I absolutely love this, and it leaves me wondering about the role of social in the sabbath. This post mentions early, “Most want more social events, but coordination is hard and events are work. Now there’s always Friday night,” but the subject does not come up again. And yet with regard to the historical referent, sociality is baked deeply into the sabbath. For the orthodox version, the minyan rule (plus the no driving rule) requires that people live close together and that they see each other once a week.
On the one hand, community has the potential to enhance the sabbath from the perspective of this article, which is sabbath as slack and relaxation. A social element in the weekly ritual naturally enforces regular adherence, since people must provide explanation if absent. Other people also tend to flag deviance and reinforce norms, reducing the cognitive burden of self-enforcement e.g. to a no-social-media rule.
From Ben’s perspective, i.e. Sabbath as an alarm system, social has added benefits. Conversation with trusted and familiar people can help identification and diagnosis of challenges of all kinds; e.g., other people can sometimes notice the depth of our stress we see it ourselves. Though I don’t know them all, there are countless other benefits of social networks for well-being. So if the sabbath is about well-being, it should be about social.
On the other hand, there are also unique benefits to isolation. If the sabbath is strictly about slack and relaxation, then social may play no role for some/many people. This conundrum, though, also highlights an interesting design feature of orthodox sabbath; Friday night may be a personal or family affair, and socialization is only enforced on Saturdays. My modern take is a quiet Saturday night and a shared Sunday Brunch.
One issue I have with the regular meal with friends/family bit is that (aside from those in your household, who you would see anyway) this potentially sets up a regular commitment which could well become onerous. In that, if you establish a pattern of seeing the same people week after week, you may after a while start to get bored of it/them (even close friends can pall if seen too often), and want to see other people, or no-one, for the Sabbath meal. Which starts to make Sabbath tedious/stressful if not dealt with, and even if dealt with delicately can create an awkward situation.
(Cf during COVID lockdowns my family set up a weekly Zoom meeting, with its own ‘rituals’ such as a quiz. This got quite tedious after a few months, with nothing much new to say, connection problems, the calls tending to overrun for no good reason, etc. etc. It was eventually broken only by people starting to drop out with excuses, after a few weeks of which everyone got the hint and it finally ended, having long outstayed its welcome.)
I absolutely love this, and it leaves me wondering about the role of social in the sabbath. This post mentions early, “Most want more social events, but coordination is hard and events are work. Now there’s always Friday night,” but the subject does not come up again. And yet with regard to the historical referent, sociality is baked deeply into the sabbath. For the orthodox version, the minyan rule (plus the no driving rule) requires that people live close together and that they see each other once a week.
On the one hand, community has the potential to enhance the sabbath from the perspective of this article, which is sabbath as slack and relaxation. A social element in the weekly ritual naturally enforces regular adherence, since people must provide explanation if absent. Other people also tend to flag deviance and reinforce norms, reducing the cognitive burden of self-enforcement e.g. to a no-social-media rule.
From Ben’s perspective, i.e. Sabbath as an alarm system, social has added benefits. Conversation with trusted and familiar people can help identification and diagnosis of challenges of all kinds; e.g., other people can sometimes notice the depth of our stress we see it ourselves. Though I don’t know them all, there are countless other benefits of social networks for well-being. So if the sabbath is about well-being, it should be about social.
On the other hand, there are also unique benefits to isolation. If the sabbath is strictly about slack and relaxation, then social may play no role for some/many people. This conundrum, though, also highlights an interesting design feature of orthodox sabbath; Friday night may be a personal or family affair, and socialization is only enforced on Saturdays. My modern take is a quiet Saturday night and a shared Sunday Brunch.
One issue I have with the regular meal with friends/family bit is that (aside from those in your household, who you would see anyway) this potentially sets up a regular commitment which could well become onerous. In that, if you establish a pattern of seeing the same people week after week, you may after a while start to get bored of it/them (even close friends can pall if seen too often), and want to see other people, or no-one, for the Sabbath meal. Which starts to make Sabbath tedious/stressful if not dealt with, and even if dealt with delicately can create an awkward situation.
(Cf during COVID lockdowns my family set up a weekly Zoom meeting, with its own ‘rituals’ such as a quiz. This got quite tedious after a few months, with nothing much new to say, connection problems, the calls tending to overrun for no good reason, etc. etc. It was eventually broken only by people starting to drop out with excuses, after a few weeks of which everyone got the hint and it finally ended, having long outstayed its welcome.)