The Long Brief: Time, Not Theocracy
How Israel uses a Jewish calendar to structure public life without enforcing belief—just as Western democracies quietly do with Christian time.
Shalom, friends.
This is perhaps, on the surface, a little less timely than some of our Long Briefs, but it was inspired by a conversation with a Christian pilgrim at Ben Gurion a few weeks ago. They were relatively opposed to Israel observing Shabbat. More kvetching about it than one would anticipate, but that’s ok. However, it led me to realize just how different people’s perception of the matter could be, so I want to take this opportunity to dive into how Israel deals with “Jewish time.”
I first really noticed how different it was a couple of years ago on my first visit to Israel. Back before Aliyah was even on my radar. It was during a Friday afternoon in Tel Aviv.
The city was loud, impatient, caffeinated. Horns. Deadlines. What else is new? You probably know that familiar Israeli hum that feels just one traffic jam away from combustion. Then, almost without warning, it softened. Shops pulled shutters. Phones went quiet. Someone, passing by, wished us a Shabbat shalom and tried to give us a box with a pair of tea lights. The hands on the clock had turned, and the country turned with it.
No one asked what I believed. Well, almost no one. Some Chabadniks asked if I was Jewish and if I had wrapped tefillin that morning. No one checked where I was going. The overcrowded shuk cleared out. The streets cleared. Families drifted home. Some to synagogue. Some to dinner tables. Some to the beach.
I’ve heard arguments against this slowing down. Many of them in fact. Usually from people who have never step foot in the country. Those whose views of multiculturalism have been made toxic. Those who think that slowing on Saturday is anathema—though who have no trouble with the same thing happening on a Sunday.
That moment—watching a modern, secular society slow itself down on purpose—stuck with me. Not as religion. With coordination. As a nation choosing how it lives in time.
This brief is an attempt to explain that moment properly.
A Jewish calendar, not theocracy
How Israel structures national life around Jewish time without enforcing belief—and why this is normal, democratic, and historically grounded.
Israel’s public life runs on Jewish time. The work week bows to Shabbat, school vacations align with Passover, and on Yom Kippur the country falls eerily quiet.
To critics, this looks like the trappings of a “Jewish theocracy.” But the reality is more subtle and deeply secular. The state’s calendar is Jewish, yet the society remains largely secular in practice. No one is compelled to pray or believe. Only to allow for pause, collectively, on the nation’s holy days.
This pause is a civilizational framework—paralleling how Christian-derived calendars quietly structure life in the West without making those nations theocracies.
In neither case are citizens forced into houses of worship or faith, yet in both cases a dominant historical religion bequeathed the template for communal time.
Israel’s use of the Hebrew calendar is codified in quasi-constitutional form. In 2018 the Knesset passed the Nation-State Basic Law, declaring the “Hebrew calendar is the official calendar of the State” and that the Jewish Sabbath and festivals are the legally established days of rest. What Israel’s laws mandate is a shared weekly pause and recognition of Jewish civil holidays — not a state religion. Work ceases on Saturday much as it does on Sunday in many Christian-coded democracies. Shops close on Yom Kippur as they do on Christmas Day in secular Western cities. The Israeli government notably lacks any power to enforce personal religious practice.
And tellingly, secular Israeli Jews — many of them non-believers — overwhelmingly defend and cherish the structure of Jewish time even as they ignore or redefine its religious content.
In a land of many internal divides, the Hebrew calendar provides a rare common rhythm, one that arguably stabilizes society much as the weekend does everywhere. Far from being a tool of clerical rule, Israel’s calendar is a conscious choice to live in Jewish time after generations when Jews could not.
Calendars as Power Structures
Time is never just time in human society. Every modern state operates on a structured calendar that encodes historical and cultural priorities. In sociological terms, time is a public institution. Nations tell their story through the rhythm of workweeks and holidays. As historian Benedict Anderson suggested in describing how calendars foster imagined communities, a shared sense of time is part of what makes a nation cohere. It coordinates millions of individual lives and signals collective priorities.
Consider the concept of the weekend. Why a seven-day week, with a two-day weekend on Saturday and Sunday (or Friday and Saturday, or Sunday alone in older practice)? There is nothing inevitable about that cycle. The seven-day week itself is of biblical origin, transmitted via Judaism and later adopted by Christianity and Islam. The very notion of a weekly day of rest, now enshrined in labor codes worldwide, comes straight from religious tradition.
