“Shabbat?” I said. “Are you serious?”
My husband, you see, is a proudly secular Jew who thinks that religion amounts to at best harmless superstition and at worst nefarious brainwashing. He’s outwardly respectful of the religious, of course, and he has adapted admirably to my request that we keep kosher at home (even as he relishes his bacon cheeseburgers at restaurants). He dutifully sits through my family’s two lengthy Passover Seders every year. But he maintains that belief in God is as preposterous as belief in the tooth fairy.
So, it was somewhat shocking when he came up with this Shabbat idea, although I knew what had inspired it. We’d been feeling that something just wasn’t right about answering non-emergency work-related phone calls at 10:30 on a Friday night, or checking email reflexively upon awakening on Saturday. We yearned to carve out a space in our week to shut it all down. Read more »
