
In our day, as in Heschel’s, a world without the Sabbath is a world without soul.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel celebrated his final Sabbath on Friday, Dec. 22, 1972. As usual, the dinner was attended by friends, who read aloud from the Yiddish poems Heschel had written while forging his biblical thought in the crucible of the Holocaust. The next morning, he didn’t wake up. His daughter, Susannah, has written: “In Jewish tradition, dying in one’s sleep is called a kiss of God, and dying on the Sabbath is a gift that is merited by piety.”
'A Good Name for What's All Over'
When our father died in 2005, my brother inherited the house on the West Side of Cleveland we had lived in as kids. I lived there from 1955 to 1970, when I left for college, and in some primal way – in dreams, in memory -- it remains “home.” About seven years ago, Ken sold it. During my last visit to Cleveland, in 2016, we drove by the house and it was a mess – trees and hedges chopped down, grass overgrown, windows patched with cardboard. A neighbor said squatters were living in the garage and the owners were dope dealers. Now I see the house and yard have been cleaned up and the realtors have posted a “virtual tour” of the interior.
That too is jarring but in different ways. The carpets have been stripped to expose plank floors. I never knew we had so much knotty pine and I’d forgotten the fireplace my father built in 1964. In photo 3, I see the room we called “The Little Room” – it once held my mother’s clothes mangle -- has been painted Delft blue. My bedroom, in photo 16, is painted red like a New Orleans bordello. The place looks familiar, yet not. There’s no sense of outrage, of a fondly recalled place defiled. I’ve been away too long for that and I’m not by nature sticky-sentimental. Rather, the memories I associate with those rooms no longer match. There’s a sense of temporal dissonance. Two poets have described similar experiences. Eric Ormsby writes in “Childhood House”(Coastlines, 1992):
“Somehow I had assumed
That the past stood still, in perfected effigies of itself,
And that what we had once possessed remained our possession
Forever, and that at least the past, our past, our child-
Hood, waited, always available, at the touch of a nerve,
Did not deteriorate like the untended house of an
Aging mother, but stood in pristine perfection, as in
Our remembrance.”
The least sentimental of poets, Kingsley Amis, remembers a neighbor’s house in “Bobby Bailey” (Collected Poems 1944-1979, 1979):
“Of course. I know that, every year, some people
Simply get up and go
Too far for you to see, much less drop in on,
Less yet stay with. I know
“‘The past’ is a good name for what’s all over;
You can’t, in fact, return
To what isn’t a place. It does sound like an
Easy lesson to learn.”