By the mid-20th century, most industrialized countries settled on a five-day workweek with a common rest on Saturday-Sunday. This was neither a neutral nor a natural choice. But it was embraced for its social and economic benefits.
Likewise, revolutionary France sought to de-Christianize time itself in the 1790s with the French Republican Calendar, imposing a 10-day week to break the grip of Sunday. People resisted the new cadence, and Napoleon abandoned the experiment after a dozen years.
Inherited religious calendars are the norm. Nations have secularized the meaning of thems without discarding the structure. Whether it’s Sunday in Europe or the long Christmas-to-New Year’s break in the United States, ostensibly secular states still follow patterns set by majority faiths.
Time as coordination is distinct from time as worship. An atheist can appreciate a Sunday off or enjoy a Christmas market. A non-Christian in America still likely gets Christmas Day as a holiday simply because the nation has arranged itself that way.
In Israel’s case, a secular Jew (or a Christian or an Arab Muslim, for that matter) benefit from the slower pace of Shabbat — perhaps going to the beach or reading a book — without any rabbinical intrusion.
The state’s interest is in the pause itself, not how one spends it. Uniform days of rest are seen as a matter of “secular goals” like social welfare, not as acts of religious establishment.
No state manages to be all things to all people at all times. Instead, a dominant cadence is chosen and minorities are given carve-outs or parallel observances. This is exactly what the British Mandatory government did in Palestine. Article 23 of the Mandate mandate (1922) required recognizing “the holy days of the respective communities in Palestine as legal days of rest for the members of such communities.” In practice, that meant Shabbat for Jews, Friday for Muslims, Sunday for Christians — a pluralistic scheme under an overall British administrative week. Israel inherited parts of this approach, but as a Jewish-majority sovereign state it naturally elevated Shabbat to the primary national rest day.
The Christian Calendar in Secular Western Life
Walk through an American town early-ish on a Sunday morning, and you might notice the stillness. Stores open late or not at all, streets empty out in residential neighborhoods, and “Sunday quiet” reigns. A weekly pause that Americans take for granted. Come Christmas Day, that stillness becomes nearly universal. Businesses close. Families mostly stay at home (or the home of a relative). Highways unusually sparse. Officially, the United States has no state religion. But its rhythms betray its heritage. The Christian calendar quietly organizes much of American life, just as it does across Europe. This happens without any formal establishment of religion, due largely to historical momentum and legal allowances for “tradition.” By exploring how this came about, we can see that what Israel does with the Jewish calendar is a variation on a very common theme.
In the United States, Sunday rest was enforced by law for centuries in the form of “blue laws.” These were regulations banning most commercial activities on Sundays, dating back to the colonial era. Initially overtly religious in purpose (to ensure church attendance and Sunday piety), over time they were reframed as secular statutes promoting a common day of rest. American courts upheld these laws even as they acknowledged their religious roots. The landmark case was McGowan v. Maryland (1961), where the U.S. Supreme Court faced a challenge to Maryland’s law that prohibited Sunday retail sales of various goods. Chief Justice Earl Warren, writing for the majority, conceded that “the original laws which dealt with Sunday labor were motivated by religious forces.” Yet he observed that “over the course of years, the purpose and effect [of Sunday laws] became secular — to provide a uniform day of rest for all.” The Court ruled that contemporary Sunday closing laws did not violate the First Amendment’s establishment clause, precisely because their primary rationale had become civil in nature. “The present purpose and effect of most of our Sunday Closing Laws is to provide a uniform day of rest for all citizens,” and the fact this day is Sunday, “a day of particular significance for the dominant Christian sects, does not bar the State from achieving its secular goals.” In other words, as long as the state’s intent is rest and relaxation rather than religious observance, the law stands — even if, practically, it aligns with Christian custom.
