At summer camp, we used to sing a song every Shabbes by the Canadian writer Yosaif Silverman. Jewish summer camps, even the ones operating today, have deep roots in the soil of the Labor Bund, European Social Democracy, and Labor Zionism.* And the one I attended was like that: a strange mishmash of history, identity, labor politics, cookouts, and lusty singing. Silverman’s song “The Big Gedalia Goomber” captured much of that spirit and mined the deep roots of the Jewish labor experience.
I’m big Gedalia Goomber
I’m not exactly small
But really not so very big
Just seventeen feet tall
I’m really rigged for working
For that I’m very fit
Six days a week I’m at it
And on the seventh day I quit
And then the rousing chorus, accompanied with table banging and hoots:
Ain’t gonna work on Saturday
Ain’t gonna work on Saturday
Double, double, triple pay
Won’t make me work on Saturday
Ain’t gonna work on Saturday
It’s shabbos kodesh
Camp Wooden Acres, in the Laurentian mountains north of Montreal, wasn’t what anyone would consider a particularly frum summer camp; in fact, its roots were sunk deep in the soil of the Jewish socialism, Bundism, and Labor Zionism. It had been created, at some point in the 1940s or 1950s as a refuge for poor urban Jewish kids from the grit and grime of summer in the city.
Yet, there was one thing that no one questioned: it was a Jewish summer camp. That meant a kosher kitchen and dining hall serving 400-some campers and staff blintzes and latkes for milkhik meals, and brisket, or cheeseless pizza with beef pepperoni, for fleyshik meals. Above all, it meant no work on Shabbes; the kitchen would remain closed and its staff would have a day off, and our Saturday meals consisted of cold cuts from Lester’s delicatessen in Montreal on kimmel rye bread, and usually a cookout with beef hotdogs after Havdalah.
Shabbes is one of the things that have defined Jewish life since, well, the beginning. We sort of invented the whole idea of the weekly day of rest – an idea so radical in the ancient world that our neighbors the Greeks and the Romans just couldn’t get their heads around it. Tacitus cited the fact that we did not work one day per week as manifest evidence of our moral turpitude. “Can you imagine these people?!” he wrote, “they actually take a day off every week!” He didn’t actually use those words, of course – he wrote in Latin – but that was the sense of it.
Polybius, a Greek historian of the second century BCE, was so flummoxed that he could not even comprehend what those Jews might be doing on their day off; were we maybe fasting? The Greeks had, of course, noted our aversion to pork and the fact that a lot of our holy days seemed to involve fasting, so rather than, you know, actually ask a Jew what we do on Shabbes like a normal person might, they just speculated wildly. “It’s gotta be a fast,” Polybius declared sometime around 140 BCE, and generations of know-it-all Gentiles just nodded sagely.
For a culture with a (mostly undeserved) reputation for deep thought, the ancient Greeks were absolute dumbasses when it came to trying to understand other civilizations. For the most part, they figured that they were so superior that they didn’t have to. So almost everything that Herodotus wrote about Persia, for example, is dead wrong. Diodorus and our old friend Polybius were convinced that there was a secret room in the Temple in Jerusalem where the Kohanim were fattening up a Gentile Greek to be used as a sacrifice.
Not only was that a fine bit of projection – human sacrifice had, in fact, been a feature of archaic Greek religious practice until fairly recently then, but never a part Jewish ritual – but it was the first statement of a slander that would take on a life of its own as the Blood Libel, to be used as a pretext for pogroms and genocide for millennia.
Still, most of our neighbors in the ancient world got a few things right, and they were most befuddled by the three things that defined Jewishness both then and now: We snip a tiny piece of skin from our sons’ shmekls, we are very picky about what we eat, and we insist on taking a day off every week. Strangely enough, it was the latter that they commented on most often.
That might be because Shabbes is the central experience of Jewish life. It defines the cycles of the weeks to the extent that, even in Yiddish, where Monday is montik and Friday is fraytik – with dinstik, mitvokh, and donershtik in-between – but Saturday is always Shabbes. Among the biggest issues for Jewish organized labor in America in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, the struggle commemorated in Yosaif Silverman’s song, was Shabbes. Until then, employers would give their workers Sunday, or only Sunday morning, off. That wasn’t going to work for the millions of Jewish immigrants flooding into American cities, so they went on strike until the bosses grudgingly conceded.
That’s right: If you enjoy your two-day weekend, you have Jewish labor activists to thank for it.
The Talmud tells us that Shabbes, the day of rest, marks the birthday of the world, the day that Adon Olam stopped and beheld their creation. The philosopher Mordecai Kaplan noted that it is the most important of all our holy days because it marks our own weekly moment of self-creation, in which we pause, reflect, strive for a “this-worldy” redemption, and begin each week renewed.
