One more useful attribute of the Jewish Sabbath is the extent to which its rigid rules generate friction in emergency situations. If your community center is not within walking distance, if there is not enough slack in your schedule to prep things a day in advance, or you are too poor to go a day without work, or too locally isolated to last a day without broadcast entertainment, then things are not okay.
In our commercialized society, there will be many opportunities to purchase palliatives, and these palliatives are often worth purchasing. If living close to your place of employment would be ruinously expensive, you drive or take public transit. If you don’t have time to feed yourself, you can buy some fast food. If you’re not up for talking with a friend in person, or don’t have the time, there’s Facebook. But this is palliative care for a chronic problem.
In Jewish law, it is permissible to break the Sabbath in an emergency situation, when lives are at stake. If something like the Orthodox Sabbath seems impossibly hard, or if you try to keep it but end up breaking it every week—as my Reform Jewish family did—then you should consider that perhaps, despite the propaganda of the palliatives, you are in a permanent state of emergency. This is not okay. You are not doing okay.
Something about the tone of this post seems like it’s missing an important distinction. Targeted alarm is for finding the occasional, rare bad actor. As Romeo pointed out in his comment, we suffer from alarm fatigue. The kind of alarm that needs raising for self-propagating patterns of motivated reasoning is procedural or conceptual. People are mistakenly behaving (in some contexts) as though certain information sources were reliable. This is often part of a compartmentalized pattern; in other contexts, the same people act as though, not only do they personally know, but everybody knows, that those sources are not trustworthy.
As someone currently practicing Orthodox Judaism (though I am coming at it from an agnostic perspective, which is somewhat unusual), I find that Shabbos is often the most “productive” day of the week for me, even though I’m not online and can’t write anything down. This Saturday I ended up reading a random paperback book that gave me an idea for a potentially important neglected cause area, for instance (will probably post more details later).
It definitely gives some perspective on how much of an emergency most perceived “emergencies” are, that’s for sure.
Some other posts that feel related (not sure you should cite them here, I might just reply with comments once the post is up) are the “Sabbath as Alarm” section of Ben Hoffman’s Sabbath Hard and Go Home.
And maybe also his comment on this post.
As someone currently practicing Orthodox Judaism (though I am coming at it from an agnostic perspective, which is somewhat unusual), I find that Shabbos is often the most “productive” day of the week for me, even though I’m not online and can’t write anything down. This Saturday I ended up reading a random paperback book that gave me an idea for a potentially important neglected cause area, for instance (will probably post more details later). It definitely gives some perspective on how much of an emergency most perceived “emergencies” are, that’s for sure.