Shabbat observance laws

Shabbat observance laws organize more than a day of religious practice in the memoir: they govern communication, shape the household’s weekly routine, and become part of the conflict between communal expectations and urgent personal needs. The episodes involving Yossi’s overdose and the narrator’s pregnancy show both the force of the no-phones rule and the acknowledged exception for a life-or-death matter. Friday night also carries a distinct marital expectation, which the narrator experiences as binding even when the relationship is strained.

Weekly Practice and Friday Night

The Sabbath appears as a recurring framework for family and domestic life. At her in-laws’ home, the narrator witnesses Yossi collapse after drinking cognac before the morning meal. Hatzolah takes him to the hospital, but the family cannot use phones to learn what has happened until Shabbos is over. Only then does Cheskel call: Yossi has been treated at Cornwall Hospital and is doing okay. The delay makes observance tangible not as an abstract principle but as a restriction on receiving news during a family crisis.

Friday night also carries a marital expectation that the narrator associates with religious teaching. She reports that the Talmud assigns different frequencies of intercourse according to a man’s occupation, including Friday nights for Torah scholars; because Hasids consider themselves primarily scholars, this is the practice she and Eli follow. She is tired after the Shabbos meal and does not understand how Eli can seek physical intimacy immediately after they have been cold toward one another. The weekly schedule thus places a religiously framed expectation inside a marriage whose emotional condition may be quite different.

Their disputes over food further show how religious practice enters ordinary household life. Eli criticizes her handling of kashrut when she mistakenly puts the meat knife on the dairy counter. She argues that peace in the household should take precedence over such a mistake. Their argument can spoil the Friday-night meal she has prepared; afterward, she may refuse sex because, as she understands the rule, a husband cannot have intercourse with his wife while they are fighting and must first apologize. The same evening therefore brings together Sabbath routine, dietary observance, marital tension, and a religious condition that can affect whether intimacy takes place.

Emergency and the Limits of the Rule

A more urgent conflict arises when the narrator is six months pregnant and experiences severe cramps and vomiting during Shabbos. She tells Eli that they need to call a doctor, recognizing that a life-or-death matter permits phone use. They call and leave their information with the answering service. The doctor on duty advises them to come in, explaining that such symptoms during pregnancy may signal labor and that it is too early for the narrator to give birth.

Eli asks whether they can wait twelve hours, until Shabbos is over. The doctor leaves the decision to them, while the narrator recognizes that Kiryas Joel is at least an hour from the hospital. After the call, Eli begs her to wait. He fears that leaving will alert everyone, alarm his mother, and disrupt the wedding celebration. The narrator is furious that the family’s concern with the occasion and the consequences of leaving seems to compete with the medical risk. Although the emergency exception has been invoked by calling the doctor, it does not settle the couple’s decision about when to travel.

They wait until Shabbos ends, pack as though nothing is wrong, and drive to the hospital. Monitoring reveals contractions, and the medical team admits her and gives her medication to stop them. Eli stays overnight, joining two hospital armchairs to make a bed, while the narrator remains connected to monitoring equipment. After two days, she is discharged with medication and instructions for bed rest. They tell no one about the incident and return to their routine; Eli is somewhat more considerate afterward, and during her recovery he comes home early on Fridays to prepare for Shabbos and warms purchased challah because she is too unwell to cook.

Observance Within Marriage and Family

The pregnancy episode exposes a gap between the formal recognition of an emergency and the practical choices made under family and communal pressure. The call itself is treated as permissible because life may be at stake, yet the decision to leave is weighed against the risk of upsetting relatives and disrupting a wedding celebration. The narrator’s disagreement with Eli is not simply about whether Shabbos matters: it is about what the situation demands and whose needs should govern their response.

The weekly practice also operates within an unequal and difficult marriage. The narrator’s account of Friday-night sex places an inherited religious interpretation alongside her exhaustion and the couple’s arguments. Her reference to the requirement that Eli apologize if they are fighting gives her a limited way to resist an expectation she does not welcome. That resistance does not erase the pressure of the schedule; it shows how she negotiates it within the rules as she understands them.

Observance and the Possibility of Leaving

As the narrator considers her future, her concern extends to the life her son may inherit. She fears that at three he will begin cheder, with a daily course of Torah study and a religious identity she believes will narrow his possibilities. She asks how she could allow him that constrained future while trying to broaden her own horizons. Her wider account of wanting freedom from the performance of piety places Sabbath practice within a religious order she increasingly experiences as restrictive, although the memoir does not present a separate renunciation of Shabbat observance as a discrete event.

Her departure from Hasidic life changes the setting in which mother and son live: afterward, she changes her phone number and withholds her address, then begins teaching Yitzy English and reading books with him. The contrast is not a detailed account of which Sabbath rules she continues or abandons. Rather, the earlier episodes establish how observance had structured communication, intimacy, meals, and responses to crisis, while her later choices center on safety and a more direct relationship with her child. In that arc, Shabbat observance laws are part of the weekly order she must navigate before she can imagine a different life.