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created on the sixth day and God rested on the seventh, so the first thing Adam did was rest.
    The question underlying the dispute, I think, is this: When time has disappeared and space is a comfortless ripple of white sand, should you imagine yourself inside the skin of the first man or inside the mind of God? The Talmud gives an answer to this question. It is, the mind of God. To save yourself, you re-create the world.
 3. 
    T HE FIRST URGES to keep the Sabbath came over me sometime after college. I was unable to settle on anything to do on Friday nights and would spend Saturdays alone, away from my busy, brunching friends. It took me years to grasp that there was a link between my Friday nights present and past. Trying to keep the Sabbath, I thought, would give me something to do when melancholy set in. It would serve as a therapeutic subordination of the self. But I never really got around to subordinating myself, at least not to the level of Orthodoxy I considered (without ever having quite admitted this fact to myself) the authentic mode of self-subordination. So now, when I come into the house and find my children freshly bathed but not dressed, dinner uncooked, and the table unset, I feel light-headed with self-disgust.
    If only I’d been raised in a fully traditional home, instead of my half-godless one! If only I had been trained to follow rules, rather than having been spoiled by the modern disrespect for them! On the other hand, who has time for all these rules? Like anyone else trying to get ahead, before I had children I logged late hours and weekends in the office, then complained proudly to my friends. When my children were little, I rushed irritably through every diaper change, every walk, every meal. There seemed no other way to retain economic independence, professional viability, a feeling of competence, the faith that I would continue to exist once I stepped outside the house. Observing the Sabbath as it was supposed to be observed seemed strictly aspirational.
    In short, for me, the Sabbath is not, and never has been, a day ofrest. It is a torturous dangle between two orders of, well, time, though I’m not sure that word captures the degree of incompatibility I have in mind. The Sabbath is the place where the modern and mundane open up to yield glimpses of something else—something half monkish and half Romantic and wholly imaginary. But, just at the moment that I am about to enter this world, I hear my father’s voice. It tells me that I am freer than any Jew who came before me. I’m not restricted to Jewish schools and workplaces. I don’t have to obey oppressive Jewish rules. Why twist freedom into a curse?
 4. 
    I N 1919 , shortly after the end of World War I, a Hungarian neurologist named Sándor Ferenczi, a disciple and close friend of Sigmund Freud’s, identified a new disorder, the “Sunday neurosis,” which he defined as “mostly
headaches
or
stomach disturbances
that were wont to appear on this day without any particular cause, and often utterly spoilt the young people’s one free day of the week.” After ruling out possible physical causes, such as overeating and oversleeping, Ferenczi decided that his patients were having a problem with the day itself.
    Ferenczi’s essay is now considered to be the first description of workaholism, but Ferenczi thought that it reflected the relationship between mental illness and time. He was diagnosing a time sickness. “We know from psychiatry,” he wrote, “of illnesses that display a marked periodicity…. But as far as I am aware no one has yet described neuroses the oscillation of whose symptoms were dependent on the particular day of the week.”
    In this, Ferenczi predicted the future. Nearly a century later, specialists in a new field, chronobiology, study the internal clocks of living things, which are driven by an intricate dance of outside and inside factors—by light and darkness interacting with hormones. Cortisol, the