It is the nature of Jewishness, or yiddishkeyt in all its richness of meaning, to have to negotiate a non-Jewish world where we are, in most places, a tiny minority. There is no playbook for this, or perfect template; nor is there a perfect formula for being a good Jew in a non-Jewish world. There is no absolute authority on anything Jewish, after all, we famously say about ourselves, “two Jews, three opinions.” There are Jews who keep kosher and observe all the yontifs, and there are those who feel a faint pang of guilt when they have bacon for breakfast on Yom Kippur. (I am convinced that the transgression is the whole point of the bacon.) And there are many different ways of being Jewish in-between.
The kind of Jew whom I choose to be – and it really is a personal choice – worries about things like what to wear under my helmet so I don’t get a weird disk tan-line on my head intersecting the tiger stripes (“they’re great!”) when I wear a yarmulke, and where I can find supplements and multivitamins that don’t contain pork gelatin. (For the record, I wear a sports bandana or a cycling cap, and I buy vegan vitamins at Trader Joe’s.)
I carefully planned my training schedule around Tisha b’Av this summer, and I am inexpressibly grateful that the organizers of my cycling club’s annual century ride planned an earlier start on 24 September this year to accommodate those of us who will start our Yom Kippur fast later that evening. I really want to do the ride, and I have signed-up for it, but I am struggling with whether I want to take on a 3,500-calorie deficit a few hours before I fast for 25 hours.
Yet, the one that gets me the most is whether to ride on Shabbes.
The problem is that the weekend – those two days of the week for which Jewish labor fought – afford the best opportunity for people with jobs to get in a long ride. That was why, for a long time, I would swallow my discomfort about training on Shabbes and, on those Saturdays when I was not in shul, I rationalized it as oneg Shabbat.
This is one of the oldest Shabbes traditions; it means “joy of the sabbath” in Hebrew, and evokes the belief that rest from work, not to mention creation itself, is something to be enjoyed and celebrated. Traditionally this has meant going for walks with loved ones, chatting, singing, and joking around, enjoying the Shabbes seudas (the three festive meals), and basically having a grand old time. Shabbes is meant to be something different in a week full of responsibility and toil and, Polybius notwithstanding, it is, in fact, the very opposite of a fast day.
So why not do other enjoyable things, like cycling, as part of oneg shabbat? That made sense to me. I would never race on Shabbes, or follow an explicit training plan, but I would ride and run. One of my most memorable runs in recent years was a 13-mile Saturday ramble through the Middlesex Fells north of Boston, in which I marveled at the scenery, the animal life – I saw deer, pine martens, and a bobcat that day – and just reveled in the glory of creation. “The woods are my temple,” I told myself, and I am sure that my trail-running comrades would agree.
When I moved to central New Jersey earlier this year, I started doing my club’s Saturday group rides from Cranbury. They were a blast, with amazing people. Even better, the start point is only 4-1/2 miles from my front door, so a 40-mile ride doesn’t automatically become a 65-mile ride. I loved those rides but, as I toiled (mostly) enthusiastically, in a B-pace paceline that invariably accelerated to B+, or even A (“Did you see that?” Joe exclaimed ecstatically. “We got a 20 mile-per-hour average on that ride!”) I began to feel uncomfortable.
My enjoyment was always tempered, and even soured, by a growing sense of guilt. The point of Shabbes, and of oneg shabbat, is that the day should be reserved for special things, activities that you don’t do every day. They day of rest, the birthday of the universe, is a day set apart from world of montik to fraytik, of work and everyday concerns. As a daily cyclist who rides for fun, of course, but also for training and transportation, who blasts along the D&R Canal tow-path to buy cheesecake at Wegman’s, and spins up to Princeton Junction to catch the train to work, it was hard to say that this was not an everyday thing.
On my last Saturday ride with the Cranbury Bs, I kept hearing the hearty chorus of “Ain’t gonna ride on Saturday,” ringing in my ears. “It’s shabbos kodesh.” It ruined my ride. Life is full of choices, and my choice was that I could be a good Jew in a way that I understood, or I could continue to ride on Saturdays. That was not really a hard choice at all.
Other people – and, of course, other Jews – will make their own choices, and I can’t argue with them. It is even possible that I will make different choice at some point in the future; after all, if two Jews can have three opinions, then why can’t one Jew have two? But this is a choice that makes sense to me. As the great Rabbi Maimonides wrotemore than nine hundred years ago, it is more important to understand the Torah than to follow it blindly without understanding; to be a good Jew is to perform mitzvahs not because they are an absolute, immutable obligation, but because it is through them that we do good and sanctify the world. The point of all of this is to always be aware of what it means to be a Jew in the world.
For now, at least, that means that I “ain’t gonna ride on Saturday.”
***
Photo of the Bike Rabbi riding on a Sunday courtesy and © Jim Brittain.
* Shabbes is the Ashkenazi Hebrew pronunciation of שבת (Shabbat in Modern Hebrew), and is rendered as Shabbos in the YIVO standard transliteration. Shabbes, Shabbos, and Shabbat are all therefore the same thing (שבת), and I use all versions fairly promiscuously, but I prefer Shabbaes because that’s what it was to my father and Zeyde. Farshteyt?