FRIENDSHIP, TIME, AND THE SABBATH

Abstract

6 5 R F R I E N D S H I P , T I M E , A N D T H E S A B B A T H R O N A L D A . S H A R P Wisdom is paradoxical. ‘‘Distance,’’ we are told, ‘‘makes a√ections wander’’; yet ‘‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder.’’ ‘‘A penny saved is a penny earned,’’ which may be true; but then ‘‘Penny wise is pound foolish.’’ Proverbs are often mutually exclusive. My own favorite example is ‘‘Look before you leap’’ or, alternatively, ‘‘Opportunity only knocks once.’’ Watch it! Go for it! Be careful! Seize the moment! It begins to sound like the conflicting advice of stockbrokers. The proverbial tradition, that reservoir of cultural wisdom, provides a wealth of truisms on virtually every side of a complex issue. But there is one proverb in particular, a proverb that contains a paradox about value, that I hope will provide a useful entrance into the topic of this essay: the relationship between the ideal of friendship on the one hand and the meaning of the Sabbath – the Jewish conception of Shabbat – on the other. I will argue that the Sabbath and friendship give a new value to time, moving time as we usually experience it into a gift economy where it is di√erently measured, in every sense of the word. The old Latin tag I have in mind is this: ‘‘Friends are people who waste time together.’’ For Americans, still deeply influenced 6 6 S H A R P Y by the Puritan tradition, wasting time has always been considered a sin. Together with the Protestant work ethic, the American preoccupation with e≈ciency and the capitalistic imperative to produce have long nurtured a suspicion of any activity, even any human relationship, that wastes time. Yet the Latin tag expresses a paradoxical wisdom that in my view is at the heart of friendship. In a strictly utilitarian sense, friendship can be seen as both labor intensive and wasteful of time that could be more profitably spent on productive enterprises. The proverb simultaneously acknowledges that perspective and critiques it by punning on the word waste, thus implying that in a proper understanding of friendship it is envisioned as moving in a time zone in which the traditional instrumental understanding of time is exposed as a shallow illusion . This is a wisdom that is also embodied in the Jewish concept of the Sabbath, which is based on a conception of time that in my view has crucial implications for an understanding of friendship. This proverb is especially relevant at the present historical moment , in which time has not only been dramatically accelerated but also pervasively commodified. Both the Sabbath and friendship , on the other hand, participate in a gift economy. In his important work on gift theory, the cultural critic Lewis Hyde begins with a fundamental distinction between commodity exchange and gift exchange, arguing that the defining feature of art, for example, is its participation in a gift economy in which the whole is always larger than the sum of its parts. ‘‘Unlike the sale of a commodity,’’ he says, ‘‘the giving of a gift tends to establish a relationship between the parties involved.’’ I want to argue that friendship and the Jewish conception of the Sabbath both participate in that same gift economy, particularly with respect to time. Just as the Sabbath provides an antidote to treating time as a commodity, something that should not be wasted, friendship recon figures both our understanding and our actual experience of time. I want to extend the implications of Hyde’s distinctions and, by locating friendship and the Sabbath in a gift economy, explore their power to release time from instrumentality, from something understood as a commodity, something that must be spent usefully and productively, and transform it into something that functions in the dimension of gift exchange, where the central dimension of bonding is spiritual. F R I E N D S H I P , T I M E , A N D T H E S A B B A T H 6 7 R In The Fourth...