Sabbath and the Art of Rest
About this episode
Klein and writer Judith Shulevitz explore the Sabbath as a technology of rest and time. Shulevitz, author of 'The Sabbath World,' argues the Sabbath is not merely the absence of work but the active, collective creation of meaningful, bounded time — a day set apart by shared rules that protect people from ceaseless production and consumption. They discuss how real Sabbath observance depends on community synchronization, labor protections, and limits on commerce and technology, and why rest is a collective-action problem: time off is only truly restful when others share it. Klein and Shulevitz debate whether a secular society can recover anything like Sabbath without religious authority, concluding that the hunger for bounded, festive, communal time reveals how much modern life's formlessness costs us.