Shabbat

In E. L. Doctorow's City of God, Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath, functions as both a fixed ritual inheritance and a site of radical reinvention. The novel presents the Sabbath not merely as a day of rest but as a living institution whose meaning is actively contested and reshaped. At the Synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism, the Sabbath services are being redesigned to what the text calls the "basic and unarguable essentials," a stripping away of accumulated tradition that leaves only the Shema, the declaration of the oneness of God and the principle of abstract monotheism; a Kaddish, the ritual prayer for the dead that comforts mourners, renews their memories, and restores their gratitude; and an acknowledgment of the idea of the Sabbath both in the fact of the timing of the services and as the occasion for reflection in a state of freedom. Beyond these, the congregation commits itself to the study of the Torah in order to derive from it the imperatives that would complete the restructuring of the services and eventually provide the theoretical basis for the evolved faith. This is Shabbat as a work in progress, a ritual whose form is explicitly provisional and whose future is to be determined by ongoing scholarly and communal labor.

The Redesigned Service at the Synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism

The redesigned Shabbat is the centerpiece of the Synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism's project, and the novel presents it in precise liturgical detail. The service, conducted on Friday evenings on Eighty-ninth Street by Sarah Blumenthal, has been reduced to the Shema, the Kaddish, and the acknowledgment of the Sabbath's timing. The Shema is described as the declaration of the oneness of God, the principle of abstract monotheism, a formulation that aligns the congregation's practice with a philosophical commitment to a God stripped of anthropomorphic and mythological accretions. The Kaddish, the ritual prayer for the dead, is retained because it gives comfort to mourners, renews their memories, and restores their gratitude, a justification that grounds the ritual in human psychological and emotional need rather than in divine command. The acknowledgment of the idea of the Sabbath is double: it is honored both in the fact of the timing of the services and as the occasion for reflection in a state of freedom. This last element is crucial, for it redefines the Sabbath not as a day of mandated prohibitions but as a space of liberty, a temporal enclave set apart for thought. The congregation's commitment to Torah study is presented as the engine of further change, with the first five books of the Bible analyzed as the collected texts of different historical sources, J, E, P, and D, a higher-critical approach that treats the scriptures as documents to be examined rather than as monolithic divine dictation.

Pem's Attachment and the Congregation's Character

The redesigned Shabbat becomes the setting for Thomas Pemberton's deepening involvement with the congregation. The novel records that Pem loves these evenings, and that the narrator, Everett, is himself surprised to find them so fascinating. The congregation is small, usually no more than ten or twelve people in attendance, less than half the number when Joshua Gruen was the presiding rabbi. Its members form a cross-section of educated, professional New York: a professor of Comparative Religion at Columbia, a judge of the State Supreme Court, a young woman studying at the Actors Studio, a married couple both of whom are physicians, a Barnard junior, and, most touchingly, an elderly white-haired man whose son carries him up the brownstone stairs and retrieves him at the end of the evening. For Pem, given his own scholarship, much is familiar from his days as a divinity student, while Everett is in the different position of learning things for the first time. The intellectual content of the evenings is substantial: a doctoral candidate from Harvard discusses the work of his eminent teacher J. L. Kugel, who has attended in detail to the distinction between the original texts and the interpretive commentary that sprang up in the three hundred years before and a hundred years into the Common Era, commentary that created the Bible read today under the illusion that it is the original Scripture. The biblical texts, written in a language without vowels or punctuation, were seen from the beginning as enigmatic, and since they were supposed to be divine in their source and therefore of supernatural perfection, the scholars, priests, and sages of antiquity felt called upon to explain contradictions, un-God-like sentiments, unsavory passages, and less than noble acts of noble personages by interpreting them metaphorically, symbolically, or otherwise. This is the intellectual atmosphere of the redesigned Shabbat, a space where the highest criticism is welcomed as a challenge rather than dismissed as irrelevant.

Shabbat as a Site of Conversion and Continuity

The Sabbath services at the Synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism are the immediate context for Pem's conversion to Judaism. The novel shows Pem attending these Friday evening services regularly, and it is within this setting that his transformation from Episcopal priest to Jew takes shape. The redesigned Shabbat, with its emphasis on abstract monotheism, on the comfort of the Kaddish, and on reflection in a state of freedom, provides a theological home for Pem's own evolving convictions, which he had articulated in his remarks to the Bishop's Examiners as a profession of faith burdened by the miracles he was asked to affirm. The Shabbat service, stripped of those burdens, offers an alternative. The novel's account of Pem's wedding to Sarah Blumenthal, at which he declares that he will soon be a Jew and will find the joy of a hallowed life, is the culmination of this trajectory, and the redesigned Shabbat is the ritual ground on which that trajectory unfolds. The service's small size, its intellectual seriousness, and its provisional, evolving form all stand in contrast to the institutional weight of the Episcopal Church from which Pem has resigned, and the novel presents his embrace of this fragile, experimental congregation as a deliberate choice of a faith in process over a faith in settled doctrine.

The Sabbath in the Novel's Broader Meditation on Time and the Sacred

The novel's treatment of Shabbat participates in its larger meditation on the nature of sacred time and the possibility of religious renewal. The redesigned service, with its acknowledgment of the Sabbath as an occasion for reflection in a state of freedom, resonates with the novel's recurring concern with the relationship between the everyday and the transcendent. The Midrash Jazz Quartet sections, which reinterpret popular standards as theological meditations, function as a kind of secular Sabbath, a setting apart of ordinary songs for extraordinary reflection. The novel's structure, which interleaves these jazz meditations with the narrative of Pem's crisis of faith and the mystery of the stolen cross, mirrors the Shabbat's own rhythm of withdrawal and return, of setting aside a portion of time for a different mode of attention. The Sabbath, in this reading, is not merely a rule to be observed but a model for the novel's own method, a way of taking the materials of ordinary life and, through the discipline of reflection, revealing their hidden depth. The congregation's commitment to deriving the imperatives of the evolved faith from Torah study suggests that the Sabbath is not an end in itself but a beginning, a foundation on which a new religious structure is to be built, and the novel leaves that structure deliberately incomplete, a work in progress that mirrors the unfinished business of faith in the modern world.