This ruling, and several companion cases, form a fascinating mirror to Israel’s situation. In Braunfeld, Orthodox Jewish storekeepers in Pennsylvania argued that a law forcing them to close on Sunday (when they already closed on Saturday for religious reasons) put them at unfair economic disadvantage. The Supreme Court sympathized but ultimately upheld the law, effectively saying that the inconvenience to religious minorities did not make the Sunday law unconstitutional. The Court noted that the law “had a secular basis and did not make any religious practices unlawful.” One justice acknowledged it was “a cruel choice” for an Orthodox Jew to pick between livelihood and Sabbath, yet the majority deemed it an unfortunate side effect of a general law not aimed at religion. Such reasoning shows how deeply ingrained the notion of a common rest day was.
Over time, many blue laws were relaxed or repealed under commercial pressure, yet remnants persist. As of today, numerous U.S. states still prohibit certain activities on Sundays. For example, car dealerships are famously closed by law on Sundays in about a dozen states, a holdover from blue laws that legislators defend as providing an industry-wide day off. Some jurisdictions bar hunting on Sunday or restrict alcohol sales on Sunday mornings. In strongly churchgoing regions, these laws enjoy broad support from even non-devout people who simply like having a quiet Sunday morning. Culturally, sports leagues avoided scheduling major events on Sunday mornings for decades, and even the NFL (which plays on Sunday afternoons) long treated the early hours as off-limits out of respect for church time. It’s changing now, but the echo of a Christian sacral calendar remains just beneath the surface of American daily life.
Europe presents an even starker example. Most Western European countries have national laws or customs enforcing Sunday as a day of rest, often tied to historical church influence. Germany puts this in its constitution and its courts have struck down attempts to liberalize Sunday shopping. As recently as 2009, Germany’s highest court upheld the primacy of Sunday rest by nixing a Berlin law that allowed too many Sunday openings. The rationale given wasn’t “because God said so,” but because protecting Sunday ensures social and spiritual well-being.
Perhaps the most illustrative comparison is how Western societies handle religious holidays as national holidays. Christmas Day is a public holiday across the Western world, including in the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia — even in countries with significant non-Christian populations. This is done under the secular veneer of it being a cultural holiday, a time for family, giving, Santa Claus and reindeer. But of course, it’s Christmas — literally a Christian holy day — being observed nationwide. No one is forced to attend Mass or believe in the Nativity, yet effectively an entire society changes rhythm for a religious festival. The sky doesn’t fall on pluralism because of this. Non-Christians take the day off work like everyone else.
One might ask: does this cause resentment among non-Christians or secular people in those countries? Generally, no — because the expectation to believe isn’t there. That isn’t so say some cranks won’t complain. Atheists can celebrate a secular Christmas (many do, calling it a season of goodwill, or just enjoying the cultural festivities). Jews and Muslims in Christian-majority countries often adapt by doing their own thing on those days, but they rarely call for abolishing Christmas as a holiday. Everyone understands it’s part of the national framework. Minorities do ask, rightly, for their own major holidays to be respected (for example, in the U.S. many cities now declare Eid or Yom Kippur school holidays in districts with large Muslim or Jewish populations, and employers increasingly allow personal days for them). This is all workable.
Jewish Time in the Diaspora: Private and Suppressed
For nearly two millennia before Israel’s re-founding, Jews lived as minorities in other peoples’ societies. This meant that the Jewish sense of time — the cycle of Sabbath and festivals commanded by Torah — often ran up against the dominant calendars of Christian and Muslim civilizations. The story of Jewish life in diaspora is, in one respect, the story of navigating a dissonant clock.
From medieval Europe’s strict Sunday observances to the Islamic world’s Friday-centric week, Jews had to find ways to honor their own Sabbath on Saturday while not falling afoul of (or economically behind in) societies that did not stop for it.
The result was frequently painful compromise, creative workaround, or outright suppression of Jewish time. Publicly sanctifying the Sabbath was usually impossible or restricted. Frequently the best option available to Jews was to keep it privately—if they were willing to pay the price (sometimes literally in fines or lost income, sometimes in social marginalization).
This context underscores a key point: the privatization of Jewish time was an artifact of Jewish powerlessness, not some voluntary secular ideal. When today’s critics suggest Israel should just let Sabbath observance be a private matter, they may not realize that such privatization historically was forced upon Jews by hostile or indifferent host societies. Zionism’s impulse to restore the Jewish Sabbath to public life was in part a reaction to that history of suppression.
