Thread by @ewzucker

A THREAD for all who must tragically avoid community this weekend:

In his classic book The Sabbath, AJ Heschel beautifully described the “love affair” btwn the Jewish people & the Shabbat. Ask any sabbath-observant Jew & they’ll gush about how they couldn’t live without it.

And this love affair is echoed now (since the week spread over the last 2000 yrs from the Jewish community to the entire world) in the love affair the entire world has with the weekend. (In bit.ly/2w5SqO, @cristobalyoung5 & Chaeyoon Lim show why. In a word: community!

Now among the things that observant Jews love about the Shabbat is the annual cycle of readings of the Pentateuch, divided up into weekly portions that are read in synagogues throughout the world.

Among the reasons is that it’s an incredibly powerful communal experience to be reading the same text together, to be sharing ideas about it, etc. (The #DafYomi cycle has lately inspired similar affection) For many, this is a key part of what will be sorely missed this Shabbat.

Interestingly, while observant Jews are feeling pangs of longing for their love this weekend, this week’s Torah portion- ki tissah (Exodus 30:11-35)- contains a discussion of the Shabbat that’s very hard to square with the idea that Shabbat observance is an act of love.

I’m referring to the troubling idea- related twice in 31:14-15 (& again in 35:2) that violation of the Shabbat is a capital crime. Shocking! Barbaric!
& very strange: why should an institution that can be sustained by love be deemed so fragile that it needs such strong sanction?

Jews are generally not troubled when they read this, likely because we have never heard of capital punishment being applied. But then why is it there? Moreover, it apparently was applied!

Numbers 15:32-35 tells the story of a man who was found gathering wood on Shabbat. He’s+

brought to Moses & Aaron, who consult with God. God says to stone him, & that’s what the people do. Again, shocking! Stone a man just for gathering wood on the sabbath? This is the foundation for the world’s love affair with the weekend??

Ok so here’s the key to unlocking this mystery, one that should have especially poignant resonance during this weekend of global crisis. You need to consider the following thought experiment:

Put aside the Shabbat for a moment & imagine it’s any day of the week. Even better, try to imagine a world that has no week (& therefore no weekend) because there was no week anywhere in the world back then (the Torah is in part an account if its invention)

Now consider: can you imagine a circumstance where you would get extremely angry- murderously angry even- because you found someone gathering wood?

I would suggest that if you can’t, you’re not thinking hard enough because we all can. Think in particular about the current crisis

Can you imagine getting very angry at someone for gathering something that you’d ordinarily care as little about as a stick? Maybe a protective mask or even a roll of toilet paper if it’s running out?

The general point: whenever a resource is very valuable (perhaps due to unusual circumstance- wood is extremely valuable in the wilderness as fuel!) & it doesn’t belong to the gatherer, perhaps because it belongs to *everyone*, there’s good reason to be very angry at gatherers.

Put differently, the story of the wood gatherer is an ancient parable of what’s known today (due to the work of such scholars as Hardin & Ostom) as “the tragedy of the commons.” This is a “social dilemma” that applies whenever cooperation would increase social welfare but it+

requires self-sacrifice to achieve. Every fisherman knows that if everyone takes take too much fish out of the bay, there will eventually be no fish left; but why should he be the one to hold himself back? He has to feed his family just like everyone else!

These kinds of dilemmas are pernicious & they’re everywhere in a crisis like the present one. We need everyone- even those who are at least mortality risk- to engage in social distancing even if it harms their livelihood. This is very very hard!

As such, the wood gatherer’s action is a dagger thrown at the heart of the community- it threatens to unleash a mad scramble for resources that not only will destroy the fledging institution of the Shabbat/week but social order more generally.

We can now see the need for strict enforcement, especially when the Shabbat/week was young.

Ok but we don’t need (we hope & pray...) a similarly harsh level of enforcement today, right? What’s the difference?

In short: *knowiedge of the value of cooperation.*

A necessary (but insufficient) condition for resolving commons problems is that community members recognize what they’ll get from cooperation. The fisherman knows the value of a sustainable fishery. The herder knows the value of a commons filled with grass. Refraining from+

overgrazing or overfishing is hard not because they don’t get why they shouldn’t but because it’s hard to do it if you can’t be sure others won’t.

But if you don’t know the value of cooperation, how is such self-sacrifice possible? That was the challenge when Shabbat was new!

Everything that’s the basis of the “love affair” today is the product of thousands of years of cumulative social experience. They had no such frame of reference then. So how couid you convince them to close their shops (Neh 13:15-22) or leave their crops in the field (Ex 34:21)?

We today are in much better shape thank God.

First, after we weather this crisis, we’ll come back strong & savor shabbatot/weekends together like we never have before!

Second, thanks to modern science, public health, & communications systems, we are teaching the value of+

social distancing for “flattening the curve,” thereby making it possible for us to manage our collective resources more efficiently. Of course, our performance (at least here in the US) to this point could have been much better.

But if we all contribute to the needed self-sacrifice & look out for another, guided by our growing knowledge of the value of this form of cooperation, we will come out stronger together.

Shabbat shalom

P.S. The ideas in this thread+

are developed in the last & first essays here (thelehrhaus.com/author/ezrazuc…), which (along with some other essays there & other unpublished material) are part of a book project tentatively entitled “The First Week.” Feedback is very welcome but it may take me awhile to respond.

P.S. I should thank & plug @The_Lehrhaus (founding editor @Adderabbi & @zev_eleff & current editors @ZuckierShlomo & @TSinensky ) for input & encouragement

Sorry for the bad link. here's a good one: sociologicalscience.com/time-network-g…

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